On 15 January 2017, former US President Barack Obama seemed fittingly arrogant for a statesman as he handed the presidency to his successor President Trump, whom everybody knows he despises and
who he turned into a mockery on talk shows. In the famous meeting with journalists, he humiliated Trump for having the audacity to believe that he would once become a president like him.
In reality, however, we were only seeing the surface. Two weeks before that date, specifically on January 5, a meeting was held by Obama and was attended by his deputy Biden, his National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) James Comey. The meeting targeted Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
In a secret email that has recently been declassified, there was a conversation revolving around an unusual relationship between Flynn and the Russian ambassador in Washington, demanding that the President look more into it and asks whether they should stop any information related to Russia from reaching the team that would replace them. Comey did not point to any information or evidence but talked about an unusual communication between the two men.
This meeting practically started the story about Russian complicity with the Trump administration, and was an early electoral smear campaign against the coming President and his team, portraying them as Russian agents and jeopardizing the credibility of the new administration; political desires that were realized through intelligence tools and media campaigns. Recently, a memo was revealed where a high official in the FBI mentions explicit intentions to overthrow the new National Security Advisor. In this memo, the official wrote to get Flynn “to lie, so that we can prosecute him or get him fired”. This is exactly what happened when Flynn left his office less than one month after Trump’s team took over.
That was the first smear on the new administration’s reputation. Afterward, intelligence leaks to the media poured in. A few weeks later, CNN showed an interesting story of fabricated memos about Trump’s relationship with the Russians. The memos were fabricated by a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele. The memos included a set of suspicious claims, one of which was a video of Trump spending a night with a prostitute in a hotel. The recording, the memo claimed, was with the Russians and they were using it to blackmail the US President into following their agenda in the White House. This was followed by a long campaign of accusations that did not officially end until Robert Mueller’s investigation showed that there was no evidence of complicity between the Russians and the Trump administration and that all of the stories were a hoax. A clever and polite but violent and harsh campaign was launched after the meeting, where sex and accusations of treason were used. We now remember that all of the Obama administration had taken part in this campaign. John Brennan, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency who refuses up until now to utter the phrase “President Trump”, explicitly accused him of treason after his famous meeting with Putin in Helsinki. All of the watchdogs of the Obama ideology did their job to the fullest in making complicity with the Russians a central issue for the people despite knowing that it was groundless. They are, however, ideologues who are loyal to their president. On the other hand, there is a justifiable and understandable party aim to turn their rival into an exhausted and bleeding prey in the electoral season. The plan did not work, but we have now forgotten everything after the Corona pandemic weakened Trump despite his economic success.
All of the preceding leads to this most important point: we are watching the real appearance of President Obama after years of hiding behind his men. He chose the right moment to personally step into Biden's campaign to overthrow Trump in a way that contravenes protocol, as former presidents usually prefer to stay away from party conflicts to preserve the value of the presidency and image of the president.
From the 5th of January meeting to overthrowing Flynn to the intelligence leaks, and more recently the pandemic, and the former president's actual intervention in the conflict, we see the truth behind the actual conflict between the two schools, which is what matters to us in the region. Trump practically nullified all of the plans that Obama and his men in the region had laid the groundwork for and destroyed their political legacy and limited their leftist ideology's spread. Let us remember that both the Nuclear Deal and Soleimani are now corpses. However, now Obama and his team have found a chance more valuable than the dead bat in Wuhan to take revenge and set the clock back by four years. Stories of secret meetings behind closed doors and intelligence memos have consequently started. The masks, however, have now been removed and we will witness a turbulent six months ahead. Let us prepare.
