President Trump reposted a fake video showing former President Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office, as Trump administration officials continue to accuse Mr. Obama of trying to harm Mr. Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election, and the president seeks to redirect conversation from the Epstein files.
The short video, which appears to have been generated by artificial intelligence and posted on TikTok before being reposted on Mr. Trump’s Truth Social account on Sunday, comes days after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration trying to undermine the eight-year-old assessment that Russia favored the election of Mr. Trump.
The video appears to be manipulated footage of an Oval Office meeting that took place in November 2016 between Mr. Obama, then the president, and Mr. Trump, who days earlier had defeated Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, in the election.
The fake video purports to show F.B.I. agents bursting into the meeting, pushing Mr. Obama into a kneeling position and putting him in handcuffs as Mr. Trump looks on smiling, while the song “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People plays. Later, the fake video shows Mr. Obama in an orange jumpsuit pacing in a cell. The start of the video shows a compilation of actual footage of Democratic leaders, including Mr. Obama and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., saying, “no one is above the law.”
Mr. Obama’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the video.
Mr. Trump regularly reposts A.I.-generated or mocked-up videos and photographs on his Truth Social account.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said last week that the latest report released by her offices showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials to harm Mr. Trump. She said she would make a criminal referral to the F.B.I. based on recently released documents.
A link to real video footage from an interview that Ms. Gabbard gave to Fox News on Sunday on the subject was also posted to Mr. Trump’s social media.
Democrats have denounced the administration’s effort to discredit Mr. Obama as politically motivated and riddled with errors, and contradicting previous reviews of the assessment.
The latest document, issued last week, did not show Russian manipulation of the election, and instead reinforced the view of intelligence officials who found no evidence that Russia hacked voting systems to change votes.
Democrats have cited reports by intelligence agencies and Senate investigators who found that, while Russian hackers probed election systems to see if they could change vote outcomes and extracted voter registration data in at least two states, there was no evidence that they attempted to change votes.
The Obama administration’s assessment also did not say that Russian hackers manipulated votes.
Mr. Trump has been trying to change the conversation among his supporters, after the Justice Department walked back its promise to release the full collection of files about Jeffrey Epstein, a multimillionaire financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019.
That decision angered some of the president’s most ardent supporters. Some have questioned Mr. Trump’s judgment on the matter, causing strife within the MAGA movement that powered Mr. Trump to two presidential election victories.
Source: New York Times
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