• FBI Director James Comey and Clinton emails: Comey gained access to eight thumb drives containing sensitive State Department emails from Clinton and Obama that appeared compromised by foreign hackers, but closed the investigation without examining them before exonerating Clinton in July 2016.
• Obama and Air Force One timing: Obama invited Clinton aboard Air Force One hours after the FBI exoneration on July 5, 2016, to launch her campaign tour; security experts noted the trip required weeks of advance planning, suggesting prior knowledge of the investigation's closure.
• Comey's predetermined exoneration: Comey began drafting his exoneration statement months before concluding the Clinton email investigation, with declassified documents showing he conveyed urgency to complete the probe.
• Attorney General Lynch and Clinton campaign: DNC communications revealed Obama's Attorney General Loretta Lynch was secretly communicating with Clinton campaign officials and assuring them the FBI would go easy on Clinton during the email investigation.
• Clinton Foundation investigation shutdown: FBI headquarters shut down the Clinton Foundation investigation on July 20, 2016, citing political sensitivities and barring agents from issuing subpoenas, conducting interviews, or sharing information related to the case.
• Clinton campaign plan to smear Trump: Declassified documents reveal Clinton campaign officials developed a plan to link Trump to Russia, which CIA officials warned President Obama about; Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook testified Clinton personally approved the strategy.
• Trump campaign investigation launch: On July 31, 2016, the same day Comey approved opening the "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation into Trump campaign's alleged Russia collusion, FBI official Peter Strzok texted that investigating Trump "matters" more than investigating Clinton.
• Post-election intelligence assessment revision: After Trump's election victory, Obama ordered intelligence agencies to revisit assessments regarding Russian interference; within three weeks, the CIA concluded Putin personally launched an influence operation to help Trump, partly relying on the Clinton-funded Steele dossier.

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In the run-up to the 2016 Democratic Party convention, FBI Director James Comey gained access to at least eight thumb drives containing large volumes of former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s sensitive State Department emails – as well as some from President Obama – that appeared to have been compromised by foreign hackers.

Instead of investigating the explosive new batch of evidence revealed in recently declassified documents, Comey rushed ahead to close an investigation into whether Clinton improperly transmitted and received classified material from a private, unsecured server she kept in her basement. Comey also took the extraordinary step of bypassing the attorney general and personally exonerating Clinton of wrongdoing during an unusual press conference on July 5, 2016.

Although such trips take long planning, Obama flew with Clinton aboard Air Force One just hours after the FBI exonerated her regarding her use of a private email server. 

AP

Just hours later, Obama invited Clinton – who would be formally nominated as the Democrats’ standard bearer three weeks later – aboard Air Force One to help launch her multicity campaign tour, during which he officially endorsed Clinton as his preferred White House successor. “I’m ready to pass the baton,” Obama declared, as he stumped for her for the first time.

Comey’s decision to remove the cloud of scandal over Clinton’s campaign, allowing the president to get on with the business of campaigning for her, is just one avenue of investigation the Justice Department is pursuing in wide-ranging probes whose targets include a figure largely unscathed by his era’s scandals: former President Barack Obama. 

Attorney General Pam Bondi said prosecutors are investigating, among other things, “possible coordination between the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”

Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, has impaneled a grand jury to hear evidence related to an alleged “grand criminal conspiracy” by Obama and Biden officials to enlist law enforcement and intelligence agencies in rigging elections and carrying out political espionage against Donald Trump.

The fate of these investigations is still unclear. Actions against former presidents – especially for conduct in office – have been exceedingly rare, with the exception of President Trump. And the courts have pushed back on the Trump administration’s recent efforts to indict other Obama-era figures, including Comey.

Nevertheless, a RealClearInvestigations look at the evidence Trump administration prosecutors are presenting to the grand jury, which includes a raft of recently declassified CIA and FBI documents, shows Obama’s deep involvement in both protecting Clinton and advancing the conspiracy theory that Trump conspired with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Drawing from thousands of pages of documents and exclusive interviews with law enforcement and intelligence officials, RCI’s analysis shows the former president was repeatedly at the center of events surrounding both the closing of the Clinton investigation and the subsequent opening of several investigations targeting the Trump campaign. Post-election, Obama also ordered the manufacturing of anti-Trump intelligence, which set Trump’s presidency up for continued investigations. 

On the Tarmac

The neutrality of Obama's Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, was questioned after she met with Bill Clinton at a Phoenix airport while the Hillary investigation was ongoing.

YouTube

Airports played an outsized role in the 2016 election. It was former President Bill Clinton’s June 27 meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on his parked plane at a Phoenix airport that reportedly convinced Comey that Lynch might appear compromised and that he should go around the proper charging officer for federal crimes to clear his wife. 

About a week later, Obama signaled the all-clear after Comey’s press conference by inviting Hillary Clinton to fly to campaign rallies on Air Force One. 

“I’m here today because I believe in Hillary Clinton,” Obama said during their July 5, 2016, rally in Charlotte, N.C. “I have had a front-row seat to her judgment and her commitment.”

Some presidential security experts and Secret Service sources contacted by RCI said the timing of the trip was suspicious.

They point out that the president authorizing Clinton to fly aboard Air Force One on the same day his hand-picked FBI director absolved her of crimes was almost certainly not a last-minute decision because it would have required extensive pre-planning.

“The security involved in setting up that tour took weeks of advance work, which means Obama knew she was going to be cleared and not charged,” said a veteran Secret Service official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. “Obama wasn’t going to risk endorsing her and joining her on the campaign trail without her first being cleared of federal crimes,” he added. “He knew about the end of the investigation well ahead of time.”

Although the FBI did not interview Clinton about her emails until July 2, 2016, Comey had been circulating drafts of his exoneration statement at FBI headquarters for months and conveying to agents there was an “extraordinary sense of urgency” to complete the investigation, according to the declassified documents released recently by the Justice Department. Critics note that the reasoning he offered for clearing Clinton in his July 5 statement was rife with contradictions. “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information,” Comey said, “our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

It is not known if any of the drafts were shared with the White House. Secret Service entry logs show Comey visited with Obama at least three times in 2016. “The timing and presumption that Clinton would eventually be the Democratic Party nominee for President was part of the defendant’s decision-making process,” according to court papers the DOJ filed in November detailing why it alleges Comey predetermined Clinton’s innocence.

Pulling Punches

The new evidence suggests that Comey wasn’t acting alone. It indicates that Obama was more involved in the Clinton probe than previously reported and that Comey, whose entire family supported Clinton, may have pulled his punches to placate the incumbent president and avoid getting on the wrong side of the woman he assumed would be Obama’s successor.

Obama's FBI Director James Comey began drafting his exoneration of Clinton months before the email probe was concluded. 

AP

The recently declassified appendix of a 2018 report from the DOJ’s inspector general reviewing the integrity of the FBI’s investigation of Clinton found that the FBI never searched the eight thumb drives containing thousands of unexamined Clinton emails that were “exfiltrated” by foreign actors. Comey was first briefed about the cache of new evidence in May 2016 when he had begun drafting his exoneration statement, and then again a week before he unilaterally exonerated Clinton.

FBI lawyers admitted in internal written memos, also recently declassified, that the information was necessary to conduct a “thorough and complete investigation” and “assess the national security risks” associated with the breaches from Clinton’s use of a private email server, which cyber-forensic analysts had already found contained at least 2,063 classified emails, some at the “Top Secret/Special Access Program” level. They also thought it was necessary to divine “the full scope of unauthorized disclosure of classified emails found on the former Secretary’s server and to identify any potential cyber intrusions of the server.”

“They got some thumb drives that dealt with all these issues, [and] they didn’t even bother to go through [them],” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley. “It was a complete cover-up.”

The appendix also reveals Democratic National Committee communications suggesting that Obama’s attorney general, Lynch, was secretly in communication with the Clinton campaign during the probe of her emails and had assured campaign officials that the FBI would go easy on her.

According to the communications, which U.S. intelligence analysts determined were “not fabrications,” Obama was putting “pressure” on Comey through Lynch to get rid of Clinton’s email scandal as early as January 2016. Not long after, Comey began drafting his statement exonerating Clinton – months before FBI agents had ended their investigation.

In her 2018 congressional deposition, Lynch testified that she never obstructed the probe or exerted any influence over it. But she has acknowledged that she had spoken to Comey about diminishing the probe’s significance by referring to the email investigation in the press as a “matter,” not an investigation. Lynch did not respond to requests for comment sent to her law firm.

Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, whose wife had sought the support of Clinton allies while seeking office, ordered agents to back off a probe of the Clinton Foundation. 

AP

DNC communications from March 2016 revealed that Obama also “sanctioned the use of administrative levers” to scuttle the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation. Recently declassified FBI documents show that around the same time, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had ordered field agents to back off their investigation of Clinton Foundation donors and former Secretary of State Clinton as part of a possible pay-for-play scheme. McCabe did not respond to requests for comment sent to his attorney and to George Mason University, where he is a visiting professor.

(Just months earlier, McCabe and his wife Jill met with Virginia’s then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton ally, at the governor’s mansion in Richmond to discuss raising money for Mrs. McCabe’s state senate race. The Clinton machine ended up pumping more than $675,000 into Jill McCabe’s Democratic campaign. McAuliffe had long maintained a seat on the Clinton Foundation board. RCI has learned, furthermore, that before moving to the D.C. area, the McCabes were 15-year neighbors of the Clintons in the hamlet of Chappaqua, N.Y., according to property records.)

Then, on July 20, just five days before the start of the Democratic National Convention, FBI headquarters shut down the Clinton Foundation investigation. “Based on the [political] sensitivities surrounding the Clinton Foundation,” a just-declassified internal FBI document reveals, agents were suddenly barred from issuing subpoenas, conducting interviews, or sharing bank information related to the case with other offices. HQ warned field offices to avoid creating “any impression we are investigating the Clinton Foundation or the Clintons.” 

RCI made several requests for comment to Comey and Obama. Comey declined comment through his attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, who successfully defended him against federal perjury and obstruction charges. The DOJ is appealing the case, which was dismissed by a Clinton-appointed judge, not on the merits, but on the grounds that the federal prosecutor who indicted him had not been appointed properly. Obama’s Washington office declined comment.

At the time, the White House insisted it had no prior knowledge of Comey’s decisions. 

Trump, pictured at the 2016 GOP Convention, accused Obama and Comey of running a “rigged” investigation of his Democratic opponent.

AP

Trump, who was on the verge of accepting the Republican Party presidential nomination, did not buy it. He accused Obama and Comey of running a “rigged” investigation of his Democratic opponent.

“It was no accident that charges were not recommended against Hillary the exact same day as President Obama campaigns with her for the first time,” Trump said on July 5, 2016.

Unbeknownst to Trump, July 5 would loom large for another reason: On the very day Obama’s FBI cleared Clinton, it set its sights on him.

Using the FBI To Smear Trump

That day, the bureau received the first in a series of false reports alleging Trump conspired with Russia. The reports, authored by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, then working as an FBI informant, were funded by Clinton’s campaign. 

Weeks later, President Obama was personally warned by the CIA that the Clinton campaign was planning to create a foreign espionage scandal falsely tying Trump to Russia to distract attention from her own espionage investigation involving her use of a private server to transmit classified emails.

A declassified memo revealed that Clinton had personally approved a plan to “smear” and “demonize” Trump as a Putin stooge,  which was proposed by one of her foreign policy advisers, Julianne Smith, who had previously served as Vice President Joe Biden’s deputy security adviser. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robbie Mook, later testified in Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation that Clinton personally approved a plan to claim Trump had a back-channel to Putin through a Russian bank – an assertion that proved utterly baseless. “We discussed it with Hillary,” Mook told a D.C. court in 2022. “She agreed with the decision.”

According to the document, Smith said that the FBI, where Clinton had “supporters,” would help pour fuel on “the fire,” suggesting foreknowledge of the coming Russiagate investigation, which had not yet been formally opened. She added that they would also get help from the “IC,” or intelligence community, where Clinton had a lot of “sympathizers.”

Strikingly, there appeared to be an understanding among Clinton campaign aides that the FBI and CIA would get involved in an effort to kneecap Trump well before such an effort manifested in an official capacity.

In addition, the campaign solicited help directly from the White House.

In a July 25 text-message exchange with another Clinton adviser, Smith reached out to a special assistant to the president and National Security Council member for information about an “investigation” into Russia and Trump. “She went as far as she could” in divulging sensitive information, Smith told the other adviser. Sources say the Obama aide is believed to be Celeste Wallander, who at the time was also senior director for Russia and Eurasia on the National Security Council. Smith indicated she also contacted the “OVP,” or office of the vice president.

Special Counsel John Durham unearthed evidence suggesting Hillary Clinton approved the plan use false Russian ties to smear Trump. 

AP

Smith told Durham she did not “specifically remember any such idea” to spread dirt on Trump. Wallander did not reply to requests for comment when contacted at her new position as executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s office in Washington.

Grassley said that the new evidence, which he has fought for years to declassify, provides additional proof that “the Clinton campaign believed elements of the Obama administration would help them achieve their political ends against Trump.”

The plan to tie Trump to Russia went prime time during the DNC convention, held from July 25 to July 28.

During his nationally televised convention speech on July 27, Biden warned, “We cannot elect a man who belittles our closest allies, while embracing dictators like Vladimir Putin.” Obama pitched in during his own speech the following night, claiming that Trump “cozies up to Putin.”

Comey also knew about Clinton’s plan to manufacture a smear campaign against Trump, according to Durham. Yet on July 31, 2016, he approved the opening of the code-named “Crossfire Hurricane” espionage investigation of the Trump campaign for alleged – and since-disproven – collusion with Russia. Three months later, Comey even obtained a wiretap to spy on one of Trump’s campaign advisers, Carter Page, based almost entirely on the false allegations in the Clinton-funded Steele dossier.

The Russia probe was headed by Peter Strzok, the same FBI counterintelligence official who led the Clinton email probe. Internal FBI communications strongly suggest Strzok plotted to take a hard line against Trump. 

Although Peter Strzok was officially in charge of the FBI's Trump probe, he texted a colleague that the "White House is running this thing." 

AP

On July 31, Strzok texted FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who worked directly under Comey’s deputy Andrew McCabe, to discuss the difference in the two investigations. He emphasized that the Trump case mattered more than the Clinton case, and suggested that the FBI merely checked the boxes in its investigation of Clinton.

“[D]amn this feels momentous. Because this matters. The other one did, too, but that was to ensure we didn’t F something up. This matters because this MATTERS,” Strzok said. “So super glad to be on this voyage with you.”

“White House Is Running This”

Strzok would soon learn he was the nominal head of the investigation. On. Aug. 3, Obama met with Biden and Comey and several other officials inside the White House to discuss the Clinton plan to link Trump and Putin, according to declassified records.

The next day, Strzok attended a meeting with CIA officials as part of an interagency group on Russia and Trump created by then-CIA Director John Brennan. Known as the “fusion cell,” the group was quarterbacked by CIA official Elizabeth “Liz” Vogt.

The following day, Strzok texted his FBI partner Page about the meeting. “Went well, best we could have expected,” he said, though he seemed annoyed to hear his investigation was under the control of the president. “Other than Liz’s quote, ‘the White House is running this,’” he added.

Nonetheless, their goals were aligned: Help Hillary Clinton, hurt Donald Trump.

Strzok and Page had earlier agreed to aggressively probe Trump to “stop” him from being president, in contrast to the softball approach they endeavored to take investigating Clinton. “One more thing: [Clinton] may be our next president,” Page wrote Strzok. “The last thing you need [is] going in there loaded for bear.”

“Agreed,” Strzok replied, before interviewing Clinton.

Both Strzok and Page have been subpoenaed by the recently impaneled federal grand jury hearing conspiracy evidence.

Instead of alerting the Trump campaign about the bureau’s concerns, Strzok dusted off the rarely used law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, to open additional espionage cases targeting Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort (code-named “Crossfire Fury”), George Papadopoulos (“Crossfire Typhoon”), and Carter Page (“Crossfire Dragon”).

The FBI dusted off a rarely used law to target Trump associates, including his first National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn

AP

The following week, he used FARA to open another counterintelligence case on Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, under the code name “Crossfire Razor.”

In a Sept. 2, 2016, text exchange, Page wrote Strzok that she was preparing talking points for Comey to brief Obama on their progress because “Potus [President of the United States] wants to know everything we’re doing.” 

Also, Obama appeared to be directing political strategy for the Democratic ticket from the White House.

In October 2016, Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine was caught on video saying Obama had called him the prior night to warn him Trump was in bed with “fascist” Putin. In conversation captured in the 2020 documentary “Hillary,” Kaine said the president demanded he and Clinton go hard on Trump: “Tim, remember, this is no time to be a purist. You’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House.” Clinton is overheard saying, “I echo that sentiment,” and hinted at a nefarious relationship between Trump and Russia.

A little more than a week before the election, Comey reluctantly reopened Clinton’s email case – a controversial decision he made only after New York FBI agent John Robertson blew the whistle on headquarters trying to “bury” the discovery a month earlier of more than 300,000 new Clinton State Department emails he found on a laptop Clinton confidante Huma Abedin shared with her then-husband, Anthony Weiner, a former Democratic lawmaker from New York, as RCI first reported. 

“The only reason Comey reopened the investigation is because the New York office threatened to bypass FBI headquarters and go straight to the Department of Justice regarding the additional emails that were discovered as a result of the Weiner [sex crimes] investigations,” former prosecutor and assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker said in an RCI interview.

Around the same time, McCabe denied field agents potentially valuable evidence from the Weiner laptop that could have justified reopening their Clinton Foundation probes, recently declassified FBI records also reveal.

Obama Doubles Down

After Trump defeated Clinton the following month, Obama doubled down, ordering U.S. intelligence agencies to revisit their prior assessments that found no evidence the Russian government tried to hack the election for Trump.

After Trump's surprising win, Obama ordered his intelligence agencies to revisit their conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin had not supported either candidate.

Pool Kremlin

Within just three weeks of Obama’s Dec. 9 order, the CIA came up with new evidence to conclude Putin personally launched an influence operation to help swing the race to Trump. The publicly released version of the assessment, which helped Obama and Clinton explain her shocking defeat, hid the fact that the CIA relied in part on the Clinton-funded dossier to reach its new conclusion.

Intelligence contradicting the “key judgment” that Putin helped Trump win was omitted from the assessment, known as the ICA. Career analysts objected to using the dossier, but Obama’s CIA chief Brennan overruled them. At least one senior intelligence analyst, now a whistleblower cooperating with the DOJ in its ongoing investigation of the entire scandal, said he was “threatened” by superiors to change his pre-election assessment to suggest Putin stole the election for Trump.

The Obama White House even prevented analysts preparing the new assessment from seeing the incriminating so-called Clinton Plan intelligence that exposed the plot to frame Trump as a Russian conspirator. In denying ICA drafters access to the intel, the White House spuriously claimed it was withholding the material “on grounds of executive privilege,” according to a secret congressional report that debunked the intelligence behind the ICA. (The explosive 2018 report had been locked in a safe at CIA headquarters until its declassification and release in July.)

On Dec. 15, 2016, weeks before the assessment had been finalized, Obama let it slip out in an NPR “exit interview” at the White House that his intelligence team had essentially predetermined the conclusion of the Trump-Russia assessment.

He said that no one should be “surprised by the CIA assessment that this [Russian meddling in the election] was done purposely to improve Trump’s chances [of winning].” Obama even suggested that Putin “was helping the Trump campaign.”

“So what the CIA is now assessing – which was, it was done purposefully to tilt the election in the direction of a particular candidate – shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody,” Obama added.

Obama's National Security Adviser, Susan Rice (center), was concerned after the president seemed to suggest to NPR that he knew what his intelligence agencies would conclude about Russian interference in the 2016 election before their assessment was complete.  

AP

Standing in the wings, Susan Rice, the president’s national security adviser, sent Obama back into the room following the interview to reassert that the assessment was still under review. 

“You had something to add?” asked NPR’s Steve Inskeep.

“It is worth noting that when it comes to the motivations of the Russians, there are still a whole range of assessments taking place among the agencies,” a clearly chagrined Obama said, his voice cracking. “And so when I receive a final report, you know, we’ll be able to, I think, give us a comprehensive and best guess as to those motivations.”

He stressed that “different agencies are still looking at all that stuff, gathering it together and hopefully putting [it] into a single package.” In fact, only three of the 17 intelligence agencies were involved in the process – the CIA, FBI, and NSA – and only five analysts drafted the final intel report, all of whom were handpicked by Obama’s CIA Director Brennan, who previously worked for Obama in the White House.

Obama’s intelligence czar James Clapper later revealed in a 2018 interview that the Obama-ordered assessment set off a chain of investigations targeting Trump and his administration over Russia.

“If it weren’t for President Obama, we might not have done the intelligence community assessment that we did that set up a whole sequence of events which are still unfolding today, notably, Special Counsel [Robert] Mueller’s investigation,” Clapper told CNN. “President Obama is responsible for that.”

Recently declassified emails reveal that after taking his marching orders from Obama, Clapper pressured the NSA, which had partially dissented from the key judgment that Putin personally intervened in the election to help Trump, to get “on the same page” and be “supportive” of the conclusion. He suggested they would all have to “compromise” their normal standards for intelligence-gathering to rush out the report to meet Obama’s deadline.

Sen. Grassley was even more emphatic: “There’s no doubt the new intelligence assessment was a political hit that had been ordered by President Obama.”

Obama's DNI, James Clapper, and CIA Director, John Brennan, have been told by federal prosecutors they are “targets” of investigation for their conduct regarding Russiagate. 

AP

Both Clapper and Brennan have been told by federal prosecutors they are “targets” of investigation and have been subpoenaed by the grand jury looking at conspiracy charges. In a letter from his attorney, Brennan said he has cooperated with the probe, turning over documents requested for the period July 2016 to February 2017. Brennan said he stands by the ICA and complained he is the target of a “manufactured criminal investigation.” Attempts to reach Clapper for comment were unsuccessful.

Oval Office Planning Session

The first week in January 2017 was a busy time at the Obama White House. 

On Jan. 5, Obama and Biden held an Oval Office meeting with Comey and other officials during which they discussed using the Logan Act, a little-used 18th-century law that criminalizes efforts by private citizens to conduct American foreign policy, against Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Later that month, Comey dispatched Strzok to the West Wing to ambush Flynn in an interview that would set a perjury trap leading to Flynn’s ouster and indictment on charges that were later dropped.

More significantly, they also discussed a plan to confront President-elect Trump with false allegations from the Steele dossier, which Comey presented as “intelligence.” On Jan. 6, Comey briefed Trump on Russia-related allegations, including those in the now-debunked Steele dossier – the same day the administration released an unclassified version of the ICA to the public.

Comey’s private briefing with Trump was later leaked to the press, lending credence to the dossier and giving Washington journalists official cover to publicize its transparently bogus rumors, starting with Buzzfeed, which published the entire Steele Dossier on Jan. 10.

On Jan. 12, still under the direction of the Obama administration, Comey also sought the renewal of a wiretap warrant to continue spying on Trump adviser Carter Page as a suspected “Russian agent” – the same day the bureau received an intelligence report warning of false information in the dossier that had put Page under suspicion. And Comey knew by that point the dossier was based on fabrications by Steele’s paid “primary subsource.” 

Later that month, Comey’s investigators learned while interviewing Igor Danchenko, a former Brookings Institution analyst who worked as Steele’s primary researcher, that key allegations in the dossier were nothing more than “bar talk.” Comey nonetheless approved the affidavit – underpinned by those same dossier lies – to electronically eavesdrop on Page for another 90 days.

GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley fought for years to declassify information that indicates the Obama White House and Clinton campaign colluded to undermine Trump.

AP

“With all these red lights flashing STOP, the Obama administration went full speed ahead,” Grassley said.

Some former prosecutors see a conspiracy in the unequal investigative treatment of Clinton and Trump, and they place Obama at the center of it.

“There are reasonable grounds for an investigation to determine if this was part of a broader conspiracy to protect Hillary Clinton and influence the election by smearing Trump at the same time,” said Swecker, a former prosecutor and top FBI official. 

“I don’t think there’s any doubt Obama was the mastermind behind the whole conspiracy,” he told RCI. “The problem is proving it.”

Trump leveled similar allegations last year, even going so far as to accuse the 44th president of “treason.” Obama spokesman Patrick Rodenbush dismissed the accusations as “bizarre” and “ridiculous.”

Hannah Hankins, now acting spokesperson for Obama’s post-presidency office, told RCI, “I won’t have anything new to add for this story.”

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• Brain Plasticity: The brain can form new connections and reorganize throughout adulthood, contrary to earlier scientific belief that neuroplasticity was limited to childhood.
• Challenge and Growth: Mental abilities including clear thinking, focus, creativity and judgment develop through exposure to challenges that push beyond routine cognitive autopilot.
• Novelty Over Repetition: While repetition maintains brain function, novel activities such as learning languages, dancing or playing instruments produce measurable increases in brain volume and connectivity.
• Neural Fatigue Limits: Prolonged mental work without breaks causes performance decline as attention networks slow and chemical signals accumulate, similar to muscle fatigue from overuse.
• Recovery is Essential: Rest periods allow strained neural circuits to reset and function optimally; breaks do not interrupt learning but are critical for efficient cognitive development.
• Sleep's Biological Role: Sleep serves non-negotiable functions including waste clearance through the glymphatic system, glycogen restoration, growth hormone release and memory consolidation during REM sleep.
• Exercise as Brain Support: Physical activity increases brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), promoting neuron growth, blood flow increase and cognitive health protection across the lifespan.
• Practical Implementation: Consistent small habits including routine variation, timely breaks, physical movement and prioritized sleep produce greater cognitive benefits than expensive programs or radical changes.

Your Brain Can Be Trained Much Like Your Muscles

By Joanna Fong-Isariyawongse
January 24, 2026

Karolina Grabowska www.kaboompics.com

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If you have ever lifted a weight, you know the routine: challenge the muscle, give it rest, feed it and repeat. Over time, it grows stronger.

Of course, muscles only grow when the challenge increases over time. Continually lifting the same weight the same way stops working.

It might come as a surprise to learn that the brain responds to training in much the same way as our muscles, even though most of us never think about it that way. Clear thinking, focus, creativity and good judgment are built through challenge, when the brain is asked to stretch beyond routine rather than run on autopilot. That slight mental discomfort is often the sign that the brain is actually being trained, a lot like that good workout burn in your muscles.

Think about walking the same loop through a local park every day. At first, your senses are alert. You notice the hills, the trees, the changing light. But after a few loops, your brain checks out. You start planning dinner, replaying emails or running through your to-do list. The walk still feels good, but your brain is no longer being challenged.

Routine feels comfortable, but comfort and familiarity alone do not build new brain connections.

As a neurologist who studies brain activity, I use electroencephalograms, or EEGs, to record the brain’s electrical patterns.

Research in humans shows that these rhythms are remarkably dynamic. When someone learns a new skill, EEG rhythms often become more organized and coordinated. This reflects the brain’s attempt to strengthen pathways needed for that skill.

Your brain trains in zones too

For decades, scientists believed that the brain’s ability to grow and reorganize, called neuroplasticity, was largely limited to childhood. Once the brain matured, its wiring was thought to be largely fixed.

But that idea has been overturned. Decades of research show that adult brains can form new connections and reorganize existing networks, under the right conditions, throughout life.

Some of the most influential work in this field comes from enriched environment studies in animals. Rats housed in stimulating environments filled with toys, running wheels and social interaction developed larger, more complex brains than rats kept in standard cages. Their brains adapted because they were regularly exposed to novelty and challenge.

Human studies find similar results. Adults who take on genuinely new challenges, such as learning a language, dancing or practicing a musical instrument, show measurable increases in brain volume and connectivity on MRI scans.

The takeaway is simple: Repetition keeps the brain running, but novelty pushes the brain to adapt, forcing it to pay attention, learn and problem-solve in new ways. Neuroplasticity thrives when the brain is nudged just beyond its comfort zone.

Tasks that stretch your brain just beyond its comfort zone, such as knitting and crocheting, can improve cognitive abilities over your lifespan – and doing them in a group setting brings an additional bonus for overall health. Dougal Waters/DigitalVision via Getty Images

The reality of neural fatigue

Just like muscles, the brain has limits. It does not get stronger from endless strain. Real growth comes from the right balance of challenge and recovery.

When the brain is pushed for too long without a break – whether that means long work hours, staying locked onto the same task or making nonstop decisions under pressure – performance starts to slip. Focus fades. Mistakes increase. To keep you going, the brain shifts how different regions work together, asking some areas to carry more of the load. But that extra effort can still make the whole network run less smoothly.

Neural fatigue is more than feeling tired. Brain imaging studies show that during prolonged mental work, the networks responsible for attention and decision-making begin to slow down, while regions that promote rest and reward-seeking take over. This shift helps explain why mental exhaustion often comes with stronger cravings for quick rewards, like sugary snacks, comfort foods or mindless scrolling. The result is familiar: slower thinking, more mistakes, irritability and mental fog.

This is where the muscle analogy becomes especially useful. You wouldn’t do squats for six hours straight, because your leg muscles would eventually give out. As they work, they build up byproducts that make each contraction a little less effective until you finally have to stop. Your brain behaves in a similar way.

Likewise, in the brain, when the same cognitive circuits are overused, chemical signals build up, communication slows and learning stalls.

But rest allows those strained circuits to reset and function more smoothly over time. And taking breaks from a taxing activity does not interrupt learning. In fact, breaks are critical for efficient learning.

Overdoing any task, whether it be weight training or sitting at the computer for too long, can overtax the muscles as well as the brain. Halfpoint Images/Moment via Getty Images

The crucial importance of rest

Among all forms of rest, sleep is the most powerful.

Sleep is the brain’s night shift. While you rest, the brain takes out the trash through a special cleanup system called the glymphatic system that clears away waste and harmful proteins. Sleep also restores glycogen, a critical fuel source for brain cells.

And importantly, sleep is when essential repair work happens. Growth hormone surges during deep sleep, supporting tissue repair. Immune cells regroup and strengthen their activity.

During REM sleep, the stage of sleep linked to dreaming, the brain replays patterns from the day to consolidate memories. This process is critical not only for cognitive skills like learning an instrument but also for physical skills like mastering a move in sports.

On the other hand, chronic sleep deprivation impairs attention, disrupts decision-making and alters the hormones that regulate appetite and metabolism. This is why fatigue drives sugar cravings and late-night snacking.

Sleep is not an optional wellness practice. It is a biological requirement for brain performance.

Exercise feeds the brain too

Exercise strengthens the brain as well as the body.

Physical activity increases levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, a protein that acts like fertilizer for neurons. It promotes the growth of new connections, increases blood flow, reduces inflammation and helps the brain remain adaptable across one’s lifespan.

This is why exercise is one of the strongest lifestyle tools for protecting cognitive health.

Train, recover, repeat

The most important lesson from this science is simple. Your brain is not passively wearing down with age. It is constantly remodeling itself in response to how you use it. Every new challenge and skill you try, every real break, every good night of sleep sends a signal that growth is still expected.

You do not need expensive brain training programs or radical lifestyle changes. Small, consistent habits matter more. Try something unfamiliar. Vary your routines. Take breaks before exhaustion sets in. Move your body. Treat sleep as nonnegotiable.

So the next time you lace up your shoes for a familiar walk, consider taking a different path. The scenery may change only slightly, but your brain will notice. That small detour is often all it takes to turn routine into training.

The brain stays adaptable throughout life. Cognitive resilience is not fixed at birth or locked in early adulthood. It is something you can shape.

If you want a sharper, more creative, more resilient brain, you do not need to wait for a breakthrough drug or a perfect moment. You can start now, with choices that tell your brain that growth is still the plan.

Joanna Fong-Isariyawongse, Associate Professor of Neurology, University of Pittsburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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• Scientific Integrity Foundation: Feynman emphasized that experimental agreement is the ultimate test of validity, regardless of theoretical beauty, intelligence, or authority.
• Practical Verification Approach: Feynman preferred learning through direct experimentation and participation rather than abstract description or reading.
• Reality Over Authority: Feynman exposed the Challenger disaster by demonstrating O-ring failure with ice water, cutting through institutional flawed reasoning to reveal physical truth.
• AI Performance Limitations: Modern AI systems excel at pattern detection but often provide statistical correlations without causal understanding or explanation of failures.
• Black Box Problem: Neural networks with millions of parameters produce confident outputs while remaining opaque about internal reasoning and failure conditions.
• Cargo Cult Science Warning: Feynman distinguished between systems that imitate scientific appearance while missing essential verification, versus genuine tools that expose idea limitations.
• Uncertainty as Progress Engine: Feynman valued doubt and provisional knowledge over false certainty, treating unanswerable questions as more valuable than unquestionable answers.
• Institutional Accountability Need: AI systems influencing real decisions require transparent limits and visible failure modes to maintain trustworthiness and prevent institutional opacity.

Explore

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool,” Richard Feynman said in a 1974 commencement address at Caltech. He wasn’t speaking as a lofty philosopher but as a working physicist, offering a practical guide to daily work. He had little patience for prestige, authority, or explanations that couldn’t be tested. “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, how smart you are, or what your name is,” he liked to say. “If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.” Students often giggled at first, but then became silent as it sank in.

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Feynman was a man of contrasts—lively, irreverent, and deeply suspicious of explanations that sounded good but didn’t cash out in practice. Instead, he emphasized curiosity and intolerance for nonsense. And when things got too stuffy, he preferred playing the bongo drums. Feynman had a strong instinct to understand things by doing them, not by reading about them. Just as with physics, he didn’t want descriptions, he wanted participation. Curiosity didn’t need justification. And yes, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. He invented a visual way to understand how light and matter interact—diagrams that let physicists see complex processes at a glance.

As a teenager, Feynman repaired radios without schematics. In his last act as a public figure, he exposed the cause of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Despite being ill with cancer, he cut through NASA’s flawed reasoning, insisted on speaking to engineers rather than administrators, and demonstrated O-ring failure with a simple glass of ice water on live television. In his mind, fixing radios and explaining the Challenger disaster were the same problem. In both cases, authority had obscured reality, and a simple experiment was enough to reveal it. That way of thinking—forged long before machine learning and neural networks—turns out to be uncomfortably relevant today.

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You can imagine Feynman being tempted to rise and ask a deceptively simple question: How do you know?

If Feynman were alive and wandering through our technological landscape, it’s hard to imagine him standing on a stage at an AI product launch. He disliked hype. He was suspicious of grand promises delivered before the details were understood—of applause standing in for questions. Instead of unveiling a finished product, he’d likely say something like, “I don’t really know what this thing does yet—that’s why I’m interested in it.” He might take the demo apart and break it, before fixing it and putting it back together. That alone would drain the room of hype and dampen the mood of anyone hoping for a smooth pitch, such as investors and stakeholders.

It is easier to imagine him sitting in the last row of a darkened auditorium, notebook in hand, watching carefully. On the screen, colorful animations glide past: neural networks glowing, data flowing, arrows pointing confidently upward, unencumbered by error bars, a demo that works beautifully, provided nothing unexpected happens. A speaker explains that the system “understands language,” “reasons about the world,” “discovers new knowledge.” Each claim is met with nods and polite applause. You can see Feynman being tempted to rise and ask a deceptively simple question: How do you know?

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But Feynman, new to this spectacle, would wait. He would listen for the moment when someone explained what the machine does when it fails, or how one might tell whether it truly understands anything at all. He would notice that the demo works flawlessly—once—and that no one asks what happens when the input is strange, incomplete, or wrong. He would hear words doing a great deal of work, and experiments doing very little.

UTTER HONESTY: In his 1974 commencement speech at Caltech, Richard Feynman told students scientific integrity depends on “utter honesty.” Experiments should “try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.” Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Artificial intelligence is being presented to the public as a transformative force—one that promises to revolutionize science, medicine, education, and creativity itself. In many ways, these claims are justified. Machine learning systems can detect patterns at scales no human could manage: predicting the three-dimensional structures of proteins, screening images of tissue and cells for changes, identifying rare astronomical signals buried in noise, and generating fluent text or images on demand. These systems excel at sifting through oceans of data with remarkable speed and efficiency, revealing regularities that would otherwise remain hidden.

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Feynman would not have dismissed any of this. He was fascinated by computation and simulation. He helped pioneer Monte Carlo methods (simulating many possible outcomes at random and averaging the results) at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and computational approaches to quantum mechanics. Used well, AI can help scientists ask better questions, explore larger parameter spaces, and uncover patterns worth investigating. Used poorly, it can short-circuit that process—offering answers without insight, correlations without causes, and predictions without understanding. The danger is not automation itself, but the temptation to mistake impressive performance for understanding.

Much of today’s artificial intelligence operates as a black box. Models are trained on vast—often proprietary—datasets, and their internal workings remain opaque even to their creators. Modern neural networks can contain millions, sometimes billions, of adjustable parameters. One of Feynman’s contemporaries, John von Neumann, once wryly observed: “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make his tail wiggle.” The metaphor warns of mistaking noise for meaning. Neural networks produce outputs that look fluent, confident, sometimes uncannily insightful. What they rarely provide is an explanation of why a particular answer appears, or when the system is likely to fail.

This creates a subtle but powerful temptation. When a system performs impressively, it is easy to treat performance as understanding, and statistical success as explanation. Feynman would have been wary of that move. He once scribbled on his blackboard, near the end of his life, a simple rule of thumb: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” For him, understanding meant being able to take something apart, to rebuild it, and to know where it would break. Black-box systems invert that instinct. They invite us to accept answers we cannot fully reconstruct, and to trust results whose limits we may not recognize until something goes wrong.

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Feynman had a name for this kind of confusion: “cargo cult science.” In fact, that was the title of his 1974 commencement address. He described cargo cult science as research that imitates the outward forms of scientific practice—experiments, graphs, statistics, jargon—-while missing its essential core.

The term came from South Pacific islanders who, after World War II, built wooden runways and bamboo control towers in the hope that cargo planes would return. They reproduced the rituals they had observed, down to carved headphones and signal fires. “They follow all the apparent precepts,” Feynman said, “but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.” The lesson was not about foolishness, but about misunderstanding. Without knowing why something works, copying its surface features is not enough.

Feynman’s message was not that science produces miracles but teaches a way of thinking that resists dogma.

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The risk with AI is not that it doesn’t work. The risk is that it works well enough to lull us into forgetting what science is for: not producing answers but exposing ideas to reality. For Feynman, science was about learning precisely where ideas fail. When performance becomes the goal, and success is measured only by outputs that look right, that discipline quietly erodes.

He loved technology and new tools, especially those that made it easier to test ideas against reality. He created visual tools, like his Nobel-Prize-winning diagrams, that simplified complex interactions without hiding their assumptions. But he was always careful to distinguish between instruments that help us probe nature and systems that merely produce convincing answers. Tools, for Feynman, were valuable not because they were powerful, but because they made it easier to see where an idea broke.

In Feynman’s view, science does not advance through confidence, but through doubt, by a willingness to remain unsure. Scientific knowledge, he argued, is a patchwork of statements with varying degrees of certainty—all provisional, all subject to revision. “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered,” Feynman said, “than answers that can’t be questioned.” This is in stark contrast to venture capital, which rewards bold claims. Corporate competition rewards speed. Media attention rewards spectacle. In such an environment, admitting uncertainty is costly.

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But for Feynman, uncertainty was not a weakness, it was the engine of progress. “I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing, than to have answers which might be wrong,” he said.

It’s tempting to think these concerns belong only to academics. But artificial intelligence is no longer confined to laboratories or universities. It shapes what people read and watch, how students are assessed, how medical risks are flagged, and how decisions are made about loans, jobs, or insurance.

In many of these settings, AI systems function less as tools than as institutional opacity—systems whose authority exceeds our ability to question them. Their outputs arrive with an air of objectivity, even when the reasoning behind them is clouded. When a recommendation is wrong, or a decision seems unfair, it is often difficult to know where the error lies—in the data, the model, or the assumptions embedded long before the system was deployed?

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In such contexts, the discipline of not fooling ourselves becomes more than an academic virtue. When opaque systems influence real lives, understanding their limits—knowing when they fail and why—becomes a civic necessity. Trust depends not only on performance, but on accountability, whether their limits are understood, questioned, and made visible when it matters.

Stepping back, the issue is not whether AI will transform science. It already has. The deeper question is whether we can preserve the values that make scientific knowledge trustworthy in the first place. Feynman’s answer, were he here, would likely be characteristically simple: slow down, ask what you know, admit what you don’t, and never confuse impressive results with understanding. History has shown more than once that scientific knowledge can race ahead of wisdom. Several physicists of Feynman’s generation would later reflect on having learned what could be done long before learning what should be done—a realization that arrived too late for comfort.

In 1955, Feynman gave a talk called “The Value of Science” at a National Academy of Sciences meeting at Caltech. He said that science is a discipline of doubt, remaining free to question what we think we know. His central message was not that science produces miracles but teaches a way of thinking that resists dogma, false certainty, and self-deception. He opened not with equations or authority, but with a Buddhist proverb: “To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.” Science, Feynman said, is that key, a tool of immense power. It can open both gates. Which way it turns depends on you.

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More on Richard Feynman from Nautilus

“What Impossible Meant to Feynman”

“The Day Feynman Worked Out Black-Hole Radiation on My Blackboard”

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“Another Side of Feynman”

Lead image: Tamiko Thiel / Wikimedia Commons

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• Robert Endres

  Posted on January 22, 2026

  Robert Endres is a professor of systems biology at Imperial College London, working at the interface of physics and biology to understand cellular sensing, migration, and pattern formation.

• Board of Peace Initiative: President Trump unveiled a "Board of Peace" at the World Economic Forum in Davos to address the Gaza conflict, with Phase 2 involving demilitarization, new governance, and reconstruction.
• International Opposition: France and Britain refuse to participate, citing concerns about certain member countries and the potential for the Board to rival the United Nations.
• Problematic Board Members: The inclusion of Vladimir Putin and the dictator of Belarus on the Board raises concerns about the initiative's credibility and intentions.
• Hamas Disarmament Challenge: For peace to succeed in Gaza, Hamas must be disarmed, as the group continues killing, torturing, and intimidating Gaza's citizens.
• UN Peacekeeping Failures: Historical examples demonstrate that UN peacekeeping forces lack the willingness to fight when necessary, citing failures in Yugoslavia, Lebanon, and elsewhere.
• Shared Security Responsibility: Countries like Egypt, Qatar, and others with regional stakes should contribute troops and funding to Middle Eastern security rather than relying solely on Israel and America.
• Trump's Coalition-Building Success: Trump has demonstrated ability to strengthen NATO commitments and force European allies to increase military spending through diplomatic pressure.
• Regional Threat Persistence: Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Government, Qatar's funding of anti-Western groups, and terrorist organizations remain primary threats to Middle Eastern security.

US President Donald Trump speaks at the "Board of Peace" meeting during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on January 22, 2026. AFP via Getty Images

President Trump’s remarks at Davos have caused a chorus of howls. Some of that howling is understandable. But some of it is makes as much sense as howling at the moon.

Take the “Board of Peace” proposal. Countries like France and Britain are refusing to sign up to the President’s initiative. They complain that there are countries on the Board they do not approve of. And that there is a risk that it could prove a rival organization to the United Nations.

It is true that the idea of Vladimir Putin or the dictator of Belarus being on the board is a worrying sign.

But if the Board can be a counter to the UN? Then good.

The Board of Peace was started in order to try to secure the situation in Gaza. And if the President succeeds in that then he deserves every accolade. He will have cracked one of the hardest conflicts in the world.

After all, Phase 2 of President Trump’s peace plan is now meant to be in process. That involves demilitarization of Gaza, new governance and reconstruction.

Yet Hamas still has a presence in Gaza. That “presence” means that the group are still killing, torturing and otherwise intimidating the citizens of Gaza. In order for peace to break out Hamas needs to be disarmed.

And that’s where the really big problem of the UN creeps in.

I’ve witnessed plenty of UN peacekeeping efforts for myself over the years. And they have a huge problem. Mainly the fact that the last thing most UN “peacekeeping” forces want to do is to fight.

Yet unless they are willing to fight then how can they keep the peace?

Some readers will remember how effective Dutch troops were in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. They stood aside as Serb forces massacred around 8,000 Bosnians.

More recently, take the situation in Southern Lebanon, which I reported from for the Post in 2024. For decades there has been a UN peacekeeping force in the south of Lebanon. Those troops were meant to be there to stop Hamas’ friends in Hezbollah from rearming their stockpile of missiles.

Did they do that? Did they hell. Over the years that the UN’s “peacekeeping force” was in southern Lebanon the Iranian proxy terror group stockpiled tens of thousands of long and short range missiles. And promptly started another war.

When I was there I saw the Hezbollah bases and tunnel entrances which had literally been created under the UN’s forces’ own eyes. The peacekeeping force’s bases and watch-towers had Hezbollah infrastructure mere yards from them. The UN’s “peacekeepers” had clearly said and done nothing.

The UN troops stationed in Lebanon when I was there were from Ireland and Sri Lanka. And as I said at the time to Post readers, find me an Irishman or Sri Lankan who is willing to lay down their lives in a confrontation with Hezbollah and I will try to find a bridge to sell you.

Of course they wouldn’t risk their lives. The average Irish or Sri Lankan soldier has zero interest in a confrontation with Hezbollah. So which troops would?

To date the answer in the region has each and every single time been the same: Israel and America.

But why should young Israeli and American soldiers have to be solely responsible for stopping anti-Western terrorist groups in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and any number of other places? Why shouldn’t the other countries whose security is at stake from these Ayatollah-funded terror groups also put their young peoples’ lives on the line?

Why shouldn’t Egypt — which used to control Gaza — have responsibility for security and be held to account for it? Why shouldn’t Qatar — which hosted and funded Hamas — now pay for the destruction they helped create?

The nervousness of some people about the “Board of Peace” centers on the fact that there are some distinctly shady actors who have been invited onto it. But if Trump can get these countries to actually pony up then it would be a very different matter.

Of course that will require a commitment of troops and funding which are not connected to terror. The Turkish and Qatari governments are too entwined with the region’s terror axis to be trusted with stationing troops. But they should be made to pay for it. And they and other countries can and should be made to help keep the peace in Gaza and help to rebuild it in other ways.

Through his recent interventions on the world stage Trump has shown that is capable of knitting together — not tearing apart — this country’s coalitions. By the admission of Mark Rutte — the NATO Secretary General — at Davos, if it had not been for Trump then there is no way that European countries would have fulfilled their military spending commitments.

If it had not been for Trump this country’s NATO allies would have continued to piggyback off American taxpayers and expect America to keep funding their security. By making some (often undiplomatic) threats to those allies Trump has made them take their own security seriously again.

Could the same thing now happen in the Middle East?

By appointing himself chairman of the Peace Board, President Trump has shown that he is committed to the peace plan that is in place. By inviting regional actors to join him he has shown that for once it will not be just Israel and America that are expected to police the Middle East.

But the main threats to Middle Eastern security remain the same. The terrorists still run the Islamic Revolutionary Government in Iran. The state of Qatar is still funding anti-Western propaganda and terrorist groups across the region. Even here at home in America.

But if anyone is in a position to tell them to cut it out and accept the new reality then President Trump is in the position to do so.

If he succeeds then you can expect those howls of alarm to turn to cheers.

• Claude Code Overview: Anthropic's AI coding tool translates written prompts into functional applications, enabling non-programmers to build working apps without writing code manually.
• Accessibility and Speed: Users can create websites, games, and productivity tools in minutes rather than weeks, democratizing software development beyond trained developers.
• Practical Applications: Examples include personal websites, educational games, expense trackers, column analysis tools, and file organization utilities built by the columnists.
• Usage Requirements: Claude Code requires a minimum $20-monthly Pro subscription with usage limits resetting every five hours; higher-tier plans available for $100+ monthly.
• Interface Options: Standard Claude Code offers a command-line style interface, while Claude Cowork provides pre-written prompts and user-friendly design for common tasks.
• Developer Evolution: Boris Cherny, Claude Code's creator, transitioned from writing 10% of his code with AI assistance in 2024 to relying entirely on AI-generated code by 2025.
• Quality Limitations: AI-generated code requires human oversight for bugs, design consistency, and accessibility; professional developers and designers remain necessary for refinement and optimization.
• Workforce Impact: Tool enables rapid task completion and creative expression while raising concerns about job displacement in software development and design industries.

ILLUSTRATION: EMIL LENDOF/WSJ

By

Joanna Stern

and

Ben Cohen

Jan. 23, 2026 5:30 am ET

What do two newspaper columnists do on a Saturday night?

We talk to AI and tell it to make weird apps. Then we brag about our creations.

Ben Cohen

I just redid my personal website from scratch in 20 minutes without writing a single line of code.

Joanna Stern

Wow, 1995 is super jealous of your personal website. Why does every vibe coder act like rebuilding a website is the equivalent of discovering fire?

Ben Cohen

Fine. I also made my daughter a reading game in 10 seconds! You learn to spell the names of the characters in “Frozen.”

Joanna Stern

Let it go, man. You’re proving my point: everyone’s making websites for themselves and janky games for their kids with Claude Code. At least I made Expenser, an app to do my expenses.

Ben Cohen

I wonder if we should just write a column together.

Joanna Stern

I wonder if we can vibe code the article page?

For the record, our bosses here at The Wall Street Journal pay us to write words, not lines of code. Which is a good thing, because we have absolutely no programming skills. But together, we managed to “vibe code” this article. The code to make those look like messages above? Us. That “Retro” button that makes the messages look like an old AOL Instant Messenger chat? Also us. The button below that flips all this to a classic newspaper design? Us again.

And by “us,” we mean our new intern, Claude Code.

This is a breakout moment for Anthropic’s coding tool, which has spread far beyond the tech nerds of Silicon Valley to normies everywhere. Not since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022 have so many people become so obsessed with an artificial-intelligence product.

Claude translates any idea you type into code. It can quickly build real, working apps you’ve always wished for—tools to manage your finances, analyze your DNA, mix and match your outfits, even keep your plants alive. Vibe-coding apps aren’t new, but Claude Code has proven to be a leap ahead in capabilities and smarts.

The results are wondrous and unsettling: People without a lick of coding experience are building things that once required trained software developers.

Things like this article.

We wrote all the actual words you’re reading—we swear!—but Claude Code wrote all the 1s and 0s.

Ben Cohen

I just made a tool that can search through all my previous columns and find patterns in the writing.

Joanna Stern

Oh, that’s cool. What did you find out?

Ben Cohen

That I have used the word “peculiar” in 34 columns. (And now 35.)

Joanna Stern

That is peculiar. I just ran my “Toothpaste Blaster” benchmark. And Claude did amazingly well.

Ben Cohen

You ran your what?

Joanna Stern

It’s how I compare vibe-coding apps. I make a game for an 8-year-old who refuses to clean the sink. I built it in Cursor last year. The prompt is simple: Make a game with a sink with toothpaste and allow the player to clean it with a sponge and water. Using Claude was easier than Cursor. Although Claude’s first sink faucet bore a strong resemblance to...male genitalia.

Ben Cohen

OK, now that is peculiar.

There are a few ways to use Claude Code. The easiest is to download Anthropic’s Claude desktop app for Mac or Windows and click the Code tab. Advanced users run it directly in their computer’s terminal.

You start by creating a folder on your computer’s desktop. This will be the home for Claude’s files and code. Then you type a prompt into the app’s chat box: Make me a WSJ-style article webpage with iMessage-like text chats. Claude might ask a few questions about what you want before it gets to work, showing the code it’s writing in real-time. When it’s done, you open that folder, click the webpage file and your app opens in a browser. Want to make tweaks? Just tell Claude: Make the gray background a little grayer.

As we found out, there’s something oddly magical and satisfying about watching AI make things.

Our Vibe-Coding Experiments

Clip Search

Freading

Toothpaste Blaster

Expenser

You need at least the $20-a-month Pro plan to access Claude Code. That buys a certain amount of computing power, with usage limits that reset every five hours. At first, it seems like plenty. Then it’s not. When you’re in a groove, the last thing you want to see is: “You’ve hit your limit.” You might even be tempted to splurge on the Max version of Claude Code for $100 or more a month.

For non-coders who want a friendlier interface, Anthropic just added a variation called Claude Cowork. It comes with pre-written prompts for common tasks—and it doesn’t look like Sandra Bullock’s screen in “The Net.”

Joanna Stern

Wow, wow, wow. I just had Claude Cowork clean up and organize all my book documents and my desktop. Nerve-wracking but amazing.

Ben Cohen

I’m jealous. I’m rate-limited till midnight.

Joanna Stern

This is where cool people would call you “Claude-pilled.”

Ben Cohen

Yes, I’m basically Boris Cherny.

Joanna Stern

Who?

Boris Cherny is the head of Claude Code. When we weren’t using his product, we called the Anthropic engineer to find out how he invented it.

One day in September 2024, Cherny began tinkering on a coding tool as a side project. A few days later, he shared it with his colleagues. When it was released to the public in early 2025, Cherny was using it for about 10% of his code. After a few months, he was relying on it for closer to 50%. These days, he says 100% of his code comes from the machine he built.

“I have not written a line of code by hand in two months,” he said. “A year ago, that would have sounded crazy.”

Now he spends his days managing a fleet of robot coders: Cherny typically has 10 different Claudes doing whatever he tells them to do.

“We call this multi-Clauding,” he said. “I wake up, have some idea, open my phone, go to the Code tab and start a few agents.”

Before long, Anthropic’s data scientists and even non-technical people on the company’s sales team found themselves multi-Clauding. The product got better as the underlying AI models got smarter, most recently with Anthropic’s Opus 4.5 release late last year. It got prettier, too, when Claude Code built a cleaner user interface for…Claude Code.

“In the next year,” Cherny said, “coding is going to start to get even more democratized.”

We felt that democratization firsthand while creating this article. Claude instantly spat out work that once required designers, developers and a string of meetings. Having collaborated on interactive projects at the Journal, we know this process can take weeks.

This time, we had a working prototype within five minutes—and Claude never once got sick of our many requests. As we kept going, we fixed bugs, added new features like the screenshot gallery and even figured out a way to flow Google Docs text into the design.

Then we did one thing that Claude couldn’t: We called our human colleagues.

To make sure our code wouldn’t crash the Journal’s site and app, we enlisted computational journalist Brian Whitton. To make sure the look wouldn’t burn your eyes, we brought in one of our designers, Audrey Valbuena. Let’s just say they had thoughts.

# article-review

Brian Whitton 2:34 PM

In an attempt to justify my existence, I’m offering to fix this bug for you where the photos don’t load right in newspaper mode.

Joanna Stern 2:35 PM

Ha, I’m putting this in the story. But let me try it on my own first.

Brian Whitton 2:36 PM

There’s also an issue with the alignment on the gallery images.

Joanna Stern 2:36 PM

I know, I’m going to fix that.

Audrey Valbuena 2:38 PM

I count numerous fonts in just the first section. Every hover interaction is different 😩 Zoom, bounce, change color, more drop shadow. I’m dizzy.

Joanna Stern 2:39 PM

Claude, please make a puke-cleaning app.

Audrey Valbuena 2:40 PM

I wish the toggle between iMessage and AIM changed all the chats on the page, too.

Joanna Stern 2:40 PM

Yeah, and I wish I had a pony.

Brian Whitton 2:41 PM

And the newspaper-mode button should be more accessible.

Joanna Stern 2:42 PM

I DO NOT WANT THIS JOB!

Audrey Valbuena 2:43 PM

It should all be more accessible, IMHO.

Joanna Stern 2:44 PM

I quit. This is the last time I try to do your job.

Ben Cohen 2:45 PM

And I’m rate-limited again.

So it’s not perfect, but it’s already pretty good. And this is the worst it will ever be. Before Claude’s work was picked apart by our colleagues, we asked Cherny what we should take away from our coding adventures.

“This is a skill and it takes time to learn, so don’t expect that you’re going to be good at it in the beginning,” he said. (Noted!) “Ultimately, it’s something that lets people be much more creative,” he went on. “It makes this thing that was locked up to this very small group of people accessible to everyone.”

The workforce implications of that are scary. Few leaders have been as vocal as Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei in warning about job displacement from AI.

But none of that stops Claude Code from being fun to play around with. When Claude is working on a task, it doesn’t say that it’s loading. It’s shenaniganing, combobulating, julienning, hullaballooing, whatchamacalliting, flibbertigibbeting—even Clauding.

There are currently 184 verbs on the company’s official list. We got it from Anthropic to verb-code this:

Thinking...

🏆 Winner:

Joanna Stern

OK, I’m almost done razzmatazzing. Now I’m just coding up another chat and improving the design of the gallery. Then we should be ready to publish.

Ben Cohen

I believe that’s called newspapering.

Joanna has left the chat.

×

Write to Joanna Stern at joanna.stern@wsj.com and Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com

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• Ownership Structure: Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX collectively own 45% of TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, with ByteDance retaining nearly 20% and existing ByteDance investor affiliates holding nearly one-third.
• Additional Investors: Michael Dell's family office, Alpha Wave investment firm, and Revolution venture capital firm joined the ownership group alongside the primary investors.
• Operational Responsibilities: The joint venture controls U.S. data protection, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurance functions.
• Algorithm Management: The joint venture licenses ByteDance's algorithm and will retrain it on U.S. user data to prevent outside manipulation of content.
• Security Oversight: Oracle serves as security partner with authority to audit and validate compliance with national security terms.
• Leadership: Adam Presser was named CEO and Will Farrell as chief security officer, both with prior TikTok experience, with a seven-member board including representatives from TikTok, Silver Lake, Oracle, MGX, and other investment firms.
• Valuation: The deal values TikTok U.S. at approximately $14 billion despite the U.S. entity generating roughly $14 billion annually in advertising revenue alone.
• Legislative History: Trump issued an executive order in 2020 demanding ByteDance sell U.S. operations; Congress passed a ban law in 2024; Supreme Court upheld it in January 2025; Trump delayed enforcement while negotiating the sale.

State of play: With the deal, U.S. tech giant Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX will collectively own 45% of the U.S. entity, which will be called "TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC."

• Nearly one-third of the company will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors, some of which are American firms.
• Nearly 20% of the joint venture will be retained by ByteDance.
• New investors include Michael Dell's family office, New York-based investment firm Alpha Wave and Revolution, a Washington D.C.-based venture capital firm co-founded by Steve Case and Ted Leonsis.

Between the lines: The joint venture will be responsible for U.S. data protection, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurance.

• The joint venture will license the company's algorithm from ByteDance and will retrain it on U.S. user data to ensure the content U.S. users see is free from outside manipulation, the company has said.
• After the deal closes, Oracle will act as the security partner responsible for auditing and validating compliance with the agreed-upon national security terms.

Zoom in: Adam Presser was named CEO of the joint venture, while Will Farrell was named chief security officer. Both previously held roles at TikTok and its U.S. data security organization.

• The joint venture's seven-member board consists of: TikTok CEO Shou Chew, TPG Global senior advisor Timothy Dattels, Susquehanna International Group managing director Mark Dooley, Silver Lake co-CEO Egon Durban, DXC Technology CEO Raul Fernandez, Oracle executive vice president Kenneth Glueck and MGX chief strategy and safety officer David Scott.

By the numbers: The deal values TikTok U.S. at around $14 billion, a source confirmed to Axios, which is an extremely low price given that TikTok's U.S. entity makes roughly $14 billion annually in advertising revenues alone, per analyst estimates.

Catch up quick: The White House and the Chinese government hammered out a deal in principle in September to sell TikTok's U.S. operations to a joint venture controlled by a U.S. investor group led by Andreessen Horowitz, Silver Lake and Oracle.

• Terms of that deal have since shifted, in part because of conflicts of interest. Andreessen Horowitz, for example, was an early investor in Facebook, now Meta, and its co-founder Marc Andreessen sits on Meta's board.
• President Trump at one point last year said in a Fox News interview that the investor group is expected to include Michael Dell, Lachlan Murdoch and Rupert Murdoch.

Flashback: Trump first issued an executive order demanding that ByteDance sell its U.S. operations in 2020.

• Congress passed a law in 2024 to ban the app unless it was sold.
• The Supreme Court upheld that law in January 2025, but Trump repeatedly postponed its enforcement through a series of executive orders while his administration tried to negotiate a sale.

Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional context.