For the former assistants who worked in the White House of Barack Obama, the accusations of the “betrayal” of the Trump administration carried the stench of despair of a president who strives to change the focus of a flourishing scandal around Jeffrey Epstein.
Even so, they are dealing with How to contain the unprecedented accusations The National Intelligence Director, Tulsi Gabbard, has level, even when they discard them as Asinine, interviews with more than half a dozen people who worked in the White House of Obama or in their campaigns reveal.
These people say that the events of the last week have become an act of messaging balance between oxygen unnecessarily to the statements that Obama ordered a false intelligence analysis to show that Russia had worked to help Trump win the 2016 elections and leave the potential of accusations without control of the globe. Many of those who talked to NBC News were not authorized to speak publicly about the strategy.
“The battle is now playing this even to make sure that thoughts do not begin to drag to the more conventional audience,” said a former Obama administration official. That person said it was important to reach the “conventional republicans”, who would hear the editorial boards and those in Congress that the accusations against Obama considered as “beyond the pale.”
Some expressed uncertainty about what to wait after Trump or his lieutenants, accusing that the administration could become more optimistic to move attention to a series of explosive stories of Epstein that Trump is fighting to play. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comments, but has said that there is merit in the accusations about Obama.
“I don’t know what is ahead, and I don’t know what their plans and intentions are,” said John Brennan, director of the CIA in the administration of Obama, to NBC News. “I only find all this very worrying when people who serve in such important positions and know that what they are doing is wrong.”
The former National Intelligence Director James Clapper echoed Brennan’s ambiguity about the intentions of the Trump administration, telling CNN that he “advocated.”
The National Intelligence Director, Tulsi Gabbard and the director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, level the claims last week that Obama administration officials manipulated intelligence and conspired to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s electoral victory in 2016. Gabbard published on social networks last Friday that he was making a criminal reference to the Department of Justice. Then, this week, advertising around the accusations of the Information Room of the White House increased.
In general terms, former Obama assistants unequivocally say that there is merit in the accusations and that they do not believe they will lead anywhere. They indicate a 2020 Senate investigation, which supported the evaluation of the intelligence agencies that Russia had disseminated online misinformation and filtered stolen electronic emails from the National Democratic Committee to undermine Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016 and help Trump. The Secretary of State appointed by Trump, Marco Rubio, was the interim president of the Senate Intelligence Committee at that time, which supported the findings.
“There is no objective basis for the accusations that Tulsi Gabbard is doing. It is collecting the things of several documents that are out of context and badly characterized,” said Brennan.
“For me, it is clear that he has not read the evaluation of the intelligence community or that he is deliberately lying about the contents,” he added.
Obama’s allies also say that the moment of accusations is suspicious. They arose when Trump has fought to deal with his own base after his administration announced that he would not publish more documents linked to Epstein, a convicted sexual criminal who faced a litany of accusations of abuse of minor women before dying for suicide.
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch, informed that Attorney General Pam Bondi told Trump in May that his name appears in Epstein’s archives, although he told journalists this month that Bondi had not informed him that he was named.
In the midst of a fire storm that Trump has not yet been shaken, the administration took out the accusations against Obama. During the weekend, Trump again published a false video generated by Obama’s AI arrested on social networks.
Once Gabbard used the word “betrayal”, Obama’s team increased his messages, which led Obama’s spokesman to publish a carefully written statement. He denounced Gabbard’s accusations without mentioning Epstein, because he was “below the former president’s dignity,” said a former Obama administration official.
“Out of respect for the presidency’s office, our office normally does not worthy the constant nonsense and the wrong information flowing from this White House with an answer,” said Obama’s spokesman Patrick Rodenbush, in a statement this week. “But these statements are outrageous enough to deserve one. These strange accusations are ridiculous and a weak attempt of distraction.”
Ned Price, who occupied under Obama roles as special assistant of the President, director and spokesman of the National Security Council and as a senior analyst at the CIA under Obama and George W. Bush, said he thought it was imperative to reach the conservative public with an answer. On Wednesday, he wrote an opinion article for Fox News entitled: “Americans must be careful with Gabbard’s ‘dangerous distraction’ with the revisionist history of the 2016 elections.”
“This was not a piece that would have written for any conventional or left -wing exit of the center. This was designed exclusively and exclusively for Fox News, because that is where this misinformation fire is furious,” Price said in an interview. “I thought it was important … Injecting facts in that same place in the hope that at least some people read it and were exposed to what really happened in 2016.”
