A Bigger Trump Scandal Than the Epstein Mess

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and press secretary Karoline Leavitt at the White House press briefing room on Wednesday. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

If you’ve been obsessed with Donald Trump’s not-going-away Jeffrey Epstein scandal, you might have missed a more disturbing development on the road to American authoritarianism. Trump’s top intelligence officer fabricated evidence to support a sham Justice Department criminal investigation that could lead to a show trial of former President Barack Obama and his aides. This is autocracy in action.

Here's what happened. About a week ago, Tulsi Gabbard, the soft-on-Putin director of national intelligence, released a memo that claimed that in early January 2017 Obama and his national security aides cooked up a phony intelligence report that stated the Russians had attacked the 2016 election to sow discord, impede Hillary Clinton, and help Trump. She insisted that Obama and his aides knew that the latter point—the Moscow operation had aimed to boost Trump’s chances—was false and that these Democrats had schemed to include this assessment in the report, which was released in a declassified version, to destroy Trump and his presidency.

This, she said, was a “treasonous” act and she called for the Justice Department to mount a criminal investigation of Obama and his aides. Gabbard then appeared at a White House press briefing, where, like a good conspiracy theory-monger, she displayed an impressive-looking wire diagram and said Obama and his crew had orchestrated an attempted “coup” against Trump.

No surprise, Trump, too, saw it the same way. He has never acknowledged that Vladimir Putin assaulted the 2016 election—with a hack-and-leak operation and a massive covert social media influence campaign—to aid his campaign. Russia’s actions—as well as Trump’s denial of the Kremlin’s intervention, a move that abetted Putin’s attack—have tainted Trump’s 2016 victory, and he has steadfastly refused to admit this, even at times declaring that the whole thing didn’t happen and was just a “hoax.”

So with her memo, Gabbard is trying to rewrite history for the benefit of Dear Leader and feeding his desire for revenge.

As did his DNI, Trump called for Obama to be prosecuted and declared Gabbard’s report was “proof” of Obama’s “treason.” Trump went so far as to post an AI-generated video of FBI agents violently handcuffing and arresting Obama and tossing him into a prison cell. In the video, Obama is on his knees before Trump. (Sick and troubling stuff, right?)

Next, the Justice Department run by Attorney General Pam Bondi, another Trump lackey, announced it had created a “strike force” to investigate these allegations. (Strike forces are usually set up to investigate wide-ranging criminal enterprises that require the participation of multiple government agencies—not the production of a single 25-page-long government report.) At this stage, it is not tough to imagine Trump’s DOJ ginning up a prosecution and then a show trial of Obama and his former aides, including his CIA director, John Brennan, and his FBI director, Jim Comey, and others. (Comey and Brennan are favorite MAGA and Trump targets.)

Here's the problem: Gabbard’s memo is trash.

It cites as evidence several intelligence documents from 2016 that she declassified. But these records have nothing to do with that assessment that Putin preferred a Trump victory. These documents noted that Russian efforts to penetrate US election systems—which had occurred throughout the nation in 2016—would not affect vote-counting. Moscow probing of election boards was a matter of great concern to US intelligence and the Obama White House, but it was an entirely separate subject from the hack-and-leak and social media operations perpetuated by Kremlin operatives.

The documents Gabbard issued had nothing to do with the question of whether those covert operations were implemented to help Trump. She was pulling a disingenuous sleight of hand, conflating two different intelligence topics. (I explained this in more detail here.) And subsequent investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (when it was chaired by then-Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican)—which each had access to much more information than the earlier intelligence assessment that Obama had ordered produced quickly in the waning days of his presidency—confirmed the obvious point that the Kremlin’s attack favored Trump.

This is what the GOP-led Senate intelligence committee reported in 2020:

The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow's intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.

It’s hard to believe that Gabbard and her henchmen and henchwomen at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence made an honest mistake by using intelligence reports on one subject to challenge the finding on another. They can’t be that dumb.

What we have here is Trump’s top intelligence official using the spy services to manufacture a blatantly fake case so that Trump’s DOJ can investigate and perhaps prosecute Trump’s political rivals and critics, including a former president of the United States.

This is all so Soviet.

It’s also a politicalization and weaponization of the intelligence community that may be more brazen than what happened with weapons of mass destruction prior to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s invasion of Iraq.

Many media commentators have characterized this latest Trump assault on Obama as a distraction from the Epstein mess. And it is. Whenever Trump gets into a jam, he cries “hoax” (check) and denounces Obama and the Deep State for persecuting him (check).

Yet it’s more than just another Trump political stunt that ought to be ignored. Trump is now fully abusing the power of the state to pursue a vendetta. During a session with reporters in the Oval Office this week, while talking about prosecuting Obama, he said, “Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people.”

That was some admission. The president was saying he intended to deploy US intelligence agencies and the Justice Department against political targets even if it’s “wrong.” That ought to have been front-page news across the land. But did you see it in the headlines? Was there an outcry from the media and members of Congress? It’s a sad sign of where we are at this moment that Trump’s acknowledgment of launching illegal witch hunts did not create a major stir.

The Gabbard-Trump scheme is a clear perversion of US intelligence and law enforcement. This is a leap forward in Trump’s push toward authoritarianism. The Epstein affair is indeed serious, but we don’t yet know what, if anything, Trump is trying to keep hidden. Much of it remains a puzzle. Trump’s plot to sic the CIA, the FBI, and the Justice Department on his perceived enemies is out in the open. There’s no mystery. As he seeks to be an autocrat, he is brutally assaulting American democracy.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

The judges are sick and tired of figuring out how many Trump quotes to include each week. He could dominate this contest, but that would be boring. So they apply an informal mercy rule to give others a fighting chance. Nevertheless, they do want to note that the dumbest thing said this week came from the president. Bragging that his administration would lower prescription medicine prices, he commented:

This is something that nobody else can do. We’re gonna get the drug prices down not 30 or 40 percent, which would be great. Not 50 or 60, no. We’re gonna get them 1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent. Numbers that are not even thought to be achievable because I used a certain talent that I have.

If you lower the price of an item by 100 percent, its cost is zero. What happens when you go beyond 100 percent? The price goes into negative numbers. In real life, that’s impossible. I asked Perplexity AI to help with this: “Can you lower the price of a good by 1000 percent?” The chatbot replied, “Lowering the price by 1,000 percent means the seller would have to pay the buyer nine times the original price simply to take the product, which is generally not done in real-world transactions.” Trump was correct: That’s a circumstance “not even thought to be achievable.”

In response to a Wall Street Journal story that revealed that in 2003 Trump sent Jeffrey Epstein a bawdy birthday card—“may every day be another wonderful secret”—Trump filed a $10 billion defamation case against the newspaper. His complaint contained this idiotic passage: “The Article was published in The Wall Street Journal as an exclusive. However, since publication, Defendants have widely disseminated it to hundreds of millions of people worldwide.”

Does Trump’s legal team not know the meaning of “exclusive” in a journalistic context? It’s a story that no one else has—not a story, as the filing seems to suggest, that only a few people have access to. This is a sign that Trump has not recruited top-notch legal talent for his ridiculous lawsuit. In fact, the lead attorney for Trump in this lawsuit is Alejandro Brito, a Florida-based attorney who handles commercial law. He specializes in cases related to the franchise industry.

This week, when Gabbard appeared at the daily White House briefing to falsely accuse Obama of rigging an intelligence report to subvert Trump (see above), White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt chimed in:

The outrage…is the fact that the intelligence community was concocting this narrative that the president colluded with the Russians, that the president’s son was holding secret meetings with the Russians. All of these lies that were never true.

Not at all. Leavitt was tossing off lies. The intelligence report in question did not state Trump colluded with the Russian attack on the 2016 election. It said Putin had intervened in the election to help Trump. As for Trump’s son, well, Donald Trump Jr. did hold a secret meeting in 2016 with a Russian emissary whom he was told could deliver the Trump campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of a Kremlin effort to aid the Trump campaign. This event has been dubbed, unimaginatively, the Trump Tower meeting. (Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Paul Manafort, then the Trump campaign’s chief executive, also attended.) Fortunately for Leavitt, knowing the basic information about a scandal involving your boss is not a necessary requirement for this job.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is back in the running for this comment about Dear Leader: "His approval ratings are skyrocketing. CNN had a story a day or two ago—he was at a 90 percent approval rating! There's never been a president that high."

Again, facts don’t seem to matter to our contestants. Presidents have hit that height. George W. Bush scored a 92 percent approval a month after 9/11. His dad hit 90 percent a week into the first Gulf War in 1991. Harry Truman reached 87 percent on V-E Day in 1945. FDR made it to 82 percent following Pearl Harbor. As for Trump, the most recent Economist/YouGov poll has him at 40 percent approval and 55 percent disapproval. And the latest Gallup poll placed him at a six-month low of 37 percent.

The winner this week is Axios for its bizarre summation of Trump’s first half-year in office, in which it reported that Trump had “crushed” it.

That is quite the spin. Axios and the referenced piece written by Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen left out so many major Trump accomplishments, such as killing kids overseas (by annihilating USAID) and at home (by undermining the national vaccine system); destroying the nation’s research infrastructure; adopting police state tactics for its cruel mass deportation crusade; eviscerating national security agencies (including the CIA and State Department); implementing Medicaid cuts (which will lead to millions losing their health insurance); passing a ginormous tax cut for the rich (which will explode the deficit further); demolishing the Consumer Financial Protection Board (so Big Finance can more easily screw people); engaging in erratic trade wars; undoing environmental protections and climate change policies; dismissing firefighters and food safety inspectors; and undermining American democracy. And don’t forget the bump up in inflation.

It's a wonder more people are not impressed with Trump. Or maybe it’s a wonder Trump is as high as 37 percent. The judges certainly wondered why Axios celebrated a wannabe autocrat who in so little time has done so much damage.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the marvelous exhibit of Amy Sherald’s paintings at the Whitney Museum in New York City. She gained national prominence when her official portrait of Michelle Obama was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in 2018. I noted, “Her work contemplates and celebrate the everyday Black experience in American life. With her subjects often looking straight at the viewer dispassionately yet evincing a rich interior life, the paintings deliberately evoke an Edward Hopper–like quality...At a moment when Trump is mounting a cultural battle that aims to discredit and defund art and history that dares to examine race in America, the Whitney show feels rebellious.” I also pointed out that the show, which runs through August 10, was slated to move to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in September and added, “I hope that happens”—suggesting that in the Era of Trump that might not happen.

Indeed, it is not.

Sherald has withdrawn the show from the National Portrait Gallery after being told the museum was considering removing one of her paintings, which depicts a transgender Statue of Liberty, to avoid ticking off Trump and MAGA culture commissars. Her exhibition would have been the first by a Black contemporary artist at the Portrait Gallery. 

“I entered into this collaboration in good faith, believing that the institution shared a commitment to presenting work that reflects the full, complex truth of American life,” Sherald wrote in a letter to Lonnie Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian. “Unfortunately, it has become clear that the conditions no longer support the integrity of the work as conceived.’’ (Reportedly the Smithsonian had suggested adding a video to the exhibit that would show people’s different reaction to this particular painting—a move that could have challenged, if not undermined, Sherald’s intent.)

In a statement, Sherald said that this portrait “exists to hold space for someone whose humanity has been politicized and disregarded. I cannot in good conscience comply with a culture of censorship, especially when it targets vulnerable communities. At a time when transgender people are being legislated against, silenced, and endangered across our nation, silence is not an option. I stand by my work. I stand by my sitters. I stand by the truth that all people deserve to be seen—not only in life, but in art.”

Amy Sherald's “Trans Forming Liberty” (2024). (Photo: Kelvin Bulluck)

In summertime, the mail does tend to dip a bit. I take that as a good sign that Our Land readers are out and about, kayaking, climbing mountains, parasailing, and eating ice cream. But the issue on the Russian connection to the Epstein scandal drew a number of responses.

Robin Dumler emailed:

You explain many things I didn't care about or pay attention to before due to the BS and conspiracy nature of it, such as PizzaGate. I couldn't fathom how anyone could give credence to this, but there's a lot of nutcases out there. To find out that Russian propaganda is behind that now makes sense. I'm just glad that it has come back to bite them in the ass; they deserve it and more. Thanks for an entertaining and enlightening read.

Harvey Berman observed:

It would be fitting if a Russian influence campaign winds up bringing down the same guy they did so much to enable. As they say, "Karma is a bitch."

I wouldn’t yet predict that the Epstein scandal will be the end of Trump. He ain’t going anywhere on his own volition, and the Republicans remain zombie cultists who show few signs of breaking with him. The House Republicans even ran out of Washington, DC, to avoid voting for a release of the Epstein files. But, yes, that would be just deserts.

Thompson wrote:

Thank you for laying out the whole MAGA demented timeline at the core of the cult. I couldn't have said it better myself. It's been bothering me that on the Stephanie Ruhle show a few nights ago where the panel seemed to express that they were at a loss to understand why this particular scandal subject was so important to the MAGA gang. Maybe national media elites are so sheltered that they didn't understand how foundational the beliefs are that you spelled out so clearly. Though the media did get it right soon after.

I don't know if we can ever put the genie back in the bottle regarding these core beliefs of the Kool-Aid drinkers, but this latest twist is interesting and encouraging. We may have to wait for a generation to fade away and die out.

“Moxie, did you see there’s new research showing dogs don’t really sense good or bad in people?”
“I like to think I’m pretty good judge of character.”
“Well, how can you tell who’s good or bad?”
“The good people are the ones who pet me.”
“Isn’t that just about everyone you meet?”
“I know a lot of good people.”