President Donald Trump ratcheted up his threats against former President Barack Obama this week, telling reporters Obama was “guilty” of “treason” and that “right or wrong, it’s time to go after people.”
Trump officials are seemingly laying the groundwork to do just that: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Wednesday that she’d referred documents about Obama to the FBI for investigation, and the Justice Department said it created a task force to probe Obama and his administration officials, pledging to “leave no stone unturned to deliver justice.”
Senators from both parties are brushing it all off.
“It’s an unfortunate comment,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, said, dismissing Trump’s recent focus on Obama.
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“No, I don’t,” she replied when asked if she thought Trump was serious about going after him. “I don’t think it was a statement that should have been made.”
Sen. Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat, said Trump’s fixation with Obama and other former rivals had more to do with the current news cycle’s focus on the Epstein documents. Asked if he’s concerned that the president was really going to target Obama or charge him with treason, Schatz said he wasn’t, at all.
“No. I’m not,” he told NOTUS. “I’m not. And I think, even among Republicans who have rolled over and among voters who support Republicans, everybody understands that that’s not how we operate in the United States of America.”
“This is a sign that he feels personally politically imperiled,” Schatz said of Trump.
Trump has often threatened to send his political opponents to prison, with many of his early campaign rallies featuring “lock her up” crowd chants about Hillary Clinton. Most senators see this renewed talk of sending Democrats to jail as just more of the same. Republicans said in interviews on Wednesday night that they wanted to see more information or that they hadn’t been following Trump’s comments about it.
“I hadn’t really thought about it, to be honest with you,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said.
Are there any grounds for an indictment, as far as she can tell?
“I don’t know,” she told NOTUS. “I doubt it. I doubt — I don’t — it’s just not something I’ve thought about. I didn’t even hear him say it.”
Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas avoided the topic altogether. “Those aren’t the questions I answer,” he said. “I don’t even know what he said.”
And Sen. Mike Rounds said the prospect of Obama being charged with treason “surprises me,” but he wants to look into what Trump is talking about.
Others were more enthused to see Trump attacking Obama.
“What President Obama and his henchmen did is reprehensible,” Sen. Ron Johnson told NOTUS. “This needs to be exposed.”
“If you look at all of the evidence, it sure looks like there was clearly a Russia hoax that the Obama administration started,” Sen. Rick Scott of Florida echoed. “But we’ll have to get more facts.”
Trump and his officials allege that Obama and his officials engaged in a “treasonous conspiracy” to undermine then-candidate Trump by sounding alarms about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. A 1,300-page Senate Intelligence Committee report, produced on a bipartisan basis, found “unprecedented” levels of intervention from Russia in that election, intended to undermine trust in democracy. The committee found no evidence Russia had changed vote counts, but it had targeted state election infrastructure and launched complex influence campaigns on social media.
Then-Sen. Marco Rubio — now Trump’s secretary of state — said when releasing the report that it was based on interviews with more than 200 witnesses and reviews of more than 1 million pages of documents.
He said the investigation had found no evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign to meddle in the election, but “Paul Manafort’s presence on the Trump campaign and proximity to then-candidate Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign.”
Rep. Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat who is the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, said the Trump administration’s threats were a “transparent effort to distract from bipartisan criticism of the Trump administration’s refusal to release the Jeffrey Epstein files that it promised months ago” and “desperate claims.”
The Trump team’s arguments that Obama and his officials manufactured intelligence reports about Russian interference to hurt Trump run directly counter to Rubio’s findings.
“We’ll let the courts decide it,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican, said of the dispute.
One Republican — retiring Sen. Thom Tillis — said he’s worried about the precedent Trump could set.
“Presidents don’t prosecute people. Prosecutors do. And they rise to a standard of evidence that I would respect,” Tillis told NOTUS. “I really think it has to be compelling information to open that up.”
“We are in danger of setting precedents here that I think people could regret,” he warned.
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