President Trump has encountered more highs and lows in the first six weeks of his presidency than most new administrations experience during their first six months, and the Obama administration’s 11th-hour activism could explain some of Trump’s early setbacks.
The White House’s largely untested team has shouldered much of the blame for what critics have described as a chaotic rollout of the Trump agenda. Those critics have pointed fingers at infighting between West Wing staff and inconsistent messages from Trump himself as reasons why the administration has found itself mired in controversy in fits and starts since Inauguration Day.
But at least some of the early complications can be attributed to roadblocks erected by Trump’s predecessor in the waning days of the Obama administration. And Trump’s allies have grumbled that Obama alumni are privately peddling stories designed to damage the president to a press corps they view as incurably biased against Trump.
Here are six ways Obama alumni have made Trump’s life harder.
Spreading Russian intelligence
Obama administration officials reportedly attempted to spread evidence of Russia’s contact with Trump campaign associates throughout the government by keeping the classification level of analyses as low as possible and passing volumes of material to congressional committees looking into allegations of Russian interference in the election.
Those Obama administration officials reportedly feared that the incoming Trump team would squelch any lingering investigation into alleged contacts between Trump campaign aides and Russian officials. Their efforts have helped to ensure that questions about Russia’s pre-election activities follow Trump’s team well beyond the inquiry former President Barack Obama ordered his intelligence community to conduct before Inauguration Day.
Obama had also asked intelligence agents to produce a report outlining their conclusions about Russian cyberattacks during the campaign. That report, published in an unclassified version on Jan. 6, laid out the administration’s belief that Russians had infiltrated Democratic inboxes with the specific intention of helping Trump, but didn’t provide any evidence as to why the intelligence community had reached that conclusion.
Limiting access to sources of Russia allegations
The same Times report cited U.S. officials in its account of the ways Obama administration aides attempted to limit the number of people who could access the names of people who provided Russia-related intelligence or the identities of key people under surveillance by the intelligence community.
Trump does have access to information about the sources of Russia-related intelligence.
But the Obama administration officials reportedly pushed to spread allegations of Russian hacking and Russian contact with Trump associates while doing “the opposite” when it came to the sources of those allegations.
In mid-February, the Wall Street Journal published a similar report that suggested intelligence agencies had withheld the most sensitive material — showing how the government had collected information about Russian activities — from the president out of fear that his team could not be trusted with it.
The White House aggressively denied the report.
Leaking to the press
Stories about Trump associates’ alleged contacts with Russian officials have been heavily sourced to “former officials” with knowledge of the intelligence activities begun under the Obama administration.
These former officials described Obama appointees’ elaborate attempts to disseminate information about Russian contacts within the government. They disclosed details of a conversation between Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and former national security adviser Mike Flynn in which sanctions were discussed, a revelation that ultimately led to Flynn’s resignation because he misled Vice President Mike Pence about the talks. And former officials rushed to criticize the Trump administration’s approval of a raid in Yemen that claimed the lives of several Yemeni civilians and an American Navy SEAL.
Beyond the former Obama administration officials’ constant contact with the press, the White House has made clear its suspicion that other unflattering stories have made their way to the surface thanks to the Obama alumni still employed by the federal government.
Trump has repeatedly attempted to draw focus off damaging headlines and onto the leakers who put them there, calling the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information the “real story” on multiple occasions.
Obamacare ‘metrics’
Former White House press secretary Josh Earnest laid out a political framework for healthcare in late November that continues to define much of the conversation about Obamacare reform.
“I spent a little time working with my staff today to develop what I think are some metrics that all of you and the American public should apply in evaluating some of the proposals that may be put forward by the other side,” Earnest said Nov. 29 during the daily briefing.
The five “metrics” Earnest listed related to the most favorable interpretation of the Obama administration’s signature policy achievement: how many people had been covered under the Affordable Care Act, “consumer protections” included in the law such as the ban on discrimination against pre-existing conditions, and other positive features of the law.
The Obama administration’s aggressive promotion to the media of how they should frame their coverage of the healthcare law continues to dominate the conversation about Obamacare reform.
Resistance to the ‘travel ban’
Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates’ decision to instruct the Justice Department not to defend a controversial executive order that temporarily suspended immigration from seven Middle Eastern countries cost her a job and touched off a cascade of criticism from former Obama officials looking to disrupt the rollout of the policy.
High-level Obama alumni — including former national security adviser Susan Rice and former Secretary of State John Kerry — joined with former Bush officials in filing a brief in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals early last month in which they argued the travel ban did not boost the nation’s security.
A court challenge in Washington state halted the travel ban shortly after Trump signed it. The appeals court subsequently declined to lift the temporary pause of Trump’s executive order.
Although the White House continues to indicate a new travel ban is in the works, officials have not given clear guidance as to when the president will sign it. A report Saturday claims Trump will sign a replacement order on Monday.
Wiretapping Trump Tower?
Saturday morning, Trump tweeted out the incendiary allegation that the Obama administration had tapped his phones at Trump Tower during the general election contest. If this is true — and Trump has not offered proof — then it is conceivable that the Obama administration had inside information and could have inflicted some kind of adverse impact on the Trump campaign, the election results, and even the operations and staff of the Trump White House.
