Changing Subject Amid a Pandemic, Trump Turns to an
Old Ploy: Blame Obama
After
pressure from the president, Senator Lindsey Graham agreed to hold a hearing,
but he rebuffed Mr. Trump’s suggestion that his predecessor be called to
testify.
By Peter Baker
·
Published May 14,
2020Updated May 15, 2020, 12:48 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON
— President Trump has embarked on an aggressive new drive to rewrite the
narrative of the Russia investigation by making dark and unsubstantiated
accusations that former President Barack Obama masterminded a sinister plot to
bring him down.
On
Twitter, on television, in the Rose Garden and even on an official White House
social media page, Mr. Trump in recent days has taken aim at his most recent
predecessor in a way that no sitting president has in modern times, accusing
Mr. Obama of undefined and unspecified crimes under the vague but politically
charged catchphrase “Obamagate.”
The
president went even further on Thursday by demanding that Mr. Obama be
hauled before the Senate “to testify about the biggest
political crime and scandal in the history of the USA,” a scenario that itself
has no precise precedent in American history. Within hours, Mr. Trump’s most
faithful Republican ally in the Senate promptly announced that he would indeed
investigate, although he would probably not summon Mr. Obama.
In
flinging incendiary charges at his predecessor, Mr. Trump has offered no
evidence and has not even specified what “crime” he was accusing the former
president of committing. Instead, Mr. Trump seemed to be tying the
investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, which has enraged
him for years, back to Mr. Obama while hinting ominously at forthcoming
revelations that will bolster his claims.
The
new focus on the former president comes as Mr. Trump appeared eager to change
the subject amid the deadliest public health crisis to confront the United
States in a half-century. On a day when the death toll in the United States topped 85,000 and
the government reported nearly three million more people filing for unemployment,
Mr. Trump spent part of his morning attacking Mr. Obama.
In
addition to diverting attention from the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Trump’s
focus on Mr. Obama allows him to try to turn the tables on his accusers by
making them out to be the ones who are corrupt while simultaneously putting his
Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., on the
defensive.
“This
was all Obama, this was all Biden,” Mr. Trump said in an interview on Fox Business
Network that aired on Thursday. “These people were corrupt, the
whole thing was corrupt, and we caught them. We caught them.”
When
the host Maria Bartiromo asked if he believed that Mr. Obama directed American
intelligence agencies to spy on him, Mr. Trump agreed, without evidence.
“Yes,
he probably directed them,” Mr. Trump said. “But if he didn’t direct them, he
knew everything — and you’ll see that,” he went on, adding that documents would
be released soon to bolster his charges.
Mr.
Obama, whose advisers have dismissed Mr. Trump’s comments as the ludicrous
ranting of a president in trouble, issued what amounted to his own one-word
rejoinder hours later on Twitter: “Vote,” he wrote.
No
evidence has emerged that before the November 2016 election Mr. Obama was
involved in the F.B.I. investigation into Mr. Trump’s advisers and any ties to
Russian campaign interference, much less that he directed it, although its
existence had been reported in the news media. Mr. Obama was told in January
2017 about telephone calls between Mr. Trump’s incoming national security
adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and Russia’s ambassador discussing
sanctions that the outgoing president had just imposed on Moscow in response to
its attempted election sabotage.
Documents released by Mr. Trump’s allies this week show
that several Obama administration officials, including Mr. Biden, requested the
identity of the American who was originally unnamed in intelligence reports
about contacts with Russia, an American who turned out to be Mr. Flynn. Such
“unmasking” requests are made thousands of times a year and, according to the
documents, these were approved under normal procedures and the recipients were
authorized to receive the information.
But
Mr. Trump’s allies suggest the requests indicated that Mr. Obama’s aides must
have been involved in trying to “set up” Mr. Flynn, who was interviewed by
F.B.I. agents after Mr. Obama left office and eventually pleaded guilty to
lying to them. Attorney General William P. Barr last week moved to throw the case out, concluding that the F.B.I.
had no basis to interview Mr. Flynn, a decision that Mr. Obama later said
undermined the rule of law.
Mr.
Trump’s attacks have been amplified by Fox News, other conservative media and
his re-election apparatus. He has even used his government platform to advance
the charges, posting a campaign-style “Obamagate”
video on the official White House Facebook page, an overtly
partisan message that would have been seen as crossing a line in past
administrations.
Mr.
Trump has often aired grievances against political opponents with sensational
but unspecific accusations, leaving advisers to follow and try to fill in the
lines. In this case, Mr. Trump hopes enough information will be released by his
intelligence appointees to muddy the waters and lend a patina of confusion
about what Mr. Obama may have done, according to people familiar with his
thinking.
Other
presidents have feuded with predecessors over policy or politics, even publicly
quarreling at times. But putting aside Richard M. Nixon and Watergate, no
sitting president in modern times has explicitly and aggressively accused a
former president of criminality.
“What
makes Trump’s attacks so egregious in contrast to his predecessors is how he
simply concocts scandals out of thin air, cooking up conspiracies that have no
relation to historical fact,” said Matthew Dallek, a presidential historian at
George Washington University.
Mr.
Trump has long harbored a personal animus toward Mr. Obama. Mr. Trump spent
much of Mr. Obama’s presidency championing the racist and false “birther” conspiracy theory that
Mr. Obama was born in Africa. Mr. Obama reciprocated by mocking Mr. Trump at the White
House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2011 as the reality show host sat
nearby seething.
Mr.
Trump turned back to Mr. Obama in March 2017, two days after Jeff Sessions,
then the attorney general, recused himself from the investigation into Russian
election interference, a move that infuriated the president and led to the
appointment of Mr. Mueller.
As
Mr. Trump stewed at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida club, an aide showed him a story
from the conservative website Breitbart quoting the radio host Mark Levin
accusing Mr. Obama of “police state” tactics. The president took to Twitter to assert that Mr.
Obama “had my ‘wires tapped,’” a
claim that Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department later
debunked.
The
president lashed out again last weekend after news reports about Mr. Obama’s
criticism of Mr. Barr’s decision to negate Mr. Flynn’s guilty plea.
Mr.
Trump began using the term “Obamagate” on Sunday but refused to explain what
specific crime he was alleging when asked the next day by a Washington Post
reporter. “You know what the crime is,” the president said testily. “The crime
is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except
yours.”
He
still has not explained, but on Thursday morning, he prodded Senator Lindsey
Graham, Republican of South Carolina and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, into opening an investigation.
“If
I were a Senator or Congressman, the first person I would call to testify about
the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA, by FAR, is
former President Obama,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter.
“He knew EVERYTHING. Do it @LindseyGrahamSC, just do it. No more Mr. Nice Guy.
No more talk!”
Less
than two hours later, Mr. Graham announced hearings into the Flynn case and
other matters, including whether Mr. Mueller should have been appointed in the
first place. Mr. Mueller’s investigation concluded that Russia mounted a
major operation to tilt the 2016 election to Mr. Trump and that there were
multiple contacts with Mr. Trump’s associates, but it did not find enough
evidence to charge a criminal conspiracy.
“To
say we are living in unusual times is an understatement,” Mr. Graham said in a statement.
“We have the sitting president (Trump) accusing the former president (Obama) of
being part of a treasonous conspiracy to undermine his presidency. We have the
former president suggesting the current president is destroying the rule of law
by dismissing the General Flynn case.”
Still,
Mr. Graham threw cold water on the idea of calling Mr. Obama. “Both
presidents,” he added, “are welcome to come before the committee and share
their concerns about each other. If nothing else it would make for great
television. However, I have great doubts about whether it would be wise for the
country.”
The
F.B.I. opened its investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign
in July 2016 not long after WikiLeaks released thousands of internal Democratic
Party emails that intelligence officials believed had been hacked by Russian
intelligence operatives. The investigation, code named Crossfire Hurricane, was handled by a small
group of law enforcement and intelligence officials, who did not brief White
House officials about the inquiry, according to accounts that have emerged
since.
When Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump met in person two days
after the November election, Mr. Obama warned him about Mr. Flynn, who had
served as the Defense Intelligence Agency director during the Obama
administration. Former officials said that the warning concerned Mr. Flynn’s
job performance and penchant for conspiracy theories, not any government
investigation.
Mr.
Obama learned about communications between Mr. Flynn and Russian officials in
January 2017 after pressing intelligence and law enforcement officials to
review and sum up information about Russia’s election interference.
During
a search, intelligence officials came across records of the phone calls between
Mr. Flynn and the ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, that had been intercepted as
part of the intelligence agencies’ regular surveillance of Russian officials.
In one of the calls, Mr. Flynn had urged Russia not to retaliate for the
sanctions as a new, outwardly friendlier administration prepared to assume
office.
During
a Jan. 5 conversation in the Oval Office that included Mr. Biden; James B.
Comey, the F.B.I. director; Sally Yates, the deputy attorney general; and Susan
Rice, the national security adviser, Mr. Obama said any law enforcement issues
should be handled “by the book,” but he wanted to know as a matter of
counterintelligence policy whether he should share sensitive information on
Russia with the incoming Trump team, according to a memo by Ms. Rice. During the
meeting, he told Ms. Yates that he “did not want any additional information on
the matter” regarding law enforcement, according to a recently disclosed F.B.I.
summary of an interview with Ms. Yates.
Four days after Mr. Obama left office,
Mr. Comey sent F.B.I. agents to interview Mr. Flynn about the calls with Mr.
Kislyak. Mr. Flynn’s answers led to him being charged with lying to
investigators, which he pleaded guilty to. He later tried to change his plea
and Mr. Barr concurred. An apparently skeptical judge will decide whether to
allow it.
Maggie Haberman
contributed reporting from New York, and Mark Mazzetti and Adam Goldman from
Washington.
