Former president Barack Obama’s office on Tuesday issued a rare admonishment of the Trump administration’s claims that Obama administration officials planned a “treasonous conspiracy” aimed at the current commander in chief, calling the allegations “a weak attempt at distraction.” On Friday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — whose position has traditionally been apolitical — released declassified documents that she said show Obama and his national security team “manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.” The evidence pertains to the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to interfere in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf.

The evidence on which Gabbard based her findings is paper-thin and discounts more substantiated intelligence findings, The Washington Post Fact-Checker found, but Trump has nonetheless embraced the material as the basis for potential criminal prosecutions against his perceived political enemies — including Obama.

Advertisement

Patrick Rodenbush, a spokesperson for Obama, said in a statement that while the office “does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” the administration’s new “bizarre” and “ridiculous” allegations warranted one.

“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. These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio,” Rodenbush wrote, referring to Trump’s secretary of state.

Multiple in-depth investigations found that Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election, largely in an attempt to interfere with U.S. democracy but also in a way that suggested Putin preferred Trump to win.

Advertisement

The studies and assessments include the years-long bipartisan investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which Rubio signed onto; the probe by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III; and the January 2017 U.S. intelligence community assessment that Trump and his aides are now seeking to undermine.

Earlier Tuesday, Trump said a criminal investigation should move forward as a result of the findings, saying, “it’s time to go after people.” He singled out Obama, whom he said had been “caught directly.”

“It’s Obama. His orders are on the paper. The papers are signed. The papers came right at their office. … What they did in 2016 and in 2020 is very criminal. It’s criminal at the highest level,” Trump told reporters.

Gabbard said in a Tuesday interview with Fox News that Obama’s office was deflecting.

Advertisement

“There is a long laundry list of facts and intelligence reporting that directly contradict the statement coming from President Obama’s office and those who are trying to deflect away from what actually happened,” Gabbard claimed in the interview with the president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. “… After Donald Trump was elected, led by President Obama there was an effort to create a document that would serve as a foundation for what would be a years-long coup against President Trump, therefore trying to subvert the will of the American people who sent him to the White House in 2016.”

The documents released by a special team that Gabbard has assembled called the Director’s Initiative Group conflated two separate lines of inquiry into Russia’s election interference: one having to do with potential cyberattacks by Moscow on U.S. voting machines and other election infrastructure, the other involving social media campaigns and hacking of Democratic campaign documents that were then publicly released.

Gabbard released documents, including a declassified September 2016 study by spy agencies, that found Russia and foreign adversaries probably would not be able to use cyberattacks against U.S. election infrastructure or manipulate vote totals in any meaningful way.

Advertisement

But the attacks that did take place, according to previous investigations, involved other cyber tools: divisive cyber media campaigns and hacking into computer systems belonging to the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. The hacks were the work of two Russian intelligence agencies, the GRU and the SVR, investigators found.

The statement from Rodenbush also marks a rare public rebuke of the Trump White House from Obama’s team.

On Monday, for example, a spokesperson for Obama declined to comment when asked by The Post about a video Trump posted on the social media platform he owns, Truth Social. The video, which appears to have been generated with artificial intelligence, appears to show Obama being pushed to the floor and arrested by FBI agents inside the Oval Office as Trump, seated beside the former president, watches and smiles. As of Tuesday evening, the post had been reshared nearly 12,000 times.

Advertisement

Although it had been rare for there to be so much friction between current and former occupants of the Oval Office, Obama has been a frequent target of Trump’s attacks.

Most recently, Trump has suggested that Obama somehow helped write the “Epstein files” and is mishandling the construction of Obama’s presidential library. Obama, for his part, sought to present a contrast to the president without becoming a high-profile spokesman for the Democratic opposition. Last month, Obama suggested Trump has a “weak attachment to democracy.”