In April 2026, social media users shared a claim that former U.S. President Barack Obama set up a "back channel" to establish a shadow government for communicating with NATO world leaders. According to users' posts, Obama established a secret "contingency plan" in case President Donald Trump attempted to end U.S. membership in the treaty organization, going so far as to purchase a multimillion-dollar mansion in the U.K. Above all, users alleged Obama's actions signaled a "globalist effort" to undermine the Trump administration's foreign policy, circulating an image meme that read, "ARREST OBAMA NOW!"
In short, the Obama "back channel" claim entirely lacks credible evidence: No available data conclusively confirms or disproves it. As such, we didn't add a fact-check rating to this article.
Snopes contacted conservative political commentators David J. Harris Jr. and Terrence K. Williams — as well as an X user named Joshua Hall and a social media user with a large following named Britany Henry — to request evidence to support their posts promoting the claim. We also emailed the White House, the Pentagon and an Obama spokesperson to ask about the rumor, and will update this article if we receive further information.
Regarding NATO, Trump's White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during an April 8 news briefing that withdrawing from the organization is "something the president has discussed" and said she thought it was "something the president will be discussing in a couple of hours with [NATO] Secretary-General [Mark] Rutte and perhaps you'll hear directly from the president following that meeting later this afternoon."
Initial investigation of Obama 'back channel' rumor
Snopes used a number of methods to conclude there was no evidence confirming the claim.
For example, searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo located dozens of social media posts repeating the claim but failed to find any news media outlets — conservative sources included — reporting the rumor as fact. Further searches failed to locate any evidence of the Obamas purchasing property in the United Kingdom (allegedly as part of a plot to flee prosecution by Trump's Justice Department).
Harris, host of the Newsmax TV show "The Pulse," reposted (archived) the "back channel" claim, as did Williams (archived), his fellow conservative commentator and a comedian.
Harris and Williams both shared an image meme reading:
BREAKING: OBAMA'S BACK CHANNEL EXPOSED. Reports claim Obama has established a "back channel" with NATO leaders ahead of a possible Trump withdrawal. It's a globalist effort to undermine President Trump and interfere with his foreign policy agenda. ARREST OBAMA NOW!
(Terrence K. Williams/Facebook)
On April 6, social media user Britany Henry shared the rumor in a Facebook video (archived) with her 130,000-plus followers. Henry also promoted the claim in an April 5 Instagram video (archived). Both posts received hundreds of thousands of views.
(Britany Henry/Facebook)
Other users promoted the claim on Threads (archived), Truth Social and X (archived). A Snopes reader emailed text from one of the posts, asking, "Is this clickbait? I saw it on Facebook."
(@_MAGA_NEWS_/X)
Locating the original Obama 'back channel' post
Lining up dozens of social media posts chronologically can aid finding the ultimate source of a rumor or specific piece of content. While some users have in past years discussed various evidence-free claims about Obama undermining Trump via contact with world leaders, we traced the iteration of this rumor circulating in April 2026 to an X user named Joshua Hall.
On April 5 — around one hour before Henry's Instagram post — Hall posted a photo (archived) of Obama and other world leaders attending the 2015 G20 summit in Antalya, Turkey.
(@JoshHall2024/X)
Hall previously shared a very similar post (archived) in December 2025. That older post explained why the April 2026 post included language about an alleged federal indictment of Obama "dropping at the beginning of the new year" — Hall copied that outdated bit from the older post. The Justice Department never announced any such Obama indictment. Both of Hall's posts received millions of views.
(@JoshHall2024/X)
For further reading of rumors involving NATO, we previously reported about whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth drank alcohol during a NATO meeting, as well as a rumor in which users alleged a man named Adolf Heusinger was Adolf Hitler's chief of staff and after World War II became the chief of staff for NATO forces.