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Writing for The Scroll, Tablet‘s Substack, Park MacDougald has quickly established himself as one of my favorite columnists. On the day before the election Park drew attention to the January 17, 2017 transcript of “Remarks by the president in roundtable with progressive journalists.” At the time “the president” was still Barack Obama.

Hans Mahncke and Jeff Carlson note that the transcript was dredged up in 2022 via the Freedom of Information Act but only posted lo, these many years later. Mahncke and Carlson write about it in “Obama Fueled Russia Collusion Lies in Secret White House Meeting” at Truth Over News.

Park’s long November 4 Scroll column deserves reading in full. Here I want to quote Park in medias res as he discusses the transcript:

At their Substack “Truth Over News,” independent journalists Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke report on the newly obtained transcript of a Jan. 17, 2017 meeting between then outgoing President Barack Obama and 17 unnamed “progressive” journalists, in which they discussed Trump’s upcoming term and allegations that Trump had colluded with Russia. As Carlson and Mahncke note, Obama knew the Russia allegations were false; his CIA director, John Brennan, had briefed him in late July on a “proposal from one of [Hillary Clinton’s] foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference from Russian security services.” Within three days of that meeting, however, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched its “Crossfire Hurricane” counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, and the espionage would continue until Trump’s inauguration Jan. 20, 2016.

In the meeting, Obama reassured the journalists that while a single Trump term was survivable, “eight years” of Trump posed a “genuine threat.” On four occasions in the conversation, he seeded the Trump-Russia collusion narrative among the journalists, despite knowing that it was a false piece of Clinton campaign propaganda. As usual, Obama spoke in innuendos, rather than directly, but the point of his briefing was clear. He blamed Trump’s victory on the Clinton campaign and the media for not reporting enough on “the Russia leaks.” He stated that “the Russia thing” was a “problem” with the incoming administration and said it’s “hard to know what conversations the President-elect may be having offline with business leaders in other countries who are also connected to leaders of other countries.” That’s an apparent reference to the discredited Alfa Bank conspiracy theory, shopped first to the CIA and then the press by Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman, which held that Trump was secretly communicating with Putin through the servers of a bank. Obama suggested that Trump was receiving indirect payouts from Vladimir Putin through Russian nationals purchasing apartments in his buildings.

Park then quotes Obama leaving the “progressive journalists” with this morsel:

What I would simply say would be that any time you have a foreign actor who, for whatever reason, has ex parte influence over the president of the United States, meaning that the American people can’t see that influence because it’s not happening in a bilateral meeting and subject to negotiations or reporting—any time that happens, that’s a problem. And I’ll let you speculate on where that could go.

Park comments:

All this, again, about a piece of Clinton campaign opposition that Obama himself knew was false. It would be an understatement to say that the press fell for the scam; this entirely fake story became the dominant political narrative of the first two years of Trump’s presidency, and it is still believed by a narrow majority of Democratic partisans, who nonetheless consider Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election to be disqualifying from office.

I highlight this briefing not only because the transcript is new but also because it points to the origin point for the derangement of American politics over the past eight years: the Obama faction’s weaponization of the security state and the press to deny the American people a legitimate opportunity to reject their agenda at the ballot box. That agenda was described (in part) in the first half of [Park’s column, unquoted here]: alliance with Third World regimes abroad and the cultivation of a Third Worldist political culture at home, complete with corrupt spy services, rigged elections, a lackey press, the censorship and legal harassment of the opposition, sectarian division of the population among party-designated identity categories (“LGBTQI+” and “AAPI”), and violent street displays targeting the perceived enemies of the ruling regime, whether “racists” and “cops” (as in 2020) or “Jews” and “Zionists” (as in 2023 and 2024). Indeed, both in and out of government, the party-state machine constructed by Obama did its best to create, in lieu of a governing program that could appeal to the majority of Americans, a vast public-private apparatus of censorship and thought control targeting dissident speech as “misinformation”—a project that was thwarted only by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022. More recently, the criminal prosecution of Trump on absurdly inflated charges suggests a willingness to abuse the legal system to go after opponents and interfere with electoral outcomes—unless, of course, they suffer blowback at the ballot box.

The blowback has arrived and the battle begins.