Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast. My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of the

spectator and the editor of its U.S. edition. We thought that 2020 was going to be all about the

presidential election, but now it will forever be the year of the pandemic.

So instead, Americano is going to look at how COVID-19 is transforming the United States and its politics.

There's a lot to talk about, perhaps even more so than before.

So please keep tuning in.

I'd like to draw your attention to our Memorial Day flash sale, which will be running until Monday the 25th of May.

It's a very good offer. You get three issues of The Spectator for just three dollars.

That includes monthly delivery of the magazine, unlimited access to Spectator.us, our newsletters and our podcasts, and full access to

the digital archives. Do take advantage of it by going to spectator.us forward slash memorial day.

I'm joined today by Amber Athe, who is the Spectators Washington editor, and we're going to be talking about

Obamagate. Now, Amber, Obamagate, for those who don't know, is the sort of reverse of

Russiagate. And Russiagate was the idea that we talked about a lot in the last three years,

that Trump was somehow in collusion with Moscow, with Putin, and that he'd been compromised in some way.

And this was a source of a huge investigation that ended up being a bit of a damp squib.

And now we have Obamagate, which is the sort of unpicking of that investigation.

And it seems to lead all the way back to President Obama.

Have I done a fair summary of what Obamagate is?

Yeah, I think generally speaking, the Obamagate issue is about the origins of the investigation

into Russia Gate, as well as what Obama's knowledge was of the level of

spying on the Trump campaign and how much of that was more created by the FBI and the

intelligence community rather than really following up on legitimate leads in regards

...