The Obama Dossier
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released material confirming that the infamous “Steele dossier,” put together by former British spy Christopher Steele as a product of the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, was a strategic weapon in the Obama administration’s covert operations against candidate and president Donald Trump. Though undeniably sensational, these revelations fail to qualify as news for those of us who have been watching this story closely from the beginning.
Over at Frontpage, Mark Tapson simply reposted his review of The Plot Against the President, a documentary based on the book by Lee Smith. Over the years, countless books and articles exposed the “Russia hoax” but some still doubt that Obama could have been the kingpin. For documentarian Joel Gilbert, this is “far from implausible, and even likely,” given the former president’s experience in Chicago.
Obama was tight with Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, and his supporters included “unsavory characters” such as real estate developer Tony Rezko, convicted of fraud and corruption. In his 1996 Illinois State Senate race, Obama “used legal technicalities to challenge the petition signatures of his opponents, including incumbent Alice Palmer, knocking them all off the ballot for an easy Obama victory.” So no surprise that President Obama “weaponized federal agencies to target opponents and protect allies.” Also deserving attention are Obama’s “radical ideological roots.” Consider a book, released one year before that state senate race, that might be called the “Obama dossier. ”
In 1995’s Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama explains that the Kenyan Barack Obama was born in 1934 and in 1954 married Kezia Aoko, who bore him two children. Barack and Kezia were still married when the Kenyan arrived at the University of Hawaii in 1959. Dreams contends that the Kenyan married UH student Ann Dunham and “bequeathed his name” to their son, born in 1961. Trouble is, in all his writings from 1958 to 1964, now housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, the Kenyan Barack Obama makes not a single mention of an American wife and Hawaiian-born son.
Further, Dreams from My Father plagiarizes passages from I Dreamed of Africa and African Nights by Italian author Kuki Gallmann. The fakery leaps off the pages and there’s a reason the book lacks an index and photo section.
This is what Pulitzer Prize winner David Garrow said about Dreams in his 2017 book Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama:
Dreams from My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. It featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself. (Italics in the original.)
Also in Garrow’s book, he quotes a reporter who reveals that White House staffers are “terrified of people poking around Obama’s life. The whole Obama narrative is built around this narrative that Obama and David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it’s not entirely true. So they have to be protective of the crown jewels.”
Obama’s Dreams devotes more than 2,000 words to a happy-drunk poet and counselor the narrator calls “Frank.” Garrow identified “Frank” as Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party journalist and pornographer. That posed a problem for young Barry Soetoro, stepson of Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian student Ann Dunham married in 1965. Garrow contends that “Davis’ Communist background plus his kinky exploits made him politically radioactive,” which was indeed the case.
As Paul Kengor explained in The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: the Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, the Stalinist Davis was a de-facto Soviet agent on the FBI’s security index. Director Joel Gilbert made the case for Davis’s parenthood in his film Dreams from My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception. The former Barry Soetoro looks nothing like the Kenyan Barack Obama but is the spit-and-image of Frank Marshall Davis. The likeness is easily confirmed by photos in Davis’s Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet, published in 1992. Also bearing fearful symmetry are the two men’s voices, and their politics.
The Stalinist Davis was politically radioactive, so the former Barry Soetoro teamed up with David Axelrod, branded “Obama’s Narrator” by The New York Times, to engage in a massive act of identity theft. Davis disappeared from the audio version of Dreams, and everything else that falls under the Obama brand. On July 27, 2004, at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Illinois State Senator Barack Obama, then age 42, told the delegates:
Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant.
To paraphrase Michael Corleone, the Democrats, along with their media and deep state allies, figured people “might like a story like that.” Shortly before the 2008 election, Obama proclaimed, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Frank’s pro-Soviet politics would play a role.
Early in his first term, Obama canceled missile defense for U.S. allies Poland and the Czech Republic, but it wasn’t only about them. In 2012, Obama told Dimitry Medvedev he would have “more flexibility” on missile defense after the election. The Russian president said “I will transmit this information to Vladimir,” last name Putin. Obama made it easy for Putin to grab the Crimea, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “reset” pretty much gave Russia everything they wanted. The notion that Putin would have opposed a Hillary Clinton was always nonsense and, besides, Obama boasted another ally in the CIA.
The agency’s slide to the left began after the firing of counterintelligence expert James Angleton in 1974. In 1980, the agency hired John Brennan, who voted for Communist Party USA boss Gus Hall in 1976 and never should have been allowed to walk through the front door. Brennan rose through the ranks at lightning speed and in 2013 Obama made him CIA director.
As Brennan revealed in Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad—note the order—the CIA had no advance warning of the massive terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001. Brennan believes that jihad is merely “a holy struggle in pursuit of a moral goal” and has nothing inherently to do with violence.
In similar style, the former Barry Soetoro, raised in Indonesia, refused to link terrorism with Islam. When self-described “soldier of Allah” Maj. Nidal Hasan murdered 14 Americans at Fort Hood in 2009, the president called it “workplace violence,” not terrorism or even gun violence. In 2014, Obama refused to meet with Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, who took seven bullets from the soldier of Allah.
On Obama and Brennan’s watch, the CIA failed to prevent Islamic terrorist attacks at the Boston Marathon (2013) San Bernardino (2015) and Orlando (2016), each of which racked up massive fatalities. The vaunted FBI also failed to prevent the attacks and played no role in the takedown of the terrorists.
A failure at their appointed tasks, the CIA and FBI had become partisan forces. In 2016, Obama deployed the agencies against his domestic opposition. Still in triumphal mode, Obama backed the Russia hoax against candidate and president Trump. The establishment media, which swallowed the Dreams deception whole, was on board from the start.
In 2020, Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and other intel bosses revived the hoax with their letter charging that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. That helped put Joe Biden in the White House, but people wondered if the Delaware Democrat, in Conrad Black’s phrase a “waxworks effigy of a president,” was really in charge. That came up David Samuels’s very interesting interview with Rising Star author David Garrow in Tablet magazine in August, 2023.
“I find Barack Obama deeply sympathetic as a person,” Samuels told Garrow. “I identify with him emotionally. Yet there was something about this fictional character that he created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now.” (emphasis added) As Samuels saw it, Obama was still running the country:
All of his people are already inside the White House. They hold the Iran file. Tony Blinken doesn’t. Rob Malley is just one person. Brett McGurk. Dan Shapiro in Israel. Lisa Monaco in Justice. Susan Rice running domestic policy. It’s turtles all the way down. There are obviously large parts of White House policymaking that belong to Barack Obama because they’re staffed by his people, who worked for him and no doubt report back to him. The “disaster we are living through now” is Obama’s fundamentally transformed America.
Recall the open borders, with millions entering the country with no criminal background checks or health records. Recall the LGBTQ madness. Both of these, according to Robert Gentry’s Neutering the CIA and Brennan’s Undaunted, were major forces in the CIA.
Recall the abject surrender in Afghanistan, with billions in arms and an airbase handed to the Taliban, making them, as Angelo Codevilla explained, “the world’s fourth-best armed force.” That defeat, which Biden called an “extraordinary success,” prompted the Fort Hood terrorist, Nidal Hasan, to proclaim “we have won!”
Recall China’s massive balloon overflying the country and surveilling strategic military bases. Recall military personnel dismissed for declining COVID vaccinations. Recall Biden, backdropped in red, with Marines at the ready, threatening those Americans who want the nation to be great. Recall the FBI targeting pro-life activists, and branding patriotic Americans domestic terrorists, and so much more. This is what Obama wanted, all part of his fundamental transformation.
Kamala Harris would have headed an Obama fourth term, but the people had seen enough. Trump survived two assassination attempts and the people returned him to the White House. DNI Tulsi Gabbard is now referring the Russia hoax revelations to the Department of Justice. As people may recall, Joe Biden did not pardon Brennan, Comey, or Clapper.
“Why are Clapper and Brennan not in prison?” wondered Angelo Codevilla in 2019. The next year Codevilla wrote “Abolish FISA, Reform FBI, and Break Up CIA,” contending that “intelligence officials abuse their positions to discredit opposition to the Democratic Party, of which they are part. Complicit with the media, they leverage the public’s mistaken faith in their superior knowledge, competence, and patriotism to vilify their domestic enemies from behind secrecy’s shield.”
If none of the prime movers of these hoaxes go to prison and justice is not served, the deep state wins, and more hoaxes will surely emerge. As Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens.
For further reading see this author’s Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation, written two years before Rising Star, and Yes I Con: United Fakes of America. In 2025,as the news cycle churns ever more information in a 24-hour period, understanding American politics becomes a race of memory against forgetting.