It was only five years ago that President Donald Trump pushed the “Obamagate” conspiracy theory, erroneously accusing the former president of treason for spying on him. Now, Trump is at it again, accusing former president Barack Obama of treason and fantasizing about locking him up.
Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, wants Obama and several of his administration officials to be criminally prosecuted for “treasonous conspiracy” in connection with Trump’s 2016 election, referring to it as a “years-long coup.”
A declassified intelligence report, released on July 18 by ODNI, claimed that Obama officials “manipulated and withheld” key findings from the public regarding possible Russian interference in the 2016 election, despite growing evidence to the contrary.
The accusation is being widely debunked by politicians and pundits, with Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, calling it “baseless.” Skeptics are flooding social media with their reactions, some suggesting it’s another tactic to distract the public from a pressing scandal: the release of the Epstein files.
Way back in September 2024, Trump promised to release the Epstein files if he won the election, but he has continued to kick the can down the road, and recently scapegoated Obama. On July 15, he told a Fox News reporter that Obama and former FBI Director James Comey simply “made up the files.”
Commenters on social media pounced on the theory: “FACT CHECK: The first federal Epstein probe was under George W. Bush. The second? July 2019 – UNDER TRUMP. Obama had ZERO to do with it,” wrote the account Call To Activism.
Then, in a bizarre social media post on July 20, Trump shared an AI-generated clip showing Obama being forced to his knees and handcuffed in the Oval Office while Trump sat beside him smiling. The video cuts to Obama walking dejectedly around a jail, with the caption “No one is above the law!” The popular account, Republicans Against Trump, flagged the outrageous clip as another attempt to distract the public.
“Donald Trump just posted a video of former President Obama getting arrested. Anything to distract from the Epstein files…” read the caption.
Gabbard’s “Russian Hoax Memo” led with the claim that there was “no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count” in the 2016 election. But the Obama administration never contended that Russian hackers manipulated votes, according to The New York Times, which explained that the report conflated two different things: Russian hacking into voter systems and Russian influence operations, such as fake social media accounts, that tried to sway public opinion.
Brian Krassenstein, a political commentator and outspoken critic of Trump, labeled the report a “false narrative” in an X post, writing, “The most ironic thing is that Tulsi Gabbard is doing the exact thing that she’s claiming Obama did (even though he didn’t), which she claims is ‘Treason.’ She is Manufacturing a false narrative to politicize a report. Maybe Gabbard should be arrested.”
Gabbard is committed to the narrative, however, and on her X account the day of the report’s release, she wrote, “Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people.”
In her official announcement that she was turning over the report to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution, she exclaimed, “No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
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