Trump, Obama and the Question of Treason

Opinion|Trump, Obama and the Question of Treason

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 relitigate the nearly decade-old controversy over Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump is wrong on the facts and the law, and his sensational allegation serves only to demonstrate how completely he has degraded contemporary political discourse.

Mr. Trump denounced Mr. Obama after 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. When the question of who should be targeted in the investigation was posed at an Oval Office press availability, Mr. Trump said: “It would be President Obama. He started it. … This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever even imagined, even in other countries.” Mr. Trump also mentioned former President Joe Biden, former F.B.I. Director James Comey, the former director of national intelligence James Clapper and former C.I.A. Director John Brennan as other possible defendants.

President Trump’s history of intemperate remarks has earned him a perverse kind of immunity; the more outrageous his statement, the faster it is often dismissed. But Mr. Trump doesn’t deserve this bloviator’s privilege. He’s not just the president, but, more to the point, he’s the overseer of an unusually compliant Justice Department, and his offhand condemnation of his predecessor is as significant as it is chilling.

Indeed, Mr. Trump made sure that the investigation of purported treason swiftly took on a life of its own. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that a Justice Department “strike force” would investigate the allegations against Mr. Obama and the others, and a pair of Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn, have called for the appointment of a special counsel to lead the inquiry.

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.”