President Donald Trump accused former president Barack Obama of ‘treason’ yesterday, blaming him, without providing evidence, for leading an effort to falsely tie him to Russia and undermine his 2016 presidential campaign.
While Trump has frequently attacked Obama by name, the Republican president has not since returning to office in January gone this far in pointing the finger at his Democratic predecessor with allegations of criminal action.
A spokesperson for Obama did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During remarks in the Oval Office, Trump leaped on comments from his intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, on Friday in which she threatened to refer Obama administration officials to the Justice Department for prosecution over an intelligence assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
She declassified documents and said the information she was releasing showed a ‘treasonous conspiracy’ in 2016 by top Obama administration officials to undermine Trump.
“It’s there, he’s guilty. This was treason,” Trump said yesterday. “They tried to steal the election, they tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever imagined, even in other countries.”
An assessment by the US intelligence community in 2017 concluded that Russia, using social media disinformation, hacking and Russian bot farms, sought to damage Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign and bolster Trump. The assessment determined that the actual impact was likely limited and showed no evidence that Moscow’s efforts actually changed voting outcomes.
A 2020 bipartisan report by the Senate intelligence committee had found that Russia used Republican political operative Paul Manafort, the WikiLeaks website and others to try to influence the 2016 election to help Trump’s campaign.
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