It’s Time To Put Barack Obama In Handcuffs

Around noon on Donald Trump’s first Inauguration Day, in January of 2017, while every other Democrat in Washington was either destroying store windows or sobbing uncontrollably, or a bit of both, Barack Obama’s outgoing national security adviser was hard at work. She logged onto her computer and sent a lengthy email to her own government email account, even though very soon, she wouldn’t be able to access that account. Yes, the national security adviser, Susan Rice, wrote an email to herself. And to be clear, this email wasn’t a reminder to pick up dog food at the store, or a motivational quote as she headed towards unemployment, or anything like that.

Instead, the email that Rice sent to herself amounted, essentially, to a lengthy statement claiming that no one in the Obama administration had committed any kind of treason whatsoever, nor would they ever dream of doing such a thing — why would you ask? In other words, it was exactly the kind of email you’d send if you had just committed treason. Short of an outright confession, it does not get any more incriminating (or more bizarre) than this email. Just a few miles away, at exactly this time, Donald Trump was taking the oath of office. Barack Obama was getting ready to board a helicopter and leave Washington. The wailing Democrat lady from the meme was screaming in the street, entering into eternal internet infamy. And contemporaneously with all of that, this is what Susan Rice was sending to herself.

The email describes a meeting that took place in the Oval Office back on January 5, in which several senior Obama administration officials met to discuss “Russian interference” in the 2016 election. So for some reason, we’re summarizing a meeting that took place more than two weeks earlier. Here’s what Rice wrote: “President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book.’ The president stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.”

Shortly after the Trump administration declassified this email, it was obvious to everyone that Susan Rice had written the document because, in fact, Barack Obama had not ordered the investigation into Russiagate to be conducted “by the book.” Instead, he had done the opposite. He had invented Russiagate out of whole cloth, with the intention of sabotaging the incoming Trump administration and discrediting the populist movement that Trump represented. And in an attempt to cover for her boss, Susan Rice was engaging in some last-minute “C-Y-A.” After all, if everyone was doing everything in accordance with the law, there’d be no reason to say that. That’s supposed to be the default assumption. It’s a very bad sign when you have to note, in the official logs, that you’re totally not committing any crimes.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

But despite this evidence, and a lot of other evidence like it, no document directly linked Obama himself to the creation of the Russiagate fraud. The evidence of Obama’s involvement, up to this point, has been overwhelming, but it’s also been circumstantial. That all changed on Friday, when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified hundreds of new documents that leave no doubt about this: Obama deliberately orchestrated Russiagate, and his top lieutenants in the intelligence agencies — all of whom are now open, partisan hacks — willingly carried out the fraud. This is one of the greatest crimes that a president has ever committed in this country. As Gabbard put it, this is a “treasonous conspiracy.” The same people who claim to care deeply about American “democracy” had, in fact, met in secret to begin a sustained campaign to subvert the will of the voters.

Before we get into the new documents and how they prove this conspiracy, we’ll start with this news report, which I found while looking through old footage from late 2016. This is how the Russiagate fraud began. By now, we’ve all probably blocked this period of time from our memories, so it’s worth a quick look back to frame what was happening. This is footage from “The Today Show” on December 11, 2016. Watch:

This kind of coverage — as I probably don’t need to remind you — was nonstop for the next several years. And it had a very observable effect on tens of millions of people. There was a YouGov poll that found, in 2018, that “67% of Democrats believed it was definitely true or probably true that Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected.” This was the narrative that led to multiple criminal investigations that destroyed the lives of several Trump advisers — solely on the basis that they had supposedly “lied” to investigators who were looking into a nonexistent crime. And we can be sure that Russiagate, along with the magic of untraceable “mail-in voting,” was a big part of the reason Joe Biden ultimately became president.

All of that has been known for a while. What’s new is the timeline that’s created by Gabbard’s document dump, which directly implicates Obama. Again, that clip I just played is from December 11, 2016. By that point, the leaks from the Obama administration about Russian collusion were all over the media. Here’s a document which was just unsealed by Gabbard, dated December 8 of that same year.

This is an email in which intelligence officials are preparing the “president’s daily brief” that’s about to be sent to Barack Obama. According to these officials, as of December 8 of 2016, the conclusion is that “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.” The officials say that the brief will be published the following day, due to “high administration interest.”

Documents that were just declassified by Gabbard show that this was not a new conclusion by the intelligence agencies. For months, in various internal emails and reports, they had concluded that Russia didn’t have the capacity to “hack” the election in any way.

Here’s just a small handful of those assessments, from August through early December. As you can see, the intelligence agencies were not talking about Russian Facebook memes, or Russian blackmail on Trump, or WikiLeaks emails, or anything like that. Instead, they were assessing whether Russia had hacked voting machines or other U.S. infrastructure, or had the capacity to do so, and they concluded that it didn’t. So really, this latest conclusion on December 8 of 2016 was just affirming their assessments from before the election.

But this president’s daily brief was never published. Within hours of the email about the draft daily brief, someone at the FBI said that the agency would “dissent” from the conclusions in the draft of the presidential daily brief. And then, around the same time, the deputy director of the Office of National Intelligence wrote, “Based on some new guidance, we are going to push back publication of the president’s daily brief.”

At the time, it wasn’t explained what this “new guidance” was, or where it came from. A day later, though, it was obvious to everyone what was going on. Obama assembled all of his senior intelligence officials for a meeting — including James Clapper, John Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, and Andrew McCabe. All of these people, of course, are rabid Left-wing activists. Immediately after that meeting concluded, the assistant to James Clapper — the director of national intelligence at the time — sent this email to senior leaders at the Office of Director of National Intelligence.

The email is entitled, “POTUS Tasking on Russia Election Meddling.” And right there in the email, all of these senior officials are told to prepare “an assessment per the President’s request.”

This is proof, in writing, that Obama personally directed all of the intelligence and national security agencies — including the CIA, FBI, NSA, and DHS — to investigate Russian election interference, after they had indicated that Russia didn’t hack the election machines. Keep in mind, by this point, Obama’s director of national intelligence had already issued a statement about the DNC emails that were released by WikiLeaks. The Obama administration concluded, probably fraudulently, that Russia had orchestrated that hack. That was back in early October of 2016. And then, after that statement, the intelligence agencies went on to conclude that Russia didn’t hack any election machines or infrastructure.

So there was no need, at this point, for any additional investigation to occur. The big fear of the intelligence community — that Russia would somehow hack voting machines, just as easily as the DNC servers were supposedly hacked — had turned out to be unfounded. But Obama wasn’t satisfied with that conclusion from the intelligence agencies. So here are the specific areas Obama told them to go back and “investigate.” This is also from the Clapper email:

“How did Moscow seek to influence the US presidential election in 2016? What tools did they use?” And then the email runs down several domains of election interference — “Hacking, Leaks, Cyber activity, Media spin, trolls, fake news, domestic Russian intelligence efforts.” Then it ends with this question: “Why did Moscow direct these activities?”

The prodding is pretty overt. Now the intelligence agencies are told to assume that Moscow “directed” all of these activities, including “hacking” and “trolling.” They’re told to make this assumption not because of any evidence, but because the president told them to assume it. All of a sudden, online “trolling” is something that the intelligence agencies are supposed to take seriously, and to present to the public as a vector of “election interference.”

This was never a serious idea. But it didn’t have to be. The absurd suggestion that “trolling” has impacted the 2016 election would easily be laundered through the national news media. Within just a few hours, the leaks began. As Gabbard’s report reveals, the CIA went straight to The Washington Post, and leaked that the intelligence agencies had “concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened” in the election to help President Trump. Yes, “Russia intervened” — don’t worry about how, exactly. Just know that they “intervened.” That reporting from the Washington Post led to the footage from “The Today Show” shown earlier in this piece, along with thousands of reports like it.

Russia had “attempted through cyber means to interfere in, if not actively influence, the outcome of an election,” the Post claimed. Vladimir Putin “became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election,” reported NBC News, citing anonymous intelligence officials. See how this works? The details of the “interference” are left vague and unsubstantiated. It’s something about cyber warfare, though. And that was all they had to say.

From this point on, the floodgates were open. Within a few weeks, we saw additional hysteria over the “Steele Dossier,” which was an obvious fabrication (with funding from the Clinton campaign). As all of these leaks were underway, and the hysteria was ramping up, Obama went out of his way to promote the lie. On December 16th, 2016 — several days after he ordered the intelligence agencies to commence the hoax, and after the frantic reports about Russian collusion had been published in The Washington Post — Obama was asked directly about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Specifically, he was asked, “Did Clinton lose because of the hacking?” He had an opportunity to explain that, actually, the intelligence agencies didn’t think Russia had interfered with the election. Instead, Obama strongly implied that there was hacking, and that he couldn’t talk about it because it was classified. Watch:

December 16, 2016. Eight days after Obama received the report that Russia had no effect on the outcome of the election and that Russian election interference was negligible at best.

Watch how Obama carefully lays the groundwork for the Russia hoax.

Reporter: "Did Clinton lose… pic.twitter.com/814Cq7ycwg

— MAZE (@mazemoore) July 20, 2025

A few weeks after this press conference, the intelligence agencies under Obama announced that “We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.” Put another way: Obama told the intelligence agencies to allege that Russia had impacted the election one way or the other. They could even say “trolling” had impacted the election, if they wanted to. And indeed, the intelligence agencies — all of them run by lunatics who would go on to become MSNBC personalities — did exactly what Obama asked them to do.

This is about as overt and explicit as a conspiracy can be. Everyone involved in this fraud knew exactly what they were doing. When given the opportunity to pull back, they kept pushing the lie. Solely to undermine the incoming administration, Obama told his deputies to go back to the drawing board, to find some other way that Russia could have influenced the election. He knew that it was absurd to suggest that Trump had won because Russia spent $100,000 on Facebook memes, or that Russia wanted Trump to win because they could blackmail him. He also knew there wasn’t any real evidence that Russia had ever hacked the DNC. But Obama knew that he didn’t need to prove any of this. Instead, he could simply order the intelligence agencies to start leaking about their phony investigation, and the media would take it from there.

It’s clear that Tulsi Gabbard understands all of this. Here she was the other day on Fox. Watch:

.@DNIGabbard on the Russia collusion hoax: "The effect of what Pres. Obama and his senior national security team did was subvert the will of the American people, undermining our democratic republic, and enacting what would be essentially a years-long coup against Pres. Trump." pic.twitter.com/29kviGOAdE

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 20, 2025

Everything Tulsi just said is obviously true. This was a treasonous conspiracy. It’s in writing. And it’s all based on a fraud. That’s why every single analysis that would follow — even the Mueller report, and even the “bipartisan” Senate report on election interference that liberals cite all the time — failed to demonstrate that the Trump campaign had “colluded” with Russia or corrupted the election in any way. From the beginning, the objective of Russiagate was to spread fear and uncertainty when it was completely unfounded. If a Trump official spoke to a Russian or shared publicly available polling data, it was supposedly proof that the election was rigged. If a random person with a bank account living within 5,000 miles of Moscow spent ten rubles to promote a gay Bernie meme on Facebook, then it was more proof that the election was compromised. This wasn’t insanity. This was premeditated sabotage. It was, as Tulsi Gabbard said, a treasonous conspiracy.

So what then? What of it? What’s next? That’s the question. The Trump administration is making a claim, on the record, about a criminal conspiracy at the highest levels in Washington, D.C., to undermine Trump and subvert the will of the voters. It’s far from the first criminal conspiracy people in the Trump administration, or Trump himself, have claimed. I believe them. I believe this conspiracy happened. The evidence is overwhelming. So what then? What will the consequence be? Right now, President Trump is making a bunch of posts on Truth Social depicting Obama officials in orange jumpsuits. Tulsi Gabbard is doing hits on Fox News and posting long threads on Twitter. They’re sounding notes of indignation and outrage. All of that is fine. But none of this matters if they fail to actually go and make arrests. Barack Obama himself should be in handcuffs. You cannot allege a “treasonous conspiracy” and then do nothing about it. The typical pattern by Republicans, since forever, is to make these kinds of claims but to make them only on social media and Fox News, and never actually bring it to a court of law so that the parties responsible can be held accountable for their crimes. I’m tired of it. I’m sick to death of it. Go arrest these people and bring them to justice. Funny memes and outraged soundbites on Fox News aren’t going to cut it anymore. Go make an arrest. Put someone in prison. If you won’t do that, then what does any of this matter?

In fact, I’ll say this: The consequence of these allegations from Tulsi must be one of two things: Either top Obama officials are arrested, or Tulsi should be fired. I like Tulsi, but the only valid reason to not make any arrests is if the claims she made are false. If the DNI is falsely alleging “treasonous conspiracies,” she clearly needs to be run out of town. If what she’s saying is true (and I believe it is, as I just outlined), then failure to make arrests would make top Trump officials complicit in the conspiracy after the fact. There is no legitimate reason to make no arrests if the claims are true. So *SOMETHING* must happen here. *SOMEONE* has to be punished. Or else none of this means anything at all. It’s just fodder for cable news and nothing else. Go make an arrest. Put someone in handcuffs. Put Barack Obama in handcuffs. They did it to Trump with far less justification. So what are you going to do, Trump Administration? What are you actually going to do about this?

Maybe something will happen. But the pattern has always been that Republicans allege high crimes and misdemeanors, only to punish precisely no one for them and hold no one accountable in any way whatsoever. That has to change. Right now. Democrats just spent years trying to imprison the president of the United States for fake crimes. They pursued fake charges shamelessly and relentlessly. For once, Republicans should apply that kind of intensity towards pursuing Democrats, including Barack Obama, who have clearly committed actual crimes. Enough with the tough talk. Go kick down some doors. It’s time. Way past time.