Peloni: Jennifer explains the limiting consequence of focusing too exclusively on Obama’s entry into the conspiracy surrounding Russiagate, rather than following the evidence.
Don’t start the clock too late. The good stuff is teed up earlier.
J.E. Dyer, a retired Naval Intelligence officer, blogs as The Optimistic Conservative, July 26, 2025
This article will intentionally be kept short(-er than usual) [Yes, that didn’t really work out – J.E.], because what I want to focus on is the nature and core purpose of the two approaches. References to the raft of evidence referred to are readily available. Nothing should be unfamiliar (though readers may not have revisited some known events or documentation for quite a while). Rather than build extensive application scenarios, I want to present the concepts in outline.
Both of the approaches here involve investigation by federal agencies. I’ve made the case many times that we need an independent task force to look into how government powers are being weaponized to affect electoral and other due-process outcomes. Focusing on the use of agencies isn’t about excluding that option. I think a task force is actually the most important thing we could do. The meaning of, at a minimum, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution hasn’t kept up with technology and political hubris, and that overbalance is badly in need of adjustment.
But the approaches in this article are about the themes we might consider as predicates for investigation with the potential of criminal charges being brought.
At the outset, it’s vital to keep in mind that Obama and his senior appointees have the executive “right to be wrong” in their assessments as they use the tools of government. They can use government for legitimate purposes and yet produce bad outcomes because their premises were faulty: ignorant, ill-formed, even biased. Presidents cause things to turn out badly based on biased premises all the time. They’re not committing crimes by doing that. The people’s recourse is to stop electing the individuals or the party that keeps churning out those undesirable results.
What presidencies don’t have the right the do is use the tools of government for inherently illegitimate purposes. It’s the latter we need to focus on.
The two approaches I’m looking at focus on these two predicates.
The first is the predicate of an apparent conspiracy to delegitimize the outcome of the 2016 election: an attempt to impugn it and paralyze President Trump’s execution of constitutional duties in his first term. In my view this is probably the most fruitful approach. Call it “Russiagate,” for simplicity’s sake.
There’s no question it’s illegitimate. In no scenario is it ever legitimate to try to subvert or interfere with the executive performance of a duly elected president by conspiring to make it appear that he wasn’t duly elected.
It’s one thing if there’s some evidence that would impugn the result of an election – as opposed to using gossipy media themes to make the voters uneasy about it.
Actual evidence relating to actual outcomes is the definition of raising questions legitimately. Ad hominem themes against the winning candidate, and vague references to people losing faith in their democracy, driven around town with a loudspeaker howling “Russia! Russia! Russia!”, are not legitimate methods of promoting doubt and then using doubt as a pretext to interfere with a presidency as it works on the people’s business.
The “Russia!” theme itself is something of a distractor. It has served to keep the debate focused on drive-by nuggetry regarding Russia, instead of on the baseline intent to delegitimize the election itself, and render Trump ineffective and politically non-viable.
The latter is where an approach should be focused, to see if the elements of conspiracy back up the predicate of an attempt to subvert the Trump 45 presidency.
The latter is the political enormity against the Republic.
The second approach is that of identifying unlawful intent in the Obama administration’s use of intelligence and law enforcement tools against U.S. citizens. In this case that’s Trump and his associates in the political career he began in June 2015. Call this one “Spygate.”
My opinion on the viability of this approach is simply expressed. The more that can be made of approach one, the more weight this second one has, and the more it’s badly needed. What we have to keep straight is that it’s not the same approach as approach one.
But success with approach one would really be of benefit to approach two. The reason: it would establish that the use of government assets against U.S. citizens in Spygate was for illegitimate purposes.
Back in March 2017, Devin Nunes pointed out that there’s a lot of executive discretion in the use of intrusive national surveillance assets, and it probably wouldn’t be feasible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Obama officials like Susan Rice and James Clapper broke the law in having U.S. persons “unmasked.” Nunes was right, though the tendentious weight of who was being unmasked was bound to look suspiciously political.
That was especially the case considering that nothing accountable was ever done, and national security was never visibly served by unmasking the assembly of targeted persons. If they were a threat to U.S. national security, it’s astonishing – a point I’ve made repeatedly (e.g., here and here) – that all Obama did with the surveillance of them was save its supposed fruits to defame them in the media, and arrange to continue spying on them after they took office.
If the Trump circle had done things that warranted concern and surveillance, faithful execution of the law would exclude the one course Obama and his alumni did pursue. That itself is telling.
But if there’s a strong case that the Obama administration’s main purpose was not to protect the country but to tank the outcome of the 2016 election, by foul means including made-up “evidence” as necessary, that puts the “gate” in Spygate, in spades. It means the government tools were indeed used for unlawful purposes.
In pondering the evidence of intent being released on Obama and his administration, it all keeps coming back to this: there was a plan to dog the next administration with trumped-up “evidence” against it, and render Trump ineffective in his office, cornered by an onslaught of weaponized processes and losing executive and political viability by the day.
Key: Where the timeline is entered
I view with disquiet the assessment coming from DNI Tulsa Gabbard that the plot to undo the Trump presidency started in December 2016.
Evidence that it started months before that has been there for years. I’m not sure what perspective Gabbard and her advisors are using, but it appears to me that the existence of a plan has been in plain view for a long time. It’s only the involvement of Obama himself that hasn’t been verified with certainty before his December 2016 order: i.e., to basically make the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) an indictment of Trump.
It’s a separate question how much Obama’s involvement is needed to solidify the case that there was a conspiracy in his administration against the next presidency. The prior actions of cognizant leaders in the DOJ, FBI, CIA, State Department, ODNI, and National Security Council (NSC) point to conspiracy even if direct proof of Obama’s involvement starts on December 2016.
An important piece of evidence in this regard is one that few readers may recall. It came from a filing in British court against Orbis Business Intelligence, Christopher Steele’s outfit, by executives in the senior leadership of Alfa Bank, which had received objectionable mention in the Steele dossier. The filing – which made its way into a similar case brought in U.S. federal court – indicated that Fusion GPS, at the behest of Perkins Coie, sought “intelligence” from Orbis that could be used in a challenge to the 2016 U.S. election.
The date at which this was clarified for Orbis was June 2016, when Fusion and Orbis were discussing the company’s services against Trump.
According to the Orbis response in court, captured in the linked document, at the time Orbis was hired, Orbis knew its services were being obtained for the U.S. Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign, with the purpose of having material to challenge the outcome of the 2016 election with.
The evil angel of “interference” was to be Russia, and the dossier as a whole obviously sought to implicate Trump in collusion with Russia. But don’t let that distract you. A foreign connection to Trump was necessary, as a way to plant faked evidence with the FISA court and get surveillance authority that would cover the Trump campaign.
The real import, however, is that all of this had the prior objective – as early as June 2016 – of delegitimizing the 2016 election, presumably if that became necessary because the Republican won on Election Day.
We can speculate endlessly on whether Hillary her own little self foresaw having the latitude to act in such a manner if she lost. I doubt it; I would assess without hesitation that she knew perfectly well she couldn’t plan to upend the election without the approval of the Democratic leadership, starting with Obama, and the collaboration of the Obama agencies.
In any case, Hillary never negotiated independently for the Orbis product. She was most likely the principal in whatever dealings led to similar oppo-research “dirt” from Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal, both close acquaintances of the Clintons. But the Orbis project was honchoed by Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS, on behalf of the DNC and Hillary Clinton. Hillary is an “and Hillary” in that grouping. We can confidently read that as meaning that the DNC fully intended to have challenging the 2016 election as an option. Perkins Coie’s notorious election-challenger, Marc Elias, puts the certainty of that through the roof. It was a Democratic Party plan, not just Hillary’s.
The extended implication of Obama’s probable involvement earlier than Election Day would remain to be proven, and might not be provable. But the fact in any case is that, on 9 December 2016, Obama gave an order to do exactly what the DNC and Hillary foresaw wanting to do, back in June 2016. His ICA order was to dirty up the 2016 election and throw doubt on its outcome.
As regards prior indications of a plan, meanwhile, John Brennan recorded himself in his notes from the Oval Office meeting of 3 August 2016 giving Obama the heads-up that Hillary had something already cooking along those lines. At a minimum, Obama couldn’t plead ignorance later of such a plot being afoot.
If we take a step back and realize how Obama was treating information on “threats” to the election in the latter half of 2016, it remains most noteworthy that he never did anything responsible about it. The one thing we know for sure he did was use the DNC and Hillary’s pretext for throwing shade on the election to throw shade on the election – but only after its outcome was known.
We also have the indication from the Peter Strzok-Lisa Page texts (see the Brennan link above) that in September 2016, Strzok understood himself to be on the hook for a White House update, apparently destined for Obama himself, on what Strzok had called an “insurance policy” against Trump getting into office.
At that point, the FBI had been formally aware of the Steele dossier for two months, and in the latter half of 2016 received information on it directly from Steele, who’d been a confidential informant for the Bureau for some years. The FBI couldn’t possibly plead ignorance of what the dossier was for. It launched Crossfire Hurricane in order to use the dossier as a basis for obtaining FISA surveillance authority against the Trump campaign.
The court action by Alfa Bank reminds us as well of the obvious NON-coincidence that Alfa Bank figured in the Steele dossier as “evidence” of a Trump-Russia connection, at the same time that supposed type of connection – links between Alfa Bank and an unattended computer system in Trump Tower – was, in the broader generic, the subject of a DARPA-sponsored cyber study involving persons connected by one or at most two hops to the Obama DOJ, FBI, and Executive Office of the President.
If we pull the thread on that, we discover that the solicitation for the DARPA study was put up for bid on 22 April 2016 (oddly, at nearly the exact time the Russian infiltration of the DNC email system was discovered). A contract was awarded to Georgia Tech in mid-July 2016. Participants figuring in the Alfa Bank saga – some of the same ones mentioned above – were in correspondence on Georgia Tech discussions of their exertions to obtain and assemble data. Weeks later, as Peter Strzok was stressing over an update to the Obama White House on the “insurance policy” against Trump, an FBI alumnus (Michael Sussmann) practicing at Perkins Coie and representing the Hillary campaign was shopping material on the supposed Alfa Bank-Trump connection, also featured in the dossier, to the Bureau.
C’mon man. A number of events that in hindsight were relevant to this political war on Trump and the 2016 election go back into 2015, and even earlier. I honestly don’t think much can be done with all of this if the focus is narrowly on Obama’s big day in December 2016. What he did doesn’t mean nearly as much if we leave out what went before it. The context of what Obama endorsed and invoked, by ordering an ICA that impugned the 2016 election, is what makes his move so significant.
If we use a football analogy, the offense of Brennan, James Comey, James Clapper, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, the DNC, Perkins Coie, and a cast of lesser characters moved the ball downfield in the fourth quarter to within field goal range. Obama came in on 9 December 2016 to call the play: kick it through the uprights. If we care to keep going, we can say Brennan did the honors as the placekicker. Go just one breath further and say, he missed – but it took the officials (the American voters) four more years at the reviewing display to make the call.
If Obama did more than make that call, we aren’t going to figure that out by acting as if there was no strategy in execution prior to 9 December 2016 . We’ll have to look at this story as if there was a whole game being played before that play call was set up. (Elegantly, we can even compare Spygate to the Patriots allegedly spying illegally on opposing teams’ signals, and pulling the sneak with deflated footballs. Have your LOLs now; it’s likely to get bumpy ahead.)
On that head, another important timeline is after Obama ordered his ICA, and then after Trump took office, and the various measures by which opponents of Trump tried to continue spying on him and restricting his ability to perform his duties as president. These measures included everything from showcasing release of the dossier to the media, attacking Michael Flynn with pit bull ferocity, and extending the FISA authority against Carter Page even after Trump became president, to getting Robert Mueller appointed as Special Counsel, plus the repeated and weirdly tenacious attempts to locate Michael Cohen in Prague sometime in or about August or September 2016, and promoting the weeks-long obsession over the Fusion GPS-linked meeting with Donald Trump, Jr. in Trump Tower in June 2016, which turned out to pretty much mean exactly the opposite of the import obediently assigned to it in mainstream media coverage.
Mueller at least got some process-crime scalps out of it all.
Brennan bookends
You’d be reading for another year if we tried to pack in all the evidence we already have of Obama administration actors and others working with them to tank the 2016 election if Hillary didn’t win. So we won’t do that.
But I have had Brennan in view for a long time as the deus ex machina of the war to head Trump off at the pass. And it’s worth recalling things I’ve reported on before that make nice bookends to the state of play now emerging before us. I’ll restrict this to the three most proximate, and with the least clarity on what they were about. Brennan spent quality time leaving little “wasn’t me” markers in the record about what other people were implicitly responsible for, but these are something else. Each one is about where he was on very interesting dates, with no apparent purpose.
The first is his appearance at the biomedical conference in Jackson Hole sponsored by Biden crony Patrick Soon-Shiong from 1-3 August 2015. The visit to Jackson Hole, about six weeks after Trump rode down the escalator on 15 June 2015, doesn’t make much sense, especially since Brennan was transported to and from it by one of the U.S. Air Force’s scarcest, highest-value VIP aircraft, a ride he would normally merit only on state business. The aircraft sat idle on the tarmac for three days.
The way his little trip does make sense is in the context of one salient fact: Bill Clinton was there too. Local reporters couldn’t get anyone at the airport to say if the two of them met there, in Brennan’s conveniently over-equipped airplane.
Th second event was Brennan’s travel to Moscow on or shortly before 14 March 2016, supposedly to meet with the Russian FSB (the counterpart to the U.S. FBI, as opposed to CIA) on the topic of Syria. There was no reason for Brennan to do that at the time. He was, however, out of town and talking to the Russians just at the time the crisis exploded in the U.S. intel community surrounding unauthorized access by contractors in FBI intelligence to unmasked U.S. person identifying information (USPII).
Fast forward past his dossier-shopping period in August and September 2016 and the outcome of the 2016 election in November, and we arrive at a surpassing strange visit Brennan made to – of all places – Albania, from 4-7 December 2016. Yes, in the week immediately before Obama’s ICA play call on 9 December 2016, CIA Director Brennan was in Albania. Ostensibly, the visit was about resettling members of the longstanding Iranian resistance group known as MEK, from southeastern Iraq to Albania.
Somehow, that just seems to require further explanation. Maybe at some point we’ll get it.
Feature image: The “Old” (Eisenhower) Executive Office Building across from the White House in Washington, D.C.. (Image: Wikimedia)
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