Former President Barack Obama won't likely face criminal charges as a result of the Department of Justice's strike force investigation into allegations that he and members of his intelligence community pushed to undermine President Donald Trump's first term in office with claims about Russian collusion, author Victor Davis Hanson told Newsmax on Friday.
Still, the documents declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard show that Obama was the "architect" of the plan, Hanson said on Newsmax's "Newsline."
"The one person that we are all looking at is Barack Obama," Hanson, who recently questioned the matter in his column, "Revenge or Justice," added.
"I don't think they're going to charge him over anything. He might be an unindicted co-conspirator, but he was the architect of this."
Meanwhile, Hanson said he thinks that the formation of a strike force to investigate the documentation rather than a special counsel is a good idea, considering the information that is already available.
"John Brennan, remember, he's on record and under oath to the House Intelligence Committee, saying that he has no idea about the Steele dossier at all," said Hanson. "And now there are whistleblowers and testimony, allegedly, that he, in fact, knew much about it."
James Clapper, he added, also was "on record" saying that the "whole redirect" toward Trump would not have happened "unless Barack Obama had redirected Clapper, [James] Comey and Brennan, as he was a lame duck on Dec. 9."
And, Hanson added, "they're all untrustworthy people."
"It's just a question of to what degree are these lies that were given under oath subject to statute of limitations, or are they more recent with this trove?" he said. "I think they're all going to be culpable."
Trump commented on Friday that the recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity will help Obama, "but it doesn't help the people around him at all."
"He's done criminal acts, there's no question about it," Trump added. "But he has immunity, and it probably helped him a lot."
Even though several GOP senators are calling for a special counsel to investigate the matter, Hanson said that special counsels in recent investigations have not had a "very good record."
"When we have the DOJ, they can have a point person, but they should not appoint a so-called disinterested special counsel and give them all those powers because it's never worked out well," he said.
Meanwhile, Obama has "attacked the messengers" when asked about the claims that are being made.
"But all he had to do was say, 'I was in the Oval Office. I was a lame duck. I was concerned that maybe the intelligence agencies had made an oversight, so I directed to go back and find something,'" said Hanson. "He could have just said that, but he was lawyered up himself, so he didn't want to say anything like that. He just made fun of the people, Tulsi Gabbard and others, and that made it worse."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.