Obama's Criminal Plot To Oust President Trump
Tulsi Gabbard's Documents Link Obama To Russia Collusion Hoax
Last Friday (July 18, 2025), Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired what can only be described as a “Constitutional Broadside” against an entire cadre of Beltway insiders and Democratic Party heavyweights, alleging that former President Barack Obama, along with his intelligence heads, attempted a “years-long coup” against President Trump almost from the moment he first won the White House in 2016.
Claims of Democrat corruption are hardly new. Discussions and defenses of these claims have given birth to more than few Substacks, including this one. That Democrat politicians have actively sought to subvert the Constitional order in this country is a recurring theme among my “Political Matters” articles.
Only Tulsi Gabbard didn’t just merely make such claims. She proceeded to back them up. And she pointed her accusatory finger directly at the party’s current elder statesman, Barack Obama.
Contents
The Russia Collusion Hoax Was A Conspiracy
The Russian Collusion Hoax Was A Crime
Impeach Obama Before Indicting Him
The Russia Collusion Hoax Was A Conspiracy
DNI Gabbard’s central thesis is blunt and direct: in December of 2016, then-President Obama met with his intelligence heads and directed them to craft an intelligence assessment that Vladimir Putin and Russia sought to subvert the 2016 election to ensure Donald Trump won and Hillary Clinton lost.
That the nation’s intelligence agencies had already concluded no such influence operations occurred was irrelevant. Obama wanted a Russian Collusion Hoax, and so his intelligence heads crafted a Russian Collusion Hoax, using the garbage intel of the infamous Steele Dossier as the basis for what was a phony narrative through and through.
After months of investigation into this matter, the facts reveal this new assessment was based on information that was known by those involved to be manufactured i.e. the Steele Dossier or deemed as not credible. This was politicized intelligence that was used as the basis for countless smears seeking to delegitimize President Trump’s victory, the years-long Mueller investigation, two Congressional impeachments, high level officials being investigated, arrested, and thrown in jail, heightened US-Russia tensions, and more.
To the delight of the “conspiracy theorists” within the MAGA Coalition, and the likely discomfiture of the top tier of the Obama Administration, Tulsi Gabbard did not merely make sweeping allegations. She brought receipts, declassifying a number of email communications and other documents showing the timeline of how the outgoing Obama intelligence team crafted the Russia Collusion Hoax out of whole cloth, making the documents available in a declassified download on the ODNI website.
The documents were accompanied by a declassified memorandum showing the chronology of how the Russian Collusion Hoax was developed.
Note: I am linking to archives of the ODNI materials, as a precaution against them being “disappeared” later.
Gabbard’s allegations and posting of detailed evidence came closely on the heels of Director of Central Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassifying a “tradecraft review” of the work product of Obama’s intelligence heads, the now-infamous “Intelligence Community Assessment” from early 2017 “assessing” Russia sought corrupt influence over the 2016 specifically to get Donald Trump elected.
We should note that a hallmark of that 2017 ICA was its naked political bias and internal incoherency—characteristics I noted at the time of its release, concluding that the ICA was nothing more than “Fake News”.
The ICA’s clear bias is significant because it highlighted not only how obsessed Obama and his intelligence minions were with subverting Trump’s nascent Presidency, it illustrated that there were no legal, logical, or ethical limits restraining their actions. They were determined to take Donald Trump down by any means necessary.
Thanks to Tulsi Gabbard’s declassified materials, we have a clear and irrefutable basis in fact for stating this.
The Russian Collusion Hoax Was A Crime
The ICA was a lie. Was it also a crime? I believe that it was.
To reiterate what I said last week:
The real takeaway from Tulsi Gabbard's thread on X: the Democrats were willing to break any law necessary to bring down President Trump.
Russia Collusion was a criminal conspiracy against President Trump. Which makes the impeachment efforts tantamount to an attempted coup against President Trump.
The Russian Collusion Hoax can now be called a criminal conspiracy because we are now faced with evidence that the outgoing Obama Administration—at the direct instruction of Barack Obama himself—ignored months of intelligence community analysis concluding that Russia was not seeking corrupt influence over US elections to fabricate an official “assessment” asserting the exact opposite.
Barack Obama and his intelligence heads all knew the ICA was a lie. They knew it was built on lies. They presented it to the American public and to the Congress as the truth.
What crimes were committed in the course of promoting this lie? Ultimately, that will be for the Department of Justice to determine. A few possibilities do come to mind, however:
Seditious Conspiracy (18 USC §2384)
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.
By calling the Russian Collusion Hoax a “years-long coup”, Tulsi Gabbard is alleging that Barack Obama and his intelligence heads conspired to overthrow Donald Trump’s Presidency. There might not have been physical force involved, but there was certainly a conspiracy against the government of the United States.
Conspiracy to defraud the United States (18 USC §371)
If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
Based on Tulsi Gabbard’s data dump, there was indisputably a conspiracy, and the ICA, being a lie, is arguably a fraud by definition.
specifically : intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right
Conspiracy against rights (18 USC §241)
If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same
One only has to consider the lawfare1 which was deployed against Donald Trump, Lt. General Michael Flynn, and others to realize the extent to which this conspiracy was an explicit and egregious effort to deny quite a few people their basic civil liberties, and the subversion of a Presidential election is without a doubt an assault upon the right of every American voter to have free and fair elections.
Coercion of political activity (18 USC §610)
It shall be unlawful for any person to intimidate, threaten, command, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, command, or coerce, any employee of the Federal Government as defined in section 7322(1) of title 5, United States Code, to engage in, or not to engage in, any political activity, including, but not limited to, voting or refusing to vote for any candidate or measure in any election, making or refusing to make any political contribution, or working or refusing to work on behalf of any candidate. Any person who violates this section shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
Again, we only have to consider the lawfare that has been deployed against President Trump and others to understand that this was an effort to coerce specific political outcomes both from particular individuals and from the American electorate broadly.
Major fraud against the United States (18 USC §1031(a)(1))
(a) Whoever knowingly executes, or attempts to execute, any scheme or artifice with the intent—
(1) to defraud the United States
Given that US intelligence agencies had for months concluded that Russia had not engaged in any corrupt influence operations regarding the 2016 election, there can be little doubt that the decision to manufacture out of nothingness an ICA alleging that Russia had engaged in corrupt influence operations regarding the 2016 election was the knowing execution of a scheme to defraud the United States. It is difficult to conceived a fraud against the United States more major than a scheme to explicitly deprive tens of millions of American voters the President and the government for whom they voted.
Might there be other crimes as well? I would not be at all surprised. Certainly Obama’s intelligence heads are facing potential perjury charges, given their sworn Congressional testimony that the Steele Dossier was not a part of how the ICA was formulated.
Can a clear case be made for all of these charges? That is the question the Department of Justice must now answer.
Tulsi Gabbard, with the full-throated support of President Trump, has asked the Department of Justice to provide that answer.
Tulsi called for prosecutions and sent the newly declassified documents to the Justice Department.
“These documents detail a treasonous conspiracy by officials at the highest levels of the Obama White House to subvert the will of the American people and try to usurp the President from fulfilling his mandate,” Tulsi Gabbard said.
Will there be indictments? I certainly hope so.
Impeach Obama Before Indicting Him
While I believe there are strong cases to be made for criminal charges against Comey, Clapper, Brennan, et al, the person who sits at the heart of this conspiracy is the one who will likely prove the most difficult to indict: Barack Obama.
In the perverse karmic twist that only the law can provide, Donald Trump’s own defense against the lawfare Obama’s minions deployed against him may very well prove Obama’s best defense against indictment. The same logic that Trump’s lawyers successfully argued before the Supreme Court asserting Presidential immunity2 with respect to “official acts” could now be applied to Obama with respect to the Russian Collusion Hoax.
The conclusion of the Supreme Court is that the President of the United States cannot be charged criminally for “official acts” carried out in the performance of Presidential duty.
We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power requires that a former President have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office. At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is also entitled to immunity. At the current stage of proceedings in this case, however, we need not and do not decide whether that immunity must be absolute, or instead whether a presumptive immunity is sufficient.
We only have to examine the National Security Act of 19473 to understand that coordination of intelligence activities, including the development of the broad analytical documents known as “Intelligence Community Assessments” is squarely within the President’s official duties as the nation’s Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief of the nation’s armed forces.
While Barack Obama has now been shown to have ordered the promulgation of a fraudulent ICA, ordering up an ICA itself is indisputably an official act.
Legally, the logic argued by Trump’s lawyers that he should not be prosecuted for statements and actions made surrounding the J6 protests and his challenging of the 2020 election applies equally to Barack Obama’s actions surrounding the promulgation of the fraudulent Russian Collusion Hoax ICA.
Yet that does not mean Obama is free from all accountability. Just as the legal logic of Presidential immunity put forward by Donald Trump must apply equally to Barack Obama, so too does another political argument regarding Jack Smith’s indictments of Donald Trump: The requisite first step in any such indictment must be an impeachment and conviction of the former President.
Impeachment is necessary because it resolves the political questions so that the legal questions can be examined free from political taint.
The same historical precedents arguing in favor of impeaching an ex-President apply as much to Barack Obama as to Donald Trump.
From the founding of the Republic, impeachment has been understood to be first and foremost a political process, a point Alexander Hamilton conceded in Federalist 654:
A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.
Indeed, the rationale for establishing impeachment within the Constitution as the remedy for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” was to provide a broad mechanism for confronting political corruption within the government5.
While ordering the promulgation of specific Intelligence Community Assessments is indisputably an official act by a President, ordering that the assessment be fraudulent and built using known false information is indisputably a corrupt act. Even ignoring the laws cited above such an act arguably violates, such rank dishonesty is a violation of every ethical norm we have in civilized society. Lying is simply not okay.
A challenge, of course, to the impeachment process is that the Democrats are likely to close ranks behind Obama, so that even if the House should vote articles of impeachment, a strict party-line vote in the trial phase within the Senate would mean that vote would fall short of the two-thirds vote necessary for conviction. This is indeed a possibility, perhaps even a probability.
Yet for the Democrats to do that, they would have to defend against the evidences being brought forward by Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, and others within Donald Trump’s intelligence team. They would have to defend Obama against the likely testimony of a number of Obama Administration members, such as Susan Rice, who, we should remember, took the curious step of memorializing in an email on her very last day as National Security Advisor a January 5 meeting involving Obama and FBI Director James Comey.
This email struck many as bizarre and unusual even then, including then Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley.
Ambassador Rice appears to have used this email to document a January 5, 2017 Oval Office meeting between President Obama, former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates regarding Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. In particular, Ambassador Rice wrote:
“President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book’. The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.”
This meeting takes on renewed significance in light of reveals within the Gabbard document dump that the Steele Dossier was discussed at the time.
How will Democrats appear to the American electorate if they support the use of blatant lies and known falsehoods to construct a hoax narrative specifically targeting a sitting US President? What would be the political fallout to the Democratic Party from taking such a stance?
The Democrats might block a successful impeachment and conviction of Barack Obama, but at what political price—a price that would surely be paid at next year’s mid-term elections and perhaps even again in 2028?
Yet the ramifications of such a political spectacle are why we have impeachments, and why impeachment is important. Unlike a criminal prosecution, impeachment is an avowedly political process. By presenting arguments for impeachment during an impeachment inquiry in the House, and arguments for conviction during the trial phase in the Senate, the Congress is compelled to engage in a public debate over the conduct in question, and to decide whether that conduct is tolerable to the American polity or no. Every Congressman and every Senator is compelled to put their political future more or less on the line when the votes are cast, with public sentiment at the time determining the vote’s significance.
Should the Democrats in Congress decide to throw Barack Obama under the proverbial bus, an impeachment conviction would remove the immunity argument against criminal indictment. An act adjudicated by the Senate as politically corrupt and worthy of impeachment could hardly be considered to be an official act for which a President enjoys immunity—and the same Supreme Court logic that established immunity for official acts rejected immunity for unofficial acts.
The parties before us do not dispute that a former President can be subject to criminal prosecution for unofficial acts committed while in office.
We do well to remember that the Constitution specifically leaves on the table the possibility of criminal prosecution after an impeachment conviction.
Impeaching Barack Obama is a political maneuver, but a necessary one. It puts into sharp focus the debate over what constitutes permissible uses of government power against political opponents. It compels Democrats and Republicans in Congress alike to weigh the merits and demerits of pursuing an ex-President, with their political futures likely hanging in the balance.
If it should be that individual Congressmen and Senators do not feel their political futures hang in the balance, that itself would argue that the American electorate overall is not that concerned with lawfare (rightly or wrongly). In such circumstance, an argument could be made that the American electorate does not consider a criminal case against Barack Obama to be in the nation’s interest.
Whether or not one agrees with such an assessment, surely it is within the Constitutional order of things that the American electorate be the ones to make that decision.
By foisting the Russian Collusion Hoax upon the American people, Barack Obama and his Administration actively sought to deny the American people their 2016 choice for President of the United States, Donald Trump. We now have definitive proof the hoax was a criminal conspiracy orchestrated by Barack Obama and carried out by his intelligence heads.
Now it remains to be seen if the American electorate will receive the justice that is our due. Hopefully, justice will be done.
I have written extensively about this topic, for those wishing further illumination on the matter:
Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. ___ (2024)
Hamilton, A. The Avalon Project : Federalist No 65. 7 Mar. 1788, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed65.asp.
US Senate. About Impeachment | Historical Overview. https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/impeachment/overview.htm.
I’m praying this isn’t just another testify before a committee and then crickets.
Wow, Peter. Several Substacks have addressed this political bombshell in the past few days, but your essay, with its comprehensive and insightful analysis, is the best by far! I’m imagining a Supreme Court Justice reading this and being blown away, thinking that your writings put theirs to shame, and being a little bit alarmed that a Substack analyst could be so much better than they could ever hope to be. Seriously, Peter - I can’t gush enough. You are off-the-charts GREAT!
Okay, the Trump administration, via the DOJ, now has TWO Constitution-level scandals to pursue, with plenty of evidence to result in multiple convictions. They could bring down several top-level Biden-administration players because of the Auto-pen malfeasance. AND Gabbard now shows that there is evidence to torpedo members of Obama’s administration, too. We’re talking impeachment, sedition, and potentially MASSIVE damage to the Democratic Party.
Because these are Watergate-level scandals, with Constitutional implications, to fully pursue either of these matters would take years, and require the expenditure of enormous amounts of political capital. Peter, do you think that legally pursuing BOTH issues is realistically feasible for the Trump administration? I think it’s a tall order - but Trump has just effectively negotiated the end to three armed conflicts in the world, so he’s shown that he can indeed tackle the big challenges. What do you think - will Trump fight to the finish in both of these political battles?