President Donald Trump lobbed criminal allegations at Barack Obama, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and other political opponents during an Oval Office meeting with Philippines president Bongbong Marcos.
The U.S. president was asked about his Department of Justice seeking a meeting with Jeffrey Epstein's co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell as House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sends lawmakers home to avoid action on the growing scandal, and Trump instead told reporters they should be talking about his administration's criminal claims against Obama and others.
"President Trump has a long history of accusing former President Obama of committing crimes while not specifying how exactly those crimes were supposedly committed," said CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale. "So in this case, he kept saying Obama was caught, his name was on a document. He didn't specify what Obama was caught doing and did not say what document he was talking about, so it's a bit difficult to fact check."
"But I think there's a strong chance he's talking about something highlighted by the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, that refers to an email post-election in 2016, where the member of the intelligence community said the president had directed the intelligence community to come up with a new assessment of how Russia had attempted to use tools to intervene in the 2016 election," Dale added. "So two things about that. First of all, that is post-election, that is pre-inauguration, but post-election so would not be an election rigging effort as President Trump specified, and, second of all, the president directed the intelligence community to assess Russian interference is simply not treason. There is very little there."
That directive by Obama has been repeatedly examined, and Dale said Gabbard was misrepresenting the facts.
"Tulsi Gabbard has alleged that that assessment that was produced after that meeting, she said, directly contradicted previous assessments," Dale said. "She did not prove that, and she is emphasizing the fact that that assessment in January of 2017 did not find that Russia, sorry, that previous assessment, did not find that Russia had altered the election results, altered vote counts, while the new assessment didn't either. What the new assessment found was that Russia engaged in hacking operations targeting Democrats, had engaged in influence operations online to attempt to alter the results in favor of Trump to hurt [Hillary] Clinton. That is not contradictory as far as we know, and a GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee review of this found that these conclusions were correct and that there had not been political interference by the Obama administration."
"So, look, there continues to be analysis by this current administration of of what happened back then," Dale added. "But what we have so far from Ms. Gabbard, from President Trump, simply does not come close to proving that President Obama committed any crimes here."