Obama Is Still Waging War on Trump
Editor's Note
There exists in America an enemy regime. It does not recognize our laws or our Constitution. It does not honor our way of life. It will not accept any kind of peace with the regime that came before it.
Conservatives who find such language hyperbolic may simply not understand how much power this rival regime has already attained. As Lee Smith demonstrates, it gained a stranglehold on the intelligence community, on Big Tech, on the media, on our courts, and more during the Obama administration. Led by Barack Obama himself, it then deployed that power against its political enemies — chief among them Donald Trump. Republicans must understand this history to understand the present: We are, and have long been, at war.
Elon Musk told Joe Rogan in an interview Monday that Barack Obama made a big mistake in attacking Donald Trump. The world’s richest man was referring to the 2011 White House correspondents’ dinner, during which the 44th president and comedian Seth Meyers teamed up to mock the New York businessman. It “was so over the top it was making everyone uncomfortable,” said Musk. “You could see Trump get angrier and angrier and upset. This is not good Karma.”
Maybe Karma explains why Obama has looked wan and anxious campaigning for Kamala Harris the last few weeks. He knows that if Trump returns to the White House, the president can hardly ignore the fact that making America great again — restoring the republic — means holding accountable the Obama aides and allies who perverted the rule of law and twisted the justice system to serve their own interests and wage an eight-year campaign against Trump, his aides, and his supporters.
Trump has known since early in his first term that the trail leads to Obama. “Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory,” Trump tweeted on March 4, 2017. With that and a subsequent series of posts, he identified the power behind the multi-pronged operation that has unlawfully targeted him since his first run for the White House.
As I detail in Disappearing the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic, Trump’s predecessor directed the multi-pronged anti-Trump operation from the start, initiating or green-lighting the specific campaigns that have done most damage to America — election interference, domestic spying, censorship, and political violence.
Election Interference
Obama interfered in the 2016 election by using the resources of the federal government to support claims made by the Hillary Clinton campaign that Trump had been compromised by Russian intelligence services. Obama knew from the outset that Russiagate was a lie. Former CIA director John Brennan’s handwritten notes show that he told Obama in an August 2016 meeting at the White House that the Clinton campaign was “stirring up a scandal” by smearing Trump as a Russian agent to deflect attention away from her use of a private email server.
Brennan’s information should have cued Obama to shut down the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation that had been opened only weeks before. Obama knew about the investigation. According to texts exchanged between two FBI agents working the case, “potus [the President of the United States] wants to know everything we’re doing.”
Investigating an active presidential campaign is a very sensitive matter — it had never been before Obama’s FBI director James Comey launched the “Crossfire Hurricane” probe on July 31. And here was the CIA director saying the Trump-Russia allegations were based on a political narrative. It was a very dangerous dirty trick — falsely claiming that a presidential candidate was compromised by an adversarial power could damage the country’s national security and squander the public’s faith in the institutions built to serve and protect Americans. And putting a powerful nation like Russia in the middle of an information warfare operation could turn a cold rivalry hot. The last thing anyone would expect from a U.S. commander-in-chief is that he’d allow his spy chiefs to participate in the anti-Trump plot. But Obama did.
At the same time Brennan acknowledged that the Russia collusion story was a Clinton campaign hoax, he was nonetheless advancing that very narrative. He went toSenate minority leader Harry Reid and got him to write a letter to Comey pushing him to act on the Clinton campaign’s baseless charges.
Comey was motivated. According to government records, he “was getting daily briefings” from the “the team that was working the case” and “was intimately involved with” them. It was “a top priority for Director Comey.” He kept pushing his underlings to secure a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant in order to spy on the Trump campaign. Comey pressed his deputy Andrew McCabe, repeatedly asking him, “Where is the FISA, where is the FISA? What’s the status with the … FISA?”
FISA, one the most intrusive intelligence programs in the U.S. arsenal, is designed to keep Americans safe from terrorists and other foreign threats. Under Obama, it was used to target political opponents.
In September, Obama sent Comey, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, and his homeland security advisor Lisa Monaco to give a briefing to congressional leaders. Obama’s purpose, according to reports, was to get a “show of solidarity and bipartisan unity” against Russian interference in the election. But Obama’s lieutenants had no details to share with congress.
“They had no evidence of anything,” former Republican congressman and chair of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes told me. “I was wondering, ‘Why aren’t you giving us information about what they’re up to? Why aren’t you, the executive branch, taking care of it? Why are you coming to us with it?’”
“Comey and the others wanted to create a panic,” Nunes said. The Republicans didn’t take the bait because, said Nunes, they knew the briefing “wasn’t on the up-and-up.” Obama’s lieutenants, Nunes explained, “were trying to create the impression that there had been a major occurrence, and the Russians were behind it. They were trying to coerce Congress to come out with a joint statement of some kind: the Russians were up to something.”
It wasn’t the Russians who were interfering in the election to help Trump, as the FBI’s warrant alleged. Rather, under Obama’s directions his spy chiefs manipulated Congress and the media and used intelligence programs and personnel in an attempt to tilt the 2016 vote against Trump.
Surveillance
The FISA warrant used to spy on the Trump team was only one part of a larger espionage operation targeting the newly elected commander-in-chief. For instance, FBI agents collected intelligence on Trump and his deputies when they were supposed be briefing them. The Obama administration also spied on the incoming administration by unmasking their names from transcripts of classified intelligence intercepts.
To protect Americans’ fourth-amendment rights, those transcripts typically use descriptors like “US Official 1” instead of the real name, but the Obama team made a habit of unmasking Trump transition officials by asking intelligence officials for their names. Then Obama aides would leak Trump team names to the press to show they were being watched. At least forty Obama deputies, including then-Vice President Joe Biden, unmasked the name of incoming national security advisor Michael Flynn. The retired three-star general’s conversation with a Russian ambassador was unlawfully leaked to the media, sparking a media frenzy concerning Flynn’s relationship with Russia that eventually led to his departure from the White House.
Shortly before leaving office, Obama institutionalized the politicization of foreign intelligence intercepts.The outgoing president amended Executive Order 12333, which regulates how the NSA collects, retains, analyzes, and disseminates foreign signals intelligence, and masks the names of U.S. citizens in records of intercepted communications. Obama amended E.O. 12333 to give every U.S. intelligence service and law enforcement agency access to the NSA’s raw, unredacted signals intelligence.
“Before Obama amended it,” says former FBI agent George Hill, “12333 put up really high walls and delineated which intelligence agency could do what. I had to test out every year to show that I knew the procedures.”
The NSA would notify agencies about electronic communications they’d collected and whether the particular agency, the FBI for instance, had any interest in the individual.
“The NSA would provide a phone number, or an IP address, or something of that nature, without giving out the name,” says Hill. “And then we would have to go and look at our own database to say, ‘No, we don’t have any cases here related to this individual. So the answer’s no, no need to unmask him.’ But if we had information matching what the NSA provided and we wanted the individual unmasked, there was a formal process to get the name.”
The FBI no longer has to go through any formal procedures to get the names of Americans unmasked because, says Hill, “nobody is masked. The American citizens that are in that intelligence traffic are not masked. Now, it’s a straight shot. You get to see everything.”
According to Stephen Friend, another former FBI agent who, like Hill, turned whistleblower, the FBI “and actually all federal law enforcement can just go and have access to all the raw information that the NSA collects. And when you have that ability, you can really abuse people. Because you can just go in there and shop for whatever you want, and if you’re an intelligence person who’s politically motivated, you can create an intelligence product or open an investigation on anything or anyone you want.”
For a time, the left was panicked about the new rules. Civil libertarians and journalists couldn’t fathom how Obama had blundered so badly by leaving to Trump what he’d surely use as a political weapon. “WIRED Magazine did a piece about it shortly after 12333 was amended,” says Friend. “They were worried that the Obama administration had given the agencies unfettered access to all that material and the incoming Trump administration was going to use it to go after the left.”
But that was the opposite of Obama’s plan. Rather, he left to his allies a powerful instrument to target their political enemies: access to all their communications. “He knew that the left had already captured institutions like the FBI,” says Friend. It was only a few months later, says Hill, that “the left stopped complaining when they saw Russiagate and the other shenanigans and realized Obama had left it out there to target Trump.”
Censorship
The campaign of mass censorship targeting Trump and his supporters first became apparent in the run-up to the 2020 election, when social media users who questioned the integrity of new voting procedures were shadow-banned or outright silenced a coalition of government and private-sector actors. The censorship component of the anti-Trump op culminated with Facebook and Twitter permanently banning the president from their platforms after the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021. But it really began after the 2016 election when Obama bullied Mark Zuckerberg into silencing his political opponents.
A week and a half after Trump’s surprise victory, the outgoing president was at a conference of world leaders in Lima, Peru, where he saw the Facebook founder and pulled him aside to deliver a message: for helping put Trump in the White House, he and his company were on notice.
Even before the election, the media had accused Zuckerberg of allowing his platform to proliferate “hoax or fake news” that might enable a Trump victory. Zuckerberg argued it was “pretty crazy” to blame Facebook for fake news, since “more than 99% of what people see is authentic.” He explained, “Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes.”
To rationalize their vilification of Facebook, Obama allies in the intelligence services and media concocted an elaborate plotline alleging that the social media giant was part of the Russian plot to put Trump in the White House. Facebook, according to cybersecurity experts, had been infiltrated by the very same Russian hacking group, Fancy Bear, that had hacked and leaked the emails of the Democratic National Committee. However, as cybersecurity expert Shawn Henry, a former FBI agent hired by the Clinton campaign, testified under oath, there was never any evidence that the DNC emails were exfiltrated, by Russia or anyone else.
Obama’s real problem with Facebook had nothing to do with Russia or disinformation. Rather, it was the fact that Zuckerberg’s company drove the bulk of the $250 million the Trump campaign raised online.
“Social media was Trump’s primary communication channel,” WIRED reported a week after the 2016 vote. Trump understood the medium and mastered it. Facebook was happy to help. The company even sent staff to show the Trump campaign how to exploit the platform’s advertising tools to maximize response. For Obama, that alone was enough to make Zuckerberg complicit in Trump’s victory.
Only weeks after Obama cornered him in Peru, Zuckerberg succumbed to a pressure campaign led by the Poynter Institute, a non-profit research organization funded by Obama allies, like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and e-Bay founder Pierre Omidyar. With Poynter repeatedly pushing stories like “Facebook’s fake news problem won’t fix itself,” Zuckerberg wanted relief from the attacks. So, he agreed to sign on to Poynter’s International Fact Checking initiative, which worked more like a censorship bureau. If Poynter’s fact-checkers labeled a story as fake, it was marked “disputed” and ranked lower on users’ news feeds — i.e., shadow-banned.
A full election cycle before the censorship industry announced its arrival in 2020, here was the essential template: Democrat-aligned media and civil society teaming with Big Tech to silence political opponents at the behest of the federal government. In this case, it was Obama himself who demanded social media suppress Trump’s voice.
Political Violence
The political violence that led to two attempts on Trump’s life is rooted in the Left’s divisive language calling him a dictator and a fascist and likening him to Hitler. The point of the rhetoric is to categorize Trump as fundamentally un-American, an effort that began nearly a decade ago when Obama resolved to use the executive branch to label Trump a traitor.
In December 2016, Obama directed Brennan to produce an intelligence assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election that would show how Trump owed his electoral victory to Vladimir Putin. The analysts who wrote the assessment were handpicked by Brennan.
“He kept it small to keep everyone else out,” said Derek Harvey, a U.S. Army combat veteran and former intelligence officer who was tasked by Nunes’s House Intelligence Committee to investigate Brennan’s intelligence community assessment (ICA). “Brennan didn’t want anyone looking at process, methodology, and tradecraft,” Harvey told me. “He wanted to avoid scrutiny because he was purposefully manipulating intelligence to support this illusion that Trump had colluded with Russia.”
Brennan’s fraudulent ICA was critical for setting up the collusion narrative. “It gave credibility to everything,” Harvey said. “What Obama ordered gave political operatives, the press, and his intelligence chiefs a second shot at Trump.”
With only weeks left in his term, Obama was on offense. In a January 5, 2017 meeting at the White House attended by Comey, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and then-Vice President Joe Biden, Obama told the FBI director to continue the phony Trump-Russia probe.
Obama validated the Russia narrative both through his spy chiefs and directly. In a January 17 media roundtable, he said, “I think the Russia thing is a problem.” Obama said that Trump’s alleged “relationship with a foreign entity” was “unprecedented.”
Drawing examples of Trump’s Russia ties directly from the Clinton campaign’s fabricated allegations, Obama said that the president-elect has “been doing business in Russia for a long time. Penthouse apartments in New York are sold to folks — let me put it this way. If there’s a Russian who can afford a $10-million, or a $15- or a $20- or a $30-million penthouse in Manhattan, or is a major investor in Florida, I think it’s fair to say Mr. Putin knows that person, because I don’t think they’re getting $10 million or $30 million or $50 million out of Russia without Mr. Putin saying that’s okay.”
Obama’s chief goal was to undermine his successor in the hope of forcing him out of the White House. But seeding the lie that an American president was controlled by a foreign power was also designed to rock the country. Cultivating the idea that the Americans who voted for Trump were at best witless dupes and at worst knowing accomplices in a conspiracy to betray the country set Americans against each other in an atmosphere of relentless anger and unremitting fear.
For eight years now, Americans have been forced to navigate the dark reality — including domestic spying, rigged elections, censorship, political violence — that Obama imposed on the country he was twice elected to lead. It appears that Obama now understands that a second Trump presidency could finally hold accountable the Obama deputies and private sector allies whose abuses and unlawful actions destabilized the American government and polarized the nation.