Trump posts fake video showing Obama arrest in the Oval Office
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US President Donald Trump regularly reposts AI-generated or mocked-up videos and photographs on his Truth Social account.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Matthew Mpoke Bigg
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WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump reposted a fake video showing former US president Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office, as Trump administration officials continue to accuse Mr Obama of trying to harm Mr Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election, and the US President seeks to redirect conversation from the Jeffrey Epstein files
The short video, which appears to have been generated by artificial intelligence and posted on TikTok before being reposted on Mr Trump’s Truth Social account on July 20, comes days after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration trying to undermine the eight-year-old assessment that Russia favoured the election of Mr Trump.
The video appears to be manipulated footage of an Oval Office meeting that took place in November 2016 between Mr Obama, then the president, and Mr Trump, who days earlier had defeated Mrs Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, in the election.
The fake video purports to show FBI agents bursting into the meeting, pushing Mr Obama into a kneeling position and putting him in handcuffs as Mr Trump looks on smiling, while the song YMCA by the Village People plays. Later, the fake video shows Mr Obama in an orange jumpsuit pacing in a cell. The start of the video shows a compilation of actual footage of Democratic leaders, including Mr Obama and former US president Joe Biden, saying, “No one is above the law”.
Mr Obama’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the video.
Mr Trump regularly reposts AI-generated or mocked-up videos and photographs on his Truth Social account.
Ms Tulsi Gabbard, the US director of national intelligence, said last week that the latest report released by her offices showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials to harm Mr Trump. She said she would make a criminal referral to the Federal Bureau of Investigation based on recently released documents.
A link to real video footage from an interview that Ms Gabbard gave to Fox News on July 20 on the subject was also posted to Mr Trump’s social media.
Democrats have denounced the administration’s effort to discredit Mr Obama as politically motivated and riddled with errors, and contradicting previous reviews of the assessment.
The latest document, issued last week, did not show Russian manipulation of the election, and instead reinforced the view of intelligence officials who found no evidence that Russia hacked voting systems to change votes.
Democrats have cited reports by intelligence agencies and Senate investigators who found that, while Russian hackers probed election systems to see if they could change vote outcomes and extracted voter registration data in at least two states, there was no evidence that they attempted to change votes.
The Obama administration’s assessment also did not say that Russian hackers manipulated votes.
Mr Trump has been trying to change the conversation among his supporters, after the Justice Department walked back its promise to release the full collection of files about Epstein, a multimillionaire financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019.
That decision angered some of the US President’s most ardent supporters. Some have questioned Mr Trump’s judgment on the matter, causing strife within the Maga movement that powered Mr Trump to two presidential election victories. NYTIMES
