[Salon] IS TRUMP’S JUSTICE DEPARTMENT PURSUING OBAMA?

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

IS TRUMP’S JUSTICE DEPARTMENT PURSUING OBAMA?

Prosecutors are investigating officials from the Obama administration
for their actions after the 2016 election and the ex-president may be
in their crosshairs

Seymour Hersh
May 21  https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/is-trumps-justice-department-pursuing?r=1eogb

Former President Barack Obama and then President-elect Donald Trump
speak ahead of the state funeral services for former President Jimmy
Carter at the National Cathedral on January 9, 2025 in Washington,
D.C. / Photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images.

If you don’t remember the Steele dossier, it was the largely
discredited report assembled in 2016 by former British intelligence
officer Christopher Steele, claiming that Donald Trump, then running
against Hillary Clinton for the presidency, had engaged in what we
will say here were “perverted acts” while in a Moscow hotel, among
other allegations that were catnip to Democrats. The FBI subsequently
concluded that no such tape could be verified.

Such fanciful allegations have returned in Washington, although this
time it’s the Republicans who are overreaching, spurred on by Trump.
In his second term, he still wants payback against the Democrats
because he believes they were bending the truth when he first took
office in 2017. One key target has been former FBI Director James
Comey. He was indicted last month not in Washington, where federal
grand juries occasionally refuse to indict, but by a compliant federal
grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina.

There were two felony counts in the indictment. It accuses Comey, who
was fired in 2017 by Trump four years into his Congressionally
mandated ten-year term as FBI director, of posting an item on
Instagram last May that included a photo of seashells arranged on a
beach that spelled 86 47. Federal prosecutors have claimed that the
seashell numbers, as Comey knew or had to know, were a death threat.
(To 86 in hospitality parlance means to eject a patron from an
establishment, among other things, and Trump is the forty-seventh
president of the United States.)

The indictment further claims that any reasonable recipient of the
shells’ message would interpret it as “a serious expression of an
intent to do harm to the President of the United States.” Comey, among
other high-level officials who served in the Obama administration, was
reviled by Trump. He is known to believe that the White House plotted
against him between his stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton in November
2016 and his inauguration in January 2017.

Cabinet members of the Trump administration understand that loyalty to
the president is a requirement for keeping one’s job. So Todd Blanche,
a former New York federal prosecutor who represented Trump in three
cases while in private practice, found himself trying to explain away
the Comey indictment on May 3 on NBC’s Meet the Press. Moderator
Kristen Welker asked Blanche: “How does that image of seashells amount
to a serious threat against the president’s life?”

Blanche, after some blathering, got to the truth. “Rest assured that
it’s just not the Instagram post that leads somebody to get indicted,”
he said. As we have repeatedly seen in recent months, the most
pressing issue for Trump is payback. I have been told that the
president remains convinced that Obama, working through John Brennan,
a former CIA station chief who was first brought into the Obama White
House as a homeland security assistant and became CIA director in
2013, sought to find ways after the election to delegitimize Trump
after he prevented Hillary Clinton from succeeding Obama. I soon was
hearing accounts of alleged Brennan-inspired operations to find a way,
using active National Security Agency contractors, to monitor and
intercept telephone calls coming in and out of Trump’s temporary
executive offices at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan during the
transition. One such group of contractors was detected by members of
an NYC police unit working with the Secret Service. There was a
confrontation, with guns raised by Secret Service agents, in the
account I was told, and it took a few days in the city jail on Rikers
Island before the contractors were released. At that point, the head
of the NSA Admiral Michael Rogers was doomed, so I was told. He and a
key deputy were fired by Trump a few months into his presidency,

I followed the story at the time, and I’m still following it, but
trying to determine if there was a last-minute Brennan-led
operation—as Trump and others inside clearly believe—to collect enough
dirt to keep the president-elect from office in early 2017 may never
be resolved. I am told that Brennan is under investigation for his
actions against then President-elect Trump by a Justice Department
prosecution team headquartered in Florida. He was interviewed, and he
may soon be charged with perjury.

What will happen if Obama—another Trump target—is determined to have
had knowledge of or to have ordered the alleged off-the-books
Brennan-led operations against Trump. At this highly politicized
moment, it’s impossible to predict.

I asked a source who is well informed, with access to foreign
intelligence, about the Trump administration’s ongoing inquiry, what
he thinks of Obama’s role and that of a few of his most senior aides
who officially sought access to NSA voice intercepts in the weeks
before Trump was to take the oath of office. Could all of this amount
to a plot against the incoming president?

He said he had seen, amid the records and documents he’d studied, no
evidence of a “substantiated criminal conspiracy by Obama officials to
fabricate the Russia investigation or to prevent Trump from assuming
office.” He added, however, that “There is ample material here for
serious criticism of how the FBI and Department of Justice handled a
politically explosive counterintelligence matter in the aftermath of a
presidential campaign.”