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Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Pete Buttigieg Has A Name For What Trump Does When He's Desperate, And It's Spot On
Donald Trump's efforts to shift the nation's conversations away from files concerning the crimes of convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein don't seem to be working. Instead, Trump's base has begun turning on him over his administration's flip-flopping about whether an Epstein "client list" does or does not exist... Related: And they're burning their hats to be heard. Twitter: @krassenstein Amid the backlash, Trump used this time to bolster the unsupported claims of National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, who says she has evidence of an 'Obama Administration Conspiracy to Subvert Trump's 2016 Victory and Presidency.' (The Obama administration has denied this, and former CIA director John Brennan told NBC News, 'There is no factual basis for the allegations that Tulsi Gabbard is making.") But, of course, that didn't stop Trump from sharing a fake, AI-generated video of Obama being arrested on his Truth Social account. Related: Well, when asked about the chaos during his appearance on The Breakfast Club, former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg called Trump's actions exactly as he saw them. "So, Trump says, 'We're going to release the files, we're going to release the files, we're going to release the files.' And then he says, 'We're not going to release the files,'" Buttigieg told hosts. Related: "And people are mad, including MAGA, saying, 'Wait a minute, you said you were going to release this information and you're not.'" "And what does he do?" Buttigieg posed. "He's like, 'Uh, we're going to arrest Obama.'" As hosts laugh, Buttigieg concludes, "That has nothing to do with anything," before adding a term for Trump's behavior anytime he's cornered, "It's the distraction machine." Related: Viewers appear to resonate with the interview as a whole, which you can watch in full here. What are your thoughts on his take? Let us know in the comments. Also in In the News: Also in In the News: Also in In the News:
Russia Today
2 hours ago
- Politics
- Russia Today
US media owe Putin an apology
The US media need to make 'serious' amends to many people, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, for their active role in spreading the Russiagate hoax following the 2016 presidential election, according to popular Fox News host Greg Gutfeld. The political commentator, comedian, and author was responding to recent revelations made by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who released a trove of documents she described as 'overwhelming evidence' of a coordinated effort by senior Obama-era officials – allegedly led by Barack Obama himself – to politicize intelligence and falsely accuse Donald Trump of colluding with Russia to win the election. 'We cannot let this go. They need to make serious amends because we are still living with the aftermath,' Gutfeld said on his latest show, aired last weekend. 'People lost jobs, careers, friends. There need to be consequences.' They owe a lot of people an apology. Hell, they even include Putin. According to Gutfeld, major American news media outlets 'played the starring role in amplifying the subversive plot against the president of the United States.' He dismissed recent claims by the press accusing the Trump administration of trying to 'rewrite history,' calling them an 'attempt to shift culpability away from themselves and hide the lie they perpetuated for almost a decade.' Earlier this month, a similar assessment was made by former CIA Director John Ratcliffe. In an interview with the New York Post, he cited an internal review suggesting that American public opinion had been manipulated through repeated media leaks and anonymous sources quoted by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other major outlets. Allegations of 'Russian collusion' persisted in mainstream media coverage even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation found no evidence to support the claims. Moscow has repeatedly denied interfering in the US election. Gabbard described the Trump-Russia probe, widely referred to as Russiagate, as 'a years-long coup' against Trump. The US president himself, who has consistently dismissed accusations of ties to Russia as fabricated, praised Gabbard for 'exposing' the alleged plot and urged her to 'keep it coming.'
Russia Today
2 hours ago
- Politics
- Russia Today
Tulsi Gabbard has cemented herself a place in history
In light of accusations that former US President Barack Obama had committed treason by attempting to rig the 2016 election and stage Russiagate, newly surfaced evidence shows Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election. National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, armed with a freshly declassified 2020 report by the House Intelligence Committee, went on the offensive against Obama last week during a wild White House press briefing. Her follow-up message on X cuts to the chase and shows an administration that is no longer taking Democratic trash talk of 'Russian collusion' sitting down. She wrote that the 'Obama administration manufactured the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false, promoting the LIE that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government helped President Trump win the 2016 election.' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt gave the presidential stamp of approval to Gabbard's statement when she exclaimed: 'There was no collusion, no corruption, except on the part of Barack Obama and the weaponized intelligence agencies at the time.' Finally, it seems that some intelligent folks in Washington are coming around to the Kremlin's way of thinking when Russiagate was at its peak lunacy. In a nutshell, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not care who would emerge victorious in the heated contest between the Democrat Hillary Clinton and her Republican challenger Donald Trump. The Russian leader declared his willingness to work with either leader accordingly. After all, it was a radically different period for US-Russia relations, but things would change quickly thanks to a nasty thing known as Politics as Usual. Back in 2016, after Trump stunned Washington DC by being declared the Republican victor, President Barack Obama took a dramatic and distasteful move. Before any actual evidence of Russian interference in the election was forthcoming, he singlehandedly set out to destroy US-Russia relations by expelling Russian diplomats, confiscating Russian property, and targeting Russian officials and organizations for sanctions. This was followed up by a non-stop political witch-hunt, which largely prevented Donald Trump from focusing on anything else during his first presidency that was not Russia-related. Just seven months into Trump's first term, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether the maverick from Manhattan and members of his campaign had colluded with Vladimir Putin to influence the 2016 campaign. After nearly three years of dragging US-Russia relations over the coals, that investigation, which concluded in March 2019, yielded no evidence of criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian authorities. Yet the rumors of a Trump-Putin conspiracy, drummed up unmercifully by the Democrats, continued to spiral. That's why the revelations made by Tulsi Gabbard and her team on Wednesday are so important. They provide what appears to be the final nail into the coffin to the Democrat's great deception known as Russiagate. In fact, the revelations of skullduggery are so damaging and timely that there are rumblings on Capitol Hill that Obama and his intelligence team could face charges of treason. That would pretty much guarantee another full-blown civil war in the country. But I digress. Amid an assortment of shenanigans, the House committee reported that 'One scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest Putin 'aspired' to help Trump win.' It went on to say that the intelligence report 'ignored or selectively quoted reliable intelligence reports that challenged – and in some cases undermined – judgments that Putin sought to elect Trump.' The report also found that two senior CIA officers reportedly warned the highest levels of the intelligence community that 'we don't have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected.' The declassified committee report includes intelligence from a longtime Putin confidant who explained to investigators that 'Putin told him he did not care who won the election,' and that the Russian leader 'had often outlined the weaknesses of both major candidates.' Other revelations from the House report: '[Then] CIA Director Brennan and the Intelligence Community (IC) mischaracterized intelligence and relied on dubious, 'substandard' sources to create a contrived false narrative that Putin developed 'a clear preference' for Trump.' '[Then] CIA Director Brennan and the IC misled lawmakers by referencing the debunked Steele Dossier (drafted by counterintelligence agent Christopher Steele in 2016) to assess 'Russian plans and intentions,' which falsely suggested the dossier had intelligence value.' 'The IC excluded 'significant intelligence' and 'ignored or selectively quoted' reliable intelligence that contradicted the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA's) key findings on Putin's alleged support for Trump, that if included, would have exposed the ICA's claim was 'implausible – if not ridiculous.'' 'Senior, experienced CIA officers who objected that the intelligence did not support the key judgment that Putin 'aspired' to help Trump win, were silenced by the outgoing Director of the CIA in December 2016. Those officers might have had their voices heard if the ICA's publication (was) delayed until after the inauguration, to allow the incoming Director of the CIA to manage the process.' At this point, it must be asked: Is this the beacon on the democratic hill that the US likes to claim for itself? A country that sits idly by as a sitting president pulls off a years-long coup against a political challenger, while jeopardizing relations with a nuclear power/erstwhile ally? A tarnished country that relentlessly preaches to the world about its democratic credentials? Whatever the case may be, it is indeed fortuitous that Russia has found a fair dealer in Tulsi Gabbard. This is not the first time this courageous woman has supported Russia in a world gone mad. The American politician and military officer has previously defended Russia's military operation in Ukraine, claiming that the US had provoked Russian aggression with NATO pledges to Kiev and that Ukraine housed US-funded biolabs. Her role in bringing the Russiagate hoax to a much-delayed close must be applauded, and should help US-Russia relations at a very critical time.
New York Post
a day ago
- Politics
- New York Post
Obama's bruised ego was behind the corrupt plot to bring down Trump
The Donald Trump-Russia collusion scandal that first broke in December 2016 and roared on until April 2019 has no parallel in our history — it's not even close. As president-elect and later as sitting president, Trump was accused by the country's intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus of conspiring with a hostile power to subvert the 2016 election and sneak a crooked path to the White House. Along the way, a damning Intelligence Community Assessment was issued, a major FBI investigation, code-named Crossfire Hurricane, targeted the president, and a special counsel, Robert Mueller, was granted a team of prosecutors and a budget of millions to bring the guilty to justice. Advertisement It was the most sensational news story in history. By one estimate, more than half a million articles were written about the collusion issue, the vast majority asserting or assuming criminality on Trump's part. A manic media competed fiercely to deliver the latest 'bombshell.' Advertisement For over two years, the first Trump administration was forced to conduct America's business while in the fetal position. How much truth, you ask, did the accusations of collusion with Russia contain? None. Zilch. Nada. The entire episode was concocted out of whole cloth by the Obama White House, with an assist from the Hilary Clinton campaign and the eager cooperation of the heads of the FBI (James Comey), the CIA (John Brennan), and NSA (James Clapper), plus various zealous underlings. Bam on a mission Advertisement Before asking the obvious questions, let's pause for a moment to absorb this astounding fact: There was zero evidence, classified or otherwise, to justify the fuss, distraction and cost of the whole clamorous affair. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified documents that show the intelligence agencies did not believe that 'Russian or criminal actors' impacted the 2016 presidential election. Eric Lee – Pool Via Cnp/CNP via ZUMA Press Wire Pro-Trump fake news, as independent studies have consistently shown, had no effect on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Mueller, in his final report, rather grumpily admitted that the two-year-plus investigation he led 'did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.' Advertisement In fact, as of Dec. 8, 2016, the intelligence agencies believed that 'Russian or criminal actors did not impact recent US election results,' according to documents recently declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Yet on Dec. 9, President Obama, in essence, tasked the agencies to change their minds and come up with the opposite conclusion. They complied with a hastily-drafted ICA stating that 'Russian President Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,' and 'Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.' On Jan. 17, three days before Trump's swearing-in ceremony, an unclassified version of the ICA was made available to the public. The lack of evidence was obscured with a tactic familiar to those who have worked in intelligence: The proof, the authors claimed, was super-secret and hyper-classified. Gabbard's declassification campaign has exposed the naked falsehood of that claim. The Obama administration, Gabbard now maintains, was guilty of a 'treasonous conspiracy' to undermine Trump's 2016 election victory. Advertisement Now, 'treasonous' is a strong word — although, to be fair, former CIA chief Brennan applied the same word to Trump at the height of the collusion uproar. One thing is certain: The corpse of the Trump-Russia scandal has risen like a zombie and is now shambling towards its originators in the hope of eating their brains. I'm content to leave the legal and constitutional implications of this tawdry episode to the experts who can best explain them. My interest is in finding the answer to a basic question: What, in the end, was the point of the exercise? Out to sully '16 win Advertisement Evidently, the Obama White House, in its waning days, aimed to 'subvert President Trump's 2016 victory,' as Gabbard has said. In that, it succeeded brilliantly. Leaks to The New York Times and The Washington Post began as early as Dec. 9, before the intelligence people even had time to concoct their story. The bombardment continued for the duration, leaving the Trump administration bruised and battered under the shadow of the scandal. A chart shared by the White House on the creation of the 'Russia Hoax.' LENIN NOLLY/SIPA/Shutterstock Advertisement To this day, 60% of Democrats believe that Trump climbed to high office with a helpful push from his friend Vladimir. But the case against Trump was based on nothing. For all the bureaucratic grinding, leaking and noise-making, the investigation was bound sooner or later to arrive at that point: nothing. Trump would be exonerated. The probability was much higher than zero that he, or some future Republican president, would demand an accounting for the fraud. The Obama and Clinton people would then trade places with the Trumpists. Advertisement The prosecutors would be prosecuted. That, of course, is precisely what has happened. Again: What political advantage was worth taking that risk? One grateful beneficiary of the collusion story was Clinton, who could now answer, to everyone's satisfaction, the question that had been tormenting her since Election Day: 'How on earth could you possibly lose to that guy?' The election that ended with her defeat, Clinton happily proclaimed, 'was not on the level.' The scandal, however, was a wholly owned Obama operation. His tasking of the intel community, a month after the election had passed, fixated the government on the collusion question. The Dec. 9 meeting to which he abruptly invited the agency heads to reach a foregone conclusion included White House enforcers like Ben Rhodes. The rushed schedule ensured the ICA was completed on his watch and under his watchful eyes. Did Dems believe it? Barack Obama was deeply invested in discrediting Donald Trump, even before the latter assumed the presidency. No doubt there were partisan and personal reasons for the rancor. We may take it for granted that Obama loathed the sight of Trump. But by that point, he was the lamest of lame ducks. Only weeks remained of his time in office. Obama was already ascending majestically to the Olympus reserved for retired two-term presidents. The extraordinary activity of those last days requires an explanation. One possibility is that Obama and his people believed their own lies. They really thought Trump was a Russian operative, inserted into the Oval Office so he could destroy the country following the script of the 1962 movie, 'The Manchurian Candidate.' That's unlikely, for a couple of reasons. If President Obama truly imagined Trump to be a foreign agent, he had every incentive to raise the alarm — not in an obscure intelligence report, but in public, before a national audience. More to the point, when it came to American politics, Obama was a cold and calculating realist. He knew perfectly well when he was shading the truth to obtain a political advantage. As the bizarre drafting process of the ICA demonstrates, the same was true of top bureaucrats like Brennan and Comey. Everyone in this affair knew exactly what they were doing. My take is that the attempted smearing of Trump was literally a vanity project for Obama, a man with an exalted view of himself, his personal achievements and his place in history. His followers — a set that included pretty much all institutional elites — worshipped him. From the idealist perspective, he was seen as the embodiment of hope and change, humane policymaking and smart diplomacy. From a political angle, he was thought to be, like Franklin Roosevelt, a 'transformational' figure, as the coalition he assembled of college-educated, minority, and young voters would provide a permanent Democratic Party majority for decades, if not forever. That was the realistic position as the 2016 elections approached. It would take a man with a prodigious capacity for self-criticism not to believe such a flattering appraisal — and Obama, to put it mildly, was not that man. Trump's victory in 2016 shattered all of these illusions. Suddenly, Obama was no longer a political messiah ushering in a liberal golden age. He was a helpless failure and an object of repudiation. New level of deranged He understood, as a realist, that he had been the cause of which Trump was the effect. His vanity and self-image, I'm guessing, must have suffered a tremendous shock. Trump was a fluke, a hoax, an impossibility. He had to be exposed as both a monstrous aberration and a depraved departure from his predecessor's enlightened ways. President Obama wanted his mojo back. With the collusion scandal, he got it. On the day he left office, he was more popular with the public than he ever had been, while Trump's popularity plummeted. Was the elaborate charade worth it? Maybe so — only the former president is privy to his own internal states. But on July 23, Gabbard referred his case to the Department of Justice for potential criminal investigation. Call it tit for tat, with terrible repercussions all around — for himself, the country, even his antagonists. A Trump administration prosecution of Obama, I believe, would be a moral and political horror show. In these days of rage and riots, it would inaugurate a whole new level of derangement. At a time when we need forward progress, it would swivel our heads backwards the better to inspect minutely the sins of the past. There's a saner way to proceed. Find Robert Mueller's evil twin, appoint him special counsel, and let him loose for years to hound the paper trail of Barack Obama and the rest of the Trump-Russia crowd. That, in my humble opinion, would really be tit for tat . . .
Atlantic
a day ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
Trump's Desperate Move to Quiet the Epstein Scandal
Last week, the Trump administration made its latest and most comically desperate attempt to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed that she had unearthed bombshell proof of a Barack Obama–era plot to invent the conclusion that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump. Soon after, Trump's Truth Social account circulated an AI video depicting Obama being led off to prison. The message to his followers was that this scandal, not the other scandal involving a certain wealthy sex offender, was the one to focus on. This message contains multiple levels of dishonesty. On the surface, the effort to draw attention away from Epstein is glaring. Below that lies the wild claim that Obama or his top officials might somehow be charged with crimes. And the fantasy of prosecutions rests on yet another ludicrous claim: that Russia did not attempt to help Trump win in 2016. The president has managed to open a debate over whether the intelligence community's conclusion that Russia helped Trump was a crime, when in reality it was not even a mistake. Last Wednesday, Gabbard claimed that she'd found 'irrefutable evidence' that Obama and his aides had concocted a 'contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win.' Trump has insisted for nine years that Russia did not intervene on his behalf, and through sheer force of repetition has turned this into something close to official Republican Party dogma. The Obama administration and the CIA adamantly deny any political motive behind their conclusion that Russia was trying to help Trump win. 'We definitely had the intel to show with high probability that the specific goal of the Russians was to get Trump elected,' Susan Miller, who helped lead the CIA's analysis at the time, recently told NBC. Jonathan Chait: Trump's Epstein answers are getting worse Of course, if you think Obama and the CIA were secretly plotting to besmirch Trump's election victory, you probably don't put much stock in their denials. But the Senate Intelligence Committee similarly concluded in 2020 that Russia's goal was, as the panel's bipartisan report put it, 'to damage the Clinton Campaign and tarnish what it expected might be a Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and generally undermine the U.S. democratic process.' Trump has not explained how a 'contrived' analysis could have won the endorsement of all eight Republican committee members, including Marco Rubio, Trump's current secretary of state. The committee based this conclusion on 'a variety of information, including raw intelligence reporting.' (Subsequent reporting revealed that the United States had a high-level human source close to the Kremlin.) But the conclusion that Russia tried to help Trump doesn't have to rely on the authority of the bipartisan committee that investigated the question, or on the still-confidential intelligence that helped support the conclusion. It's obvious from the public fact pattern. In 2016, Russian television —as well as RT, the network Russia uses to propagandize abroad—was relentlessly propagandizing on Trump's behalf. Discerning which candidate Moscow favored in the race is about as hard as guessing which candidate the owner of Fox News supports. Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 election included using trolls and bots to seed social-media messages attacking Hillary Clinton and praising Trump. The content reflected the same themes Putin was pushing in his overt propaganda. Far more consequential was an operation to steal and disseminate Democratic Party emails, thousands of which were released in the immediate aftermath of an embarrassing recording of Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women. Russia wasn't trying to make the American political system look bad; it was trying to make Clinton look bad and Trump look good. Kaitlyn Tiffany: Conspiracy theorists are turning on the president Putin's Russia has a long-standing habit of intervening in foreign elections to bolster nationalist candidates who criticize Western alliances. Frequently, those interventions involve covert payments to the parties or their candidates. Not least because prominent Trump operatives refused to cooperate, the Robert Mueller investigation never definitively established the extent to which the Trump campaign worked with Russia. But even the known elements closely track with the pattern of how Russia behaves when it is trying to help a friendly candidate win. Trump's strategy of promiscuous dissembling often allows his smaller lies to be injected into the country's political bloodstream as his more extravagant lies draw attention. In this case, his main intention is to change the subject from Epstein to literally anything else. That he is simultaneously managing to inscribe his revisionist history of the 2016 election into the public record is a secondary victory Trump does not deserve.
