Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed the Justice Department to launch a grand jury investigation into the Obama administration officials who oversaw a probe into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of President Donald Trump, according to multiple reports Monday evening.
Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, forwarded a criminal referral last month to the DOJ for a number of Obama-era officials — all of them unnamed — who she said “manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork” for an FBI investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia and the country’s attempts to influence U.S. elections.
Gabbard also released hundreds of redacted documents last month related to the case and launched a task force aimed at undermining the intelligence community’s 2017 conclusion that Russia sought to interfere in the 2016 presidential race but failed to flip any votes.
That assessment contributed to Trump’s long-standing distrust of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, a theme he has repeatedly returned to in the years since.
News of the grand jury investigation was reported by Fox News on Monday and later confirmed by several outlets.
According to the network, Bondi has directed a prosecutor to present evidence before a grand jury. Further details, including the location and timeline of the proceedings, remain unclear. It is also unclear what kind of misconduct prosecutors plan to outline during the proceedings.
In late July, Gabbard appeared at a White House press briefing to unveil newly declassified emails between Obama administration officials and a 5-year-old classified House report — just days after Trump accused Obama of treason.
She said it proved the Trump administration’s claims that former President Barack Obama was the “leader of a gang” that tried to “rig the election.”
Obama then issued a rare rebuke through a spokesperson, calling the accusations nothing but “a weak attempt at distraction.”
During Trump’s first term, the investigation into Russian interference resulted in the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. His probe resulted in the successful prosecutions of at least nine people, though it ultimately did not establish proof of a criminal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign.
A subsequent 1,300-page Senate Intelligence Committee report, produced on a bipartisan basis, found “unprecedented” levels of intervention from Russia in the 2016 presidential election, intended to undermine democracy. While Russia did not change vote counts, the committee found it had targeted state election infrastructure and launched a complex series of campaigns on social media.
It remains unclear which Obama administration officials may be dragged into Bondi’s grand jury proceedings. The Associated Press reported in early July that the Justice Department was looking into former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan.
Over on Capitol Hill, Republican Senators told NOTUS last month that they were hesitant to call for charges against Obama or any of his top national security officials without seeing more damning information.
“Presidents don’t prosecute people. Prosecutors do. And they rise to a standard of evidence that I would respect,” Sen. Thom Tillis told NOTUS. “I really think it has to be compelling information to open that up.”
“We are in danger of setting precedents here that I think people could regret,” he warned.