Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has released a newly declassified report that suggests former President Barack Obama was directly involved in a high-level scheme to cover up the Hillary Clinton email scandal—drawing parallels to the infamous Watergate cover-up that led to President Nixon’s resignation.

The newly exposed details come from a 2018 Department of Justice Inspector General report, previously classified, and authored by then-IG Michael Horowitz. While there’s no incriminating audio tape like Nixon’s notorious “smoking gun,” the paper trail now released shows striking similarities.

In the Watergate scandal, the crime itself—the 1972 break-in at the DNC headquarters—was eclipsed by the Nixon administration’s attempts to obstruct the investigation. That’s where the saying “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” came from. Nixon wasn’t nailed for planning the burglary—but for trying to shut down the investigation through illegal means.

Obama, it now appears, may have employed similar tactics to shield Hillary Clinton and his own administration from political fallout in 2016.

According to the Horowitz report, the FBI Cyber Division intercepted two Russian-language documents that detailed communications between then-DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and associates connected to George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. These documents suggested potential coordination to neutralize the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s use of an unsecured, private email server while serving as Obama’s Secretary of State—a violation that put top-secret national security data at risk.

The report further concluded that the source material was likely gathered through a cyber breach of the Atlantic Council, a globalist think tank known for its ties to Democrat-aligned interests.

Crucially, the report lays bare President Obama’s mindset at the time: “Obama is not in the mood to mar the very final segment of his presidency, his legacy, with a scandal around the leading nominee of the Democratic Party. To deal with this he is using Attorney General Loretta Lynch to mount a pressure campaign on FBI Director James Comey.”

That “pressure campaign” appears to have worked. On July 5, 2016, just days after then-AG Lynch’s highly suspicious tarmac meeting with former President Bill Clinton, Comey stunned the nation by announcing that Clinton would face no charges—despite clear evidence of gross negligence, including her deletion of over 30,000 emails under congressional subpoena, the use of BleachBit, and even physically smashing devices with hammers.

It now seems that exoneration was orchestrated at the very top.

Page seven of the Horowitz report is even more damning. It cites a second Russian report stating, “Barack Obama, leading the Democratic Party, sanctioned the use of all the administrative levers to remove possibly negative effects of the FBI investigation of the business of the Clinton Foundation and the email correspondence of the State Department.”

That’s not just protecting a candidate—it’s using the executive power of the presidency to manipulate a federal investigation for political gain.

Grassley’s revelations, when combined with last week’s disclosures from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—who accused Obama of orchestrating the fraudulent Russia collusion narrative against President Trump—are forming a deeply troubling picture. It’s a picture of a sitting president weaponizing the DOJ and FBI to shield his political heir and derail his successor.

While there’s no Oval Office tape of Obama ordering the DOJ to stand down, the declassified reports show a paper trail of political interference that’s growing harder to ignore.

Just as Nixon’s presidency collapsed under the weight of the Watergate cover-up, Obama’s legacy is now under intense scrutiny for what some are calling the “ObamaGate smoking gun.”