Incorruptible Barack Obama’s halo in serious danger of slipping

Evidence is growing that Barack Obama’s administration bent the rules to undermine Donald Trump’s incoming team over Russian collusion.

New revelations have cast Barack Obama in a new light.

Every presidency gets a reappraisal at some point – some for the better, some for the worse. John F Kennedy’s went from Camelot to Sodom and Gomorrah and back again in a few years. Ronald Reagan was supposedly a halfwit B-movie actor bent on blowing up the planet until he won the Cold War and reinvigorated American capitalism.

There is no chance Barack Obama will be removed any time soon from the pedestal the world’s media put him on the first day he ran for office.

For his many admirers, his successor serves only to polish his halo. Donald Trump is everything Barack Obama was not: inarticulate; boorish; unsophisticated. Trump is well-done steak and vanilla ice cream. Obama is sushi and creme brulee. Above all Trump is a corrupt, scheming crook who has abused high office for his own advantage and to hurt his enemies. Obama was an incorruptible champion of the highest values of liberal government. Yet in the past week documents have come to light that cast Mr Trump’s predecessor in a very different light. They provide the strongest evidence yet that members of the Obama administration promoted the idea that Trump’s campaign had colluded with Moscow and that they used the federal government to investigate and prosecute key figures around Mr Trump, even as they acknowledged under oath that they had no evidence to support their case.

Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testifies before the House Intelligence Committee about his report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Picture: Getty Images.

A year ago, an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller concluded that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. For years, this claim had been trumpeted by news organisations, fed by statements and leaks from Obama administration officials, to make the case that Mr Trump might be some kind of agent for the Russians. James Clapper, Mr Obama’s director of national intelligence, told CNN in 2017, “He [Vladimir Putin] knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president.”

But recently published transcripts show that, at around this time, Mr Clapper told Congress in secret and under oath that he “never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting [or] conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.” Several other Obama aides said the same thing.

Then came the news that the justice department wanted to drop its case against Michael Flynn, Mr Trump’s first, short-lived national security adviser.

Michael Flynn leaves federal court in Washington. Picture: AP.

General Flynn had pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about a phone call he had with the Russian ambassador a few weeks before Mr Trump took office in January 2017. Justice department documents show that during this period, the waning weeks of Mr Obama’s presidency, officials were trying hard to make the Russia allegations stick.

In December 2016 Mr Flynn, as incoming national security adviser, had a phone conversation with the Russian ambassador in which he asked Moscow to delay responding to sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama White House. The Trump team – for good or ill – wanted a better relationship with Russia and, as the man tasked with shaping Mr Trump’s foreign policy, it was entirely reasonable for Mr Flynn to engage in such conversations.

US spies eavesdropped on the call because they were wire-tapping the Russian ambassador’s communications. Ordinarily, the name of a US citizen picked up in such surveillance would not be made known. But this week the plot thickened even further, with potentially significant consequences for this year’s election. It was revealed that top Obama administration team members had asked for the release of Mr Flynn’s identity at the time: among them, Joe Biden, then vice-president and now the Democratic candidate for president.

A declassified document with names of President Barack Obama administration officials including Joe Biden, who made requests for unmasking of Michael Flynn's name. Picture: AP.

Officials subsequently laid a trap for Mr Flynn by conducting an ostensibly friendly interview with him which they later used as evidence that he lied.

The most charitable case that can be made for Mr Obama’s team is that they genuinely believed that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia, based in part on Mr Trump’s friendly tone towards Mr Putin.

Joe Biden was among top Obama administration team members who asked for the release of General Flynn’s identity. Picture: AP.

But believing is not sufficient for asserting it as fact, still less for prosecuting over it. The whole Russia collusion story was in fact propelled by officials’ belief in the story – one shared by a complaisant media – that was unsupported by evidence.

We now know, from a justice department investigation last year, that the whole saga was triggered when a former Australian ambassador to London told Obama administration officials that a Trump campaign staffer had “suggested … that the Trump campaign received some kind of a suggestion from Russia that it could assist the campaign by anonymously releasing derogatory information about … Hillary Clinton”.

A suggestion of a suggestion.

Investigators took this flimsiest of pretexts and, when they failed to find evidence, bent the rules to find more. They got judges to authorise wiretaps on a Trump adviser using the infamous dossier produced by Christopher Steele, the former MI6 officer, even when they knew that the main source for its salacious allegations told them they were untrue. When that produced nothing, they went for Mr Flynn. All under the protective cover of an administration that promoted the collusion narrative to a friendly media.

OBAMAGATE makes Watergate look small time! https://t.co/vW19NbYXw6

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2020

“Obamagate!”, President Trump tweeted this week in the wake of the new revelations. It won’t be that. The Obama-adoring press will never let their idol be held to the investigative standards that did for Richard Nixon 50 years ago. But we can at least hold off on the canonisation.

The Times