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It seems Trump is keeping his allegation intentionally vague. “You know what the crime is,” he said Monday when asked by reporters what he meant and what specific crimes he was alleging. Pressed, Trump was unable to name any.

But we got some clues on Wednesday that it may be connected to two things close to Trump’s heart:

1. Trump’s full-scale effort to undermine the Russia investigation that dominated nearly the first two years of his presidency and swept up many of his top aides, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
2. Trump’s reelection efforts

Whatever it is, this Obamagate allegation seems to be ramping up this week with the help of some Senate Republicans, Trump’s conservative media allies and his top intelligence chief — and more and more, it seems to be geared at Trump’s presumptive 2020 opponent, Joe Biden.

On Wednesday, Senate Republicans released the names of Obama administration officials who may have asked intelligence officials to reveal the hidden names of Americans popping up in intelligence reports in December 2016 and January 2017. One of the people on the senators’ list was then-Vice President Biden.

An American unmasked in one of those intelligence reports was Flynn, who was observed talking to the Russian ambassador. At the time, Trump had won the presidency but hadn’t yet been inaugurated, but his incoming national security adviser was already talking with the Russian ambassador about sanctions levied on Russia by the Obama administration. (It was lies about those conversations that eventually got Flynn fired from his job shortly after Trump was inaugurated and eventually lead to a guilty plea that the Justice Department under William P. Barr is now arguing wasn’t actually a crime.)

Intelligence agencies routinely respond to such “unmasking”requests, which reveal the identities of U.S. individuals who are referred to documents to allow government officials to better understand what they are reading. Unmaskings are legal and agents say it’s a useful tool to uncover potential spies, according to The Post’s Shane Harris and Matt Zapotosky.

But sharing the names of who requested the unmasking is rare.

Republican senators publicized the names of those officials after Trump’s acting director of intelligence, Richard Grenell, declassified and gave the Justice Department their names. By disclosing these officials, the Senators are raising the specter of wrongdoing because members of the Obama administration, including and perhaps especially Biden, appear on the list. The not-so-quiet part that they leave unsaid: Did Biden somehow play a role in getting the FBI to investigate one of Trump’s allies?

There’s no evidence that’s the case.

Since his taking office, the president and his allies have accused the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and any possible ties to the Trump campaign as being a “hoax” and a political effort to undermine his presidency. Many continue to question the motives behind the investigation and the Obama administration’s role in it, especially Biden’s.

“It is, from my standpoint, pretty curious that the vice president of the United States would be requesting unmasking in this case of General Flynn eight days before he left office,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chair of the Homeland Security Committee and one of the senators who released the names, said Wednesday night on Fox News.

That question has galvanized the right, as Trump continues to get low marks from the public for his response to the coronavirus pandemic. Conservative blogger Erick Erickson, who has criticized Trump’s coronavirus response, joined in by alleging on his blog that “a lot of people close to the Obama Administration spent a year leaking information about Mike Flynn to the press.”

Biden’s campaign called this a diversion from the coronavirus situation and emphasize that he did nothing wrong in requesting the unmasking. “The documents simply indicate the breadth and depth of concern across the American government, including among career officials, over intelligence reports of Michael Flynn’s attempts to undermine ongoing American national security policy through discussions with Russian officials or other foreign representatives,” his campaign said in a statement.

“Importantly, none of these individuals could have known Flynn’s identity beforehand,” it added. “These documents have absolutely nothing to do with the — any FBI investigation, and they confirm that all normal procedures were followed. Any suggestion otherwise is flat-out a lie.”

Biden has said he knew there was an investigation related to Flynn, but that was it. The FBI investigation into Russian meddling-turned special counsel investigation-turned Mueller report was critical of Trump but declined to accuse him of obstruction of justice, citing Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. (Indeed, much of that happened after Biden was out of office.)

Flynn was a central figure in the investigation. After he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and getting fired from his job as national security adviser, he struck a cooperation agreement to help investigators looked into Russian meddling in the election and whether the Trump campaign helped.

Trump has always bristled at Flynn and his allies being caught up in the investigation, alleging it was politically motivated to undermine his presidency shortly after it got started.

As recently as a few weeks ago, he said he’s open to pardoning Flynn. Though thanks to his Justice Department, he may not have to. Last week, the Justice Department under Attorney General William P. Barr moved to drop the case against Flynn, saying that essentially the FBI shouldn’t have been investigating Flynn in the first place and thus his lies weren’t material to a legitimate investigation. (A federal judge has put that on hold while he waits to hear from legal experts and a former judge who think Flynn should get sentenced.)

If Trump were trying to drum up another Ukraine-like scandal against Biden, this would be how it gets started. But just like with Biden’s work in Ukraine, when it comes to unmasking Flynn, there’s very little evidence that Biden did anything untoward, much less illegal.

“If I were a Senator or Congressman, the first person I would call to testify about the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA, by FAR, is former President Obama. He knew EVERYTHING,” Trump said in a tweet in which he urged Graham to “just do it.”

“No more Mr. Nice Guy. No more talk!” the president wrote.

Trump has called the alleged scandal “worse than Watergate” and has kept up a drumbeat of accusations that Obama committed a crime, though he declined to offer specifics when asked to explain the extraordinary charges during a Rose Garden news conference Monday.

Asked about Trump’s latest tweet on the issue, Graham told Politico that he has no intention of summoning Obama to Capitol Hill.

“I don’t think now’s the time for me to do that. I don’t know if that’s even possible,” Graham said, adding: “I understand President Trump’s frustration, but be careful what you wish for.”

In a subsequent tweet, Graham wrote that both Trump and Obama are “welcome to come before the committee and share their concerns about each other.”

“If nothing else it would make for great TV. However, I have great doubts about whether it would be wise for the country,” the senator added.

The Justice Department said in a published opinion last year that former presidents cannot be compelled to testify before Congress.

Trump has ramped up his accusations in the wake of the Justice Department’s decision to drop its prosecution of former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Former Obama aides have been dismissive of Trump’s efforts.

“No one knows what ‘Obamagate’ is, and that includes President Trump. It’s a hashtag in search of a scandal,” said Ned Price, a former CIA analyst who served as a National Security Council spokesman under Obama. “The only people it will galvanize are those already 1,000 percent behind” Trump.

David Nakamura contributed to this report.

Here are some takeaways from Bright’s testimony.

Bright said that early inaction by the government — particularly in the Department of Health and Human Services — had, in fact, cost lives.

“That inaction has put a lot of lives at risk in our front-line health-care workers” Bright said.

Bright has said that he pushed for ramping up production of medical equipment such as masks, but that it went unheeded for months after he was informed that officials didn’t think there was a “critical shortage” of masks.

“I pushed that forward to the highest levels I could in HHS and got no response,” Bright said. “From that moment, I knew that we were going to have a crisis for our health-care workers because we were not taking action. We were already behind the ball. That was our last window of opportunity to turn on that production to save the lives of those health-care workers, and we didn’t act.”

Bright added that even today, the country is dealing with the consequences of that early negligence and that health-care workers are still more at risk than they should be.

“Lives were endangered, and I believe lives were lost,” Bright said. “And not only that: We were forced to procure these supplies from other countries without the right quality standards. So even our doctors and nurses in the hospitals today are wearing N95-marked masks from other countries that are not providing the sufficient protection that a U.S.-standard N95 mask would provide them. Some of those masks are only 30 percent effective. Therefore, nurses are rushing in the hospitals thinking they’re protected, and they’re not.”

One of Bright’s key claims is that he was moved to another post after raising objections to the administration pushing the use of the malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus.

The administration allowed for the emergency use of the drugs to treat the virus, though later studies — which have yet to be peer-reviewed and were not randomized — suggest that the use of the drugs don’t help and can, in fact, have negative consequences. The FDA has now warned about the dangers of using the drugs.

“My concerns were escalated when I learned that leadership in the Department of Health and Human Services were pushing to make that drug available outside of this emergency use authorization, to flood New York and New Jersey with this drug,” Bright said.

Bright has cited his skepticism of the drugs for his removal from his post and said the administration wanted to make it easier for people to use them without extensive medical supervision — even people who might not even have the virus.

“I believe part of the removal process for me was initiated because of a pushback that I gave when they asked me to put in place an expanded access protocol that would make chloroquine more freely available to Americans that were not under the close supervision of a physician and may not even be confirmed to be infected with the coronavirus,” Bright said.

President Trump has been effusively optimistic about not just treatments such as the chloroquines but about the timeline for a vaccine for the virus.

Shortly before Bright’s testimony Thursday, Trump even said, “I think we’re going to have a vaccine by the end of the year.”

That’s even more optimistic than the 12- to 18-month timeline that medical experts such as Anthony S. Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have said is realistic for the vaccine. But Bright said that even a year to year-and-a-half timeline might also be overly optimistic.

“I still think 12 to 18 months is an aggressive schedule, and I think it’s going to take longer than that to do so,” Bright said.

As Trump increasingly criticized Fauci, Bright said the government needs to have more regard for it scientists — and a more consistent message from the top.

He said that right now the response has been hampered by not having a “single point of leadership.”

“We need to install and empower leadership, and we need to unleash the voices of the scientists in our public health system in the United States so they can be heard and their guidances need to be listened to,” Bright said. “And we need to be able to convey that information to the American public so they have the truth about the real risk and dire consequences of this virus.

He added: “And we don’t have a single point of leadership right now for this response, and we don’t have a master plan for this response. So those two things are absolutely critical.”

Fauci has said in recent days that states that move forward with reopening their economies before meeting the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are risking new outbreaks – which could set back the entire response.

As Bright offered one of the most significant rebukes of the federal coronavirus response to date, Republicans on the committee and members of the Trump administration sought to undercut his testimony and character. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, in particular, had strong words for Bright.

“Everything he is complaining about was achieved,” Azar said while standing next to Trump on the White House lawn. “Everything he talked about was done. He says he talked about the need for respirators; we procured respirators under the president’s direction.”

Azar echoed Republicans in the hearing who questioned why Bright has been absent from his new posting — a narrower one focused on testing and vaccines at the National Institutes of Health — in recent weeks.

“While we’re launching Operation Warp Speed,” Azar said, “he’s not showing up for work to be part of that.”

Bright said that he has been on leave while dealing with “very high blood pressure” — owing in part to the stress from recent events.

“I had a conversation with my physician about my hypertension and how we’ve been managing it over the last three weeks because this has been very stressful to be removed suddenly without explanation from my role and position as a life change for me,” Bright said.