A new phrase has entered the Donald Trump lexicon. "Obamagate" has been tweeted and retweeted multiple times by the US president of late, prompting widespread speculation about the meaning of the term.
The emergence of the US president’s new attack line has coincided with more public interventions by his predecessor since he endorsed Joe Biden’s White House run last month.
At the weekend, Obama told graduating students in an online speech that leaders in Washington “aren’t even pretending to be in charge”, a rare public rebuke of the sitting president from the former leader.
Asked to define 'Obamagate' during a Rose Garden press conference last week, Trump was equivocal and vague.
“Some terrible things happened . . .You know what the crime is,” he told a Washington Post reporter. “The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.”
The unspecified crimes appear to be connected to the recent developments in the Michael Flynn case that have dominated conservative news media in the US in recent weeks.
Flynn was Trump's first national security adviser. He was fired by the president after just 24 days in the job. At the time, Trump said he dismissed him because Flynn had lied to vice president Mike Pence about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the transition period – the months between Trump's election and his inauguration.
Flynn was a central figure of interest in the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which morphed into the special counsel investigation headed by former FBI chief Robert Mueller.
Under questioning the former general admitted to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian individuals and agreed to co-operate with the investigation. He was due to be sentenced early this year.
Trump seized on the dropping of the prosecution as proof that the <a class="search" href='javascript:window.parent.actionEventData({$contentId:"7.1213540", $action:"view", $target:"work"})' polopoly:contentid="7.1213540" polopoly:searchtag="tag_location">Russia</a> investigation was a 'hoax'
But, in a highly unusual move, the US Department of Justice recently announced it was dropping the charges. In a court filing, attorney general William Barr said that a January 2017 FBI interview with Flynn was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis”.
Special treatment
The decision sparked outrage from Democrats. House of Representatives judiciary committee chairman Jerry Nadler said the justice department had become "politicised and thoroughly corrupt" by effectively giving special treatment to friends of the president.
Almost 2,000 former justice department and FBI officials wrote an open letter calling on Barr to resign, and asking Congress to censure the attorney general for "his repeated assaults on the rule of law in doing the president's personal bidding rather than acting in the public interest".
For Republicans and the president, however, the view was very different.
Trump seized on the dropping of the prosecution as proof that the Russia investigation was a "hoax" that should never have been opened in the first place.
Fox News devoted copious amounts of airtime to the development, portraying the Flynn case as a miscarriage of justice that saw politically-motivated FBI officials illegally spy on an innocent US citizen.
In a further development last week, acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell declassified an Obama-era document containing the names of officials who sought to learn the identity of the Trump officials under surveillance by the intelligence services.
Grenell, a Trump acolyte, was US ambassador to Germany when Trump appointed him acting director of national intelligence in February, though he has no background in intelligence.
Included in the list of names released were Obama, former CIA director John Brennan, former US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power and others. Joe Biden, now Trump's presumed opponent in November's presidential election, was also named.
Asked about the matter in an interview last week, Biden said he had been aware of the FBI investigation into Flynn in January 2017 but there was nothing unusual about that at the time.
Obama also said the justice department decision to drop the Flynn case had put America's 'institutional norms' and 'basic understanding of rule of law' at risk
Trump sees it differently.
He has argued that the “unmasking” of Flynn proves that the Obama administration and Biden in particular were “corrupt” by trying to find out information about the Flynn investigation. Similarly, the “dirty cops” of the FBI were guilty of a politically-motivated investigation designed to bring down a duly-elected president.
“This was all Obama. This was all Biden,” he said in a Fox News interview. “These people were corrupt, the whole thing was corrupt, and we caught them. We caught them.”
Leaked comments
He then went a step further by urging Congress to call Obama to testify “about the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA”. Even some of his most steadfast supporters rebuffed him. Republican senator Lindsay Graham said he would not summon the former president, noting concerns about executive privilege.
Trump’s attack on his predecessor is unusual, even for a president who likes to upend the rules of decorum and political tradition.
Trump may be particularly riled by leaked comments made by Obama in a phone call with former members of his administration just over a week ago, in which the former president sharply criticised his successor’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Obama also said the justice department decision to drop the Flynn case had put America’s “institutional norms” and “basic understanding of rule of law” at risk. His comment to graduating students this Saturday that the pandemic has “finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing” is likely to have infuriated Trump even more.
It has been widely reported that Obama warned Trump personally against hiring Michael Flynn as his national security adviser when the two met following Trump's election. Obama had himself fired the former general from his position as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014.
By 2016 Flynn had become a vocal supporter of Trump, leading chants of "Lock Her Up" in regard to Hillary Clinton at the Republican National Convention that year.
The accusation that Obama and Biden were the architects of a conspiracy to undermine the president of the United States by helping initiate the Russia inquiry sounds far-fetched, but is being promulgated by Trump's supporters in the conservative media.
The last week has seen Fox News devote a disproportionate amount of air time to the matter, serving to deflect from the real crisis that is occupying the US – the deaths of close to 85,000 people from coronavirus.
Whether there is any basis to the allegations is unlikely to matter for a president who likes to engage in mistruths and alternative facts
Nonetheless, the Michael Flynn case is far from resolved. In a blow to Trump allies, the federal judge overseeing the Flynn investigation appointed a retired judge to oppose the justice department's request to drop the case. In particular, Judge John Gleeson has been asked to explore if Flynn may have committed perjury. As a result, the final word on the Flynn case is still some months away.
Conspiracy theory
Nonetheless, as the presidential election campaign heats up, Trump is likely to reiterate his calls for an investigation into “Obamagate”.
The emergence of a new conspiracy theory will allow Trump to rewrite the history of the Russia investigation by arguing that the real scandal was the decision by the Obama-backed FBI to open surveillance of American citizens such as Flynn.
Whether there is any basis to the allegations is unlikely to matter for a president who likes to engage in mistruths and alternative facts. Muddying the waters may be enough to ensure that attention is deflected from the poor economic figures and the president’s mishandling of the coronivirus pandemic.
For Trump the nebulous “Obamagate” theory – augmented by coverage on Fox News – is likely to be a central plank of his re-election strategy. Barack Obama, as much as Joe Biden, may be Trump’s principal foe as he fights an election battle in the coming months.
