US President Donald Trump has accused former President Barack Obama of treason and accused him, without providing evidence, of leading an effort to falsely link Russia to undermine his 2016 presidential campaign, Reuters reports.
A spokesman for Obama dismissed Trump's claims, saying "these outlandish accusations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction."
During remarks in the Oval Office, Trump reacted sharply to comments by his intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard on Friday in which she threatened to refer charges against Obama administration officials to the US Justice Department over an intelligence assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
She declassified documents and said the information she released showed a "treasonous conspiracy" in 2016 by senior Obama administration officials to undermine Trump, allegations that Democrats have called false and politically motivated.
"There he is, he's guilty. That was treason," Trump said on Tuesday, though he offered no evidence for his claims. "They tried to steal the election, they tried to obfuscate it. They did things that nobody has ever imagined, even in other countries."
A U.S. intelligence community assessment released in January 2017 concluded that Russia, using social media disinformation, hacking and Russian bot farms, had tried to harm Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign and boost Trump. The assessment found that the actual impact was likely limited and showed no evidence that Moscow's efforts actually changed the outcome of the vote.
A bipartisan 2020 report by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that Russia used Republican political operative Paul Manafort, the website WikiLeaks and others to try to influence the 2016 election and help Trump's campaign.
"Nothing in the document released last week (by Gabbard) undermines the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes," Obama spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said in a statement.
Trump, who has a history of promoting false conspiracy theories, has often denounced the assessments as "a hoax". In recent days, Trump has reposted a fake video on his Truth Social account showing Obama being arrested in handcuffs in the Oval Office. Trump has been trying to divert attention from other issues after coming under pressure from conservative supporters to reveal more about Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Conspiracy theorists about Epstein have urged Trump, who had dealings with the disgraced financier in the 1990s and early 2000s, to release investigative documents related to the case. When asked about Epstein in the Oval Office, Trump quickly launched into an attack on Obama and Clinton. “The witch hunt you should be talking about is that they absolutely caught President Obama "tightly," Trump said.
Trump hinted that action would be taken against Obama and his former officials, calling the Russia investigation an act of treason and the former president guilty of an "attempted coup."
"It's time to start, after what they did to me, and whether it's right or wrong, it's time to go after people. Obama was caught straight," he said.
Obama has long been a target of Trump. In 2011 he accused then-President Obama of not being born in the United States, prompting Obama to release a copy of his birth certificate.
Gabbard's claim that Obama participated in a plot to undermine Trump's 2016 election by fabricating intelligence about Russian interference contradicts a CIA review commissioned by Director John Ratcliffe and released on July 2, a bipartisan 2018 Senate report, and declassified documents that Gabbard herself released last week.
The documents show that Gabbard conflated two separate U.S. intelligence findings, claiming that Obama and his national security aides had changed their assessment that Russia was likely not trying to influence the election through cyberspace.
One conclusion was that Russia did not attempt to hack U.S. election infrastructure to alter the vote count, and the second was that Moscow likely used cyber means to influence the U.S. political environment through information and propaganda operations, including the theft and leakage of data from Democratic Party servers.
The January 2017 U.S. intelligence assessment commissioned by Obama was based on the second finding: that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized influence operations to sway the 2016 vote for Trump.
The review commissioned by Ratcliffe found flaws in the preparation of that assessment. But it did not challenge its conclusion and confirmed the "quality and credibility" of a highly classified CIA report that the assessment's authors had relied on.