“A Bigger Trump Scandal Than the Epstein Mess” Will It Blow Up?

We do live in a curious world where the lead story of the day — so far — concerns the relationship of a dead pedophile and his incarcerated madam, who procured many young girls for his perverse pleasures back before they got caught breaking both God’s laws and mans’ over and over again. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell led everybody on quite the merry chase for decades. Along the way they invited any number of colorful characters into their New York and Florida mansions and Bahamas island, including Prince Andrew, Donald Trump, Alan Dershowitz and many many others.

So what could eclipse the story of the dead trafficker and his imprisoned pimp? Ask Tulsi Gabbard. This is her show. Her mission, and an impossible one at that, is to deflect attention away from the Trump/Epstein scandal with Bizarro World-level accusions against Barack Obama. It’s completely out of a cartoon, but then so is this misadministration. This is from David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. (I can’t do a hotlink because it will only take you to my email, but you can Google it and sign up for Corn’s newsletter if you wish.)

If you’ve been obsessed with Donald Trump’s not-going-away Jeffrey Epstein scandal, you might have missed a more disturbing development on the road to American authoritarianism. Trump’s top intelligence officer fabricated evidence to support a sham Justice Department criminal investigation that could lead to a show trial of former President Barack Obama and his aides. This is autocracy in action.

Here’s what happened. About a week ago, Tulsi Gabbard, the soft-on-Putin director of national intelligence, released a memo that claimed that in early January 2017 Obama and his national security aides cooked up a phony intelligence report that stated the Russians had attacked the 2016 election to sow discord, impede Hillary Clinton, and help Trump. She insisted that Obama and his aides knew that the latter point—the Moscow operation had aimed to boost Trump’s chances—was false and that these Democrats had schemed to include this assessment in the report, which was released in a declassified version, to destroy Trump and his presidency.

This, she said, was a “treasonous” act and she called for the Justice Department to mount a criminal investigation of Obama and his aides. Gabbard then appeared at a White House press briefing, where, like a good conspiracy theory-monger, she displayed an impressive-looking wire diagram and said Obama and his crew had orchestrated an attempted “coup” against Trump.

Yes, you read that correctly. The man who brought you The Insurrection is now accusing Barack Obama of having having attempted a coup against the United States.

No surprise, Trump, too, saw it the same way. He has never acknowledged that Vladimir Putin assaulted the 2016 election—with a hack-and-leak operation and a massive covert social media influence campaign—to aid his campaign. Russia’s actions—as well as Trump’s denial of the Kremlin’s intervention, a move that abetted Putin’s attack—have tainted Trump’s 2016 victory, and he has steadfastly refused to admit this, even at times declaring that the whole thing didn’t happen and was just a “hoax.”

So with her memo, Gabbard is trying to rewrite history for the benefit of Dear Leader and feeding his desire for revenge.

As did his DNI, Trump called for Obama to be prosecuted and declared Gabbard’s report was “proof” of Obama’s “treason.” Trump went so far as to post an AI-generated video of FBI agents violently handcuffing and arresting Obama and tossing him into a prison cell. In the video, Obama is on his knees before Trump. (Sick and troubling stuff, right?)

Next, the Justice Department run by Attorney General Pam Bondi, another Trump lackey, announced it had created a “strike force” to investigate these allegations. (Strike forces are usually set up to investigate wide-ranging criminal enterprises that require the participation of multiple government agencies—not the production of a single 25-page-long government report.) At this stage, it is not tough to imagine Trump’s DOJ ginning up a prosecution and then a show trial of Obama and his former aides, including his CIA director, John Brennan, and his FBI director, Jim Comey, and others. (Comey and Brennan are favorite MAGA and Trump targets.)

Here’s the problem: Gabbard’s memo is trash.

It cites as evidence several intelligence documents from 2016 that she declassified. But these records have nothing to do with that assessment that Putin preferred a Trump victory. These documents noted that Russian efforts to penetrate US election systems—which had occurred throughout the nation in 2016—would not affect vote-counting. Moscow probing of election boards was a matter of great concern to US intelligence and the Obama White House, but it was an entirely separate subject from the hack-and-leak and social media operations perpetuated by Kremlin operatives.

The documents Gabbard issued had nothing to do with the question of whether those covert operations were implemented to help Trump. She was pulling a disingenuous sleight of hand, conflating two different intelligence topics. (I explained this in more detail here.) And subsequent investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (when it was chaired by then-Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican)—which each had access to much more information than the earlier intelligence assessment that Obama had ordered produced quickly in the waning days of his presidency—confirmed the obvious point that the Kremlin’s attack favored Trump.

This is what the GOP-led Senate intelligence committee reported in 2020:

The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.

It’s hard to believe that Gabbard and her henchmen and henchwomen at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence made an honest mistake by using intelligence reports on one subject to challenge the finding on another. They can’t be that dumb.

What we have here is Trump’s top intelligence official using the spy services to manufacture a blatantly fake case so that Trump’s DOJ can investigate and perhaps prosecute Trump’s political rivals and critics, including a former president of the United States.

This is all so Soviet.

It’s also a politicalization and weaponization of the intelligence community that may be more brazen than what happened with weapons of mass destruction prior to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s invasion of Iraq.

The only real question here is how long is this going to go on and just how weird will it get? Because if it goes to a show trial of Obama, there is going to be some real demonstrating in the streets. Trump is nuts, granted, but is he this nuts? And is Gabbard? Over the years Gabbard has shown herself to not be exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer but surely she doesn’t think that she can get away with this, does she?

We know that Gabbard is desperately trying to reingratiate herself with Trump after she angered him with her WWIII video before he sent his bunker busters to Iran. So that’s the back story behind all this. But how far will she let it go?

Yet it’s more than just another Trump political stunt that ought to be ignored. Trump is now fully abusing the power of the state to pursue a vendetta. During a session with reporters in the Oval Office this week, while talking about prosecuting Obama, he said, “Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people.”

That was some admission. The president was saying he intended to deploy US intelligence agencies and the Justice Department against political targets even if it’s “wrong.” That ought to have been front-page news across the land. But did you see it in the headlines? Was there an outcry from the media and members of Congress? It’s a sad sign of where we are at this moment that Trump’s acknowledgment of launching illegal witch hunts did not create a major stir.

Trump’s admitting that he has no problem doing wrong. And he’s been freely admitting that for many years. In his sexual escapades with Epstein, Epstein asked him why he chased “so many married women” and Trump allegedly replied, “Because it’s so wrong.” So we know that Donald enjoys doing things because they are wrong.

A sociopath with all of the legal machinery of the United States government at his disposal. What could go wrong, right?

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Zoomers, I know of all the demands on your time and money. We are grateful you are here and thank you for the privilege of your time, as Murf closes out all his posts. We don’t need a lot of money from you but we need some. We’re just treading water in tough times until a depressed Democratic party decides to fully reengage with politics and our traffic returns to pre-November, 2024 levels. If you can spare a few bucks, we appreciate it. Thank you. Ursula

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