Haley Strack and Audrey Fahlberg write for National Review Online about a significant legal development in the nation’s capital.
The Department of Justice will convene a federal grand jury to investigate whether Obama-era officials conspired to fuel the false Russia-collusion tale against Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign, a source familiar with the matter tells National Review.
Attorney General Pam Bondi instructed the DOJ on Monday to act on a referral issued two weeks ago by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, which accused Obama administration officials of leading a “treasonous” campaign to promote the lie that Trump conspired with Russian officials to rig the 2016 election.
Obama’s connection to the Russiagate conspiracy — that Obama was aware of, and promoted, Hillary Clinton’s campaign’s strategy based largely on the Steele dosser to vilify Trump by connecting him to Russia — has been known. But Gabbard declassified new information in July — including the House Intelligence Committee Report originally drafted in 2017 but never released to the public; this report “exposed how the Obama Administration manufactured the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA] that they knew was false, promoting the LIE that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government helped President Trump win the 2016 election,” Gabbard said in a statement on X.
The House report, Gabbard added, found that the 2017 ICA “contrived [the] narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true. It wasn’t.”
Gabbard’s recent referral was released just days after a Trump CIA report found that the ICA was correct in confirming with “high confidence” that Putin had meddled in the 2016 election to undermine Clinton. The CIA report, however, also took issue with the ICA’s judgement that Putin had “a clear preference” for candidate Trump and “aspired to help his chances of victory.”
