‘I have never ever said this, but truth is, they got caught spying…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Former President Barack Obama can add another achievement to his long list of historic “firsts” if his successor has any say in it: First President to Commit Treason.
President Donald Trump—who has previously levied the accusation against several other powerful Democrats, including House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff—told conservative author Doug Wead that Obama was guilty of the offense, punishable by execution, according to the Washington Examiner.
“What they did was treasonous, OK? It was treasonous,” Trump told Wead for his forthcoming book, Inside Trump’s White House: The Real Story of His Presidency.
Wead’s book covers many different aspects of Trump’s first years in office, including his successful steerage of the economy that had stagnated under Obama into a booming bull market with record-shattering unemployment.
However, few things cast a greater pall over his presidency than the Russian collusion hoax that sought to undermine Trump during and after the 2016 election.
Subsequent hearings revealed that members of the FBI and other intelligence agencies had worked closely with the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National committee and left-wing media outlets to propagate and spread the since-debunked claims.
While Trump was ultimately validated and largely exonerated by the Mueller Report in March 2019, the accusations may have contributed to Democrats retaking the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm, spawning endless congressional oversight probes, subpoenas and the current impeachment inquisition into a July phone call with the Ukrainian president.
Few have been convicted treason in the U.S., with a Wikipedia page on the topic listing only 15, most of which stemmed from wartime offenses. Making such a case against Obama, particularly during his presidency, would pose considerable legal challenges.
But even if Trump indulged his characteristically hyperbolic rhetoric in making that accusation, another could be closer to its mark.
He also accused Obama and his intelligence operatives of espionage—a charge that may well be supported by Attorney General William Barr in the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal investigation of the Russian collusion conspiracy.
“I have never ever said this, but truth is, they got caught spying. They were spying,” Trump told Wead, before adding, “Obama.”
It is widely known that the FBI used the false pretenses of its unverified Russia information to wiretap the conversations of Trump adviser Carter Page with approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
They also are believed to have bugged Trump’s New York hotel, and some—including then-FBI Director James Comey—have admitted that they were approaching briefings with the president-elect as intelligence-gathering missions.
Only recently, though, has Obama’s direct role in orchestrating the attempted “coup” come more into focus.
In a recent interview, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, now a CNN analyst, admitted that the former president was calling the shots.
“The message I’m getting from all this is, apparently what we were supposed to have done was to ignore the Russian interference, ignore the Russian meddling and the threat that it poses to us,” Clapper told CNN anchor Jim Sciutto, “and oh, by the way, blown off what the then commander in chief, President Obama, told us to do, which was to assemble all the reporting that we could that we had available to us.”
Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan have become prime subjects of interest in the DOJ probe being conducted by special prosecutor John Durham.
Many now wonder what evidence will emerge that could further validate Trump’s suspicions—and what charges, if any, Barr may pursue that would offer some measure of consolation to outraged conservatives while further deepening the country’s partisan divide.
