The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced late Wednesday the formation of a Strike Force in response to new revelations about how former President Barack Obama and members of the intelligence community fabricated the Russia hoax that haunted President Donald Trump’s first term and cost American taxpayers millions of dollars.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement that the Strike Force will “assess the evidence” and “investigate potential next legal steps,” related to a damning 2020 report released this week by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
“There is irrefutable evidence that detail how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false,” Gabbard said during a White House press conference on Wednesday. “We have referred and will continue to refer all of these documents to the Department of Justice and the FBI, to investigate the criminal implications of this. … The evidence that we have found, and that we have released, directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment. There are multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence that confirm that fact.”
A federal Strike Force is made up of teams of investigators from multiple agencies working together to uncover complex cases of fraud and other offenses. Originally, Strike Forces were used to investigate webs of organized crime. For example, in the late 1960s, a Strike Force in Buffalo, New York, made up of attorneys and agents from several federal agencies achieved 30 indictments within the organized crime network, in part by learning about the organization’s leadership structure.
Since 2007, the federal government has developed nine modern Strike Force units, mostly focused on health care fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, and kickbacks.
This new Strike Force will focus on the alleged weaponization of the intelligence community.
“We will investigate these troubling disclosures fully and leave no stone unturned to deliver justice,” Bondi said in a statement.
The document that triggered the Strike Force was a 2020 Oversight Investigation and Referral report that looked at an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) titled, “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election.”
It reveals how leading members of the Obama administration conspired to further the Russian collusion narrative — the idea that Trump was working with Russia to win the election — that was pushed out to the propaganda media during the 2016 campaign. Obama intelligence officials bolstered the narrative with a presumably doctored intelligence ICA based on “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence … to suggest Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win,” according to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report.
The report showed that after Hillary Clinton lost the election, Obama directed the intelligence community to quickly prepare a report showing Trump was connected to Russia. Then-CIA Director John Brennan used unverified, suspect, or obviously incorrect reports that members of the intelligence community urged him not to use — such as the now discredited Steele dossier, which Clinton paid for.
According to the House Intelligence Committee report, the ICA credibly found that Russia assumed Clinton was going to win in 2016 and held back damaging intelligence about her poor health and ethical concerns, with the intention of using it to destabilize her presidency, raising an important question: If Putin’s regime had been working with Trump, why not use this information to discredit Clinton and help Trump?
The 46-page report offers the clearest picture yet of how President Obama and others in his administration weaponized the intelligence community against Trump and the American people and interfered as Trump tried to implement the agenda the people voted for. Behind the scenes, the handoff of the presidency from Obama to Trump was not a peaceful transfer of power. Instead, it was the beginning of a years-long attack on the U.S. government.
The Strike Force may yet bring the justice the American people deserve.