On Tuesday, the official White House Twitter account tweeted about “Obamagate,” a vague right-wing conspiracy theory that President Donald Trump has promoted heavily in the last few days.
Essentially, Obamagate theorizes that former President Barack Obama and his administration used their final weeks in power to sabotage the incoming Trump administration, including national security adviser Michael Flynn. Trump says this amounts to conspiracy against the Trump administration.
During a Monday press conference, Trump said, “Obamagate. It’s been going on for a long time. It’s been going on from before I even got elected,” but when pressed on what crime he felt Obama committed, he demurred.
“You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours,” he told a reporter.
The White House tweeted a video along with the all-caps word. It included clips of Fox News host Sean Hannity and anchor Bret Baier, along with other television pundits across the networks, discussing recently released FBI documents detailing interviews with Flynn. To Trump, the documents prove Flynn, whose charges were dropped by the Department of Justice last week.
Last week, Trump reacted to the news that the DOJ dropped Flynn’s charges, by calling him a “hero” and the FBI “scum.” Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to charges that he lied to the FBI regarding two conversations he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
“The whole thing was orchestrated and set up within the FBI — Clapper, Brennan, and in the Oval Office meetings back then with President Obama,” a talking head says in the video. The video ends with a graphic that reads “Obamagate: The most corrupt administration in U.S. History.”
OBAMAGATE pic.twitter.com/sPHfuNE0z4
— The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) May 12, 2020