Trump’s Obama ‘Russia-gate’ push offers the MAGA Epstein crowd a head on a plate. Here’s why he can’t deliver on that promise
Tulsi Gabbard is the face of Donald Trump’s newest bid to move the news cycle off the Jeffrey Epstein files.
But she, like the president himself, is likely to see her efforts end in the same murky water where the dreams of prosecuting Hillary Clinton died during Trump’s first term in office.
On Wednesday, the White House trotted out the Director of National Intelligence, alongside press secretary Karoline Leavitt, to brief reporters on an intel review that Gabbard had led.
She told reporters that new evidence pointed to the involvement of former president Barack Obama and top officials in a supposed campaign to alter the conclusions of intelligence assessments, in order to forge a link between Trump and Russia where none supposedly existed.
It was an old theory with a new twist, which Gabbard laid out as an apparent years-long “coup” attempt against Trump. She argued that Obama, along with former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former FBI chief James Comey, knowingly changed official intelligence assessments to explain the scope of the nefarious activity Russia was up to during the 2016 election.
“The implications of this are far reaching and have to do with the integrity of our democratic republic,” Gabbard claimed. “It has to do with an outgoing President taking action to manufacture intelligence, to undermine and usurp the will of the American people in that election and launch what would be a years long coup against the incoming president United States, Donald Trump.”
It’s here where Donald Trump and the White House’s call for “justice” and “accountability” (two words Leavitt and Gabbard floated Wednesday) runs out of gas. The White House directed the appointment of a special counsel to look at the origins of the Russia investigation in 2019, the probe, led by John Durham, found no evidence of criminal activity committed by Obama or other members of his administration.
And given how the federal statute of limitations works, the clock is ticking for Trumpworld to take a second crack at delivering the retribution the president has long threatened to levy against his enemies. Under federal law, most criminal charges have a statute of limitation of five years, meaning that the entirety of the “Russiagate” probe’s duration now falls outside of the legal window for criminal prosecution.
To be clear, this obviously does not apply to all crimes. It doesn’t apply to murder, or sexual abuse. It also doesn’t apply to treason, which Trumpworld has long (and unseriously) suggested charging Obama and others with. Trump again made that specific accusation in the wake of Gabbard’s memo being published last week. Nor does it apply to another criminal count that could be leveled agains the former president and members of his team in a last-ditch attempt to make something stick: conspiracy against rights.
That latter charge carries a statute of limitations of ten years, not five, and as a result it’s by far the most likely avenue for federal prosecutors to take if a real effort is made to deliver on Trump’s promised vengeance. The New York Post reported that some of Trump’s allies view it as their best shot. But their opponents say even that would be a fool’s errand.
“These bizarre claims against President Obama are a made up farrago of malicious nonsense. The context makes clear that this is an effort to distract from Trump’s major Epstein problem,” Norm Eisen, a constitutional scholar and co-counsel for the first Trump impeachment effort in 2020, said in a statement to The Independent on Wednesday.
Eisen continued: “We at Democracy Defenders Fund have filed a legal demand under the freedom of information act for the Trump – Epstein documents and if we do not get them we will be litigating. But there is no basis for charging Obama with any crime irrespective of the statute of limitations, and plucking an offense out of thin air simply because it has a longer statute of limitations just highlights the baselessness of it all. “
At Wednesday’s briefing Gabbard deflected questions on potential charges to Attorney General Pam Bondi, possibly the most embattled member of Trump’s Cabinet thanks to the uproar over the DOJ’s declaration that a list of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s clients did not exist.
“I’m leaving the criminal charges to the Department of Justice. I am not an attorney,” said Gabbard.
