Donald Trump spent Monday night consumed yet again by Barack Obama, tweeting two nearly 10-minute Fox News segments on “OBAMAGATE!” In one, Sean Hannity called Obama’s supposed 2016 targeting of Trump ally Michael Flynn “the biggest abuse of power scandal in American history” and posed the question, “What did Barack Hussein Obama know and when did he know it?…It is more clear than ever before that Barack knew a lot.” In the second clip the president shared, Tucker Carlson claimed that “[Obama] turned to the head of the FBI” and ordered him “to secretly investigate” Trump. “In any normal period in American history, this exchange would define Barack Obama forever,” Carlson added. “Obama would be known as the disgraced former president who used federal law enforcement to hurt his political enemies. That’s what he did.”
The president’s most recent Obama fit was triggered after his Justice Department announced last week that it’s seeking to drop its case against Flynn, his former national security adviser. But William Barr’s one-eighty on Flynn, who admitted to lying to the FBI, was insufficient for Trump, who is now using Flynn’s vindication to accuse Obama of illegally using the Justice Department to target his enemies, calling for criminal investigations into the former president and the FBI and DOJ officials who served under him. If Trump’s Twitter feed is any indication of his priorities, the public health and economic devastation caused by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has taken a back seat to “Obamagate” theories. In a 24-hour period at the beginning of the week, Trump tweeted and retweeted just eight posts about the coronavirus, while tweeting about the Flynn investigation, the FBI, and the Obama administration five times more, according to the Washington Post. His friends in the media are following suit: The Post found that Fox News mentions of Flynn and the FBI accounted for 13.5% of all 15-second segments, compared to just the 3.3% of such segments given to coronavirus coverage.
Despite Trumpworld’s drumbeat, the president himself appears unable to articulate what crime the previous administration is supposed to have committed. During a White House press conference on Monday, Trump was asked by the Post’s Philip Rucker about Obama’s involvement in “the biggest political crime in American history, by far” and replied with a meandering, circular rant. “Obamagate. It’s been going on for a long time. It’s been going on from before I even got elected, and it’s a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what’s gone on, and if you look at now, all this information that’s being released—and from what I understand, that’s only the beginning—some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again,” he said. “And you’ll be seeing what’s going on over the next, over the coming weeks but I, and I wish you’d write honestly about it but unfortunately you choose not to do so.” Rucker followed up by asking what exactly Trump believes Obama did, but still got no real answer. “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody,” the president seethed. “All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.”
The president’s almost single-minded focus on his nebulous conspiracy theory does accomplish one thing: It takes his election-year-messaging emphasis off of the coronavirus killing more than 82,000 people in the U.S. His Obamagate fantasy shifts focus to the so-called wrongs he has suffered at the hands of Democrats, rather than the White House’s deadly downplaying of the crisis. Moreover, the topic of alleged Obama-era corruption reliably fires up the American conservative base. “When this election happens, it’s not gonna be Biden against Trump. It’s gonna be Obama against Trump,” said Fox & Friends cohost Brian Kilmeade on Monday, driving the point home. Later in the day, Hannity implied the former president is working behind the scenes to take down Trump, saying that Obama’s recent criticism of the White House’s coronavirus response was actually a secret “message to deep state operatives to go out and do more dirty work.”
While his media allies are fully on board, Republicans in the Senate seem less than eager to buy into the theory. “I’m not anticipating calling President Obama,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, the GOP chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who’s overseeing a probe into the origins of the Mueller investigation. Though he did note, “I think the president’s got a real good reason to be upset with the Obama people,” he added. When asked by Politico if the Justice Department has reason to launch criminal investigations in relation to “Obamagate,” Senate Majority Whip John Thune suggested it’s a moot point. “That’s already being looked at, and we’ve got relevant committees up here that are talking a look at some of those issues too,” said the South Dakota Republican. “I always think that at the end, eventually the truth comes out, and I’m sure it will here too.”
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