President Donald Trump is once again claiming without any real proof—that former President Barack Obama tried to remove him from office after the 2016 election. Trump has called it the “crime of the century” and says the people responsible should be punished.
At a campaign event in Michigan on May 1, 2024, Trump repeated this claim loudly to his supporters. He also posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, saying the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was completely fake. According to him, the whole thing was a setup and the people behind it should face consequences. He called it one of the biggest scandals in U.S. history.
Trump also shared a video featuring historian Victor Davis Hanson, who said Obama and his top intelligence officials worked to damage Trump’s presidency from the beginning. Trump agreed and said they should be held accountable.
Barack Obama, in a rare public response, said these accusations were completely false and ridiculous. He only spoke out because the claims were getting so much attention again.
These renewed allegations were partly fueled by recent comments from Tulsi Gabbard, now serving as Director of National Intelligence. She pointed to some newly released government documents and claimed they showed that Obama and his team created fake evidence of Russian interference to make Trump look illegitimate. Gabbard said this was part of a years-long effort to remove Trump from power.
However, there’s a big difference between the claims being made now and what the government actually said in 2017. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election to help Trump win, but they did not say Russia changed any votes or hacked into voting machines. The Obama administration never made such claims either.
A 2020 Senate report—supported by both Republicans and Democrats, including Marco Rubio—confirmed that Russia worked to influence the election in Trump’s favor, but again, there was no evidence of votes being changed.
Obama’s office recently responded to Gabbard’s comments by saying that the new documents don’t change the fact that Russia tried to influence the election, and there’s still no evidence that any actual votes were tampered with.
Meanwhile, Trump allies are celebrating some other documents that show the FBI looked into whether Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to link Trump to Russia before the 2016 election. But according to The New York Times, there’s a chance that this information might have been planted by Russian spies, meaning it can’t be fully trusted.
All of these renewed claims come as Trump is also facing criticism over his past connection with Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy sex offender who died in jail in 2019. Trump has long said their relationship ended over a business disagreement. But now he’s claiming Epstein took some of his employees, including a young woman named Virginia Giuffre, who was later identified as one of Epstein’s victims. Giuffre died by suicide earlier this year.
Trump said he told Epstein to stop taking his workers, and once that happened, he cut ties with him completely. But this explanation has raised even more questions as Trump faces pressure to explain what he really knew about Epstein and his crimes.
