With the Jeffrey Epstein story once again in the news, President Donald Trump and his allies have come up with a strategy to provide a distraction: a convoluted conspiracy theory involving former President Barack Obama, along with the promise that Obama will be prosecuted.
It came about last week, in a report from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, titled “New Evidence of Obama Administration Conspiracy to Subvert President Trump’s 2016 Victory and Presidency.”
Gabbard’s report is a combination of old news and misleading interpretations of meetings held during the Obama Administration.
“This is one more example of the director of national intelligence trying to cook the books,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) told the New York Times. “We’re talking about apples and oranges. The Russians were not successful at manipulating our election infrastructure, nor did we say they were.”
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The report from Gabbard conflated successful manipulation of vote counts by Russia, which no one is claiming happened, with other attempts to intervene in the election, which numerous government reports, from the Mueller Report to an assessment by the then-Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee, have confirmed did happen.
Gabbard also threatened a criminal referral for Obama, although it’s not clear what crime he possibly could have committed, even if everything Gabbard alleges were true. And that’s even before last year’s Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity comes into play.
At any rate, that didn’t stop Trump from, on Sunday, posting an AI video of Obama being arrested, as “YMCA” plays on the soundtrack:
🚨 JUST IN: President Trump posted an AI video of Barack Obama being ARRESTED by FBI and rotting in a prison cell
MAKE THIS A REALITY, @AGPamBondi! 🔥 pic.twitter.com/E72YOBpcrO
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) July 20, 2025
Also over the weekend, Trump posted a photo, in the style of the opening credits of The Brady Bunch, featuring Obama and several of his former officials and advisers with fake mugshots:
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 20, 2025
The idea of all of his enemies being arrested and jailed is a staple of fever-swamp conspiracy theories from an earlier Trump era, like QAnon and Pizzagate; the very first post from “Q,” after all, had promised, falsely, the imminent arrest of Hillary Clinton.
Just as with the Trump Administration’s non-findings on Epstein, the MAGA base is likely to end up disappointed when neither Obama nor any of his contemporaries end up in handcuffs.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
