President Trump believes that President Barack Obama committed treason, a crime that may be punishable by death. Seeking a distraction from his current political travails, Mr. Trump is attempting to bring up the nearly decade-old controversy over Russian involvement in the 2016 election.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, asked the Justice Department to investigate whether intelligence officials in the Obama administration faked evidence of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.
Treason is the only crime defined in the Constitution, and it’s set out there, in relevant part, as giving “aid and comfort” to our enemies. Regurgitating a claim that Mr. Trump and his allies have made for years, Ms. Gabbard said that President Obama, after Hillary Clinton was defeated by President Trump in the 2016 election, “directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false.”
Every investigation of the 2016 campaign, including the one by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018, reached the same conclusion. “We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling,” saidthen-Senator Marco Rubio, who is now, of course, Mr. Trump’s secretary of state. In other words, the conclusion of the Obama administration, far from being a crime, much less treason, was a simple statement of fact.
