WASHINGTON: The White House pulled out all the stops Wednesday to promote claims that Barack Obama headed a \u201ctreasonous conspiracy\u201d against Donald Trump, seeking to redirect public attention from uproar over its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein affair.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard told a White House press briefing there had been a \u201cyears-long coup\u201d by Obama.<\/p>\n
The extraordinary narrative essentially rehashed Trump\u2019s longstanding argument that investigations into Russia\u2019s multi-layered attempts to disrupt the 2016 election, where he beat Hillary Clinton, were a \u201choax\u201d against him.<\/p>\n
Gabbard touted newly declassified intelligence that she said provided \u201cirrefutable evidence\u201d that Obama had ordered intelligence assessments to be manipulated to accuse Russia of election interference to help Trump.<\/p>\n
The Justice Department announced the formation of a \u201cStrike Force\u201d to examine the allegations with \u201cutmost seriousness.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Gabbard\u2019s findings run up against four separate criminal, counterintelligence and watchdog probes between 2019 and 2023 \u2014 each of them concluding that Russia did interfere and did, in various ways, help Trump.<\/p>\n
As a way to distract from the intensifying speculation over Trump\u2019s handling of the case against the late sex offender and reputed pedophile pimp to the powerful Epstein, the Obama accusations had some effect.<\/p>\n
White House journalists at the briefing barely asked about Epstein, focusing instead on Gabbard\u2019s claims, and Fox News heavily promoted the Obama story to its right-wing audience.<\/p>\n
However, the Epstein scandal quickly roared back, showing just how hard it is for 79-year-old Trump to maintain his usual mastery of driving news agendas \u2014 even within his fervently loyal \u201cMAGA\u201d base.<\/p>\n
Epstein was a financier and friend to numerous high-profile people \u2014 for years, including Trump \u2014 who was convicted of sex crimes and then imprisoned pending trial for allegedly trafficking underage girls.<\/p>\n
His 2019 prison cell death \u2014 ruled a suicide \u2014 supercharged a conspiracy theory long promoted by many of Trump\u2019s supporters that Epstein had run an international pedophile ring and that elites wanted to make sure he never revealed their secrets.<\/p>\n
After Trump came to power for a second term this January, his administration promised to release Epstein case files.<\/p>\n
But when US Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on July 7 that she had nothing to release, Republicans were furious \u2014 and Trump has been attempting to control the scandal ever since.<\/p>\n
Things got even more complicated for him after The Wall Street Journal last week reported that Trump had written a lewd birthday letter to Epstein in 2003. Trump denies this and has sued the Journal.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, the Journal dropped a new story, saying Bondi had informed Trump in May that his name appeared several times in the Epstein files, even if there was no indication of wrongdoing.<\/p>\n
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung called this \u201cfake news\u201d and said Trump had long ago broken with Epstein and \u201ckicked him out of his club for being a creep.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, the drip-drip of reminders of Trump\u2019s close former relationship with Epstein is proving hard to stop.<\/p>\n
Several of Trump\u2019s most effective promoters over the years \u2014 including new FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino \u2014 made careers of fanning the concerns about Epstein, including the rumor that his death was actually a murder.<\/p>\n
Democrats are piling on the pressure. Republican leaders in the House of Representatives sent lawmakers home early for a six-week summer break Wednesday to avoid being forced by Democrats into holding politically awkward votes on the affair.<\/p>\n
But some lawmakers on the \u201cMAGA\u201d right have indicated they are in no mood to let Epstein drop. Several bids for transparency are in the works, including efforts to circumvent Republican leadership and force a vote on releasing files after they return from recess.<\/p>\n
In another bid to satisfy his base, Trump had told Bondi to release \u201ccredible\u201d Epstein information and to seek release of grand jury transcripts from the 2005 and 2007 investigations of Epstein.<\/p>\n
But on Wednesday a judge rejected this, citing legal secrecy protocols.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: The White House pulled out all the stops Wednesday to promote claims that Barack Obama headed a \u201ctreasonous conspiracy\u201d against Donald Trump, seeking to redirect public attention from uproar over its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein affair. Trump\u2019s intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard told a White House press briefing there had been a \u201cyears-long coup\u201d …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":84210,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84196"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":84212,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84196\/revisions\/84212"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}