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Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed Justice Department prosecutors to launch a grand jury investigation of whether Obama administration officials committed federal crimes when they assessed Russia’s actions during the 2016 election, a senior Trump administration official said.
National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard claimed at a White House news conference last month that top Obama administration officials carried out a “treasonous conspiracy” against Donald Trump. Gabbard said she was sending criminal referrals to the Justice Department.
A former senior Justice Department official condemned the move as “a dangerous political stunt.” And a former senior national security official pointed out that multiple past reviews, including ones conducted by Republicans, found no such crimes.
“There’s no logical, rational basis for this,” said the official, who asked not to be named.
The senior Trump administration official said that there is no exact timetable for when the grand jury will meet and that it could take months for the proceeding to begin. Fox News first reported Bondi’s letter.
The official said a letter signed by Bondi instructs an unnamed federal prosecutor to begin presenting evidence to a grand jury to secure potential federal indictments. But the letter does not say what the charges would be, whom the grand jury will investigate or where it will meet.
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.
Democratic lawmakers have accused the administration of seeking to distract attention from the Jeffrey Epstein case. Conservative media and influencers have criticized how the administration has handled the case and demand the release of more documents and information.
Trump, Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have all been criticized by conservative media and influencers over their handling of the Epstein investigation and material related to it.
A 2020 bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee review contradicted the idea that there was a conspiracy by the Obama administration officials against Trump, finding significant evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Then-Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the acting chair of the committee at the time, signed off on the report.
The plans for a grand jury investigation are the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration designed to rewrite the history of the 2016 election and seek retribution against those whom Trump accuses of trying to sabotage his first term in the White House.
Democratic lawmakers and former senior officials say Trump and his deputies have used the tools of government authority to try to “rewrite” the history of the 2016 election, seeking to reverse an eight-year-old assessment that Russia waged an information war to boost Trump’s candidacy.
Trump and his supporters have long claimed that intelligence and law enforcement officials sought to undermine his first term by overstating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and investigating Trump’s aides over their possible contacts with Moscow.
They have accused former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan of using the probes to undermine Trump.
A lawyer for Comey did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Comey and Brennan, who is a paid contributor to NBC News and MSNBC, have denied wrongdoing.
The intelligence community’s analysis of the 2016 election and subsequent government investigations failed to satisfy the far-right and far-left sides of the American political divide.
A probe by special counsel Robert Mueller found that Russia intervened in 2016 to undercut Hillary Clinton. But it did not find evidence that the Trump team colluded with the Kremlin, as some voices on the left had suggested.
At the same time, the special counsel Trump appointed in his first term, John Durham, disappointed far-right activists with his three-year investigation.
Durham found no criminal conspiracy among Obama administration officials to fabricate intelligence about Russia’s actions in 2016. He also filed no charges against the intelligence officers who oversaw a 2017 assessment that found Russia had tried to skew the election outcome in Trump’s favor.
Trump, as president and candidate, has depicted former President Barack Obama and other former administration officials in prison garb and called for their imprisonments. He has also posted an artificial intelligence video of himself smiling as a fake depiction of Obama is arrested by FBI agents and put into jail.
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