It was with some trepidation that I visited the website of futures betting firm Polymarket on Sunday afternoon, to see what bettors thought the odds were of a coming indictment of Barack Obama. I’m pleased to report that I was reassured. Wagerers foresaw just a 7 percent chance that Obama will face federal charges in 2025.
Even 7 percent is ridiculous on Planet Earth, and if you live your life in blissful ignorance of MAGA-world social media memes, you’re probably saying: “Uh … WHAT?!?!?” But we no longer live on Planet Earth. In this country, we live on Planet Trump. And on Planet Trump, (a) anything is now possible, and (b) Obama’s “guilt” has already been established, and it’s just a question of whether Attorney General Pam Bondi will step up to the plate and assume the solemn task that history and Dear Leader have assigned to her.
What did Obama supposedly do? Before we answer that, we must take a more systemic look at why this is even happening. It’s happening because the culture that Donald Trump has built around himself, and to which all these supine jellyfish in his orbit have morally acceded, requires that Trump be placated at all times as if he were some netherworldly admixture of low-rent potentate and impetuous child. That’s the Rosetta Stone to Trumpworld generally, and it’s certainly the key to understanding this issue.
So, you see, some weeks ago, Tulsi Gabbard made Donny Shank Shot vewy angwy when she said that U.S. intelligence showed that Iran was not that close to having the bomb. Trump rebuked her. Twice. In a week. She posted a video criticizing the “political elite and warmongers” for ginning up confrontation with Iran just as Trump was … ginning up confrontation with Iran.
Speculation began to appear in the media that Trump might have reached the end of his rope with Gabbard. So she had to do something to get out of the doghouse. The solution in all such situations is obvious. Make the boss happy by using the time and resources of the American taxpayer to go after one of his enemies.
So Gabbard swung for the fences: She held a press conference on July 18 at which she put forth “new evidence” of an Obama administration “conspiracy to subvert President Trump’s 2016 victory and presidency” that led up to Obama himself. The main idea here is that while Obama and many others were publicly pushing the notion that Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 election and was helping him to do so, they buried intel arguing the opposite.
Unlike the “fake news” that Trump routinely denounces because it’s real, this is actual fake news. I won’t waste space on the details. You can read them here at FactCheck.org if you like. In a nutshell, what Gabbard is doing is this: She’s taking U.S. intel statements that Russia did not try to infiltrate our vote-counting systems and trying to argue that those statements were much broader—that Russia didn’t try to influence the election at all. Gabbard’s claim was that Obama and others buried that and pushed a false narrative in its place.
It’s insane. If you have the misfortune of bumping into some right-wing social media posts, you’ll see that they’re now peddling the line that Putin in fact wanted Hillary Clinton to win. Yes, I know. It looked like he wanted Trump to win. But you know that Putin! He’s a sneaky one. He just wanted us all to think that.
Well, I say that if he wanted us all to think that Trump was his preference, he did a pretty convincing job of it. In December 2015, right about when Trump was just vaulting to the head of the Republican pack, Putin called him “a very bright and talented man.” He referred to Trump as the front-runner, adding: “He says that he wants to move to another level of relations, to a deeper level of relations with Russia. How can we not welcome that? Of course we welcome it.”
That was during primary time. Then, after Trump had secured the GOP nomination, Putin again praised Trump, calling him a “bright” person. Then, when Trump won, Putin congratulated him almost immediately by telegram.
Oh. Wait. There’s more. A lot more. Like the email hacking by Russia that led to the whole Wikileaks scandal, which buried the Clinton campaign for weeks. And the relentless stream of anti-Clinton propaganda manufactured by those infamous St. Petersburg troll farms. They created dozens of fake Facebook pages that promoted Trump and Bernie Sanders and Green Party Idiot Jill Stein and told African American users of Facebook that Clinton, not Trump, was the real racist; and dozens of Tumblr accounts that did the same—daily, hourly, in the closing weeks of the campaign, torching Clinton with debased lies, extolling Trump’s supposed virtues.
If all of that was supposed to be pro-Clinton double-agentry, it was pretty damn well concealed. A 2020 Senate intel report, so bipartisan that its endorsers included current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, reaffirmed a 2017 finding from U.S. intelligence services that “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and that “Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
As I said, Gabbard’s new Obama theory is insane. Putin wanted Trump. Period. Oh. Almost forgot. He said as much himself in 2018. It happened at that infamous Helsinki news conference, where an American journalist asked him point blank if he wanted Trump to win. Putin said: “Yes, I wanted him to win. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.”
But to read right-wing media and social media over these last few days is to be directed to forget all that entirely. Putin secretly wanted Clinton, you see, because he had “stuff” on her. He was going to blackmail her. Into doing what, I couldn’t say. To make sure Russia could keep Crimea? To argue for Russia’s readmission to the G7? Trump did both of those things anyway.
And as far as having “stuff” on someone.… Anybody with half a working brain knows that the Kremlin has thousands, maybe millions, of pages on Trump. He’s been going there and doing business there for decades. There are many who believe, and who have claimed with evidence a hell of a lot more credible than that adduced by Tulsi Gabbard on July 18, that Russia cultivated Trump as an asset starting 40 years ago. If Russia has the goods on any American politician, it’s almost surely Trump.
Anyway. Back to Obama. He obviously did nothing wrong. He ran, despite the right wing’s relentless efforts to prove otherwise, possibly the most scandal-free presidential administration in modern history.
But is he indictable? On Planet Earth, no. But on Planet Trump, yes, he is. For what, exactly? It doesn’t matter. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino will have their FBI string together a few suspicious-looking facts, Pam Bondi will plop them in the oven, and bam, out will come the soufflé that will make Dear Leader happy.
A normal prosecutor would think of things like: But who will have testimony against him? Who will say they saw him do X thing? Fair questions to be asked, in a democratic society. But these are not normal prosecutors, and whether this is still a democratic society is increasingly open to question. A conviction isn’t the point. The public humiliation, the besmirching of the reputation, the evening up of the historical score—these are the points. They can be accomplished even absent a conviction, as Obama is bloodied up in the right-wing press for as long as the trial process takes.
Put nothing—I mean nothing—past these people. If Trump wants it, they will go out and execute it. This Department of Justice exists to execute Trump’s directives and vendettas. We’ve known for years that this is how Trump sees the world, but if there was any remaining doubt, have a gander at this terrifying propaganda poster, put out by the White House just last week, that reads: “I was the hunted—NOW I’M THE HUNTER.”
I think it’s still kind of a long shot. I think. But I’d sure like to be more confident of that than I am. And if Bondi really does try this? Everything that’s happened so far, horrendous as it is, we could have imagined—the wanton detentions, the retribution against universities and media companies. But the directly political indictment of a former president was not on my bingo card, or anyone’s I know. And while Obama’s statement last week was of course right—that this is the biggest anti–Jeffrey Epstein, “nothing to see here” dodge—I hope Obamaworld is ready for this.
