Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered federal prosecutors to take action on Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s criminal referral of Obama-era officials involved in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
With the order to begin legal proceedings, the prosecutor will schedule the presentation of evidence to a grand jury seeking a possible indictment.
Ms. Bondi’s order comes about two weeks after the Justice Department confirmed it received a criminal referral from Ms. Gabbard, which included a memorandum titled “Intelligence Community suppression of intelligence describing ’Russian and criminal actors did not impact’ the 2016 presidential election via cyber-attacks on infrastructure.”
A grand jury probe is necessary for any indictment against defendants. The order to take the matter to a grand jury was first reported by Fox News.
It is not known who is under investigation and what indictments could be brought forth, given that statutes of limitations for most of the activity from nearly a decade ago have expired.
However, former Obama intelligence officials, including John Brennan, James Clapper and former FBI Director James B. Comey, are under scrutiny from Trump officials for targeting Mr. Trump and his allies through their involvement in the now-discredited Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
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Former President Barack Obama cannot be indicted because the Supreme Court, ruling recently in Mr. Trump’s favor, granted broad immunity to presidents for their actions while in office.
Attached to Ms. Gabbard’s memorandum was a request that the DOJ open an investigation.
“There must be indictments,” she said. “Those responsible, no matter how powerful they are and were at that time, no matter who was involved in creating this treasonous conspiracy against the American people, they all must be held accountable.”
Ms. Gabbard said the report manufactured by Obama officials ran contrary to the intelligence community’s general assessment that Russia was not attempting to influence and was not capable of influencing the election.
The disclosure that the Justice Department is potentially going forward with launching a grand jury investigation happened after Ms. Gabbard declassified intelligence last month that allegedly showed the Obama administration’s efforts to make it appear that Russia wanted to help Mr. Trump in the 2016 election.
Mr. Obama and his intelligence officials pushed a “contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true. It wasn’t,” Ms. Gabbard said during a press briefing.
The recently declassified material described a meeting when Mr. Obama requested his deputies to prepare an intelligence assessment in December 2016, after Mr. Trump had won the election, that detailed the “tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election.”
