8 months ago
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Tulsi Gabbard is the face of Donald Trump’s newest bid to move the news cycle off the Jeffrey Epstein files.
But she, like the president himself, is likely to see her efforts end in the same murky water where the dreams of prosecuting Hillary Clinton died during Trump’s first term in office.
The White House trotted out Gabbard, Wednesday, alongside press secretary Karoline Leavitt to brief reporters on an ODNI review led by Gabbard. She told reporters that new evidence pointed to the involvement of Barack Obama and top officials in a supposed campaign to alter the conclusions of intelligence assessments to forge a link between Donald Trump and Russia where none supposedly existed.
An old theory with a new twist, the plot was laid out by Gabbard as a years-long “coup” attempt against the 45th president. She argued that Obama, along with former ODNI James Clapper and former FBI chief James Comey, knowingly changed official intelligence assessments to explain the scope of the nefarious activity Russia was up to in 2016.
“The implications of this are far reaching and have to do with the integrity of our democratic republic,” Gabbard claimed. “It has to do with an outgoing President taking action to manufacture intelligence, to undermine and usurp the will of the American people in that election and launch what would be a years long coup against the incoming president United States, Donald Trump.”
It’s here where Donald Trump and the White House’s call for “justice” and “accountability” (two words Leavitt and Gabbard floated Wednesday) runs out of gas. The White House directed the appointment of a special counsel to look at the origins of the Russia investigation in 2019, the probe, led by John Durham, found no evidence of criminal activity committed by Obama or other members of his administration.
And given how the federal statute of limitations works, the clock is ticking for Trumpworld to take a second crack at delivering the retribution the president has long threatened to levy against his enemies. Under federal law, most criminal charges have a statute of limitation of five years, meaning that the entirety of the “Russiagate” probe’s duration now falls outside of the legal window for criminal prosecution.
To be clear, this obviously does not apply to all crimes. It doesn’t apply to murder, or sexual abuse. It also doesn’t apply to treason, which Trumpworld has long (and unseriously) suggested charging Obama and others with. Trump again made that specific accusation in the wake of Gabbard’s memo being published last week. Nor does it apply to another criminal count that could be leveled agains the former president and members of his team in a last-ditch attempt to make something stick: conspiracy against rights.
That latter charge carries a statute of limitations of ten years, not five, and as a result it’s by far the most likely avenue for federal prosecutors to take if a real effort is made to deliver on Trump’s promised vengeance. The New York Post reported that some of Trump’s allies view it as their best shot. But their opponents say even that would be a fool’s errand.
“These bizarre claims against President Obama are a made up farrago of malicious nonsense. The context makes clear that this is an effort to distract from Trump's major Epstein problem,” Norm Eisen, a constitutional scholar and co-counsel for the first Trump impeachment effort in 2020, said in a statement to The Independent on Wednesday.
Eisen continued: “We at Democracy Defenders Fund have filed a legal demand under the freedom of information act for the Trump - Epstein documents and if we do not get them we will be litigating. But there is no basis for charging Obama with any crime irrespective of the statute of limitations, and plucking an offense out of thin air simply because it has a longer statute of limitations just highlights the baselessness of it all. “
At Wednesday’s briefing Gabbard deflected questions on potential charges to Attorney General Pam Bondi, possibly the most embattled member of Trump’s Cabinet thanks to the uproar over the DOJ’s declaration that a list of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s clients did not exist.
“I'm leaving the criminal charges to the Department of Justice. I am not an attorney,” said Gabbard.
In reality, the DOJ has gone nearly a week since the publication of a memo outlining the ODNI’s newest review, and the Justice Department hasn’t uttered a peep in terms of plans to launch investigations following up on Gabbard’s findings, despite the ODNI claimin that all evidence was referred to Bondi’s office.
A spokesperson for Obama, meanwhile, issued a rare statement on Tuesday calling the accusations “bizarre” and correctly noting that “nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but didn’t successfully manipulate any votes.”
This is true. The ODNI assessment released by Gabbard relied heavily on Gabbard’s conflation of the finding that Russian actors did not launch cyberattacks against voting platforms with a finding that Russia had not interfered at all, the latter of which was not true. Like the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020, the Department of Justice and other agencies found that Russian actors worked to push influence campaigns on social media platforms aimed at sowing disinformation.
On Wednesday, Gabbard and Leavitt presented that conclusion anew by inferring that Russia did interfere, but without the goal of helping either major candidate in the race.
Conspiracy against rights would be an ironic charge for Trump’s team to level against the former president. It’s one of the same charges he himself was accused of after the 2020 election in a criminal probe launched by Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed under the Biden administration.
It would be a difficult one to get to stick to the former president, however, as it would require that Trump’s prosecutors prove the existence of an organized plot between Obama and his advisers to keep Trump out of the White House — something even Gabbard didn’t allege on Wednesday, as the ODNI probe did not turn up any evidence of a concerted scheme.
The Biden White House tried for 4 years to launch successful criminal prosecutions aimed at holding Donald Trump accountable. His attempts to overturn the election and his handling of classified materials after leaving the presidency both triggered criminal charges; in both cases, the DOJ was too slow to bring the case to trial, and the charges were dismissed after Trump’s 2024 election victory.
Trump was charged with conspiracy against rights for allegedly conspiring to violate the rights of millions of Americans by working with state legislatures and Congress in a half-cocked bid to throw out the election results pointing to his defeat. It’s the same charge down to the letter that Obama would now face from a Trumpified DOJ, were such an effort to be launched.
Gabbard, on Wednesday, couldn’t answer why those charges weren’t pursued during Trump’s first term.
“I can't speak to what happened there,” she said Wednesday. “There were several [directors of national intelligence] under the first Trump administration. President Trump faced many challenges from those who were working in the government who sought to undermine his presidency.”
