President Donald Trump is revealing unflattering details about moves made by former President Barack Obama and his top aides during the 2016 transition, raising new questions about the dawn of the Russia investigation nine years ago.
Although the Trump administration is amplifying allegations from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that Obama and officials in his administration manufactured and politicized the intelligence that instigated former special counsel Robert Mueller’s federal Russia investigation, Obama is likely to encounter only political, not legal, consequences.
“Richard Nixon’s sins pale in comparison to what is suspected in this saga,” said Bud Cummins, a former United States attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas and Trump ally.
“Totalitarian dictatorships historically get their start by falsely accusing political opponents and then by abusing prosecutorial powers to eliminate them,” Cummins told the Washington Examiner. “As Americans, we cannot tolerate this, and it must be investigated.”
Ned Price, a National Security Council spokesman under Obama and a State Department spokesman under former President Joe Biden before becoming one of Biden’s deputies to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, disagreed.
“The only thing these baseless allegations can muddy is any shred of credibility Tulsi Gabbard has left,” Price told the Washington Examiner.
That is because, besides criticism from the Left that Gabbard did not declassify any new information, Obama is protected by the same presidential immunity extended to Trump by the Supreme Court last year in the case regarding whether Trump participated in an insurrection with the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. Obama is also likely protected by the statute of limitations and the low likelihood of a liberal Washington, D.C.-based grand jury indicting him.
“Based on the Supreme Court’s immunity decision in Trump v. United States last year, President Obama would be well-protected from criminal liability regardless of what he directed his staff to do,” Michigan State University law professor Brian Kalt told the Washington Examiner.
For national security attorney Bradley Moss, Gabbard was regurgitating “recycled conspiratorial garbage with no connection to reality, facts, or the law.”
“Putting aside the immunity protection President Trump himself secured for all former presidents for anything short of actual treason, the fact is nothing in this new ‘analysis’ by the DNI contradicts the actual findings by the intelligence community in 2017, the Mueller Report in 2019, or the bipartisan Senate report in 2020,” Moss told the Washington Examiner. “Get over it already, folks.”
The document Gabbard declassified this week was new, however. The director of national intelligence declassified a scathing 2020 report from the House Intelligence Committee that found the central claim underpinning the collusion allegations — that Russian President Vladimir Putin aspired to help Trump win in 2016 — was not supported by any credible evidence. Career intelligence officials fought to keep that conclusion out of the intelligence community’s official assessment of Russian election activities, but then-CIA Director John Brennan fought to keep the conclusion in despite there being no evidence for it, the report found.
Another review published earlier this month by CIA Director John Ratcliffe supported this conclusion. Ratcliffe’s review found that Brennan and then-FBI Director James Comey fought to include discredited opposition research from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, known as the Steele dossier, in the official intelligence community assessment. During previous reviews of the Russia saga, such as the one conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Brennan had denied ever relying upon the Steele dossier for intelligence assessments.
But Cummins, the former U.S. attorney, said that “it is already clear that [Justice Department], FBI, CIA, and White House officials knowingly put the country through an unwarranted multi-year Mueller investigation.”
“Americans deserve to know whether their president helped to criminally frame another duly-elected president,” he said. “The issue of whether Obama is immune from prosecution must not become a barrier to proving what happened.”
To that end, Gabbard made a rare appearance in the White House press briefing room on Wednesday, during which she confirmed she had criminally referred Obama to the Justice Department for investigation.
“The evidence that we have found and that we have released directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment,” Gabbard told reporters at the time.
That evidence, according to Gabbard, includes the House Intelligence Committee report she declassified earlier in the day that alleged Obama directed his top administration officials to find that Russia sought to interfere in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf despite the intelligence community’s assessment up to that point that Moscow was not explicitly supporting the then-Republican nominee.
Gabbard’s disclosure came after she published a report last week and declassified more documents alleging that Obama and his administration ignored evidence that undercut the emerging Trump-Russia narrative.
Regardless of whether the Justice Department pursues Gabbard’s criminal referral of Obama, the former president is already in a difficult period of his post-presidency after last year’s election and his repeated emphasis on the importance of democracy.
“What’s being asked of us is [to] make some effort to stand up for the things that you think are right,” he told a fundraiser earlier this month. “If we all do that, if we do our jobs over the next year and a half, then I think we will rebuild momentum and we will position ourselves to get this country moving in the direction it should.”
The potential prosecution of Brennan, Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, and his former FBI Director James Comey over their efforts to investigate Trump could further complicate his legacy.
On Thursday, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John Cornyn (R-TX) expressed their support of Trump, imploring Attorney General Pam Bondi to appoint a special counsel to investigate “the extent to which former President Obama, his staff and administration officials manipulated the U.S. national security apparatus for a political outcome,” per Graham.
“While we’ve known there was ZERO evidence of collusion between @realDonaldTrump & Russia, it’s become more evident that the entire Russia collusion hoax was fabricated by the Obama admin to subvert the will of the American people,” Cornyn added on social media.
@LindseyGrahamSC and I are urging @AGPamBondi to appoint a special counsel to investigate the extent to which former President Obama, his staff, & administration officials manipulated the U.S. national security apparatus during Russiagate.
While we’ve known there was ZERO…— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) July 24, 2025
The previous day, the Justice Department similarly announced it was forming a “strike force” to consider possible next legal steps after Gabbard’s referral.
“The Department of Justice is proud to work with my friend Director Gabbard, and we are grateful for her partnership in delivering accountability for the American people,” Bondi wrote in a statement on Wednesday. “We will investigate these troubling disclosures fully and leave no stone unturned to deliver justice.”
Notwithstanding Graham and Cornyn’s calls for a special prosecutor, Gabbard’s allegations regarding Obama have not been well received by all Republican senators.
“I personally think this is all a waste of time. Let’s leave the past in the past,” one GOP senator told the Washington Examiner.
Trump, himself, alleged this week that Obama and his administration officials were guilty of “treason,” while in the White House’s Oval Office alongside Philippine President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., accusing them of trying to “steal” the 2016 election.
“Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people,” Trump said. “Based on what I read, and I read pretty much what you read, it would be President Obama. He started it, and Biden was there with him, and Comey was there, and Clapper. The whole group was there.”
In response, amid a political ceasefire between the former presidents after last year’s election, Obama spokesman Patrick Rodenbush issued a rare statement to condemn Gabbard and Trump’s allegations as “ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
“Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes,” Rodenbush wrote in a statement. “These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.”
To that end, Democrats, from House Intelligence Committee ranking member Jim Himes (D-CT) to Himes’s counterpart in the Senate, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), have argued that Trump is merely trying to distract from criticism regarding the lack of candor concerning the Jeffrey Epstein files.
“The reason that [the] Epstein files story won’t go away is because, at core, it’s about young girls being sexually assaulted and raped, and so Trump can do all he wants by making false and bizarre allegations,” House Democratic Caucus vice chairman Ted Lieu told the Washington Examiner. “By the way, you know that Supreme Court decision [on] presidential immunity works for both Democratic and Republican presidents.”
Mabinty Quarshie, David Sivak, and Samantha-Jo Roth contributed to this report.
