Friday’s revelations by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that outgoing Obama administration officials created the “Russia collusion” hoax vindicated earlier reporting by broadcaster Mark Levin and Breitbart News.
On Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released documents showing “overwhelming evidence that demonstrates how, after President Trump won the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, President Obama and his national security cabinet members manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.”
The new allegation that emerges from the documents is that senior Obama officials defied existing intelligence assessments that suggested Russia had not interfered meaningfully in the 2016 election, and prepared new assessments to suggest that it had done so — “based on information that was known by those involved to be manufactured i.e. the Steele Dossier or deemed as not credible,” an ODNI statement said.
The revelations add weight to the hypothesis first proposed by Mark Levin on March 3, 2017, based on publicly available news reports, that President Barack Obama had taken steps to undermine his successor.
Breitbart News summarized Levin’s argument under the headline: “Mark Levin to Congress: Investigate Obama’s ‘Silent Coup’ vs. Trump.”
Breitbart News reported:
In summary: the Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media.
Levin called the effort a “silent coup” by the Obama administration and demanded that it be investigated.
In addition, Levin castigated Republicans in Congress for focusing their attention on Trump and Attorney General Sessions rather than Obama.
When President Trump referred to the allegations the next day that Obama had his “wires tapped,” the mainstream media — the source for Levin’s claims — claimed Trump was spouting a conspiracy theory.
The Washington Post said that Trump was “citing no evidence to support his explosive allegation.” CNN ran a headline implicating Levin and Breitbart, in a story by Brian Stelter: “Birth of a conspiracy theory: How Trump’s wiretap claim got started.” (The story has since apparently been pulled from CNN’s website.)
But the “conspiracy theory” turned out to be true. It was vindicated later in March 2017 by then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who revealed that members of the outgoing administration had “unmasked” Americans in intelligence wiretaps. It was vindicated again by CNN in September 2017, when the network admitted — despite its early denials — that the Trump campaign had been “wiretapped.” The “Spygate” controversy — in which it was revealed that the FBI had used at least one informant to infiltrate the Trump campaign in 2016 — vindicated Levin and Breitbart again in May 2018. And the report of Special Counsel John H. Durham in May 2023 offered further vindication that the Obama administration had surveilled the Trump campaign.
Gabbard’s new revelations add further material for investigation, and suggest the preparations to target Trump began far earlier than previously reported. They also prompt questions about how much President Barack Obama himself knew about what his senior officials were doing to reverse a democratic election.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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