Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard accused Barack Obama of taking part in a “treasonous conspiracy” Saturday on Fox & Friends, accusing the former president and other officials of “manufacturing intelligence” to suggest Russia attempted to influence the results of the 2016 election.
Special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s landmark 2019 report found no evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Russia at the time, but did determine that it made efforts to interfere in the election.
“All of a sudden, in the early days of December, there was a president’s daily brief that was drafted,” Gabbard said. “This is put together by the different elements of the intelligence community that reflected that same assessment: Russia did not try to hack the election in essence.”
“That … that document was pulled hours before it was supposed to be published for the president to see that following morning,” she continued. “That document was never published until we released it yesterday. One day later, President Obama calls a meeting of his National Security Council, his top officials, to be held on what they called a sensitive topic.”
“And the results of that meeting, which we released yesterday in these over 100 documents that talk about in detail how President Obama and his team, he directed a manufactured piece of intelligence that detailed not if, but how Russia tried to influence the outcome of the United States election that President Trump won in November of 2016. This document was then used as the foundation for everything that came next.”
The administration, she continued, then waged “essentially a years-long coup” against Donald Trump.
When asked if Obama could be, or would be, charged in connection with this so-called conspiracy, Gabbard dodged offering a real answer. “I’m not a lawyer. We’re referring all of this to the Department of Justice. I know that Attorney General Pam Bondi is committed to bringing about justice to those who have broken the law,” she said.
Gabbard has also named former director of national intelligence James Clapper as well as then-secretary of state John Kerry and then-national security advisor Susan Rice as having participated in the scheme she presented to “Fox & Friends.”
The accusations against Obama come as the Trump administration is facing mounting calls to come clean about the current president’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein — calls that are coming from within the MAGA house, who have demanded the administration release files.
Trump has alternately claimed such files are non-existent, or that they were created by the Obama administration. The president’s decision to nominate Gabbard to director of national intelligence was one of his most controversial, largely due to her lack of intelligence experience, as well as her demonstrated record of having offered comments in support of Vladmir Putin.
Watch the interview with Gabbard in the video above.
