(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) On Oct. 22, 2012, during a debate with GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, then-President Barack Obama unleashed a pre-rehearsed zinger that further hobbled the milquetoast Mormon from Massachusetts, all but locking in a Democratic re-election victory.
“Gov. Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that al-Qaeda is a threat because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America you said Russia, not al-Qaeda,” Obama haughtily began.
“You said Russia and the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because you know the Cold War has been over for 20 years,” he continued. “But governor, you know when it comes to our foreign policy you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies in the 1920s.”
But even though Obama downplayed the notion that Russia was a national security threat in his debate with Romney, his actions damaged U.S./Russian relations, and the fallout continues to this day.
Indeed, Obama supported what many consider to be a 2014 CIA-led color revolution in Ukraine, ousting its Russia-friendly leader to help install the more NATO-compliant Petro Poroshenko. Thus began the ongoing war between the two nations that’s killed hundreds of thousands of young men—along with costing the U.S. taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars in military support and other aid.
While launching a proxy war against Russia abroad, Obama ironically employed Soviet-style tactics at home. He and many others on the Left have acted as de-facto Russian agents by relying on half-truths, propaganda and outright lies to gain a political advantage when their actual ideas and policies prove to be abject failures.
Newly declassified documents released last week by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard show that Obama recycled his go-to tactic of pushing phony innuendo when he signed off on Hillary Clinton’s scheme to paint Trump as a Russian agent in July 2016.
Intelligence assessments prior to Obama’s secretive signoff appeared to have shown that Russia had a generalized desire to sow chaos in U.S. politics, which it did through a relatively innocuous social-media campaign to push disinformation. However, Putin fully expected for Clinton to win, and the Kremlin was eager to capitalize on its extensive dossier full of kompromat showing that the Obama secretary of state was mentally unstable and obsessed with power.
Nonetheless, Democrats and their deep-state flunkies laundered lies about Trump through multiple intelligence agencies and a complicit mainstream news media, using the hoax to regain control of Congress in the 2018 midterms and as one of the pretenses for stealing the 2020 election on Biden’s behalf.
The hard-proof confirmation that it was a plot knowingly contrived by top figures of the Obama administration, who seditiously conspired against the will of the American people, has again flipped the script, revealing the true threat to U.S. democracy.
Whether the Justice Department, still reeling from the public backlash over its decision to hide Jeffrey Epstein records, is able to deliver on promises to try and convict the treasonous traitors—or if, instead, it will simply be another disappointing distraction that simply reopens the long-festering wound—only time will tell.
But one question can finally be closed, which is that whatever chaos Russia hoped to sow in U.S. politics, it succeeded through the direct efforts of the Obama administration—and the very intelligence apparatus that was created to counter the threat of Soviet espionage has ultimately helped to do the KGB’s bidding.
Ben Sellers is a columnist and former editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
