The great Satchel Paige once said, “Don’t look back -- something may be gaining on you.” Well, I think for Barack Obama and his cohort, something is gaining on them, and so, too, I believe it is happening now for those who engaged with Jeffrey Epstein in his illicit activities. Stuff kept hidden by the wrongdoers in the Obama and Biden administrations is coming to light, and you can expect they will amp up their deflection and distraction moves to keep the focus off what they did. Surely many people with the concentration span of a few minutes and the critical thinking abilities of a Lego piece will fall for it. You shouldn’t.

Tuesday, DNI head Tulsi Gabbard released a report that declassified reams of material gathered by the House Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations which detailed how the Obama Administration -- at his direction -- manufactured the hoax that Trump colluded with Russia to gain the presidency.  I don’t see much coverage of this in the legacy press, but online accounts have summarized the most salient portions in case you aren’t up to reading and analyzing the entire report.

The top distillations I found are by attorney Jeff Childers, Matt Taibbi, and Professor Margot Cleveland.

Matt, who’s been saying for years that Russiagate was a hoax, details how Russiagate was built on bogus, even “ridiculous” information which was contradicted by professionals in the intelligence community whom John Brennan ignored:

It was worse than we thought. 

The January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin “developed a clear preference” for Donald Trump and “aspired to help his chances of victory” is revealed in a report released this morning by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to have been based on four pieces of evidence. One was the Steele Dossier. The surprise is that the other three were even less credible, each included over objections of the report’s CIA authors. 

The first item was a “scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment” of one sentence that the report’s five CIA authors read “five ways” and initially left out, only to have Director John Brennan order it back in. The second item was an email with “no date, no identified sender, no clear recipient, and no classification.” The third was supposedly backed by “liaison,” diplomatic, and press reporting, as well as signals intelligence (SIGINT), except the “SIGINT” didn’t mention Trump, the “liaison reporting” didn’t mention Trump and was from 2014, and the “diplomatic and media” reporting was a post-election review by a U.S. Ambassador citing a Russian pundit who said Putin and Trump should “work together like businessmen.” This was “evidence” that Putin “developed a clear preference” for Trump. 

All three reports weren’t just unsourced and unreliable, but discarded fictions pulled out of the CIA’s trash heap. “They manipulated the manipulations,” is how ODNI Deputy Chief of Staff Alexa Henning put it. 

The Assessment was written by just five CIA analysts hand-picked by Brennan, but even these most favored lieutenants couldn’t accept the key pieces of evidence. Two of the five went to Brennan to say, “We don’t have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected,” only to be overruled. The same thing happened when members of the group objected to the Steele material, saying it didn’t meet even “basic tradecraft standards.” When confronted on this point, Brennan reportedly said, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”

According to Margot Cleveland:

Someone asked me my top take-aways: 1) Corruption of creating 3 new reports to back up fake conclusions re Russia; 2) SOOOO much more dirt on Hillary that Russia had (and that we didn't know of) that Putin didn't release; 3) evidence contradicting Putin backing Trump was overwhelming and yet excluded from ICA; 4) Obama-Brennan planned this not just for fake news but for fake Congressional briefings.

The information Russia had on Hillary was this:

"As of September 2016, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service had DNC information that President Obama and Party leaders found the state of Secretary Clinton’s health to be ‘extraordinarily alarming,’ and felt it could have ‘serious negative impact’ on her election prospects," the report states. "Her health information was being kept in ‘strictest secrecy’ and even close advisors were not being fully informed." 

The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service also allegedly had DNC communications that showed that "Clinton was suffering from ‘intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.'" 

"Clinton was placed on a daily regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers’ and while afraid of losing, she remained ‘obsessed with a thirst for power,’" the report states.

The Russians also allegedly had information that Clinton "suffered from ‘Type 2 diabetes, Ischemic heart disease, deep vein thrombosis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.’"

The Russians also allegedly possessed a "campaign email discussing a plan approved by Secretary Clinton to link Putin and Russian hackers to candidate Trump in order to ‘distract the American public’ from the Clinton email server scandal."

Here's Childers’ analysis: a day after Gabbard’s presser and document release, the President openly accused former president Obama of Treason. Childers explains this was like Caesar crossing the Rubicon -- there’s no turning back from such a bold, unprecedented action, and then he expresses astonishment at Obama’s weak response:

Barack Obama’s office responded to Trump’s Oval Office treason accusation by calling it… a “distraction.”

Not defamation. Not libel. Not even baseless. Just a distraction.

“Distraction” is a bizarre word to choose when a sitting president has just accused you of the most serious crime in the Constitution, on camera, from the Oval Office, with foreign heads of state watching and evidence allegedly in hand.

Where’s the angry denial? The threats of legal action? The righteous fury? You’d expect Obama’s office -- following Trump’s example, a perfect setup -- to unload both barrels, to drop the full weight of prestige, moral clarity, and legal firepower. But nope. Instead, we got Obama spokesweasel Patrick Rodenbush blinking in the sunlight and muttering something about a distraction.

How oddly underwhelming.

And… what about the media? In a normal political reality, this would be a constitutional earthquake. Instead, corporate media is treating the story like an unflattering wardrobe malfunction -- awkward, barely publishable, and not worth looking at too closely.

Trump accused a former U.S. president of treason -- a capital offense -- and they went with Obama’s distraction. They even headlined it. Where are the emergency panels? Where are the breathless editorials about Trump’s Hitler-like authoritarianism?

Where are the calls for Trump to be impeached for abuse of authority? Why aren’t they opportuning this to wind up a whole new scandal cycle?

The material Gabbard released shows how confident the plotters were that they could keep this all secret -- the report is full of emails -- leaving an irrefutable very damaging paper trail.

A name you know -- I won't say who -- many years ago advised that whenever you need to discuss something important that could be misconstrued by people out to get you, always do it over the phone. Never, they told me, put it in an email or a text message. They warned me never to put anything sensitive in writing -- no emails, no texts. Paper trails get people burned. And if what you’re discussing wouldn’t need to be twisted to land you in hot water? All the more reason to keep it off the record.

Heh. 

Going a bit further, anybody who's ever watched a mobster movie knows that even over the phone, it's best to speak in code.

So what to make of high-ranking Democrats emailing one another about Hillary's daily regimen of "heavy tranquilizers," former Obama intel chiefs discussing how to bolster the Biden campaign, or Obama Himself ordering the intel community to alter its Russiagate findings to hamstring the incoming Trump administration?

I'm not 100% certain what to make of it, but Gabbard releasing the paper trail for all to see is just as revealing about Deep State hubris as it is about their schemes and methods.

The conclusion I'm forced to draw -- keeping in mind that this is purely speculative -- is this.

The Swamp failed to keep Trump from winning the White House in 2016. They redoubled their efforts to tilt the playing field in 2020 and 2024 -- and never expected, due to Trump's first-term failure to drain the Swamp, that they'd get caught.

But Trump 2.0 the DGAF Edition isn't messing around.

Gabbard is doing the difficult and risky work that Trump just didn't have the right people in place to do during his first term.

If the Democrats thought they could deflect and distract by promoting another lie -- that Trump was somehow involved with Jeffrey Epstein’s wrongdoings and was hiding his involvement -- that’s not going to work either. The grand jury testimony which led to his conviction is under seal by the judge who heard the case, and Attorney General Pamela Bondi’s request to release it was denied by him. But, wait -- look what’s coming down the pike!! The first (and very lengthy) interview of Ghislaine Maxwell by a federal official and here’s why that’s something that’ll be gaining on a lot of people.

After years of Biden Administration stonewalling (and file padding), Ghislaine Maxwell got a two-day DOJ interview [snip] They sent Trump’s former personal defense attorney turned Deputy Attorney General -- the DOJ’s second in command.

Comparing it to a deposition, two days of DOJ interviews requires at least four days of prep time. In other words, DOJ’s number two cleared his calendar for this. It wasn’t an interview; it was a mission.

Democrats, who ten minutes ago were pounding podiums demanding full transparency of the carefully curated Biden FBI files, were shocked to discover that Trump has another untainted source of information -- Ghislaine Maxwell, chilling in a Florida prison like a long-forgotten, sealed box in the bottom of the evidence locker.

Now Democrats are suddenly sweating like an OnlyFans producer in church.

“The Blanche-Maxwell discussion,” the Times soberly reported, “has stoked concerns from critics of Mr. Trump that he may grant Ms. Maxwell a reprieve.” (Unnamed critics, of course.)

 🔥 Ghislaine is unspoiled evidence. Astonishingly, no one had ever bothered interviewing her before. Not during the original Epstein investigation, not during her trial, not during five years of media blackout, strategic amnesia, and hot-potato footwork with the Epstein client list. And now, after she spilled the tea for ten hours over two days to Trump’s former lawyer turned top DOJ official, suddenly it’s a constitutional crisis.

Maxwell’s lawyer, David Markus, said DOJ officials had “asked about every possible thing imaginable.” Todd Blanche asked Maxwell about over 100 named individuals, and she dished the dirt. Markus said his client “answered every single question asked of her over the last day and a half.” Uh oh.

It was the most hilariously ironic twist yet. Late yesterday, reporters (obviously primed by someone) demanded to know whether Trump would pardon Maxwell in exchange for her testimony. President Trump, classically noncommital, replied, “I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I haven’t thought about.”

🔥 Democrats are losing their minds. Senate minority leader Chuck “Chuckie” Schumer wildly speculated it was “some kind of a corrupt deal so that she can exonerate Donald Trump [snip]

So let’s add this up. First, Democrats demand full transparency. Then, as soon as Trump sends DOJ’s second-in-command to find the facts, they started rioting like caged rhesus monkeys who just found out the banana shipment got rerouted to El Paso and incinerated. A pardon would be a travesty of justice!

Reporters sure have short memories. What about Biden’s pardons? That was what, less than 12 months ago? [snip] 

🔥 Apart from Epstein himself -- who is currently unavailable due to an unfortunate mishap of being suicided in a poorly run, high-security federal facility in New York -- there is no better witness on Earth than Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell might even be better than Epstein.

As Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown has said many times, man-baby Epstein never did anything for himself. No. Maxwell did it for him.

Epstein was the front of the house. Maxwell was the kitchen, the accounting department, and the security system. She holds the map, the manifest, and --most importantly -- the motive. This is exactly why the political class is panicking. Because it wasn’t just an airy, high-level interview. This was an authorized data download from the last living hard drive, carefully preserved in a Florida (not New York) prison.

As to why the Democrats are frantically waving the pardon issue, Childers nails it:

They’re desperately trying to discredit Ghislaine Maxwell before her testimony surfaces. It’s narrative preemption -- classic information warfare. If she names someone inconvenient, say, Chuck Schumer, the response is already baked into the narrative custard: She only said that to get herself out of prison!

But it won’t work. The reason will become clear in a couple more paragraphs.

The FBI’s years-long non-investigation of Epstein is backfiring spectacularly. In a sane world, by now Maxwell would have sat for thousands of hours of interviews, if only to get herself out of ‘the hole’ and be assigned to laundry duty.

The Times insinuated (not very subtly) that Trump is dangling a pardon to get Maxwell to clear his name. But… what is he supposed to do? Not question the best living witness? And as recently as yesterday’s edition, the Times demanded all the Epstein evidence come out.

Seriously, you just can’t please these people.

🔥 They thought they had Trump right where they wanted him, dead to rights, with a compromised FBI file. But one news cycle later, the press, the Democrats, and the entire institutional ecosystem are flailing like they just realized the ground they’ve been standing on might be made of quicksand.

For over a decade Obama and Biden controlled the White House and managed a compliant press. They repeatedly used their powers in office to try to destroy Trump. They nearly succeeded when they advanced defamatory claims about him and Russia. But for such an outrage, they had to rely on using corrupt officials so stupid they left a paper trail of their perfidious conduct. For years, evidence of this conduct that a House Committee uncovered was forcibly bottled up by the same malefactors. Now the evidence is out in the open. Trying to distract attention from this, they then implied a nonexistent Trump-Epstein connection to rape and other criminality by accusing the administration of lacking transparency on Epstein. But what prior administrations hid or refused to examine is in the process of being revealed. The Democrats asked for transparency and they’re going to get it good and hard. Some things are gaining on them.