Barack Obama doubled down on false claims that Russia had helped elect President Trump in 2016, which were used as a basis for spying on the future president and for an extensive investigation of him based on ‘intelligence’ manufactured by the Clinton campaign and embedded by elements of the Obama administration and his political allies into the intelligence community.

A statement from Obama’s office described a recent report breaking down how Russiagate was manufactured as “nonsense and misinformation” and claimed that “nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes… these findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.”

First, Obama is moving the goalposts by claiming that Russia “did not successfully manipulate any votes”. Democrats became obsessed with Russiagate after the 2016 election precisely because they claimed that Russia helped elect Trump.

Second, Obama is lying about both what Russiagate is and the Senate Intelligence Committee report. There’s no question that Russia engaged in malicious behavior, but the report argued that the Russians were trying to undermine us and cause chaos, or train for future attacks, rather than that they were trying to elect Trump.

And the whole point of Russiagate was not “Russia is doing bad stuff”, but that the Russians were working with Trump to help elect him.

Obama isn’t actually defending that original allegation. He’s pretending to be outraged even as he runs away from it.