Trump accuses Obama of treason in escalating attacks over 2016 Russia probe
'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.
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 socialised 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 you should be talking about is they caught president Obama absolutely cold,' Trump said.
He 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 there was no evidence of politicisation in the intelligence community's behaviour 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 weaponised the federal government against him and his allies for the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters and his handling of classified materials after he left office in 2021.
Obama has long been a target of Trump. In 2011 he accused then-president Obama of not being born in the US, 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 a CIA review ordered by director John Ratcliffe and published on July 2, a 2018 bipartisan Senate report and declassified documents Gabbard released last week.
The documents show Gabbard conflated two separate US 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 US election infrastructure to change vote counts and the second was that Moscow probably was using cyber means to influence the US political environment through information and propaganda operations, including by stealing and leaking data from Democratic Party servers.
The January 2017 US intelligence assessment ordered by Obama built on that second finding: that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorised influence operations to sway the 2016 vote to Trump.
The review ordered by Ratcliffe found flaws in the production of that assessment, but it did not contest its conclusion and upheld 'the quality and credibility' of a highly classified CIA report on which the assessment's authors relied.
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