Obama now 'squarely in Russiagate crosshairs,' journalist Matt Taibbi claims
Former President Obama is now "squarely" in the crosshairs of the Russiagate "scam," journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in a Racket News piece on Saturday, shortly after DNI Tulsi Gabbard's office unleashed a blitz of documents and a memo said to detail the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.
Taibbi quoted an unnamed source in describing Obama as no longer being a "tertiary" character in the "scam" that followed President Trump's 2016 election win over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
He elaborated on the remark, Monday, on "America's Newsroom."
"The last major revelation that came out was that John Brennan and James Comey were the focus of criminal investigations that had been opened by the Justice Department, but these new documents that were released by Tulsi Gabbard… make it clear that the investigation is now aimed at the Obama White House and, in particular, at Barack Obama, because of decisions that were made in early December 2016 to suppress the presidential daily briefing and go ahead and order a new intelligence community assessment that ultimately would have much more aggressive conclusions about Trump and Russia," he told co-host Bill Hemmer.
Last Friday, Gabbard declassified documents which she says implicate the former president and members of his national security team who "manufactured and politicized intelligence" to create the narrative that Russia was attempting to influence the 2016 presidential election — despite information from the intelligence community stating otherwise.
A declassified copy of the Dec. 8, 2016 presidential daily brief for President Obama obtained by Fox News Digital reads, in part, "We assess that Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent U.S. election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure."
It continues: "Russian government-affiliated actors most likely compromised an Illinois voter registration database and unsuccessfully attempted the same in other states."
A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation later found that, while Trump may not have accepted Russian help, Russia did meddle in some fashion.
The chairman of the Intel Committee at the time — then-Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who now serves as the top diplomat to the United States under Trump — put out a statement that said, "The committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election. What the committee did find, however, is very troubling. We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling."
Taibbi said he has heard frequent complaints that the information released by Gabbard had not come out sooner.
"A former high-ranking Trump official said [to me] there was, 'So much corruption in the last Trump presidency that this shouldn't have been overlooked, that these documents should have come out,' but the overall sense I get is that everyone's happy that they finally are coming out, and they're looking forward to what is likely to come out this week," he said.
Though former President Obama and his representatives did not respond to Fox News Digital's previous requests for comment, Democratic lawmakers have reacted to the development with their own series of statements.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., a ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, criticized Gabbard's claims as "baseless."
"Few episodes in our nation’s history have been investigated as thoroughly as the Intelligence Community’s warning in 2016 that Russia was interfering in the election," Himes said in a statement posted to X.
"Every legitimate investigation, including the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, found no evidence of politicization and endorsed the findings of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment."
Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused Gabbard of "weaponizing her position to amplify the president's election conspiracy theories."
Fox News' Brooke Singman contributed to this report.