On Thursday night, The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah addressed “a brand new conspiracy that Trump and Fox News are calling: Obamagate.” (It’s not new but more on that later.)
Cue Trump sycophant and Fox News host Sean Hannity, who called it “the biggest abuse of power/corruption scandal in American history,” adding, ‘What did Barack Hussein Obama know, and when did he know it?”
“Oh snap! Barack Hussein Obama!” exclaimed Noah. “That’s how you know you’re in trouble, when Fox is calling you by your full government name. ‘Barack Hussein Jihad Nairobi Kenya Obama, get your butt down here right now!’”
“Now, as you can tell, Fox News hasn’t been this excited since the last time Colin Kaepernick bent down to tie his shoes,” Noah continued. “They’re claiming that, when Obama was president, he illegally used the power of the Justice Department to spy on his political enemy, Donald Trump. And if you’re thinking, wait, didn’t we already do this, like, a year ago and they called it Spygate? Well, yeah, we did.”
Yes, according to the conspiracy theorists over at Fox News and Trumpworld, Obama abused his power by ordering the surveillance of Michael Flynn, a man who has twice pleaded guilty to lying to the authorities about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, who wrote pro-Erdogan propaganda columns in the U.S. while accepting money from the Turkish government, who was a registered foreign agent, and served as the special (paid) guest of Vladimir Putin at a 2015 gala dinner hosted by RT, the Russian government’s pet TV station.
Attorney General William Barr dropped charges against Flynn last week, alleging—in a seemingly partisan move, and with scant evidence—that the FBI shouldn’t have been looking into Flynn in the first place, even though Flynn was engaged in shady conversations with Kislyak concerning the retaliatory measures the Obama administration took against Russia for their interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election (Trump’s DOJ has refused to make even redacted transcripts of the Flynn-Kislyak phone conversations, which do exist, public), and subsequently confessed to lying to Vice President Mike Pence and the FBI about the nature of the calls.
A 2019 Justice Department Inspector General report found no evidence of any foul play on the part of the Obama administration with respect to the Trump-Russia investigation, but of course, that hasn’t stopped Trump from repeating a conspiracy theory he first began tweeting about in May of 2018 after seeing it floated on his favorite show, Fox & Friends.