In retrospect, it was perhaps inevitable that Donald Trump would eventually call for a criminal investigation of President Barack Obama.
After all, Trump has kept ramping up his posturing against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, as she's continued to hold a strong lead in the upcoming election. Chants of "lock her up" were once sporadic at his rallies; now they're as common as "build the wall." In a remarkable and disconcerting move, Trump directly called for Clinton to be investigated, even threatening at the second presidential debate that Clinton would "be in jail" if he had control over the country's legal system.
The rationale for imprisoning Clinton is rooted far less in fact than feeling. Trump sees Clinton's use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state as inherently illegal and the role of the government in investigating the server as hopelessly corrupted.
On Tuesday, two weeks before voters cast their final votes in the race, Trump told reporters from Reuters that new revelations from WikiLeaks necessitated a separate investigation of the president.
The WikiLeaks email to which Trump was referring was a March 2015 exchange forwarded to Clinton attorney Cheryl Mills from Nick Merrill, who now acts as Clinton's press secretary. Several Clinton aides were discussing Obama's having told press that he learned about Clinton's private server from news reports. Mills responds, "we need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov." In other words, Obama had emails from Clinton's private server — suggesting that he should have known or did know about her server before the public.
"That's why he stuck up for Hillary," Trump told Reuters' Steve Holland and Emily Stephenson, "because he didn't want to be dragged in. Because he knew all about her private server. This means that he has to be investigated."
At a campaign stop in Sanford, Florida, later on Tuesday, Trump said that Obama was caught up in the "big lie" surrounding the server.
It's important to note that evidence Obama had received emails from Clinton's private server emerged well before Tuesday. In January, State Department spokesman John Kirby said that 18 emails between the president and Clinton were turned over to the government when she submitted her work-related emails to State last year. Those 18 emails were not made public because the White House asserted his executive privilege in keeping them private.
What's new about the release from WikiLeaks is two-fold. First, the unclear meaning of "we need to clean this up," which can be read nefariously (as implying that information would be hidden from the public) or as benign (suggesting that Clinton's team and/or the White House needed to clarify Obama's comments). Interpretations of the statement will no doubt vary by political party.
The other thing that's new about the WikiLeaks email is that it came out two weeks before an election that Donald Trump is poised to lose.
Donald Trump's ascent in the Republican Party came from his opposition to President Obama, specifically by calling into question Obama's citizenship shortly before the 2012 race. Trump kept that up for a few years, only asserting that Obama was born in the United States with the first debate of the general election (and a certain question about his stance) looming. In recent weeks, an increasingly dispirited Trump has seen Obama on the campaign trail deriding his candidacy. On Monday night, Obama taunted Trump on Jimmy Kimmel, mocking Trump's likely loss.
Setting aside the personal animosity between the two, though, Trump's call to investigate the president is highly unusual and another breach of the norms governing the transition of power in the United States. Obama himself was called to launch an investigation into the behavior of his predecessor, George W. Bush, around the use of torture and the push to launch the invasion of Iraq. He declined to do so. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for his activities surrounding Watergate, a move that likely helped undercut the odds he'd earn the presidency in his own right.
It's also the case that there's no actual evidence that Obama was involved in anything even remotely illegal. The FBI looked into Clinton's use of an email server and suggested that no charges be filed; there's been no suggestion that Obama was involved in any attempted cover-up of any illegal behavior. Given our earlier mention of Watergate, we will hasten to acknowledge that evidence of important crimes is sometimes slow to come to light. In this case, though, Trump's comments seem less like a sincere concern about the behavior of the nation's chief executive and more like an attempt to continue to paint his political and personal opponents with a broad brush dripping with insinuation. Trump trails nationally by 5 points. Clinton has solid leads in more than enough states to push her past 270 electoral votes. That's more likely the revelation that's spurring Trump's comments.
In a battle between Trump and Obama, America's already got a clear preference. Obama's gotten much more popular since the election began. Trump continues to be the least positively viewed candidate in modern political history.
For that reason alone, it seems very unlikely that Obama needs to be concerned about the prospect of President Trump going on a fishing expedition on the subject.