The Daily - The Sprawling Government Effort to Prosecute Barack Obama

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

Over the past few weeks, the most senior intelligence officials in the federal government have released a series of new documents which they claim shows that, starting in 2016, President Barack Obama and his deputies carried out a criminal conspiracy against President Trump.Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter for The Times, explains what’s behind the sudden re-emergence on the Trump-Russia saga, and what happens when heads of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Justice Department all turn their attention to the president’s domestic enemies.Guest: Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, covering Washington.Background reading: In targeting Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump’s retribution campaign has taken another turn.A spokesman for Mr. Obama said that Mr. Trump’s accusations were ”ridiculous” and “weak.”For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Kenny Holston/The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the Daily. Over the past few weeks, the most senior intelligence officials in the federal government have released a series of new documents that they claim shows that President Obama and his deputies carried out a criminal conspiracy against President Trump, starting in 2020. Today, Mike Schmidt on what's behind the sudden re-emergence of the Trump-Russia saga and what happens when the heads of the CIA, FBI, and DOJ all turn their attention to the president's domestic enemies. August 13th.

Mike, I think for a lot of us, this all started a couple of weeks ago inside the White House press briefing room. Hello. Good afternoon, everybody. And I wonder if you can take us back to that moment. Let me begin with a few scheduling items off the top. It starts with the White House press secretary holding her regular daily press briefing. We have a special guest with us today who will. We will speak momentarily. But for this briefing, she brings out a special guest.

Thank you very much. Good afternoon. President Trump's direction. She hands over the podium, the biggest bully pulpit that the White House has, to Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence. The stunning revelations that we are releasing today should be of concern to every American. who oversees all of the intelligence community agencies. The implications of this are far-reaching and have to do with the integrity of our Democratic Republic.

And she proceeds to claim that she has uncovered a massive conspiracy involving President Obama, his intelligence agencies, Russia, and Trump. There is irrefutable evidence that detail how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false. She goes so far to say the expressed intent and what followed afterward

can only be described as a years-long coup and a treasonous conspiracy. That what Obama and his intelligence agencies did was treason. Director Gabbard, we thank you for the time today. This is a truly true. extraordinary claim from the senior most intelligence official in the United States. And Michael, we'll eventually talk through the specific allegations that Gabbard is making.

Well, fact check it. But just explain at the highest possible level what's really going on here, what it is that Gabbard is doing. Gabbard's press conference was the start of this week's long effort by several different members of the Trump administration to do Two things. The first is to make the case that they now have new evidence to support their longstanding claim that the Trump-Russia investigation was a conspiracy manufactured by President Obama and his intelligence officials to try to essentially destroy Trump and undermine his legitimacy as a president.

The second thing they're trying to do is apparently create a distraction because Trump finds himself in this highly unusual situation in the past several weeks in which he is almost crosswise with his base over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. And the Trump administration is going back. to an old play of using Russia in the idea that Trump is a victim of a larger conspiracy there to distract from all of the Epstein questions that they don't seem to have any good answers for. Right.

Talking about Russia better than talking about Epstein. Correct. And in a larger sense, what the administration is trying to do, is to not just say, hey, these guys were criminals, but to bring criminal charges against them for engaging in this conspiracy, which would be a major escalation in a very long-running set of complaints

about the Russia investigation. They want to follow this thing all the way through and put Barack Obama and, officials like his CIA director, John Brennan, in prison. Mike, since for the Trump administration, this is all about the original government investigation into Trump and Russia, dating back to the 2016 campaign. I think we need to go back to that investigation, which I know you covered very closely, just remind us of the very basics of that investigation and its conclusions and why the Trump administration remains so fixated on it. In the aftermath of Trump winning the 2016 election,

it was widely understood that Russia had meddled in the campaign. Obama, faced with that reality, ordered his intelligence community to conduct an assessment, essentially a determination, to understand what Russia had done and why it had done it. The intelligence community comes to a series of conclusions, which they lay out in a document that was released in the final days of the Obama administration just before Trump was about to take over. And they find that Putin tried to hurt

Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump while undermining America's democracy. But for Trump, this document, this assessment, was the original sin. because what it did was cast doubt on his victory. Did he win the election fair and square, or did the Russians help him do that? And from what you're saying, folks like Tulsi Gabbard are now coming out in the last two weeks

and saying we have firm evidence that that intelligence community assessment was wrong and that the people involved in producing it, especially Obama, knew that it was wrong. So let's get back to what Gabbard is alleging. What Gabbard is starting to do is declassified documents that she claims irrefutably prove that not only is the assessment a bunch of nonsense, but it's at the heart of a criminal conspiracy. So she releases a classified report that was written by House Republicans in Trump's first term that claims that Putin was not trying to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton. So a report that takes real issue with this pretty central finding of the Obama intelligence conclusion that Putin wants Trump to win.

Correct. But it's really important to note that this report was written by a bunch of hardened Trump partisans in the House. And it stands alone. No other serious entity that has looked at this question, including a massive bipartisan investigation in the Senate, comes to the claim that these House Republicans. did. How does a report like that justify the incredibly strong language that Gabbard is using that there is treasonous conspiracy afoot in the Obama administration against Trump? Well, it doesn't. There is a massive gap between what she is claiming and what she is releasing. the report offers essentially a different opinion from what the Obama administration came to essentially says you guys said Putin wanted to do one thing we believe Putin didn't want to do that

but there's nothing in that report like an email from Obama to his intelligence community saying I don't care what the evidence shows we need to get Donald Trump that proves or shows or raises even questions about a larger treasonous conspiracy.

Right. There's no evidence it sounds like of any kind to suggest a conspiracy, but that is not at all how Tulsi Gabbard is talking about this from the White House podium. No, she is making this out like the smoking gun

that Trump and his allies have been searching for all these years. Nothing that she has released backs up her claim of a treasonous conspiracy. But despite that, she sends a criminal referral to the Justice Department, essentially a letter saying, hey, guys, you really need to conduct a criminal investigation into this. And Gabbert is not the only Trump administration official who over the past few weeks

has been declassifying information and releasing documents to claim that they have their own evidence that Obama and his officials engaged in criminality. And we will talk about those right after the break. We'll be right back. So, Mike, walk us through what these other Trump administration intelligence officials have been releasing in their effort like Gabbard to try to prove that the Obama-Russia

assessment was a criminal conspiracy. The head of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, puts out a report that also casts out on the 2016 intelligence assessment. How so? The report doesn't dispute the central finding of the 2016 assessment, but it takes issue with the tradecraft for how the report was produced. It says that the process was rushed. It says that top officials were far too involved in it. And it says that there was pressure on analysts to reach a conclusion. But then the report kind of undercuts itself because it says that there's no evidence that the analysts actually felt that pressure. Hmm. So a pretty complicated and contradictory set of claims there. Correct. And there's

even another, I hate to say it, confusing claim. And that's about a footnote and an annex onto the original assessment. Just hold my hand. Let me try and explain this to you. Okay. As part of the assessment, the CIA had the dossier, remember that compilation of unsubstantiated allegations dug up by a British spy about Trump's ties to Russia, attached as an annex to the assessment.

The assessment was not based on the document. dossier. It didn't play a role in the conclusions. But what the report is essentially saying is that this unsubstantiated document called the dossier, it should never have been attached in the first place. And because it was attached, it cast some doubt on the entire claim. So based on this and not much more, Radcliffe comes out swinging. There is no question. This was the greatest political scandal of our lifetime. He says, all the world can now see the truth. It derailed our country.

It derailed President Trump's presidency, his first four years. Brennan, Clapper, and Comey manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals. And it really is a stain on our country that should never happen again. And Donald Trump is committed to making sure that it doesn't. All to get Trump. Despite the fact that there's nothing in his own. agency's assessment of the assessment that proves that. Correct. So as with the case of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence,

when it comes to the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, we're dealing with a very big gap between the evidence that he's putting forward and the claims he's making very loudly and very publicly. He's claiming, like Gabbard, there's a criminal conspiracy here, but This CIA report he puts out in no way supports that. But Radcliffe, too, sends his own criminal referrals to the Justice Department asking them to investigate. So we now have two intelligence officials telling the Department of Justice that they should criminally investigate Obama administration officials over the Russia investigation. And while all this is going on, the FBI chimes in. This was incredible.

Sources telling Fox News Digital, the director Cash Patel found a tranche of documents related to the Trump-Russia probe inside multiple burn bags. The FBI director Cash Patel declassifies a piece of intelligence that he claims shows that this conspiracy, it actually originated with Hillary Clinton. That's how vindictive and vicious, the former leadership structure, here was. They withheld and hid documentation and put it in rooms where people weren't supposed to look. And it's a good thing we're here now to clean it up and you're about to see a wave of transparency. Huh. And what evidence does Patel offer to support that claim? An email between

Clinton allies in which they claim that Clinton personally approved a plan to tie Trump to Russia. But what Patel doesn't say is that a previous special counsel that was appointed by Trump's Justice Department to look into the Russia hoax determined that the email was likely a fake. Wow. That Russian intelligence officials had taken a range of hacked emails and made them into a composite that depicted Clinton as the originator of that. the conspiracy. And presumably, the FBI director, Cash Patel, would have known that and yet still released it and treated it as a smoking gun. Correct. So a very noticeable pattern is clearly emerging here. A senior Trump administration intelligence official claims very publicly to have unveiled a new piece of evidence proving a criminal conspiracy when it comes to the

Russia investigation. And yet, when we actually look at the allegedly supporting evidence, the document, the report, the email, it doesn't hold up. It does not support the claim that the official is making. Yet nevertheless, it's amounting to a series of pretty serious criminal referrals to the Justice Department. And what it does is it teased up the Justice Department, and Attorney General Pam Bondi to go out and do a criminal investigation. So within days of these criminal referrals coming in, Breaking tonight, a major development in the Russia gate investigation,

reports start to emerge in conservative media. The Justice Department is taking its case to a grand jury. That there is a grand jury investigation being conducted into these allegations. Attorney General Bondi is taking the referrals from Director of National Intelligence. Tulsi Gabbard, quote, very seriously. Here's what President Trump said on true social. The truth always wins out. This is great news.

God bless America. And just put that into context for us, the significance of a grand jury, possibly looking into this. It means that the Justice Department is prepared to go out and use its criminal powers, the power of subpoena, the power to compel witnesses to tell. testify the ability to go to a judge and try and get a search warrant, it means that the Justice Department is now willing to use the federal government's most powerful tools to try to get to the bottom of this. I mean, let's end with a reality check about whether or not these criminal investigations could ever result in successful prosecutions and convictions of senior Obama administration officials. Because let's just take the example of,

President Obama, it's our understanding now, it's been widely covered that the Supreme Court's ruling that gives President Trump immunity for a lot of things that he has done in office would likely apply to previous presidents, including Obama. So it seems like it'd be pretty hard to successfully prosecute President Obama for something he did in office, right? Correct. And prosecuting the other intelligence officials would be very difficult, too. You would need to have a judge look at the evidence that the government is presenting and essentially say, yeah, there's enough here to move forward with putting this person on trial and trying to get a conviction.

Right. And as we've demonstrated, there isn't all that much evidence there. The chances that they would be prosecuted are not nearly as high as the expectations. But I think we kind of need to take a step back from that and look at the larger issue of what's going on with retribution during Trump's second term. Right after Trump came into the White House, he and his aides went after law firms and universities. And particularly with the universities, like Harvard,

they used a whole-of-government approach to pressure the school in ways that certainly I had never considered. Right. When you say whole of government, you simply mean almost the entirety of the government, multiple agencies. We use this term like whole of government approach,

a term that's usually used about how to use the federal government to solve a problem like cancer. And what we're now seeing is that whole of government approach where the intelligence community is using the fruits of what it has in its coffers to get the Justice Department to go out and criminally investigate Trump's enemies. And there's a level of sophistication to that that is just different than what we saw in Trump's first term when he had many more guardrails around him. And his best efforts at getting his enemies investigated were screaming about it on Twitter or trying behind closed doors to twist the arms of

Justice Department officials. Right. This time, he is activating the leaders of the most important agencies in the federal government who seem extremely eager to cooperate with this goal of his of going after these people. I mean, the director of national intelligence, the director of the CIA, the director of the FBI. And I don't even think Trump needs to say anything. These people all have the same view of Trump's enemies and what should be done to them. So I'm not sure it's as much about whether Trump directed or not, but that he has surrounded himself with yes people who know exactly what he wants

and are using their powers to try to get him there. But is there any risk to the Trump administration doing everything that's done here, starting these criminal investigations, and as you've said, potentially not getting very far, not being able to really prosecute anyone, probably not being able to get anyone in jail, doesn't that end up potentially backfiring in kind of a same way that overpromising on the Jeffrey Epstein story has backfired? I think the Epstein story is different because in the

Epstein story, Trump and his allies who are now in his administration promised that they would release information that was going to show Trump's base how powerful, wealthy Democrats were pedophiles. And now, in reaction to the administration not releasing that material, it's raised questions among the base about, hey, are you trying to still cover something up? In the Russia story, it's always been very clear to the base who the good guys and the bad guys are to them. Right. And it's been clear that Trump has tried as hard as he can to go after them.

And at the end of the day, I'm not sure that Trump supporters are going to hold him accountable if promises of criminal prosecutions don't turn out the way that they want. Right, because he will always be on the right side of this battle. When it comes to Russia, Trump will always be the victim, and he will always be the hero. Well, Mike, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. In response to the drumbeat of new documents and criminal referrals from the Trump White House, a spokesperson for President Obama recently issued a statement.

It said, quote, Out 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. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous, and a weak attempt at distraction. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, the mayor and police chief of Washington, D.C., met with the Trump administration

to discuss the president's takeover of the city's police force and the imminent arrival of federal troops on the city's streets to fight crime. We're here to work together with our federal parties, and that's what we're going to do. City officials appeared to take a conciliatory approach to what is widely seen as an unusual encroachment on their authority. During a news conference, the police chief and the mayor emphasized their desire to make the most of the federal support. How we got here or what we think about the circumstances right now, we have more police, and we want to. And Russian troops are making swift battlefield advances inside eastern Ukraine, just days before their leader, Vladimir Putin, is scheduled to hold high-stakes peace talks with President Trump. The Russian troops have advanced several miles into Ukrainian-held territory, potentially giving Putin a stronger hand in his negotiations with Trump. Russia now occupies about 20% of Ukraine, and has repeatedly said that it wants to win permanent control of eastern Ukraine in any peace deal.

Today's episode was produced by Anna Foley and Nina Feldman. It was edited by Rachel Quester, contains original music by Diane Wong, Marion Lazzano, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Devlin Barrett. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bobara. See you tomorrow.