I have a bone to pick with Tulsi Gabbard

I have a bone to pick with Tulsi Gabbard. I had thought, six months into Donald Trump’s second term, that I could safely say “sayonara” to the Russia Collusion Delusion and all its works. I started to count how many columns I had written about that embarrassing effort to destroy Donald Trump, but gave up. The answer is: many.  

I had hoped I had finished with the subject forever. But now the president’s Director of National Intelligence, that same T. Gabbard, has weighed in with what she rightly describes as “historic” evidence of a plot, directed by Barack Obama with various high-ranking lieutenants, to undermine the first Trump administration. 

Is there anything new in her evidence? Some say no, not really. 

But they tend to be the same people who all along dragged their feet about the episode. Indeed, it is interesting to trace the evolution of the establishment narrative about this the Russia Collusion Delusion and its aftermath. At first, it was, “Oh, dear, Donald Trump may have been aided by Vladimir Putin in winning the 2016 election! Not only that, he was cavorting with prostitutes in Moscow!” 

That, anyway, was what the British ex-spy Christopher Steele told us in his infamous “dossier.”  

But then it turned out that Steele’s document was a malignant fantasy covertly paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It was around the time that that little detail was revealed that people began speaking of the Russia Collusion “hoax.” I deployed the word myself on occasion but came to think that it was wholly inadequate. 

A better word, I decided, was “coup.” What the Obama administration had organized, it seemed clear to me, was a soft-coup, undermining the Trump administration by an aggressive deployment of lawfare (the $34 million Mueller investigations) directed not only at Donald Trump but anyone in his orbit.  

Writing in 2019, I described my belief that what had happened to the Trump administration was the greatest political scandal in the history of the American republic.

Was that hyperbolic? Some people thought so. I have several times said why I think they are wrong.

Back then, using the word “coup” seemed melodramatic. I thought that it accurately expressed the deliberate effort by actors in the Obama administration, including by President Obama himself, to undermine Donald Trump’s victory and stymie the “peaceful transfer of power” that everyone, including Obama himself, championed as a hallmark of the American system of government. 

Back then, I quoted the commentator L. J. Keith, who noted that, while, “Most Presidents leave office and essentially step back from public life,” Barack Obama was different. “Shellshocked by Hillary Clinton’s loss, Obama, Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Clinton set in motion a series of events that will forever tar his presidency, and decimate the concept of a peaceful transition of power.”

I went on to observe that:

There have been scores if not hundreds or even thousands of columns written about every aspect of this complex story. We all know by now about the deployment of shadowy characters like Alexander Downer, the former Australian Ambassador to the UK and Hillary Clinton supporter (Downer engineered a $25 million contribution from the Australian government to the Clinton Foundation). Downer had drinks with George Papadopoulos, a minor Trump campaign aide, and thereby helped get the ball rolling on the Russia investigation. For a nanosecond, the New York Times said that was where it all started.

But Downer was just the tip – or maybe just a tip – of the iceberg. One of the remarkable things about this story is how many people it has involved and how long it has taken to get a full headcount of the anti-Trump team. Remember when Joseph Mifsud’s name first surfaced? Or Stefan Halper’s? Remember when we learned about Peter Strzok and his alleged paramour, Lisa Page? Then there was Bruce Ohr, former associate deputy attorney general: he had his part to play in the drama, too. But wait! It turned out that his wife is Nellie Ohr and that she worked for Fusion GPS, the company that hired Christopher Steele. Gosh. And what about Steele himself? When we were first introduced to him, he was a former British spy, a “highly respected” operative, who had got the goods on Donald Trump.

Remember how long it took before we learned that Steele had been paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary campaign, and that his dossier was not just “unverified” and “salacious,” as James Comey put it, but was in fact nothing but a scurrilous piece of opposition research made up out of “random” scraps of gossip that Steele had assembled from highly dubious sources? Nevertheless, it was the dossier, and nothing but the dossier, that provided the unverified “evidence” for the supposedly “verified” FISA warrants to spy on Carter Page, an American citizen, and hence to spy on the campaign and then the administration of Donald Trump.

And on and on this kaleidoscopic onion has gone, as one layer after the next has been peeled back only reveal another layer and additional personalities.

It was a long and winding road we had gone down with the Russia Collusion Delusion. And of course that was only act one of this (I predict) three-act play. The second act commenced with two efforts to impeach him (one taking place, absurdly, after he had left office), 91 indictments and several spurious efforts to bankrupt and imprison him. When all that failed, they tried to assassinate him. 

Somehow, against all the odds, Trump managed not only to get reelected in 2024 but also to take office on January 20 of this year. 

Now what? Will there be an act three? Will any of the of the principal actors in the long-running attempted coup against Trump be held to account? Will Hillary Clinton? Will Barack Obama? How about John Brennan and James Comey, Peter Strzok and his erstwhile lover Lisa Page, or James Clapper or Sally Yates or Samantha Power? 

Until Tulsi Gabbard’s revelations, I had resigned myself the prospect that any serious accountability for this concerted effort to overturn the results of a presidential election were nil. I thought that L. J. Keith was correct when he observed that, “Even in the most contentious elections and after disputed results, there was never been this sort of dangerous, systematic, deliberate rejection of the will of the people. The abrogation of the constitution to use extrajudicial methods to destroy the incoming president. It is the very definition of a coup.” But what happened after all the investigations, special counsels and congressional inquiries?

Nothing. 

Many commentators believe we are in for a reprise of this “full-of-sound-and-fury” expostulation and that nothing besides an abundance of words will happen.  Maybe they are right. 

But I sense a marked difference in the political weather this time. Commentators like Lee Smith and Wendi Strauch Mahoney (to name but two of many) have seized upon Tulsi Gabbard’s revelations to outline the case against Barack Obama, John Brennan and other principals. Mahoney, writing in The American Thinker, notes that, “Gabbard’s release decisively obliterates the longstanding claim that Moscow swung the 2016 election for Donald Trump.  It also marks the first time a senior Trump administration official has directly implicated former president Barack Obama as an active participant in the alleged conspiracy.”

Lee Smith, author of Disappearing the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic, zeros in on the role of John Brennan in fomenting the plot against Trump, concluding that, “It seems appropriate that Russian intelligence may lead to the prosecution and conviction of Brennan and the intelligence officials responsible for the biggest political scandal in US history.”

The coming weeks will tell us whether any indictments and prosecutions will be forthcoming. Tulsi Gabbard says that more evidence is coming. The mood of country seems to favor accountability. Were I a betting man, I would say the odds favor some high-profile prosecutions. I acknowledge that all of our experience regarding the campaign against Trump, which was also a campaign against the American voters, argues that we’ll have excited palaver, not prosecutions. But those wishing to measure people like John Brennan for an orange suit will not, I suspect, be disappointed. 

If that happens, I will be grateful to, not irritated with, DNI Tulsi Gabbard.