Office of ex-US president breaks precedent and warns that allegations of attempted \u2018coup\u2019 are \u2018attempt at distraction\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Barack Obama<\/a> has broken his silence on calls from Donald Trump<\/a> for him to be prosecuted by unequivocally rejecting his successor\u2019s accusations that he tried to engineer a \u201ccoup\u201d following Trump\u2019s 2016 election victory by \u201cmanufacturing\u201d evidence of Russian interference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama\u2019s office took the unusual step of issuing an emphatic refutation after Trump told reporters that his predecessor had \u201c[tried] to lead a coup\u201d against him and was guilty of \u201ctreason\u201d over intelligence assessments suggesting that Russia had intervened to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton<\/a> in the campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOut of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,\u201d the statement said. \u201cBut these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The statement went on to criticize claims made in an 11-page document released last week by Tulsi Gabbard<\/a>, the director of national intelligence, who said she was passing evidence of what she claimed was a \u201ctreasonous conspiracy\u201d among Obama national security officials to the justice department, recommending their prosecution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThese findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama\u2019s response followed a fusillade of accusations by Trump in the White House as he was meeting the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, the son of the country\u2019s former autocratic president, who was ousted in a popular \u201cpeople\u2019s power revolution<\/a>\u201d in 1986.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Asked by a reporter who should be the main target of the criminal investigation recommended in Gabbard\u2019s report, Trump said: \u201cBased on what I read, and I read pretty much what you read, it would be President Obama. He started it, and Biden was there with him. And [James] Comey [the former FBI director] was there, and [James] Clapper [the former director of national intelligence], the whole group was there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was them, too, but the leader of the gang was President Obama, Barack Hussein Obama. Have you heard of him?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He went on: \u201cThis isn\u2019t like evidence. This is like proof, irrefutable proof that Obama was sedatious [sic], that Obama \u2026 was trying to lead a coup, and it was with Hillary Clinton, with all these other people, but Obama headed it up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe\u2019s guilty. 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\u2019s ever even imagined.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump said Gabbard had told him she had \u201cthousands of additional documents coming\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s the most unbelievable thing I think I\u2019ve ever read. So you want to take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense,\u201d he said, in what appeared to be a coded appeal for supporters to drop their demands for the release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein<\/a>, the disgraced financier who was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 as he awaited trial on sex-trafficking charges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the Gabbard report, which accused the Obama administration of forcing spy agencies to alter their conclusions, conflated and misrepresented different issues to discredit the intelligence community\u2019s assessment in 2017 that Russia sought to simultaneously help Trump and damage Clinton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The assessment concluded that Russia did not engage in cyber-attacks against election infrastructure to change vote tallies, but found Moscow hacked and leaked documents from the Democratic National Committee to damage the Clinton campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Gabbard report used that first conclusion to suggest that a broader Russian influence operation did not occur, and cited Obama\u2019s presidential daily brief in December 2016 that concluded there were no Russian hacks of election systems being pushed back as evidence of political interference in the assessment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n