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Trump threatens Obama, Schiff with arrest and imprisonment [1]

['Joseph Konig', 'Published Pm Et Jul.']

Date: 2025-07-21

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump over the weekend called for the arrest and prosecution of his political enemies, including former President Barack Obama, California Sen. Adam Schiff, former FBI Director James Comey and other former senior Obama administration and U.S. intelligence officials.

What You Need To Know President Donald Trump over the weekend called for the arrest and prosecution of his political enemies, including former President Barack Obama, California Sen. Adam Schiff, former FBI director James Comey and other former senior Obama administration and U.S. intelligence officials Trump claims that a new report from Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, “unequivocally exposed” evidence of his long-held claims that Obama and other officials conducted a plot that amounted to the “highest level Election Fraud” A bipartisan 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee probe led by Republicans endorsed the Obama-era intelligence community assessment that Russia meddled in the 2016 election As he made a flurry of posts demanding criminal prosecutions and impriosnment of those he views as having wronged him, Trump shared a doctored video of Obama being arrested by the FBI and put behind bars

Trump claims that a new report from Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, “unequivocally exposed” evidence of his long-held claims that Obama and other officials conducted a plot that amounted to the “highest level Election Fraud." The report focused on Obama administration officials probing Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election, highlighting those officials’ conclusions that Russian state actors did not attempt to tamper with vote-counting infrastructure and election results.

Gabbard claims internal communications show that the former president and senior officials lied or misled the public about Russian involvement in the election, conflating the determination on election infrastructure with officials’ statements about documented Russian efforts to use social media and hacks of Democratic Party accounts to influence American voters.

Trump seized on the Gabbard report and used it to renew his calls for criminal prosecutions and imprisonment of his enemies, including Obama.

Calls to arrest, imprison Obama and others

In a flurry of posts over the weekend, he boosted clips of Gabbard on Fox News alleging Obama and others “cooked up this treasonous conspiracy to … effectively launch a years-long coup against the sitting president of the United States.” In her statement accompanying the report released Friday, Gabbard said “no matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

Gabbard’s report “was not just a lie, but a very dangerous lie,” Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “When you start throwing around language like 'sedition' and 'treason,' somebody's going to get hurt.”

Himes noted, as many Democrats have, that a bipartisan 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee probe led by Republicans — and with the co-sign of now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio — endorsed the Obama-era intelligence community assessment that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.

But the president this weekend appeared to agree that criminal prosecutions of officials up to and including Obama are now necessary. The push for criminal prosecutions comes as Trump has wielded the levers of federal power to punish, investigate and prosecute elected Democrats, Republican critics, cities and states led by Democratic officials, former federal officials, major media corporations, universities and public schools, law firms and others. He has also purged perceived foes from the Justice Department and installed partisan loyalists, including multiple former personal attorneys and Bondi, atop the nation's chief law enforcement agency.

Over the weekend, Trump shared clips of Gabbard stating she referred the documents to the Justice Department over alleged criminal activity and prescribing “accountability, action, prosecution, indictments for those responsible for trying to steal our democracy.”

He also posted a video to his Truth Social platform shared by a pro-Trump TikTok account that featured clips of Democratic officials saying “no one is above the law,” followed by a doctored video of FBI agents entering the Oval Office and arresting Obama as he sits beside Trump. A handcuffed Obama is escorted away and the video then cuts to about 20 seconds of footage of the former president behind bars in an orange jumpsuit.

In another post, he shared an image featuring doctored images of Obama, Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, former George W. Bush and Obama administration Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former senior Obama and Biden administration officials Samantha Power and Susan Rice, and longtime Obama advisers Valerie Jarrett and Ben Rhodes in prison jumpsuits. The image was created by an X account that frequently spreads anti-Muslim racism.

The president added the caption “HOW DID SAMANTHA POWER MAKE ALL OF THAT MONEY???” Earlier this year, Trump and billionaire Elon Musk spread false claims that Power, Obama’s U.N. ambassador and the head of the now-defunct U.S. Agency for International Development under former President Joe Biden, saw her wealth spike during her time in government service.

Another post shared by Trump featured an edited image of what appeared to be congressional lawmakers in handcuffs with the caption “until this happens, nothing will change.” That image was originally shared by a small X account in support of Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s declaration on Fox News on Sunday that “there needs to be criminal prosecutions and arrests” over the Gabbard report.

Also on Sunday, Trump shared what appeared to be an AI-generated video of a man discussing Gabbard’s report and calling for arrests of Obama administration officials in a “Guy Fawkes mask” inspired by the 1980s graphic novel “V for Vendetta” and its 2005 film adaption that has grown associated with the activist hacker collective known as Anonymous and various other internet communities.

Requests for comment sent to the Obama Foundation, where Jarrett serves as CEO, and Obama’s family office did not receive responses Monday. Messages sent directly to or through employers and representatives of Brennan, Comey and Rhodes were also not immediately responded to. Clapper, Power and Rice could not immediately be reached for comment.

Trump urges imprisonment of a Democratic senator

Separately on Sunday, Trump made two posts focused on Schiff, the California Democrat and frequent target of the president’s ire, reupping his claims that Schiff “falsified” loan documents and committed mortgage fraud. He posted a copy of a 2011 document made public by Fox News that Schiff and his wife signed indicating their Maryland home was their primary residence as he also owned a home in California, claiming this was evidence Schiff was defrauding his mortgage lender, was “a THIEF,” and “should be prosecuted, just like they tried to prosecute me.”

Trump faced four criminal prosecutions during his time out of office, including two related to his attempts to stay in power after his 2020 election loss. Another case, a state-level prosecution in New York, resulted in him becoming the first former U.S. president convicted of a crime after a jury found him guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records last May.

“Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff is in BIG TROUBLE!” Trump wrote on Sunday night, alleging the senator was part of the alleged Democratic “coup” against him. “Shifty should pay the price of prison for a real crime, not one made up by the corrupt accusers!”

Schiff has denied any wrongdoing, describing Trump’s attacks as a “smear” last week and framing the president’s effort as a distraction from “his Epstein files problem.”

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[1] Url: https://spectrumlocalnews.com/me/maine/politics/2025/07/21/trump-obama-schiff-gabbard-russia-prosecutions-prison

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