It’s the moment we’ve feared, the moment the Supreme Court invoked in giving Trump immunity, and the moment that marks an authoritarian government at its most vulgar and vicious.
On Monday, Attorney General Pam Bondi signed an order directing an as-yet-unidentified federal prosecutor to convene a grand jury to investigate whether prominent officials in Barack Obama's administration, including Obama himself, purposely manufactured an intelligence assessment in January 2017.
The supposed purpose of this scheme: to promote a “false narrative” that Russia and its president Vladimir Putin engaged in an operation to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election with the intent of helping Trump win.
Problem #1: there's nothing whatsoever false about this narrative.
The Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), prepared by career professionals and our intelligence agencies, indeed concluded:
"Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency."
That conclusion has been repeatedly reaffirmed in multiple investigations—including those led by Mueller, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Special Prosecutor John Durham.
The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously found that the ICA was “coherent and well constructed” and reconfirmed that Russia “engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence” the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.
Durham’s work is particularly instructive here. He was a Trump U.S. Attorney whom Attorney General William Barr tasked with leading an investigation into the origins of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane probe into alleged Trump–Russia campaign ties. He investigated exhaustively—over almost four years—whether anyone broke the law in connection with the 2016 intelligence assessments.
While Durham’s final report found certain procedural faults with intelligence actors and the Mueller operation, it confirmed that Russian spies were behind the hacking of Democratic campaign files and the release of campaign emails. It specifically failed to find a plot approved by Clinton to tie Trump to Putin.
So much for the notion—jealously protected and prized by certain Trump loyalists including Hubbard—that the ICA was a fraud cooked up by the Obama administration to hurt Trump’s electoral prospects and thereafter delegitimize his victory.
Or so you might think.
But now enter Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s controversial pick for Director of National Intelligence. Trump strong-armed her confirmation notwithstanding her lack of any experience in the intelligence community—a depressing point she has in common with so many Trump nominees—and her apparent pro-Syria and pro-Russia sympathies. Over 100 former intelligence professionals wrote to Congress to warn that her candidacy posed a national security risk.
Gabbard has gone on the warpath in recent weeks with a series of document dumps seeking to revisit the unanimous verdict about 2016. Last month, she appeared at the White House press podium to accuse Obama, along with former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former FBI Director James Comey, of engineering a “years-long coup” against Trump.
She then chimed in that the information she was releasing showed a “treasonous conspiracy” by top Obama administration officials.
A few days later, Trump touted Gabbard’s comments and took it over the top, laying it on Obama himself: “It’s there. He’s guilty. This was treason.”
Unsurprisingly, both Trump and Gabbard’s treason charges were constitutionally illiterate. Treason—the most serious crime a citizen can undertake against the country, and one punishable by death—is expressly defined in the Constitution:
“Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
It’s only Trump’s twisted “l’état, c’est moi” mindset that can construe a supposed political attack on him as an act of treason against the state.
At her White House appearance, Gabbard crowed: “There is irrefutable evidence that details how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false.”
The “irrefutable evidence” turns out to be stray bits of unverified intelligence that the agencies could not substantiate and that did not alter or weaken their bottom-line assessment of Russia’s involvement.
Gabbard capped her deranged performance with a criminal referral to DOJ, seeking investigation and prosecution of the members of the “treasonous conspiracy,” including Clapper, Brennan, Comey, and Obama.
And sure enough, Bondi—who, like Gabbard, is duty-bound to be apolitical—greenlighted the scurrilous investigation.
That piled impropriety on top of impropriety. The DOJ manual—which one suspects has been run through the shredder—requires an “adequate factual predicate” before convening a grand jury. It’s unethical to use it for a fishing expedition. That rule, in fact, is what prompted the resignation of the criminal chief of the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, whom Ed Marin Jr., Trump’s first choice to lead the office, ordered to undertake a grand jury investigation without predication.
And of course, since there’s no way of showing the ICA is false (because it isn’t), there’s even less prospect of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Obama and his supposed co-conspirators not only got the intelligence wrong but intentionally set out to falsify it.
Gabbard’s argument for criminal intent seems to begin and end with her false allegation that the ICA was inaccurate—so, of course, it must have been intentionally manufactured, and of course that must mean a political conspiracy reaching all the way to the top, displacing the entire network of intelligence professionals.
It’s the hallmark of the Trump faithful: viewing every act of government through a political lens, and assuming everyone else is doing the same.
That doesn’t mean the damage here is limited to rhetoric. First, a prosecutor in the right district could easily ram a bogus case through a grand jury, and so saddle Obama and others with the cost, burden, and stigma of criminal defense. Or they could ultimately decline to bring charges—because no legitimate prosecutor would touch them—and then hold up that decision as some twisted badge of fairness. See, they’ll say, we’re the ones who exercise restraint, unlike the partisan hacks who dared to prosecute Trump for actual, documented crimes.
Republicans will claim this is all just payback for what Democrats did to Trump. In a country that still gave a damn about facts or the rule of law, that argument would be laughed out of the room. The cases against Trump weren’t political—they were textbook examples of what the justice system is supposed to do when someone in power breaks the law.
Trump hoarded classified documents and bragged about them on tape. He tried to strong-arm election officials and incited a mob to stop the peaceful transfer of power. The prosecutions were slow, careful, and supported by mountains of evidence.
What’s happening now is the opposite: the weaponization of the justice system to settle political scores, built not on facts but on fever-dream conspiracies that have already been repeatedly debunked.
It’s hard to overstate how dangerous this moment is, and how strongly it calls on all of us to reject it categorically. Using the machinery of criminal justice to pursue manufactured charges against political predecessors is the stuff of strongmen and collapsing democracies.
From Putin’s endless prosecutions of opposition figures like Navalny, to Erdoğan’s jailing of rivals and judges after labeling them coup plotters, to the cycles of vengeance in post-coup Egypt, this is the textbook authoritarian move. It corrodes trust in democratic transitions, chills dissent, and redefines political opposition as criminal subversion.
As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue in How Democracies Die, once democratic norms around restraint and mutual legitimacy are breached, they rarely recover easily. Trump is mowing down the guardrails of democracy—and the institutions built to stop him are watching with the sound off.
Ironically, this very kind of weaponization of law enforcement to pursue political attacks was one of the dangers the Supreme Court cited in granting Trump immunity for official acts. Chief Justice Roberts stressed that the rule was essential:
“Without immunity, such types of prosecutions of ex-Presidents could quickly become routine… an executive branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive President free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next.”
So who is cannibalizing their predecessors now?
Reprinted with permission from Substack.
