Report: White House officials hatch an odd revenge plan targeting former Obama administration

The White House.
(Image credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)

While Barack Obama is living his best life hanging out in tropical locales and wearing leather jackets, a gloomy group of Trump loyalists have put their heads together and concocted a plot to get revenge against the former president and members of his administration through an approach being described by one person as a "bag of crazy cats," Foreign Policy reports.

In the wake of The Washington Post's report that Trump gave highly classified information about the Islamic State to Russian officials during their visit to the Oval Office last week, members of Trump's inner circle held a meeting on Wednesday to discuss how to recover from the ongoing repercussions. A person with knowledge of the summit said the team is considering going after Obama's administration by accusing it of sharing sensitive information, too, launching an investigation into a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program called the Automated Indicator Sharing capability. That program gathers information from companies on possible cyberattacks, including malicious IP addresses and emails, that is then shared with foreign partners. The goal of the program is to "identify and block adversary methods that we've never seen before," DHS spokesman Scott McConnell told FP, but the Trump team suggests that the sharing capability can open up sensitive data to Russia and other non-allies.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.