Attorney General Pam Bondi's order to convene a grand jury to investigate Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's claim that former President Barack Obama committed treason doesn't make any sense, former federal prosecutor Elie Honig told CNN's Phil Mattingly on Monday.
And the allegations are so nebulous, Honig said he doesn't really understand what misconduct is being alleged.
Gabbard's claims have been broadly panned by national security experts, and recent reporting indicated that Bondi was blindsided by the criminal referral, which came after Gabbard had spent weeks outside of the Trump administration's good graces and may have been an effort to win favor with the president.
"What do you think the likelihood of an indictment of somebody that maybe is well known to the American public would be in a situation like this?" asked Mattingly.
"I have read Tulsi Gabbard's summaries and reports really carefully, I've tried to make sense of this, and I am not comprehending where the criminal theory comes in at all, frankly," said Honig. "Tulsi Gabbard's theory ... is essentially that Barack Obama or some of his officials were involved in falsifying intelligence around the 2016 election. But when you look at what the actual facts are, that simply does not appear to be true."
Essentially, Honig said, the consensus of the intelligence community was that "Russia was attempting to interfere in the 2016 election, in Trump's benefit, and that they did that through persuasion, through taking out Facebook ads and that kind of thing."
"But the intelligence also showed there was no criminal conspiracy between Donald Trump and the Russians, and that there was no actual hacking to switch over votes in the systems."
This is no different from what was said after Obama became involved in disseminating the findings, he said, and it was confirmed by a GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee and the inspector general of the Justice Department.
"So I'm not quite sure where I see a discrepancy there, never mind ... a federal crime," said Honig, adding that he's "not seeing anything close" to evidence that would support a charge of seditious conspiracy or treason — and in any case, this all happened nine years ago, and "the statute of limitations on most federal crimes is going to be five years."
"So I'm skeptical. But look, this is going to happen largely behind closed doors, and we'll see where it goes," Honig added.
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