Trump's Attack on President Obama

Susan Estrich on Jul 26, 2025

It's not just Trump being Trump. We -- and by "we" I mean both the public and the media -- have gotten so used to Trump repeating outrageous lies that we tend to dismiss them out of hand. But this is much, much worse. For Trump and his top officials to accuse former President Barack Obama of treason, much less to call for an investigation by the Justice Department (his puppet, Attorney General Pam Bondi, has already announced the formation of a "strike force," whatever that is) is a plain abuse of power.

Trump's most recent attack on Obama came after last weekend, when he posted an AI-generated video of Obama supposedly being arrested by the FBI. Not funny. Then Tulsi Gabbard, struggling to get back on Trump's good list after annoying the president with a self-serving video she made on her trip to Asia (after which she was excluded from some critical meetings) took to the podium at a White House briefing to call on the Justice Department to investigate what she called the "treasonous conspiracy" relating to the investigation of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election in Trump's favor. It worked. Referring to Gabbard, Trump said: "She's, like, hotter than everybody. She's the hottest one in the room right now."

As for who should be the target of the Justice Department and what should be the focus, Trump left no doubt: "It would be President Obama. He started it. ... This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody's ever even imagined, even in other countries."

That's just another lie. The investigation of Russian involvement in the 2016 election focused on the Russian hacking and dissemination of Hillary Clinton's campaign emails -- something Donald Trump well knows, since he referred to those emails on the campaign trail. The only thing Obama did was to encourage his intelligence officers to complete their investigation before he left office, understanding -- rightly -- that Trump, once he took office, could not be trusted not to interfere or block it. Telling a federal agency to finish its work is not a crime. Indeed, every investigation of the 2016 election found exactly what the Obama investigation did. In 2018, the Senate Intelligence Committee, "found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling," according to then-Sen. and now Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which is precisely what the Obama team found.

Treason, the only crime defined by the Constitution, requires that one give "aid and comfort" to our enemies. It is punishable by execution. Of course, because of the Trump Supreme Court decision affording the president near-absolute immunity for "official acts" (which Trump desperately needed to hide behind to escape responsibility for inciting a riot on Jan. 6), the Justice Department investigation of Obama is a useless task and a waste of time and money. But Obama, unlike Trump, doesn't need the shield of immunity. There are no facts supporting Gabbard's charges, and nothing for the Justice Department's strike force to investigate.

This isn't about real wrongdoing. It certainly isn't about treason. Tulsi Gabbard made these charges to earn her way back into Trump's good graces. And what better way to do it than to play to Trump's worst instincts -- his desire for vengeance and his willingness to weaponize the entire federal government to get even with his enemies. Obama is smarter, more popular and more respected than Trump will ever be. And Trump, desperate to bury his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, desperate to change the subject after playing ridiculous, self-serving games attacking his other predecessor, Joe Biden, for failing to release the Epstein files, was only too willing to applaud Gabbard, to put pressure on his attorney general and to suggest that Obama should be subject to execution. He has no shame and no limits.

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