Attorney General Pam Bondi has convened a grand jury to investigate the allegation that former President Barack Obama committed crimes during the 2016 election, an extraordinary move that deepens the Trump administration’s effort to revisit the origins of the Russia probe.
Former assistant U.S. Attorney Elie Honig told CNN’s Phil Mattingly on Monday that he has studied the administration’s claims “really carefully” but still can’t discern “where the criminal theory comes in at all,” expressing doubts about the case, questioning the strength of the evidence and whether any crime occurred at all.
“The intelligence estimate at the time was that Russia was attempting to interfere in the 2016 election in Trump’s benefit and that they did that through persuasion, through taking out Facebook ads and that kind of thing,” Honig said. “The intelligence also showed that there was no criminal conspiracy between Donald Trump and the Russians and that there was no actual hacking to switch over votes in the systems. That intelligence has since been confirmed.”
Honig said the Obama administration’s role in disseminating those findings did not contradict the facts, and that multiple bipartisan reviews—including by the GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department’s inspector general—had reached the same conclusion.
“So I’m not quite sure where I see a discrepancy there, never mind … a federal crime,” Honig said. “We’ve heard terms like seditious conspiracy and treason. I’m not seeing anything close to that.”
The probe follows Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s release last month of previously classified documents she claimed proved Obama officials had manufactured information to undermine Trump. Bondi quickly formed a “strike force” to investigate.
“We will investigate these troubling disclosures fully and leave no stone unturned to deliver justice,” the Attorney General said in a statement on July 23.
The grand jury is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to reexamine the origins of the Russia investigation, one of the president’s longest‑standing grievances against his political opponents. Since taking office for a second time in January, Trump and his allies have moved aggressively to spotlight what they call the “weaponization” of the Justice Department against him, citing the 2016 probe as a glaring example, which the administration has called a coup against him. The DOJ has already confirmed inquiries into two senior figures from that period — former FBI director James B. Comey and former CIA director John Brennan — both frequent targets of Trump’s criticism, though they have not revealed any details of those investigations.
An Obama spokesperson dismissed Gabbard’s accusations outright, calling them “bizarre,” “ridiculous” and “a weak attempt at a distraction.”
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