Trump accuses Obama of treason in escalating attacks over 2016 Russia probe

By Steve Holland, Matt Spetalnick and Jonathan Landay

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump accused former President Barack Obama of "treason" on Tuesday, accusing him, without providing evidence, of leading an effort to falsely tie him to Russia and undermine his 2016 presidential campaign.

A spokesperson for Obama denounced Trump's claims, saying "these bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction."

While Trump has frequently attacked Obama by name, the Republican president has not, since returning to office in January, gone this far in pointing the finger at his Democratic predecessor with allegations of criminal action.

During remarks in the Oval Office, Trump leaped on comments from his intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, on Friday in which she threatened to refer Obama administration officials to the Justice Department for prosecution over an intelligence assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

She declassified documents and said the information she was releasing showed a “treasonous conspiracy” in 2016 by top Obama administration officials to undermine Trump, claims that Democrats called false and politically motivated.

"It's there, he's guilty. This was treason," Trump said on Tuesday, though he offered no proof of his claims. "They tried to steal the election, they tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody's ever imagined, even in other countries."

An assessment by the U.S. intelligence community published in January 2017 concluded that Russia, using social media disinformation, hacking and Russian bot farms, sought to damage Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign and bolster Trump. The assessment determined that the actual impact was likely limited and showed no evidence that Moscow‘s efforts actually changed voting outcomes.

A 2020 bipartisan report by the Senate intelligence committee had found that Russia used Republican political operative Paul Manafort, the WikiLeaks website and others to try to influence the 2016 election to help Trump's campaign.

"Nothing in the document issued last week (by Gabbard) undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes," Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said in a statement.

TRUMP UNDER PRESSURE

Trump, who has a history of promoting false conspiracy theories, has frequently denounced the assessments as a “hoax.” In recent days, Trump reposted on his Truth Social account a fake video showing Obama being arrested in handcuffs in the Oval Office.

Trump has been seeking to divert attention to other issues after coming under pressure from his conservative base to release more information about Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Backers of conspiracy theories about Epstein have urged Trump, who socialized with the disgraced financier during the 1990s and early 2000s, to release investigative files related to the case.

Trump, asked in the Oval Office about Epstein, quickly pivoted into an attack on Obama and Clinton.

"The witch hunt that you should be talking about is they caught President Obama absolutely cold," Trump said.

Trump suggested action would be taken against Obama and his former officials, calling the Russia investigation a treasonous act and the former president guilty of "trying to lead a coup."

"It's time to start, after what they did to me, and whether it's right or wrong, it's time to go after people. Obama has been caught directly," he said.

Democratic Representative Jim Himes responded on X: "This is a lie. And if he's confused, the President should ask @SecRubio, who helped lead the bipartisan Senate investigation that unanimously concluded that there was no evidence of politicization in the intelligence community's behavior around the 2016 election."

Former Republican Senator Marco Rubio is now Trump's secretary of state.

Since returning to office, Trump has castigated his political opponents whom he claims weaponized the federal government against him and his allies for the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters and his handling of classified materials after he left office in 2021.

ATTACKS ON PREDECESSORS

Obama has long been a target of Trump. In 2011 he accused then-President Obama of not being born in the United States, prompting Obama to release a copy of his birth certificate.

In recent months, Trump has rarely held back in his rhetorical broadsides against his two Democratic predecessors in a way all but unprecedented in modern times.

He launched an investigation after accusing former President Joe Biden and his staff, without evidence, of a "conspiracy" to use an autopen, an automated device that replicates a person’s signature, to sign sensitive documents on the president's behalf. Biden has rejected the claim as false and “ridiculous.”

Gabbard’s charge that Obama conspired to subvert Trump’s 2016 election by manufacturing intelligence on Russia’s interference is contradicted by several reports including documents that Gabbard released last week.

The documents show that Gabbard conflated two separate U.S. intelligence findings in alleging that Obama and his national security aides changed an assessment that Russia probably was not trying to influence the election through cyber means.

One finding was that Russia was not trying to hack U.S. election infrastructure to change vote counts and the second was that Moscow probably was using cyber means to influence the U.S. political environment through information and propaganda operations, including by stealing and leaking data from Democratic Party servers.

The January 2017 U.S. intelligence assessment ordered by Obama built on that second finding: that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized influence operations to sway the 2016 vote to Trump.

(Reporting By Steve Holland, Matt Spetalnick and Jonathan Landay; Editing by Ross Colvin, Deepa Babington and Cynthia Osterman)