Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their homeschooled children fled Germany after the police showed up at their house to enforce Germany’s ban on homeschooling. They came to the United States in 2010 and were granted political asylum, which gave them legal permission to live in the U.S. as political refugees. However, in March 2013, the Obama administration argued in federal court in favor of deporting them and sending them back to Germany. This means that Obama did not consider them to be political refugees, and that he did not consider Germany’s policy of jailing homeschooling parents to be a form of persecution.
Leonardo DiCaprio says Malaysian financier planned to donate to Obama’s 2012 campaign
By Sarah N. Lynch
April 4, 2023
WASHINGTON, April 3 (Reuters) – Actor Leonardo DiCaprio told a Washington jury on Monday that Malaysian financier Jho Low revealed his plans to donate up to $30 million to help U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign in what prosecutors allege was part of an illegal foreign influence operation.
“It was a casual conversation about what party he was in support of,” DiCaprio said, telling jurors that Low said he planned on giving “a significant donation” to the Democratic Party that was “somewhere to the tune of $20-30 million.”
“I basically said, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of money,'” DiCaprio added.
The “Titanic” star took the witness stand in the trial of Prakazrel “Pras” Michel of the Fugees hip-hop group, who faces criminal charges for his alleged role in a foreign influence campaign aimed at the administrations of Obama and Donald Trump. Michel has denied the allegations.
DiCaprio is one of several prominent figures linked to Low, a fugitive who is facing separate federal criminal charges for allegedly embezzling $4.5 billion from Malaysia’s 1MDB sovereign wealth fund.
The financier, who was known to pay Hollywood celebrities to party with him, supported DiCaprio’s charitable foundation and helped fund “The Wolf of Wall Street,” the 2013 movie in which DiCaprio starred and was nominated for an Oscar.
The Justice Department in 2018 reached a civil settlement with the film’s production company, which forfeited $60 million that was believed to have been stolen from 1MDB.
Since then, DiCaprio has been cooperating with the U.S. government.
He managed to enter and leave the courthouse on Monday without being spotted by news crews who had been staking out his arrival.
Prosecutors claim Michel agreed to funnel money from Low into Obama’s 2012 campaign and hide the source of the funds. Federal election law prohibits foreigners from donating to U.S. campaigns.
They say he later worked behind the scenes with others to try to persuade the Trump administration to stop investigating Low, and also acted as a foreign agent of China to persuade the administration to agree to repatriate dissident Guo Wengui.
DiCaprio on Monday told jurors he has known Michel since at least the 1990s, when he met the Fugees backstage.
The bulk of his testimony centered on his relationship with Low, who threw lavish parties on boats and at nightclubs that featured Hollywood stars.
DiCaprio said he flew on Low’s private jet with a large group one New Year’s Eve between Australia and Las Vegas, in what he said was Low’s goal of celebrating New Year’s twice in one night.
He drew laughter in the courtroom, as Michel’s attorney asked him whether Low achieved his objective.
“It depends on how you look at it,” DiCaprio said.
DiCaprio said when he first met Low around 2010, he viewed him as a “sort of a prodigy in the business world.”
DiCaprio said his own legal team, an outside firm and the studios conducted three separate due diligence probes before reaching a deal with Low to finance “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
“I was given a green light from my team, as well as the studios, to accept financing from Mr. Low,” he said.
I’m glad that Brittney Griner is out of prison, but I wish the Biden administration had had better negotiation skills. This prisoner exchange in on par with when the Obama administration freed five high ranking Talbian officials in exchange for U.S. military deserter Bowe Bergdahl.
“We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled – doubled – since we were children. We know the statistics – that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.”
Black women are underserved when it comes to birth control access. The Roe decision could make that worse.
Discrimination, stigma and systemic barriers in the health care system have already led to a gap in contraceptive access for Black women.
The Supreme Court’s ruling to gut nationwide rights to abortion last week has highlighted the importance of access to birth control, which already proves difficult for many women of color due to discrimination, stigma and systemic barriers in the health care system.
While the decision does not directly impact access to contraception, legal experts say that states and municipalities that are aiming to ban abortion at the point of conception may also challenge contraceptives like Plan B and intrauterine devices. Some state legislators have already taken steps to try to restrict birth control. In Tennessee, U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican, earlier this year called Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that ensured birth control access to individuals who were married, “constitutionally unsound.” (A spokesperson for Blackburn told The Washington Post in June that she “does not support banning birth control, nor did she call for a ban.”)
“The hardest burden is going to largely fall on Black women who already have insurmountable challenges just getting health care in this country,” Jennifer Driver, senior director of reproductive rights for the State Innovation Exchange, a national resource and strategy center, said about the impact of the decision. “And now it’s going to be even harder.”
So there you have it. NBC quoted a health care expert as saying that, “Black women who already have insurmountable challenges just getting health care in this country.”
What percentage of black women voted for Obama? Well, the Washington Post reported:
“… black women have been Obama’s most loyal supporters at the ballot box. They accounted for 60 percent of all black voters in 2008 and supported Obama to the tune of 96 percent. In 2012, 98 percent of black women under 30 voted for Obama, compared to 80 percent of young black men.”
So 96% of black women voted for Obama in his first election.
And 98% of black women under 30 voted for Obama in his second election.
Liberals refer to this as “diversity.”
But I don’t see any “diversity” there.
Instead, all I see is conformity.
Anyway, the fact that under Obamacare, black women “have insurmountable challenges just getting health care in this country,” is a direct result of the fact that elections have consequences.
The vast majority of black women voted for the President who gave them Obamacare.
So the fact that these same black women “have insurmountable challenges just getting health care in this country” is a direct result of their own voting choices.
‘Can’t stay anymore’: Residents near new Obama Center fear being pushed out by gentrification
By Safia Samee Ali
October 19, 2021
CHICAGO — Less than 3 miles from where former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama broke ground last week on their long-awaited presidential center on the South Side of Chicago, Tahiti Hamer lies awake at night thinking about the limited time she and her family have left in the neighborhood where she’s lived her whole life.
Following the announcement of the center in 2015, neighborhoods adjacent to the 19-acre planned site have seen skyrocketing rents and housing prices, and Hamer, 42, a single mother of three, is one of several facing displacement.
Hamer, a teacher at a local YMCA, said she’s tried to buy a home for the last two years, but it’s been out of reach in her neighborhood. She found a house she could afford 12 miles south.
“I do not want to leave. I want to stay, but I’m barely keeping my head above water now,” she said. Hamer’s rent has gone up from $800 to $1,000, and she said her landlord has already told her there’s another $100 hike coming because the area is “coming back up.”
“It’s sad that the place that I’ve lived my whole life I can’t stay in anymore,” she said. “And once I leave, it will be impossible to ever come back. It’s the same story with so many people in this community.”
Despite the Obama Presidential Center being built for the benefit of historically underprivileged communities of color, housing experts say without timely and robust housing protections, it may become a catalyst for displacement, pushing out the residents it intended to help.
The location of the ambitious project was chosen to honor the former first couple’s roots and boasts a library, museum and activity center costing more than $500 million.
Demand has already boomed, with housing costs increasing at a higher rate in areas surrounding the proposed center than citywide since 2016, according to a 2019 study by the University of Illinois Chicago.
Much of the existing community is low-income, with many paying more than they can afford for their monthly housing costs, the study reported, and “eviction rates are some of the highest in the city with South Shore being the highest, averaging 1,800 a year, which is about 9 percent of renters.”
“This very much follows the script of how gentrification works,” said Winifred Curran, a professor of geography and sustainable urban development at DePaul University. “The Obama center is kind of like a signal to developers to get real estate now for cheap, and then the profit potential is huge. That’s what gentrification is, and unless you very specifically do things to keep housing affordable to make property accessible to long-term residents, you’re going to see displacement.”
The battle between residents who live around the site and the city of Chicago has been ongoing for the last six years, but many say they are still waiting for significant aid.
Dixon Romeo, a lifelong South Shore resident and organizer with theObama Community Benefits Agreement Coalition, a resident-based group formed in 2016 to help fight displacement, said residents are not against the Obama center but instead are looking for help, so they will be around to enjoy it.
“How can we benefit from it if we’re not there anymore?” he said. “This is the community that sent President Obama to Springfield. This is the community that sent him to the Senate. This is the community that sent him to the White House, and we should be the community that gets to stay for the presidential center.”
After intense pushback from the coalition, the city passed the Woodlawn Housing Preservation Ordinance last year, which promises to help one neighborhood, which sits directly across from the site, with $4.5 million in affordable housing programs, a requirement that at least 30 percent of new apartments be made affordable to “very low-income households” and a provision that allows renters a “right of first refusal” if their landlord decides to sell the building, among other things.
But Dixon, 27, said residents still haven’t seen any significant changes with the ordinance and that it falls short by not including South Shore and other surrounding neighborhoods that are also feeling financial impacts from the center. He, along with the coalition, is asking the city to implement protections for other neighborhoods.
In a statement to NBC News, Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office said “since taking office in 2019, the Lightfoot Administration and the newly reformed Department of Housing (DOH) have been committed to working with Woodlawn and all other communities to develop plans for growth that increase opportunity for all and consider the diverse perspectives of everyone. In just two years, the City worked with community stakeholders in Woodlawn, including a 40-member working group of advocates, residents and community organizers, to address displacement and the need for additional affordable housing so that all residents can benefit from the investment that the Obama Presidential Center will bring to the South Side.”
The office also said “DOH is working with Alderwoman Hairston and other stakeholders on several developments and opportunities,” in South Shore.
While more affordable housing is always a good thing, the first step is to make sure people who already have affordable housing don’t lose it, Curran said.
“A lot of times we’re playing a cat-and-mouse gentrification game. Something happens, causes a big spike in rents, people get displaced, and then all of a sudden the city says, ‘Oh, my God, we should have done something with affordable housing,’” she said.
Time is running out. The longer the city drags its feet in providing affordable housing, the more people will be displaced, while gentrification just makes the land more expensive — which means the affordable housing budget will cover fewer units, she said.
“If you’re going to do these things, you have to do them right away because you lose momentum, and at a certain point, what happens is that all the activists who fought for these things get displaced themselves,“ she said. “So they have no one keeping the city accountable for their promises.”
While rent control would be a strong solution to help renters with low income, Illinois prohibits municipalities from passing rent control ordinances under the Rent Control Preemption Act passed in 1997. What they can do is offer property tax breaks to help landlords who already are providing affordable housing, and other subsidies for utilities and bills, she said.
Stacey Sutton, a professor of urban planning and policy and the University of Illinois Chicago, said the issue around the Obama center is not novel for any city, and it’s the same lower-income Black and brown people that disproportionately bear the burden when development takes place largely because class and race are so intertwined.
A 2020 study by Stanford University showed Black residents have more constraints and fewer options of neighborhoods they can move to compared to their white counterparts and that minority communities disproportionately feel the negative effects of gentrification.
“We think of the neighborhoods that we may visit and enjoy, but there’s a full erasure of the history of a lot of those places. Years later, we’ll look back and we won’t remember who lived there, and that’s the erasure,” Sutton said.
“I think the problem with large-scale development, there’s always some downsides, but you try to mitigate the downside. You try to mitigate the adverse effects. And so there are better ways of doing that, and this was not a better way of doing it right,” she said.
Tahiti Hamer is still holding out hope that she’ll be able to stay in the neighborhood that she feels is a part of her, but she knows time is running thin for her.
“I feel like I’m being forced out,” she said. “How can I not afford a home in my own community where I lived for 42 years? It’s unreal and just so unfair.”
Obama Presidential Center will displace vital South Side Chicago trees, advocates say
The Center will remove hundreds of trees that provide cooling in the summer, cleaner air, and a quiet respite for residents—but promises to re-plant the area and provide an economic boost.
By Krystal Vasquez
August 31, 2021
On August 16, the Obama Foundation started work on the Obama Presidential Center, but without the fanfare that one might expect. Over the past five years, the Center’s South Side Chicago location has prompted multiple lawsuits and a recent Supreme Court petition.
It’s not that Chicagoans don’t want the Center—many seem excited for the economic opportunities it will bring. Rather, opponents, like the non-profit organization Protect our Parks, do not want the Center built in Jackson Park, where they say it will cause “irreparable” environmental harm.
An Obama Foundation spokesperson told EHN in an email that many of the trees are currently dead or in poor health. However, the 2018 survey of the area, performed by experts hired by the Foundation, states that only 64 trees currently need to be removed from the area due to their condition or suboptimal locations.
The spokesperson said current design calls “for more trees than exist on the site today” and that there are plans to increase the biodiversity of the species. This will include bird- and pollinator-friendly plant selections that will benefit the wildlife that frequents the area.
But “one tree does not equal one tree,” David Nowak, an emeritus senior scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, told EHN, explaining that the environmental benefits derived from a large tree are 60 to 70 times greater than smaller trees.
He also added that planting new trees comes with a risk. “There’s no guarantee that the young tree is going to survive,” he explained. “New trees have a fairly high mortality rate before they get established.”
Designing with creativity
Protect Our Park and other community members are pushing for the Center to be relocated to nearby Washington Park. “It’s relatively treeless,” said Hoyt, who points out that there are also many vacant lots in the area that the Foundation could build on.
“It would bring the same amount of jobs [and] it would bring more tourism” since it’s near a major train line, she added. “And we get to save…our safe space” and the environmental benefits it provides.
That said, if the Center stays in Jackson Park, Wolf wonders if there is a way to integrate some of the existing trees into the development. “Design is about creativity,” she said, “yet the first move is to remove the trees [and] create this blank slate of a parcel.”
Positioned between the University of Chicago and Lake Michigan, Jackson Park is a 550-acre green space in the southeastern edge of the city, used for everything from family get-togethers to sporting events.
The park’s lush tree canopy is a refuge from the sweltering summer heat, which has been growing increasingly worse due to climate change. Trees can reduce local temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit. “We go [to Jackson Park] to be cooler, to be comfortable as we hang out,” Jeannette Hoyt, director of CCAM Research Partners and former resident of the area, told EHN, adding that many of the nearby residents can’t afford air conditioning. Hoyt is not affiliated with Protect our Parks.
However, if the Center’s construction continues as planned, some of those trees will come down. According to a 2020 Environmental Assessment of the area conducted by the National Park Service, the project will remove 326 trees at the site of the Center, along with an additional 463 trees due to project-related construction, including transportation improvements and relocation of the park’s track and field.
Aside from their cooling effect, the environmental benefit of trees in this area also include the removal of roughly 22 tons of carbon dioxide and 342 pounds of air pollution each year, according to a 2018 survey of the area. The latter is especially important in a city that is ranked as the 16th most polluted city in the US for ozone pollution and whose asthma rates surpass national averages.
Trees also benefit our mental health, Kathleen Wolf, a research social scientist at the University of Washington, told EHN.
“Short amounts of time in nature can help us to restore our minds, and not just make us feel better, but actually reduce potential aggression, reduce irritation, reduce anxiety,” she said.
“One tree does not equal one tree”
Gentrification concerns
The battle is still ongoing, creating a conversation that goes beyond trees. Local communities fear this construction project will gentrify the area, displacing the predominantly Black residents. On the other hand, there’s the benefit of tourism and jobs that the Center has promised to provide.
“I certainly couldn’t say which is better, said Nowak. “It depends what the [local] people want.”
Still, he hopes that as this debate continues the value of these trees isn’t discarded. “There’s a cost associated—not just removing the trees—but the cost of the loss of benefits that would have been there.”
Waukegan Latinx activists protest renaming Thomas Jefferson Middle School after Barack and Michelle Obama
By John Garcia and Cate Cauguiran
March 30, 2021
WAUKEGAN, Ill. (WLS) — Waukegan’s Board of Education met Tuesday night as it considers changing the names of two of its schools, Thomas Jefferson Middle School and Daniel Webster Middle School.
Jefferson, who was the nation’s third president, owned slaves. Webster was a former senator who supported slavery. Renaming committees were formed for each school, and included people in the community, students and staff.
The school board heard concerns from the public Tuesday night over one of the finalists in the running to be the new name for Thomas Jefferson Middle School.
The country’s first Black President and First Lady, Barack and Michelle Obama, is one of the top three choices for the school’s new name, but is drawing opposition in the area with a large Latinx population.
“I will not be part of renaming a school after someone who did not and does not represent the undocumented community,” said District 60 school board member Edgar Castellanos. Castellanos said he came to the United States undocumented as a child.
Waukegan activist Julie Contreras works with a group that runs shelters for undocumented children at the U.S./Mexico border.
She said former President Obama failed to deliver on promises to help the immigrant population.
Contreras, who leads United Giving Hope, is organizing protests against naming the school for the Obamas.
“From the time Barack Obama became President until 2017 when he left, he today is still the highest ranking president with deportations in our nation,” Contreras said. “We feel that Barack Obama did disservice to us. He denied us, and he didn’t stop the deportations, the way he promised.”
“I personally don’t object to the name, but I have to be aware of the concerns,” said school board president Brandon Ewing.
Members of the area’s Latinx community held a protest outside the meeting’s doors Tuesday night.
“If you’re removing the name of Thomas Jefferson – one oppressor – the name of Obama is another oppressor and our families do not want to see that name,” Contreras said.
Mauricio Sanchez’s father was deported in 2015 under the Obama administration.
“It was something very sad,” Sanchez said. “We couldn’t even say goodbye to our dad. We just hoped for him to be able to get out.”
His dad is still in deportation hearings to this day. The Sanchez family said the Obama name is a reminder of their current struggles.
Others who spoke about the name change endorsed another popular choice to rename the school after: Civil Rights icon John Lewis.
In 1969, a guy named Bill Ayers co-founded a terrorist organization called Weather Underground, whose founding document called for “world communism.”
In 1969, Ayers set off a bomb in Chicago at a statue that was dedicated to the city’s police. At the time of the explosion, no one was close enough to the statue to be killed. However, the explosion was so powerful that it broke almost 100 windows.
On March 6, 1970, three members of Weather Underground, including Diana Oughton (Ayers’s girlfriend) and Terry Robbins (Ayers’s close friend), were killed when they accidentally, prematurely set off a bomb which they were in the process of building, in their townhouse in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. The explosion was so powerful that it destroyed the entire four-story townhouse.
In 1970, Ayers bombed the headquarters of the New York City Police Department.
In 1971, Ayers bombed the United States Capitol building.
Although charges were filed against Ayers for these bombings, the charges were later dropped because law enforcement agents had conducted wiretaps and property searches without warrants.
Ayers was later hired as a professor at the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In 1995, when Barack Obama was running for state senator in Illinois, Obama held a fundraiser in the living room of Bill Ayers’s home.
The political left doesn’t find any of this to be even the slightest bit embarrassing or shameful.
Oceanfront property tied to Obama granted exemption from Hawaii’s environmental laws
By Sophie Cocke
November 18, 2020
Officials in Honolulu have granted the developers of a luxury, oceanfront estate tied to Barack Obama a major exemption from environmental laws designed to protect Hawaii’s beaches.
The shoreline permit, issued by Honolulu’s Department of Planning and Permitting on Monday, clears the way for the controversial multimillion dollar renovation of a century-old seawall in the heavily Native Hawaiian community of Waimanalo.
Under state and county laws, such projects are typically banned. Scientists and environmental experts say seawalls are the primary cause of beach loss throughout the state, and officials expect older ones to fall into obsolescence.
But the property owners, including Marty Nesbitt, chair of the Obama Foundation, argued they needed an exemption to protect the sprawling compound they are building in eastern Oahu. State officials and community members say the former president, who was born and raised in Hawaii, is expected to be among the property’s future occupants. Representatives for Nesbitt and Obama did not return requests seeking comment for this story.
As the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica reported this summer, the so-called shoreline setback variance is just one of several loopholes that developers have exploited across the islands over the past two decades to get around policies that are supposed to protect the state’s treasured beaches and sensitive coastlines.
The consequences are stark. Oahu has already lost about a quarter of its beaches to seawalls, which essentially cause beaches to drown. Future projections are more dire, with scientists warning that most of Hawaii’s beaches could be lost if hundreds of homes, condos, hotels and roads that line the coasts aren’t moved inland.
Beach advocates and some community leaders in Waimanalo had urged government officials to require Nesbitt to take down the crumbling wall, or at least move it farther inland to restore a portion of the public shoreline. The beach there is virtually gone. The turquoise ocean now slams up against the seawall most of the time, leaving no room for the public to fish or sit along the coast.
Opponents also cited a Honolulu County ordinance, which stresses that it’s the “primary policy of the city to protect and preserve the natural shoreline, especially sandy beaches,” as well as to maintain public access and open space along the shoreline. Secondary to these priorities is the protection of private property from coastal hazards and flooding.
But on Monday, Kathy Sokugawa, the director of the Department of Planning and Permitting, sided with the property owners, approving their request to revamp and expand the seawall. She agreed with the owners that not allowing them to renovate the structure would create a hardship, depriving them of “reasonable use of the land.”
In her decision, Sokugawa noted the seawall fronting the property is at risk of failing and said it was important to repair the wall so that its collapse wouldn’t endanger coastal homes, the nearshore water and public safety.
At the same time, the department is also requiring the property owners to participate in plans to restore a beach right beside the estate.
Critics, however, blasted the decision, saying it was an extraordinary departure from county policy.
Hardship exemptions are typically given out to property owners seeking to protect existing homes. In this case, the owners of the property bulldozed the structures on the site and started construction of new homes before applying for the shoreline setback permit.
Doorae Shin, coordinator for the local Surfrider Foundation, said she’s concerned that the approval sets a “dangerous precedent” for the expansion of many old seawalls, noting similar arguments could be made in their favor.
Sokugawa, who declined an interview request, didn’t address the issue in her final written decision.
The permit marks the last significant regulatory hurdle for developers of the Waimanalo property, which according to building permits will include three new single-family homes, two pools and a guard post. Construction has been underway for the past year.
As the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica reported this summer, the property was purchased by Nesbitt, co-CEO of a Chicago-based private-equity firm, and his wife for $8.7 million in 2015, and they subsequently subdivided the site into two lots. The overall development triggered the state’s Shoreline Protection Act, which requires coastal projects to get an environmental permit from the local government. But the owners skirted the requirement by building homes on each lot just under 7,500 square feet — the threshold under the law.
Consultants for Nesbitt later argued the $3.2 million seawall renovation was necessary in order to protect the property from erosion and ocean-related hazards. The plan will increase the height of some sections of the wall, while two new walls totaling 70 feet in length will be built behind it for support.
During a public hearing last month, the Oahu Surfrider Foundation and Sierra Club testified in opposition to the renovations, as did neighbors concerned about the potential impact of the project on the beach fronting their properties.
A Native Hawaiian community group restoring a historic turtle pond that fronts the property also registered opposition to the project, worried that it will cut off freshwater flowing into the ocean that’s needed for limu, or seaweed.
Honolulu Councilwoman Heidi Tsuneyoshi told county officials that she was gravely concerned that the primary purpose of the seawall repair project was to protect the private estate, as opposed to environmental and cultural resources. She urged planning officials to require the owners to go back and obtain the environmental permit they had skirted. She said that exemption violated the spirit of the law. The county declined.
“I’m just disappointed that this project wasn’t more fully vetted because of the sensitivities of the area,” she said.
In Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama administration ordered gun storeowners to illegally sell thousands of guns to criminals.
U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was murdered with one of these guns.
The murderer, Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, was sentenced to 30 years in prison. But his accomplices, Barack Obama and Eric Holder, haven’t even been arrested or charged.
In May 2016, it was reported that newly released documents from the Department of Justice suggested that guns from Obama’s Fast And Furious program had been linked to at least 69 killings by Mexican drug cartels.
In September 2012, Obama said that Fast and Furious had
“begun under the previous administration”
Obama lied.
In reality, Fast and Furious began in October 2009.
Bush and Obama each had a program where the U.S. government put guns into the hands of Mexican criminals.
Bush’s program was called “Operation Wide Receiver,” and Obama’s program was called “Operation Fast and Furious.”
First, Bush’s program was carried out with the knowledge, permission, and cooperation of the Mexican government, whereas Obama’s program was not. Mexican attorney general Marisela Morales told the Los Angeles Times that she first learned about Obama’s program from the news, and said:
“In no way would we have allowed it, because it is an attack on the safety of Mexicans”
Secondly, many of the guns used in Bush’s program contained radio tracking devices, whereas most of the guns used in Obama’s program did not. In addition, under Bush’s program, U.S. federal agents followed the guns to see whose hands they ended up in, whereas with Obama’s program, U.S. federal agents were ordered not to do this.
Third, Bush’s program did not cause any known deaths, whereas Obama’s program did.
In April 2016, it was reported that the Department of Justice had illegally ignored a court order to turn over certain Fast and Furious documents.
In October 2013, the ACLU announced that it would be defending John Dodson’s first amendment right to free speech, against the Obama administration, which was trying to prevent Dodson from publishing a book about Obama’s Fast and Furious scandal.
Obama illegally ignored Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information requests regarding Fast and Furious.
In June 2012, a House committee voted to hold Holder in contempt of Congress because he had illegally refused to release 1,300 pages of information on Operation Fast and Furious, even though he had been subpoenaed to do so more than eight months earlier.
On October 3, 2011, CBS News aired a report by Sharyl Attkisson which showed that Attorney General Eric Holder had lied under oath regarding Fast and Furious. Here’s the report:
Afterward, CBS made it harder and harder for Attkisson to do reports on Fast and Furious, and she eventually quit her job at CBS.
I’ll believe that Democrats are serious about gun violence as soon as they speak out in favor of prosecuting Barack Obama and Eric Holder for being accessories to Brian Terry’s murder.
Liberals are upset that Trump just used the “racist” phrase “kung flu.”
Funny how none of those liberals got upset when the Obama administration used the exact same phrase in this poster, as well in as this flyer: (You can see bigger versions of both images at this link.)
Note from Daniel Alman: If you like this blog post that I wrote, you can buy my books from amazon, and/or donate to me via PayPal, using the links below:
Note from Daniel Alman: I’d like to recommend that you visit Whatfinger News. It’s a really awesome website.
In 1969, a guy named Bill Ayers co-founded a terrorist organization called Weather Underground, whose founding document called for “world communism.”
In 1969, Ayers set off a bomb in Chicago at a statue that was dedicated to the city’s police. At the time of the explosion, no one was close enough to the statue to be killed. However, the explosion was so powerful that it broke almost 100 windows.
On March 6, 1970, three members of Weather Underground, including Diana Oughton (Ayers’s girlfriend) and Terry Robbins (Ayers’s close friend), were killed when they accidentally, prematurely set off a bomb which they were in the process of building, in their townhouse in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. The explosion was so powerful that it destroyed the entire four-story townhouse.
In 1970, Ayers bombed the headquarters of the New York City Police Department.
In 1971, Ayers bombed the United States Capitol building.
Although charges were filed against Ayers for these bombings, the charges were later dropped because law enforcement agents had conducted wiretaps and property searches without warrants.
In 1995, when Obama was running for state senator in Illinois, Obama held a fundraiser in the living room of Bill Ayers’s home.
Note from Daniel Alman: If you like this blog post that I wrote, you can buy my books from amazon, and/or donate to me via PayPal, using the links below:
Note from Daniel Alman: I’d like to recommend that you visit Whatfinger News. It’s a really awesome website.
In May 2013, the Washington Post reported that the IRS had illegally targeted conservative groups for additional reviews. Organizations with the words “tea party” or “patriot” were singled out for harassment, such as requiring them to provide a list of donors, details about their internet postings on social networking websites, and information about their family members.
When this was first reported by the media in May 2013, Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that had conducted these illegal activities, claimed that only low level employees had known about it, and that no high level IRS officials had known about it. However, soon afterward, NPR reported that an Inspector General report showed that Lerner had been lying, and that she herself had actually been aware of it since June 29, 2011. Even worse, during March and April of 2012, Lerner herself had actually written such letters to fifteen different conservative groups. One of these letters can be read here.
“I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations. And I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.”
However, afterward, Lerner invoked her fifth amendment right to remain silent. The Washington Post reported that there was disagreement as to whether or not Lerner’s statement constituted a waiving of her fifth amendment right to remain silent. Soon afterward, she was placed on paid administrative leave. At a later hearing in March 2014, Lerner again invoked her fifth amendment right to remain silent.
In September 2013, a House committee released several of Lerner’s emails, which showed that she had targeted tea party groups, and that she had asked that their applications be delayed. In one of the emails from 2011, she had written “Tea Party Matter very dangerous.”
In September 2013, after having been on paid leave for four months, Lerner had still not been fired by Obama.
In September 2013, Lerner retired with a full pension.
In October 2013, it was reported that newly discovered emails proved that Lerner had violated federal law by giving the Federal Election Commission confidential tax information of several Tea party groups.
The Washington Post reported that IRS officials at the IRS headquarters in Washington D.C. had sent such letters to conservatives groups. Reuters reported that higher level IRS officials had taken part in discussions about it as early as August 2011. However, 21 months later, on May 10, 2013, the Washington Post reported that President Obama had not done anything to investigate or fire the IRS employees who had engaged in this illegal harassment. As of May 14, 2013, none of the IRS employees who engaged in any of this illegal behavior had been disciplined, despite the fact that higher level IRS officials had known about their illegal behavior at least since August 2011. Despite all of these media reports about the involvement of high level IRS officials, in February 2014, Obama said that these things had come from “a local office.”
On May 15, 2013, it was reported that Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner, had resigned. However, it was also reported that his assignment would have ended in early June anyway. He resigned – Obama did not fire him.
The IRS gave out confidential information about conservative groups. ProPublica wrote:
“The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year.”
“In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public.”
“No unapproved applications from liberal groups were sent to ProPublica.”
President Obama either lied about when he first knew about this – or was too busy playing golf and attending fundraisers to read the memos that were sent to him. The Daily Caller wrote:
“White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a press conference Tuesday that the White House was notified about the IRS targeting tea party groups ‘several weeks ago.’ This comes a day after President Obama said he found out about it from news reports on Friday of last week.”
“During a press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday, President Obama was asked about the IRS scandal. He responded, ‘I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this. I think it was on Friday.’ “
“However, Carney said Tuesday that first a report had to be compiled by the IRS’s inspector general and then when it was completed, it was passed on to the administration.”
“‘A notification is appropriate and routine and that is what happened and that happened several weeks ago,’ Carney said.”
When Media Trackers, a conservative organization, applied to the IRS for non-profit status, after waiting 16 months, it got no response. But when it reapplied with a liberal sounding name, it got approval in just three weeks. Yahoo wrote:
“In May 2011, Drew Ryun, a conservative activist and former Republican National Committee staffer, began filling out the Internal Revenue Service application to achieve nonprofit status for a new conservative watchdog group.”
“When September 2012 arrived with still no word from the IRS, Ryun determined that Media Trackers would likely never obtain standalone nonprofit status, and he tried a new approach: He applied for permanent nonprofit status for a separate group called Greenhouse Solutions, a pre-existing organization that was reaching the end of its determination period.”
“The IRS approved Greenhouse Solutions’ request for permanent nonprofit status in three weeks.”
“The same Internal Revenue Service office that singled out Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny also challenged Israel-related organizations, at least one of which filed suit over the agency’s handling of its application for tax-exempt status.”
“The trouble for the Israel-focused groups seems to have had different origins than that experienced by conservative groups, but at times the effort seems to have been equally ham-handed.”
The IRS asked conservative groups what books they were reading.
Although the IRS went 18 months or longer without responding to conservative organizations’ applications, the IRS demanded that these same organizations answer the IRS’s intrusive questions within a few weeks.
After the Waco Tea Party sent an application to the IRS, the IRS waited 19 months to respond. In its response, the IRS asked for printouts of its web page and social networking sites, copies of all of its newsletters, bulletins and fliers, and copies of all stories written about it. The IRS also asked for transcripts of its radio interviews.
As one example of how the IRS treated conservative organizations differently from liberal ones, Politico reported:
“Chris Littleton, one of the co-founders of the Ohio Liberty Coalition, said the group got a grilling from the IRS when it submitted its application, in letters the group has posted on its website. The IRS also gave him so much grief when he tried to apply for tax-exempt status for another group, American Junto, that ‘we just gave up on it,’ he said.”
“But when he submitted an application for a third group — Ohioans for Health Care Freedom, now renamed Ohio Rising — ‘it went through just fine,’ Littleton said. ‘They never asked a single set of questions.’”
After the Greater Phoenix Tea Party Patriots sent in their application, it took two years for the IRS to respond. The IRS response included 35 questions. When the group’s cofounder called the IRS, the IRS agent claimed that he had their group’s file right in front of him. But when the group’s confounder asked the IRS agent a question, the IRS agent asked, “What’s your group’s name again?”
Tea Party groups who spoke with each other said they were all getting the same questions from the IRS.
The Washington Post reported that some IRS employees were “ignorant about tax laws, defiant of their supervisors, and blind to the appearance of impropriety.”
In 2012, the IRS leaked confidential information about Mitt Romney to the co-chairman of President Obama’s re-election committee.
For a 27 month period that began in February 2010, the IRS gave exactly zero approvals to Tea Party organizations that had sent in applications. During that same time period, numerous liberal organizations with names including words such as “progress” or “progressive” did get approval.
After True the Vote, a conservative organization which was founded by Catherine Engelbrecht, sent its application to the IRS, the IRS went three years without responding. During that three year period, Engelbrecht and her family’s small manufacturing business were audited by the IRS, and were investigated by OSHA, the ATF, and the FBI.
Democratic U.S. Senators pressured the IRS to target conservative groups. In May 2013, U.S. News & World Report wrote:
“Over the last three years, Democratic senators repeatedly and publicly pressured the IRS to engage in the very activities that they are only now condemning today. At the same time, Republicans repeatedly and publicly warned against this abuse of government power and pointed to a series of red flags that strongly suggested conservative political organizations were being targeted by the IRS. Those warnings were deliberately ignored by the Obama administration and Democratic leaders in Congress.”
“From Max Baucus to Chuck Schumer to Jeanne Shaheen, key Senate Democrats publicly pressured the IRS to target groups that held differing political views and who, in their view, had the temerity to engage in the political process. The IRS listened to them and acted.”
In order to get approval, the IRS required members of Coalition for Life of Iowa, a pro-life organization, to sign a promise to avoid protesting in front of Planned Parenthood.
The IRS asked Christian Voices for Life, a pro-life organization, questions about its prayer vigils.
According to the official White House visitor’s log, during Obama’s first four years as President, IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman made 157 visits to the White House. This is more visits to the White House – by a very large margin – than any other cabinet member during Obama’s first term. By comparison, during the four years that Mark Everson was IRS commissioner when Bush was president, Everson made only one visit to the White House.
Shulman donated $500 to the Democratic National Committee in October 2004.
During Congressional testimony that had taken place in March 2012, Shulman falsely said that the IRS had not targeted conservative groups.
Shulman’s wife, Susan L. Anderson, is the senior program advisor for Public Campaign, a liberal organization. The Dailer Caller wrote of this group:
“Public Campaign receives “major funding” from the pro-Obamacare alliance Health Care for America NOW!, which is comprised of the labor unions AFL-CIO, AFSCME, SEIU, and the progressive activist organization Move On, among others.”
“Public Campaign also receives funding from the liberal Ford Foundation, the Common Cause Education Fund, and Barbra Streisand’s The Streisand Foundation, among other foundations and private donors.”
Stephen Seok was one of the IRS agents who wrote threatening letters to conservative groups. After doing so, he was given a promotion.
In June 2013, it was reported that two IRS employees had violated government ethics rules at a 2010 conference when they received $1,100 in free food and other items. One of them was Fred Schindler, the director of implementation oversight at the IRS Affordable Care Act office. The other was Donald Toda, a California-based employee. Obama did not fire them. Instead, he gave both of them paid leave. By comparison, in 1981, President Reagan fired 11,359 air-traffic controllers who had been illegally striking.
In June 2013, it was reported that The National Organization for Marriage, a conservative organization, had forensic evidence which proved that its donors’ private information had been illegally leaked by the IRS. The IRS employees who illegally leaked this private information could get five years in prison. However, Obama refused to file any charges against these IRS criminals.
The IRS illegally leaked the private information of Christine O’Donnell the same day that she announced that she would run for U.S. Senate as a tea party candidate.
According to White House visitor logs, Obama met with Colleen Kelley, the president of the National Treasury Employees Union, on March 31, 2010. The very next day, IRS employees who belonged to that union union started to target tea party organizations.
In June 2013, Associated Press claimed that the IRS had targeted liberal groups, but refused to actually name any of those liberal groups.
In July 2013, it was reported that Obama had met with a key IRS official who was involved in the targeting just two days before the key official had told his colleagues how to target tea party groups. The Daily Caller reported:
“The Obama appointee implicated in congressional testimony in the IRS targeting scandal met with President Obama in the White House two days before offering his colleagues a new set of advice on how to scrutinize tea party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.”
“IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who was named in House Oversight testimony by retiring IRS agent Carter Hull as one of his supervisors in the improper targeting of conservative groups, met with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 23, 2012. Wilkins’ boss, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, visited the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 24, 2012, according to White House visitor logs.”
“On April 25, 2012, Wilkins’ office sent the exempt organizations determinations unit “additional comments on the draft guidance” for approving or denying tea party tax-exempt applications, according to the IRS inspector general’s report.”
In May 2013, Jon Stewart said of the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups:
“Well, congratulations, President Barack Obama. Conspiracy theorists who generally can survive in anaerobic environments have just had an algae bloom dropped on their f***ing heads, thus removing the last arrow in your pro-governance quiver: skepticism about your opponents.”
In May 2013, Michael Macleod-Ball, chief of staff at the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, said of the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups:
“Even the appearance of playing partisan politics with the tax code is about as constitutionally troubling as it gets. With the recent push to grant federal agencies broad new powers to mandate donor disclosure for advocacy groups on both the left and the right, there must be clear checks in place to prevent this from ever happening again.”
In January 2014, it was reported that the Obama administration had chosen Barbara Kay Bosserman to head the investigation of the IRS’s targeting of tea party groups. Bosserman had donated more than $6,000 to Obama’s two presidential campaigns.
In January 2014, it was reported that since Sarah Palin had announced her candidacy for vice-President in 2008, the IRS had harassed her father six different times. Prior to that, the IRS had never contacted him during the 50 years that he had worked. The report did not specify how many of these six incidents happened under President Bush, or how many happened under President Obama.
In January 2014, it was reported that during the FBI’s so-called “investigation” of the IRS’s harassment of tea party groups, the FBI had not actually interviewed any tea party groups.
In January 2014, it was reported that the IRS had demanded that Friends of Abe (a conservative organization whose members work in the entertainment industry) give the IRS enhanced access to its security protected website (which included its secret membership list), even though such a demand was not standard IRS procedure. In addition, even though the organization had applied to the IRS for tax free status two years earlier, the IRS had still not made a decision regarding the application.
In February 2014, Obama said that there was “not even a smidgeon of corruption” in the IRS’s actions.
In February 2014, it was reported that during Obama’s presidency, 100% of the established 501(c)(4) groups that had been audited by the IRS were conservative.
In February 2014, when Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly asked Obama about the IRS harassment of tea party groups, Obama said “These kinds of things keep on surfacing, in part because you and your TV station will promote them.”
In May 2014, it was reported that tea party donors had been audited by the IRS at ten times the rate of the general population.
In May 2014, it was reported that the IRS had illegally ignored four Freedom of Information requests from Judicial Watch between May 2013 and October 2013. Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit in October 2013, and was finally able to get the information in May 2014. It showed that the orders for the IRS to harass tea party members had come from IRS headquarters in Washington D.C. It also showed that U.S. Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) had pressured the IRS to shut down tea party organizations.
In June 2014, the IRS claimed that Lerner’s emails to outside agencies from January 2009 through April 2011 had been “lost” when her hard drive “crashed.” Also in June 2014, the IRS claimed to have “lost” the emails from six additional IRS employees who were relevant to this scandal when their hard drives “crashed.” One of these IRS employees was Nikole Flax, who had been chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller. Flax had made 31 visits to the White House during the time that the IRS had been targeting tea party groups. However, a private company called Sonasoft had a contract with the IRS since 2005 to back up all of the IRS’s emails. The company keeps multiple and redundant backup copies of all the IRS’s emails. The company advertised itself by saying “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to back up their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?” In addition, Norman Cillo, an Army veteran who had worked in intelligence, and who had also worked as a program manager at Microsoft, listed six reasons why the IRS’s claim about “losing” the emails must be false. Also, federal law requires the IRS to keep permanent, backup copies of all of its emails at an external location. And finally, the NSA has copies of all of the emails.
Although federal law requires the IRS to keep permanent, backup copies of all of its emails at an external location, in June 2014, it was reported that the IRS has canceled its email archiving contract with Sonasoft weeks after Lerner’s computer “crashed.”
In June 2014, it was reported that emails showed that Lerner had suggested that the IRS audit U.S. Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa).
In June 2014, the IRS admitted that it had illegally given out information about the conservative group National Organization for Marriage.
In July 2014, it was reported that Lerner had called Republicans “crazies” and “assholes” in her emails.
In July 2014, it was reported that after Lerner’s hard drive “crashed,” the IRS deliberately destroyed it, without making any attempt to recover her emails. Top IRS officials told Congressional investigators that the hard drive was irreparably damaged before they destroyed it. However, IRS technical experts who had examined the hard drive before the IRS destroyed it said that this was not true, and that the data could have been recovered. Bruce Webster, partner at Provo, Utah-based IT consulting and expert witness firm Ironwood Experts, who has served as a consulting and IT expert in more than 80 civil lawsuits, said of this:
“… the IRS has no excuses for having handled this so poorly… This happens all the time… There are little storefront companies in just about every major city that can do this and there are forensic companies that can restore files and even do higher end recovery of data.”
In August 2014, the IRS admitted in a court filing that it had deliberately destroyed Lerner’s Blackberry after her computer “crashed.” In addition, an IRS official admitted, under penalty of perjury, that Lerner’s Blackberry had contained the same emails that had been on her computer.
In August 2014, the IRS finally admitted, under penalty of perjury, that Lerner’s emails had never really been “lost.” The IRS said the “missing” emails had been on its backup system all along.
On November 5, 2014, it was reported that the IRS had admitted to the court that it had not even tried to find Lerner’s “missing” emails in its backup system.
On November 21, 2014, it was reported that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration had obtained as many as 30,000 of Lerner’s “missing” emails from IRS disaster recovery tapes.
In February 2015, it was reported that Lerner had received a total of $129,300 in bonuses between 2010 and 2013.
As of April 2015, no criminal charges had been filed against Lerner.
On June 12, 2015, when the IRS missed a court ordered deadline for releasing 6,400 newly found emails from Lerner’s hard drive, the IRS said it would not be able to release those emails for another three months because it needed those three months to remove any duplicates.
In June 2015, government investigators said the IRS had “mistakenly” erased 422 backup tapes of IRS emails.
In July 2015, the House Oversight Committee released information which showed that in 2011, when Lerner’s hard drive was examined by John Minsek, a senior investigative analyst with the IRS Criminal Investigations unit, it contained “well-defined scoring creating a concentric circle in the proximity of the center of the disk.”
In July 2015, the House Oversight Committee released information which showed that the IRS had avoided searching five of six possible sources of electronic media for Lerner’s emails.
In July 2015, the House Oversight Committee released information which showed that some IRS officials, including some who were supervised by Lerner, had used a “wholly separate” instant messaging system called “Office Communication Server” that automatically erased its messages. None of these messages were archived. In an email conversation, Lerner had asked if the Office Communication Server archived its messages, and when she was told that it did not archive its messages, she responded by saying “Perfect.”
In July 2015, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan threatened to hold IRS employees, including IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, in contempt because they had illegally ignored the judge’s orders to release some of Lerner’s emails and other IRS documents. These same IRS employees had previously illegally ignored Freedom of Information requests and lawsuits for those same emails and other documents.
In August 2015, a report by the Senate Finance Committee said that during the 40 month period from February 2009 through May 2012, only one conservative group had been granted non-profit status by the IRS. The Senate Finance Committee report stated:
“Due to the circuitous process implemented by Lerner, only one conservative political advocacy organization was granted tax-exempt status between February 2009 and May 2012. Lerner’s bias against these applicants unquestionably led to these delays, and is particularly evident when compared to the IRS’s treatment of other applications…”
“Although applications from the Tea Party and conservative organizations languished at the IRS, this was not the case for all groups that applied. In cases where the IRS wanted to act quickly, it did – particularly for other high-profile applications that attracted political attention…”
“The IRS’s treatment of these organizations was almost universally consistent with Lerner’s personal political views – this is, supporting Democratic candidates and opposing conservative tax-exempt organizations…”
“We found evidence that Lerner’s personal political views directly resulted in disparate treatment for applicants affiliated with Tea Party and other conservative causes…”
“Her influence led not only to indefinite delays in the processing of these groups’ applications for tax-exempt status, but also to audits. During that same time, the IRS generally responded quickly and favorably to nonprofit organizations that were affiliated with progressive causes…”
In June 2016, the IRS released a list of names of 426 conservative organizations that it had targeted.
In June 2016, it was reported that in October 2010, at Lerner’s request, 1.25 million pages of confidential tax returns had been transferred from the IRS to the Department of Justice’s criminal division. The only way that this transfer could have been legal would be if the Justice Department had specifically requested it, and the only circumstances under which the Justice Department is legally allowed to make such a request is when the parties in question are under criminal investigation by the Justice Department. However, the Justice Department never requested these documents, and there was no criminal investigation of these organizations by the Justice Department. Therefore, Lerner’s action was illegal. Included in this transfer were the names and address of donors to these organizations – information which is supposed to be private and confidential. Of course, as always, Obama refused to file any charges against Lerner for her illegal activity.
On July 29, 2016, a Freedom of Information lawsuit by Judicial Watch resulted in more documents being released. These documents showed that top IRS officials in Washington D.C., including Lerner, had known as early as the summer of 2011 that the IRS was targeting conservative groups because of their ideology and political affiliation. Judicial Watch wrote of this:
“These documents show that the Obama FBI and Justice Department had plenty of evidence suggesting illegal targeting, perjury, and obstruction of justice. Both the FBI and Justice Department collaborated with the Lois Lerner and the IRS to try to prosecute and jail Barack Obama’s political opponents. These documents show the resulting compromised investigation looked the other way when it came to Obama’s IRS criminality.”
On August 1, 2016, Judicial Watch released additional documents, which showed that the IRS targeting of conservative groups had been happening since 2010, and that it had lasted though the November 2012 election. Multiple IRS employees said that applications from conservatives groups had been automatically denied approval, and were placed in a special “inventory” while IRS employees awaited further instructions from IRS headquarters in Washington D.C. Multiple IRS agents said that these IRS policies guaranteed that these applications from conservative groups would not be approved before the November 2012 election.
On August 2, 2016, Judicial Watch released more documents, which showed that Justice Department attorney Barbara Bosserman, who had spent more than 1,500 hours “investigating” the IRS targeting of conservative groups, had donated a total of $6,750 to Obama’s campaigns and the DNC between 2004 and 2012, including 12 separate donations to Obama for America between 2008 and 2012. In addition, it was Attorney General Eric Holder who had assigned Bosserman to oversee this “investigation.” No charges were filed as a result of this “investigation.”
In August 2016, it was reported that the Albuquerque Tea Party was still waiting for approval from the IRS more than six years after it had filed its first application.
A 2013 study by scholars from the American Enterprise Institute and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University found that, “had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5 – 8.5 million votes compared to Obama’s victory margin of 5 million.”
In November 2016, U.S. District Judge Michael R. Barrett said that the IRS was still targeting tea party groups because the IRS was still not processing applications that the tea party groups had submitted several years earlier. He ordered the IRS to process an application that the Texas Patriots Tea Party had submitted four years earlier. He also ordered the IRS to stop targeting tea party groups. Judge Barrett said:
“The evidence strongly suggests that the IRS initiated the delay because TPTP’s application was perceived at the screening stage to be a Tea Party case.”
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Below is a photograph of a woman named Urooj Rahman, holding a Molotov Cocktail. She was just arrested for throwing a Molotov Cocktail at a police car.
The Washington Free Beacon wrote of Rizvi: (the bolding is mine)
Rizvi entered the legal field after a career in the Obama administration’s intelligence community, where “her high-value work would often inform the President’s Daily Briefs,” according to her bio at the Islamic Scholarship Fund. The group gave Rizvi a law school scholarship sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a radical anti-Israel organization that has been tied to the funding of global terror networks.
During Rizvi’s time at the New York University School of Law, she was a fellow at Ramallah-based legal organization Al-Haq, which was founded to challenge the “legal status of Israel as an occupying power.” The group is best known for filing lawsuits aimed at delegitimizing Israel and providing legal backing for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against the Jewish state.
The group has been criticized for its defense of the “right to resist” by Palestinian terrorist organizations and its defense and promotion of violent actions taken against Israel.
Rizvi was also provided a scholarship toward her law degree by the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, which was started by the now-deceased older brother of liberal billionaire George Soros.
This is disturbing, but it is not surprising.
Here are 37 reasons why I’m not surprised that one of Obama’s former intelligence officials just paid the bail for someone who threw a Molotov Cocktail at a police car:
1) When Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, Obama allowed Russians who had donated to her foundation to buy American uranium.
Iran and Russia are strategic allies, and much of Iran’s military weapons were manufactured in Russia, so there is strong reason to think that the Russians who bought this American uranium might sell it to Iran.
Charity Navigator, the United States’ most influential charity watchdog, said that legitimate charities spend at least 75% of their donations on their mission. However, according to Clinton’s foundation’s tax forms for the years 2009 through 2012, of the more than $500 million that was donated to the foundation, only 15%, or $75 million, was spent on programmatic grants. More than $25 million was used for travel expenses. Almost $110 million was spent on employee salaries and benefits. $290 million, almost 60 percent, was reported as “other expenses.” Because of this, Charity Navigator put Clinton’s foundation on its “watch list.” In addition, Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, said: “It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons.”
If these Russians were truly interested in helping the causes of AIDS, famine, clean water, global warming, etc., there are plenty of other charities that they could have given to, which would have spent 75% of the money on these causes, instead of 15%. The only reason these Russians donated to Clinton’s foundation was because they wanted permission to buy American uranium, which they may end up selling to Iran.
2) The countries of Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, and Algeria all donated money to Clinton’s Foundation when Clinton was Secretary of State, at a time when these countries were attempting to conduct business with the U.S. government.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution states:
No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.
In addition, the State Department had the following rules when Clinton was Secretary of State:
Executive branch employees are subject to restrictions on the gifts that they may accept from sources outside the Government. Unless an exception applies, executive branch employees may not accept gifts that are given because of their official positions or that come from certain interested sources (“prohibited sources”).
A prohibited source is a person (or an organization made up of such persons) who: is seeking official action by, is doing business or seeking to do business with, or is regulated by the employee’s agency, or has interests that may be substantially affected by performance or nonperformance of the employee’s official duties.
Donations that foreign governments had given to Clinton’s foundation were used to pay for first class flights for Clinton, even though she was not an employee of the foundation when those flights took place. This is a clear and obvious violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against federal officials accepting money or gifts from foreign governments.
3) In 2011, the Obama administration criticized Algeria’s government for imposing “restrictions on freedom of assembly and association,” tolerating “arbitrary killing,” “widespread corruption,” and a “lack of judicial independence.”
However, in 2012, after the Algerian government donated $500,000 to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s foundation, the Obama administration authorized the Algerian government to buy “toxicological agents, including chemical agents, biological agents and associated equipment” from the U.S.
4) Boko Haram is a Nigerian terrorist organization. Gilbert Chagoury is a Nigerian businessman and diplomat. After Chagoury donated between $1 million and $5 million to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s foundation, Clinton’s State Department avoided putting Boko Haram on its terrorist watch list. After Clinton resigned and John Kerry became the new Secretary of State more than two years later, Kerry put Boko Haram on the State Department’s terrorist watch list.
5) In 2013, a passenger who wanted to fly from New York to London on Kuwait Airways was illegally rejected by the airline for being an Israeli Jew. The passenger filed a discrimination complaint with the Obama administration. The Obama administration dismissed the complaint, claiming that the airline was subject to Kuwaiti law, and not U.S. law, even though the flight originated in the U.S.
6) In July 2014, the Obama administration banned U.S. flights to Israel, based on the Obama administration’s false claim that Hamas rockets were being fired at the Israeli airport. Once this lie was exposed, the flight ban was lifted.
7) In February 2015, the Obama administration declassified and published a top secret document from 1987 which confirmed the existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons program. However, the Obama administration did not declassify or publish other parts of the document, which pertained to Italy, France, West Germany, and other NATO countries. Prior to this, Israel had never officially confirmed or denied that it had a nuclear weapons program, and the U.S. had remained silent on the matter as a gesture of good will toward Israel.
8) In May 2015, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the IRS and the Justice Department had illegally discriminated against a U.S. charity because of its pro-Israel views.
9) After Nidal Malik Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar!” and murdered 13 people on U.S. soil, instead of referring to it as “Islamic terrorism,” Obama said that it was “workplace violence.”
10) Mohamed Elibiary is a member of the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council. In October 2013, a Twitter user asked him:
“show me just ONE example of an Islamic country where non Muslims are treated with equality.”
“America and yes I do consider the United States of America an Islamic country with an Islamically compliant constitution. Move On!”
11) Although the Fort Hood shooter, the shoe bomber, and underwear bomber, and 100% of the 9-11 terrorists were all radical Muslims, the Obama administration enacted a ban on associating terrorism with radical Islam during training exercises of anti-terrrorism agents.
12) In January 2014, Commander-in-Chief Obama began allowing U.S. soldiers to wear Islamic beards, turbans, and hijabs as part of their military uniform.
13) In June 2014, Commander-in-Chief Obama banned Bibles but forced U.S. soldiers to adhere to Ramadan rules.
14) In September 2014, Obama falsely said the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant “is not Islamic.”
15) When Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, was 53 years old, he raped a girl who was either nine or ten years old at the time.
“My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives.”
However, there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution which says that that is part of the President’s job.
17) In January 2015, an Islamic terrorist named Ahmedy Coulibaly murdered four Jews at Hyper Cacher, a kosher supermarket in France.
Coulibaly called a French TV station from the kosher supermarket and said he was an al-Qaida terrorist and that he chose the kosher supermarket because he wanted to kill Jews.
18) In July 2010, Charles Bolden, the administrator of NASA, said that Obama had told him that the primary purpose of NASA was “to reach out to the Muslim world.”
Although I can’t prove that Obama actually said this, I can’t think of any reason why Bolden would lie about it. Given Obama’s behavior in so many other instances, I am inclined to think that Bolden was probably telling the truth.
19) In September 2012, the Obama administration phoned YouTube to complain about an anti-Muslim video.
“It does make us nervous when the government throws its weight behind any requests for censorship.”
Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said of this:
“I am actually kind of distressed by this… Even though there are all these great quotes from inside the White House saying they support free speech….by calling YouTube from the White House, they were sending a message no matter how much they say we don’t want them to take it down, when the White House calls and asks you to review it, it sends a message and has a certain chilling effect.”
20) In June 2013, Rasmussen conducted a poll to find out what people considered to be the “nation’s top terror threat.”
Reporting on the results of the poll, Rasmussen wrote:
“Among those who Strongly Approve of the president, more fear the Tea Party than radical Muslims.”
21) In May 2013, the Obama administration sued Star Transport, Inc., a trucking company based in Morton, Illinois, because it fired Muslim truck drivers who had refused to drive trucks that were carrying alcoholic beverages.
22) The Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization. In April 2012, the Obama administration allowed members of the Muslim Brotherhood to skip TSA screening.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration gave a very invasive patdown to a three-year-old boy in a wheelchair, which caused the boy to tremble in fear. The Obama administration gave an aggressive patdown to a seven-year-old girl with cerebral palsy. The Obama administration said that a four-year-old girl was a “high security threat.” The Obama administration placed an 18-month-old girl on its no fly list. The Obama administration gave a patdown to Henry Kissinger. The Obama administration forced a 95-year-old cancer patient to remove her adult diaper and fly without it. The Obama administration ripped open the urostomy bag of a 61-year-old bladder cancer survivor, and forced him to fly covered in his own urine. The Obama administration harassed a sick 3-year-old boy, and caused him to miss his flight.
23) Sheikh Mohammad Rateb al-Nabulsi is a Muslim preacher from Syria who has called for homosexuals to be executed. In March 2014, Obama gave him a visa so he could spread his message to mosques in 17 U.S. cities.
We are using numbers from the CIA Online World Factbook, a highly regarded government source for global statistics. It’s updated twice a month, and we’re relying on the latest version. By the World Factbook’s count, Muslims in the United States make up about 0.6 percent of the population. That’s around 1.8 million.
26) The Obama administration used taxpayers’ money to refurbish Muslim mosques in other countries.
27) Obama misquoted the Quran to give the false impression that it did not support murder.
28) In June 2011, Obama asked a Jewish singing group to remove its video from the internet.
29) In November 2014, after Palestinian terrorists murdered four Jews at a synagogue in Jerusalem, Obama said, “too many Palestinians have died.”
30) In 2010, Obama supported releasing Abdel Baset al-Megrahi from prison. Known as the “Lockerbie bomber,” Megrahi had been convicted of murdering 270 people.
31) A terrorist bomber named Rasmieh Yousef Odeh was convicted of murdering two Hebrew University students by putting a bomb in a box of candy on a grocery store shelf in Israel. Afterward, the Obama administration hired her as an Obamacare “navigator.”
32) Federal law requires the President to notify Congress 30 days before releasing terrorists. However, in May 2014, Obama released five “high risk” Taliban terrorists without giving advance notification.
At 3:25 in this video from June 2014, Marie Harf, the deputy spokesperson for Obama’s State Department, refers to these Taliban terrorists as “gentlemen.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWQ28sUBvwE
33) The Obama administration helped Hamas obtain the construction materials that it used to dig its terror tunnels, which it used to attack Israel.
34) This next one, by itself, should have been enough to have prevented Obama from being elected President. The fact that it did not stop him from being elected makes me worry very much about the moral values of the voters in this country. It’s not Obama that I’m scared of – it’s the electorate that put him into office.
In 1969, a guy named Bill Ayers co-founded a terrorist organization called Weather Underground.
In 1969, Ayers set off a bomb in Chicago at a statue that was dedicated to the city’s police. At the time of the explosion, no one was close enough to the statue to be killed. However, the explosion was so powerful that it broke almost 100 windows.
On March 6, 1970, three members of Weather Underground, including Diana Oughton (Ayers’s girlfriend) and Terry Robbins (Ayers’s close friend), were killed when they accidentally, prematurely set off a bomb which they were in the process of building, in their townhouse in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. The explosion was so powerful that it destroyed the entire four-story townhouse.
In 1970, Ayers bombed the headquarters of the New York City Police Department.
In 1971, Ayers bombed the United States Capitol building.
Although charges were filed against Ayers for these bombings, the charges were later dropped because law enforcement agents had conducted wiretaps and property searches without warrants.
In 1995, when Obama was running for state senator in Illinois, Obama held a fundraiser in the living room of Bill Ayers’s home.
35) Before Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State, she had promised that she would publish all donors to her foundation. However, after she got the job, Obama allowed her to break that promise.
In addition, before Clinton became Secretary of State, she had also promised that she would let the State Department review all new or increased donations to her foundation by foreign governments. Obama allowed her to break that promise too.
Furthermore, for three consecutive years – 2010, 2011, and 2012 – Obama allowed Clinton to lie to the IRS by falsely saying that her foundation had not received any donations from foreign governments. In reality, during those three years, her foundation had actually been given tens of millions of dollars by foreign governments.
In May 2015, the reason for all of these lies and secrecy became clear, when it was reported that 16 of the countries that had donated to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s foundation ended up getting a 143% increase in arms sales from the U.S. government, compared to the amount of sales that had occurred during the same time frame during the Bush administration.
36) In July 2015, Obama signed a nuclear “inspection” deal with Iran. ABC News wrote the following about this:
UN inspectors can demand access to nuclear facilities on Iran military sites, but they aren’t immediate or even guaranteed. Any inspections at those sites would need to be approved by a joint commission composed of one member from each of the negotiating parties. The process for approving those inspections could take as many as 24 days, which critics will claim is enough time for Iran to cover up any non-compliance.
In other words, the deal allows for “inspections” that aren’t real inspections.
This “inspection” deal gives Iran as much as 24 days advance notice before inspections. The only reason for this that I can think of is to give Iran enough time to move the stuff they don’t want the “inspectors” to see. If anyone here has a different reason, please let me know in the comments section.
In addition, Iran must agree to any “inspection” before it can take place. Therefore, even after the 24 days of advance notice, the “inspection” might not happen at all. The only reason for this that I can think of is to prevent the “inspectors” from seeing the stuff that Iran does not want them to see. If anyone here has a different reason, please let me know in the comments section.
37) In July 2016, the Washington Times reported that Obama had given taxpayers’ money to an organization that tried to oust Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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Former Obama Intelligence Official Helps Secure Bail for Molotov Cocktail-Throwing NYC Lawyer
Former official said alleged firebomber is her ‘best friend’
By Brent Scher
June 3, 2020
Rahman pictured holding Molotov cocktail during widespread protests in New York City / Eastern District of New York
A former Obama administration intelligence official who worked in both the Departments of State and Defense has guaranteed bail for a human rights lawyer accused of firebombing a police vehicle in New York City.
The former official, Salmah Rizvi, told a judge the alleged firebomber is her “best friend.” Rizvi, now an attorney at the D.C.-based law firm Ropes & Gray, helped secure the release of fellow lawyer Urooj Rahman by agreeing to be a suretor for her bail. That means Rizvi is liable for the full cost of the $250,000 bail if Rahman fails to obey the court’s orders.
Rahman was released to home confinement over the objections of government attorneys after her arrest on Saturday for throwing a lit Molotov cocktail through the window of an NYPD vehicle. Evidence presented by prosecutors included images of Rahman holding a Molotov cocktail in the passenger seat of a van that was later found to be full of the necessary materials for making the explosive devices.
U.S. District Judge Margo Brodie acknowledged the strong evidence against Rahman, who was also accused of distributing the incendiary devices to other rioters, but agreed to grant her bail due to the “willingness of family and friends to sign on as suretors,” according to a report from Law360.
Rizvi appeared in front of the court during Rahman’s Monday arraignment to certify her willingness to guarantee Rahman’s bail, according to a transcript of the proceedings obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “Urooj Rahman is my best friend and I am an associate at the law firm Ropes & Gray in Washington, D.C.,” Rizvi told the court. “I earn $255,000 a year.”
Neither Rizvi nor Ropes & Gray responded to requests for comment.
Rizvi entered the legal field after a career in the Obama administration’s intelligence community, where “her high-value work would often inform the President’s Daily Briefs,” according to her bio at the Islamic Scholarship Fund. The group gave Rizvi a law school scholarship sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a radical anti-Israel organization that has been tied to the funding of global terror networks.
During Rizvi’s time at the New York University School of Law, she was a fellow at Ramallah-based legal organization Al-Haq, which was founded to challenge the “legal status of Israel as an occupying power.” The group is best known for filing lawsuits aimed at delegitimizing Israel and providing legal backing for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against the Jewish state.
The group has been criticized for its defense of the “right to resist” by Palestinian terrorist organizations and its defense and promotion of violent actions taken against Israel.
Rizvi was also provided a scholarship toward her law degree by the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, which was started by the now-deceased older brother of liberal billionaire George Soros.
Rahman was arrested along with Colinford Mattis, a New York City attorney who was driving the van carrying the explosives. Authorities say a witness came forward to say Rahman was passing out Molotov cocktails to others at protests in Brooklyn early Saturday morning. Authorities released a picture of Rahman holding a Molotov cocktail fashioned out of a Bud Light bottle.
Rahman and Mattis were charged with causing damage to a police vehicle by fire and explosives and face up to 20 years in prison.
Government prosecutors argued that releasing the pair was a mistake given that tensions between protesters and the police remain high.
“We don’t believe this is the time to be releasing a bomb-thrower like the defendant into the community,” argued federal prosecutor Ian Richardson.
The judge in the case ultimately ruled, however, that the decision by Rizvi and others to guarantee the bail swayed him to grant them home detention.
“Home detention secured by the financial well-being of his entire family and several high-earning colleagues and friends should be an adequate deterrent to further danger to the community,” said Judge Steven Gold, whose ruling was held up by Judge Brodie on the same grounds.
Rahman was ordered by the court to forfeit all travel documents and remain in her home with a GPS device attached to her body. All travel must be approved by an officer of the court assigned to her case.
‘Obamagate’ Isn’t A Conspiracy Theory, It’s The Biggest Political Scandal Of Our Time
And the media know it.
By John Daniel Davidson
May 13, 2020
When former president Barack Obama told supporters last week that the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case against former White House National Security Adviser Mike Flynn is a “threat to the rule of law,” he was relying wholly on the fiction, willingly propagated for years by a pliant media, that the Russia-Trump collusion probe launched by his administration was lawful and legitimate.
But of course it wasn’t. A string of recently released documents have confirmed that the entire Russia-Trump investigation, which eventually entrapped Flynn and forced then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself, was an unprecedented abuse of power that amounted to organized effort by the Obama administration to nullify the results of the 2016 presidential election. It was in effect an attempted coup.
If you haven’t picked that up from the news media, it’s not your fault. Instead of grappling with the implications of newly released details about what Obama officials were doing to undermine the incoming Trump administration during the transition, the mainstream media have fixated on Trump’s use of the term “Obamagate,” dismissing it as a conspiracy theory.
A Brief History of the Flynn Case
This is to be expected. For years now the media have done everything they can to push the Trump-Russia collusion hoax—even after a years-long special counsel investigation by Robert Mueller turned up nothing—using the complexity of the scheme to hide the greatest political scandal of our time in plain sight.
A key aspect of that scheme was—and is—to make the case against Flynn appear legitimate. Flynn faced trumped-up charges that he mislead FBI agents about conversations he had with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration. (As the incoming national security advisor, Flynn was doubtless having conversations with numerous heads of state and ambassadors during this time, so there was nothing unusual about him talking to the Russian ambassador.)
The Obama administration already knew about the conversations with Kislyak because it had recordings of them thanks to a series of investigations it spun out of the Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign. Crossfire Hurricane, launched in the summer of 2016, was itself a bogus investigation based on the Steele dossier—an entirely fraudulent document riddled with Russian disinformation and paid for by the Democratic Party.
So why did the FBI want to interview Flynn ahead of Trump’s inauguration in January 2017? Top brass at the FBI weren’t exactly sure about their approach, but they knew they needed to get Flynn out of the way. As the bureau’s former head of counterintelligence, Bill Priestap, recorded in his notes, “What is our goal? Truth/Admission, or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”
Apparently the Obama administration settled on trying to entrap him in a lie. The recent disclosure of an early January 2017 Oval Office meeting attended by Obama, vice president Joe Biden, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and FBI Director James Comey, confirms the administration’s plan to hide the Russia probe from the incoming Trump team—including Flynn.
The idea was to use the Kislyak calls as a pretext to keep the Flynn investigation open, even though there was no reason to do so. After months of spying on him, the FBI had found nothing to indicate Flynn was conspiring with the Russians.
As Rice wrote in an email to herself after the meeting, “President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”
The point was to keep the Flynn investigation open as a way for Obama holdovers like Comey, Yates, and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to continue the Russia-Trump collusion probe even after Trump took office—and keep Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor, out of the loop. Since there was no reason to keep investigating Flynn, the Obama administration invented one: the preposterous notion that he intentionally mislead Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with Kislyak and then lied about it to the FBI.
There’s no evidence this happened, but even if there were it wouldn’t matter. As the Justice Department explained in its decision to drop the Flynn case, the investigation of Flynn was “untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation.”
Later, top FBI and Justice Department officials gave the House Intelligence Committee different answers about why they were pursuing Flynn. Comey, McCabe, Yates, and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord all gave conflicting testimony about the “primary purpose” of the FBI’s interview with Flynn, ranging from the outlandish notion that he violated the Logan Act—a constitutionally dubious 1799 law forbidding unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments—to the concocted charge that he lied to the FBI, which even the agents that conducted the interview with him didn’t believe.
Here’s Why Americans Need to Understand the Flynn Case
The Flynn case is just one piece of a much larger story about how the Obama administration—with the full knowledge and support of both Obama and Biden—targeted incoming Trump officials in a failed attempt to cripple the new administration with allegations it had colluded with Moscow.
The complexity of their scheme, and the efforts to hide it and mislead the American people, are frustrating. The cast of characters—from high-ranking Obama administration officials to relative nobodies loosely associated with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign—is long, as is the timeline of events. Details have come out slowly, in fits and starts, over the course of years. Following all the leaks and declassified transcripts and congressional hearings requires constant vigilance, and if you don’t keep up with it you can easily lose the thread.
That all works to the advantage of those who perpetrated this hoax, because it’s easy to get overwhelmed and tune it all out, or simply accept the corporate media’s deceptive reporting. But the ongoing revelations about the FBI’s targeting of Flynn can’t be ignored. They demand a full accounting. If ever there was a threat to the rule of law, it was the Obama administration’s abuse of power and its weaponization of intelligence agencies in an attempt to take down Trump.
However convoluted it might seem, pay attention to it. It’s the biggest political scandal of our time.
Finally, at long last, the myth of a scandal-free Obama presidency has vanished.
By Scott McKay
May 13, 2020
The hottest hashtag on Twitter is 12 years in the making, and frankly that’s far too late.
But hey, better late than never, right?
Last week’s cascade of revelations that the entire Trump–Russia narrative and Mike Flynn case, among other shenanigans falling out of Washington, D.C., over the past four years, weren’t just garbage but garbage cooked up and spread by the top levels of the Obama administration, to be summed up in one catchy hashtag, has the potential to change American politics in fundamental ways.
We know that prosecutions are afoot, and we know indictments are coming. We know that some of those indictments will be handed down to people with famous names.
We know already that #Obamagate is the correct name for the mess unfolding before us, thanks to the summary of a meeting held on Jan. 5, 2017, provided by the former president’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice. The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland follows that story:
Then came the January 5, 2017, meeting in the Oval Office where Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper briefed President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice on Russia-related issues.
Rice later wrote an email to herself on January 20, 2017 — Trump’s inauguration day and her last day in the White House — purporting to summarize that meeting. “On January 5, following a briefing by IC leadership on Russian hacking during the 2016 Presidential election,” Rice wrote, “President Obama had a brief follow-on conversation with FBI Director Jim Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates in the Oval Office. Vice President Biden and I were also present.”
According to Rice, “President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book.’ ” But then she added a significant caveat to that “commitment”: “From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”
The next portion of the email is classified, but Rice then noted that “the President asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team. Comey said he would.”
At the time Obama suggested to Yates and Comey — who were to keep their posts under the Trump administration — that the hold-overs consider withholding information from the incoming administration, Obama knew that President Trump had named Flynn to serve as national security advisor. Obama also knew there was an ongoing FBI investigation into Flynn premised on Flynn being a Russian agent.
Yet, rather than direct his team to provide the president-elect a briefing on the Russia investigation as it related to Flynn, Obama suggested it would be appropriate to withhold such information from the Trump administration.
That is just what Comey did. The following day, Comey provided “an ostensibly similar briefing about Russian interference efforts during the 2016 campaign,” and then “[a]fter that briefing, Comey privately briefed Trump on the most salacious and absurd ‘pee tape’ allegation in the Christopher Steele dossier.”
Rice’s memo puts to bed the question about what Obama knew and when he knew it. The answers are, obviously, everything and all along.
Why do you think Comey, who admittedly might well flunk a psychological examination conducted to ascertain his competence to stand trial should he end up in John Durham’s investigative net, has been so inexplicably smug since the Robert Mueller investigation crashed and burned, leaving his own credibility in tatters?
The answer is obvious: because Comey knew all along that everything he had done was at Obama’s behest.
This isn’t different from Obama’s IRS scandal or the scandal over Hillary Clinton’s emails. All the principals involved in those scandals acted with such alacrity because they knew that Obama was every bit as dirty and was even more involved in their malfeasance than they were. Comey acted on Obama’s orders, and somehow Comey thinks that makes him untouchable because to prosecute him means prosecuting America’s first black president — and that would never happen.
Which is perhaps true. It’s clear that virtually everything about Obama’s eight years in office consisted of lies to cover up corruption and abuse — Fast and Furious, the Arab Spring, Benghazi, ISIS, the Iran deal, the IRS scandal, Hillary’s emails, Uranium One, Crossfire Hurricane. Obama, and his people, had every expectation they would turn the White House over to Hillary Clinton and the lid on their foul dealings would remain closed.
But in the event that that expectation were to somehow fail to materialize, there was, in the words of the corrupt FBI operative Peter Strzok, an “insurance policy.” We now know what that was.
In another must-read post at the Federalist, Mollie Hemingway properly casts the coverup as targeted at the two people who would be in the best position to uncover the web of lies and abuse that was Crossfire Hurricane. Michael Flynn was to be Trump’s national security adviser, and Jeff Sessions was to be his attorney general. Flynn and Sessions would be in a position to examine the abuse of the intelligence community and Justice Department, respectively, and they had to be taken out before they could. So Flynn was framed up by the FBI, and Sessions was pressured into recusing himself from any aspect of investigating matters involving Russia, and with them discredited and out of the way Trump would spend two years partially paralyzed by false accusations given life by Mueller’s partisan hack fauxvestigation — in which everyone involved knew there was no underlying crime.
It’s the greatest political scandal in American history. And it’s just getting started.
In this space we haven’t really talked about the idea of the Fourth Turning, or the Strauss–Howe generational theory of American politics, which holds that every 80 or 90 years in our history have been marked by a definable cycle which includes a crisis that leads to a redefining of what it means to live in this country. Many, including Trump’s adviser Steve Bannon, see the current period we’re living in as that crisis, or fourth turning within the Strauss–Howe cycle.
Obamagate isn’t the crisis, per se, but coupled with the Wuhan coronavirus and its economic dislocation, the related coming reorganization of the American supply chain out of China, and the collapse in American intellectual institutions from education to the news media and popular culture, the crisis is here whether you believe in the Fourth Turning or not.
And the abuses Obamagate encompasses put everything about our national politics on the table. With Obamagate, there is no longer the reasonable expectation that the Deep State, or Washington elite Americans have left largely to their own devices to regulate, legislate, and deficit-finance our lives since the Great Depression, will continue as they have. The public is now acutely aware of a two-tiered justice system that allows the political class to ignore the laws it inflicts on regular people. And the market, thanks to the virus, has been shaken out of its status quo — talk to any small or medium-sized business entrepreneur, and they’ll tell you they’re reexamining everything they’re doing in recognition their prosperity is no longer assured.
The crisis has come. It will sweep away the weak and the corrupt, and nothing will be the same once it fully washes through Washington.
And not a moment too soon. Welcome to Obamagate, and a hearty welcome it is.
How the Obama Administration Shattered the Rule of Law
By Ben Shapiro
May 13, 2020
This week, former President Barack Obama reemerged from hibernation to lecture Americans about the threat to rule of law posed by the Trump administration. After Attorney General Bill Barr announced that the Department of Justice would be dropping its case against President Donald Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who had pled guilty to one count of lying to the FBI, Obama told his former aides, “our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.” He explained, “There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. … And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”
In reality, of course, Flynn was never charged with perjury. He was charged with lying to the FBI in the course of an investigation, a separate and far lesser offense, particularly given the fact that his alleged lie was immaterial to any underlying crime. In fact, as America found out over the past two weeks, Flynn wasn’t supposed to be the subject of any investigation at all: The FBI had decided to close an investigation into Flynn in January 2017, even after supposedly nefarious calls between Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok — the same man who pledged to lover and former FBI attorney Lisa Page that Donald Trump would never be president and suggested an “insurance policy” against that possibility — then intervened to keep the investigation open. The next day, during an Oval Office meeting, President Obama himself asked then-FBI Director James Comey about the Flynn-Kislyak communications. Next, Comey upped the ante: He avoided following normal FBI-White House protocols in order to interview Flynn, and Comey’s deputy director, Andrew McCabe, avoided informing Flynn of his rights. Nonetheless, the FBI agents who conducted the interview suggested that they did not think Flynn was lying during that interview. As it turns out, notes between top FBI officials at the time said, “What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” Flynn would later plead guilty to one count of lying to the FBI — at least in part because the FBI was threatening his son with prosecution.
This should be a massive scandal. It should be a massive scandal because, at the very least, it demonstrates the nation’s chief law enforcement agencies, prompted by political actors at the very top of the government, racing to bend the rules in order to pursue a case they were convinced they would make: the case that the Trump campaign had conspired with the Russian government. From the purposefully botched Carter Page Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to the absurdly conjured prosecution of Flynn, the most powerful institutions in American life violated the protocols meant to restrict abuse, firmly secure in their own feelings of moral rectitude.
That’s the best-case scenario.
The worst-case scenario is far darker: that by early January, with no evidence of Russian collusion, leaders of the nation’s political and law enforcement agencies decided that guilt was irrelevant, and that the Trump administration had to be strangled in the crib. This seems like a major stretch, but in a highly partisan era, such a narrative will have legs.
Meanwhile, blithe in the knowledge that they were on the side of the angels, members of the Obama-era government continue to chide Attorney General Bill Barr for ending a charade of a case. Their incredible inability to see how their conduct looks beyond the echo chamber of sycophantic media sources only undermines their credibility further. As it turns out, President Obama isn’t wrong — at least not entirely. Our basic understanding of the rule of law is at risk, not because Bill Barr stepped in to prevent an unjust prosecution but because our institutions under the Obama administration were politicized in ways that should shock the American conscience.
There’s no reason to ignore the mounting evidence that Obama administration officials were corrupt in their handling of the Trump–Russia investigation.
Those sharing #Obamagate hashtags on Twitter would do best to avoid the hysterics we saw from Russian-collusion believers, but they have no reason to ignore the mounting evidence that suggests the Obama administration engaged in serious corruption.
Democrats and their allies, who like to pretend that President Obama’s only scandalous act was wearing a tan suit, are going spend the next few months gaslighting the public by focusing on the most feverish accusations against Obama. But the fact is that we already have more compelling evidence that the Obama administration engaged in misconduct than we ever did for opening the Russian-collusion investigation.
It is not conspiracy-mongering to note that the investigation into Trump was predicated on an opposition-research document filled with fabulism and, most likely, Russian disinformation. We know the DOJ withheld contradictory evidence when it began spying on those in Trump’s orbit. We have proof that many of the relevant FISA-warrant applications — almost every one of them, actually — were based on “fabricated” evidence or riddled with errors. We know that members of the Obama administration, who had no genuine role in counterintelligence operations, repeatedly unmasked Trump’s allies. And we now know that, despite a dearth of evidence, the FBI railroaded Michael Flynn into a guilty plea so it could keep the investigation going.
What’s more, the larger context only makes all of these facts more damning. By 2016, the Obama administration’s intelligence community had normalized domestic spying. Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, famously lied about snooping on American citizens to Congress. His CIA director, John Brennan, oversaw an agency that felt comfortable spying on the Senate, with at least five of his underlings breaking into congressional computer files. His attorney general, Eric Holder, invoked the Espionage Act to spy on a Fox News journalist, shopping his case to three judges until he found one who let him name the reporter as a co-conspirator. The Obama administration also spied on Associated Press reporters, which the news organization called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion.” And though it’s been long forgotten, Obama officials were caught monitoring the conversations of members of Congress who opposed the Iran nuclear deal.
What makes anyone believe these people wouldn’t create a pretext to spy on the opposition party? If anyone does, they shouldn’t, because on top of everything else, we know that Barack Obama was keenly interested in the Russian-collusion investigation’s progress.
In her very last hour in office, national-security adviser Susan Rice wrote a self-preserving email to herself, noting that she’d attended a meeting with the president, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, FBI director James Comey, and Vice President Joe Biden in which Obama stressed that everything in the investigation should proceed “by the book.”
Did high-ranking Obama-administration officials not always conduct such investigations “by the book”? It is curious that they would need to be specifically instructed to do so. It is also curious that the outgoing national-security adviser, 15 minutes after Trump had been sworn in as president, would need to mention this meeting.
None of this means that Obama committed some specific crime; he almost assuredly did not. In a healthy media environment, though, the mounting evidence of wrongdoing would spark an outpouring of journalistic curiosity.
“But,” you might ask, “why does it matter, anymore?” Well, for one thing, many of the same characters central to all this apparent malfeasance now want to retake power in Washington. Biden is the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, he’s running as the heir to Obama’s legacy, and he was at that meeting with Rice. He had denied even knowing anything about the FBI investigation into Flynn before being forced to correct himself after ABC’s George Stephanopoulos pointed out that he was mentioned in Rice’s email. It’s completely legitimate to wonder what he knew about the investigation.
Skeptics like to point out that the Obama administration had no motive to engage in abuse, because Democrats were sure they were going to win. Richard Nixon won 49 states in 1972. His cronies had no need to break into the DNC’s offices and touch off Watergate. But as the FBI agents involved in the case noted, they wanted to have an “insurance policy” if the unthinkable happened.
In 2016, the unthinkable did happen, and we’re still dealing with the fallout four years later. We don’t know where this scandal will end up, but one doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder.
It looks like President Obama ordered up phony RussiaGate scandal
May 11, 2020
RussiaGate is now a complete dead letter — but ObamaGate is taking its place. Just how far did the then-president go to cripple his successor?
It’s now clear the Obama-Comey FBI and Justice Department never had anything more substantial than the laughable fiction of the Steele dossier to justify the “counterintelligence” investigation of the Trump campaign. Yet incessant leaks from that supposedly confidential probe wound up consuming the Trump administration’s first months in office — followed by the Bob Mueller-led special counsel investigation that proved nearly the “total witch hunt” that President Trump dubbed it.
Information released as the Justice Department dropped its charges against Gen. Mike Flynn shows that President Barack Obama, in his final days in office, played a key role in fanning the flames of phony scandal. Fully briefed on the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation, he knew the FBI had come up with nothing despite months of work starting in July 2016.
Yet on Jan. 5, 2017, Obama told top officials who’d be staying on in the new administration to keep the crucial facts from Team Trump.
It happened at an Oval Office meeting with Vice President Joe Biden, intel chiefs John Brennan and Jim Clapper and national security adviser Susan Rice, as well as FBI Director Jim Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.
“From a national-security perspective,” Rice’s memo afterward put it, “President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”
This even as then-President Obama also directed that as many people as possible across his administration be briefed on the (utterly unsubstantiated) allegations against Team Trump — and as Rice and others took unprecedented steps to “unmask” US citizens like Flynn whose conversations had been caught on federal wiretaps of foreigners.
Indeed, the Obama administration went on a full-scale leak offensive — handing the Washington Post, New York Times and others a nonstop torrent of “anonymous” allegations of Trumpite ties to Moscow. It suggested that the investigations were finding a ton of treasonous dirt on Team Trump — when in fact the investigators had come up dry.
Sadly, Comey’s FBI played along — sandbagging Flynn with the “friendly” interview that later became the pretext for the bogus charges dropped last week, as well as triggering the White House chaos that led to his ouster. This when the FBI had already gone over the general with a fine-tooth comb, and concluded that, no, he’d done nothing like collude with the Russians.
Meanwhile, Comey himself gave Trump an intentionally misleading briefing on the Steele dossier. That was followed by leaks that suggested the dossier was the tip of an iceberg, rather than a pack of innuendo that hadn’t at all checked out under FBI scrutiny.
Pulitzer Prizes were won for blaring utter fiction; the Trump administration was kneecapped out of the gate. Innocents like Flynn were bankrupted along the way.
Black men protected most by Trump reforms to Obama-Biden campus sexual assault rules, experts say
Critics say there were ‘parallels between the treatment of black men accused of rape during the infamous Jim Crow period and the adjudication of sexual assault cases in the current [Obama] era.’
By Carrie Sheffield
May 12, 2020
Critics say black men were disproportionately hit by Obama-Biden campus sexual assault rules denying due process and are cheering the Trump administration’s reversal of those policies.
On Wednesday, the Department of Education released new Title IX regulations that codify the obligation of schools to investigate claims of sexual assault and harassment. Previous rules under the Obama administration laid the groundwork for what exists today on many campuses: byzantine sexual misconduct disciplinary systems that investigate and punish all manner of sex-related behavior — from sexually suggestive jokes to drunken couplings to forcible rape. Critics say these extra-judicial systems often abandon the presumption of innocence and stack the deck against accused students, denying them basic due process.
“Once again, the Trump administration is righting a wrong perpetrated by Joe Biden, who as Vice President spearheaded a Title IX initiative that attempted to overhaul the assumptions on which our legal system is built and undermined the ability of the accused, usually men and often men of color, to get a fair hearing,” Andrew Clark, Rapid Response Director for the Trump campaign, wrote in a press statement. “Black men were disproportionately hurt by Biden’s campus sexual assault policy.”
In his statement, Clark linked to a 2018 report from The College Fix titled, “Believe the survivor? Here’s 11 times young black men were railroaded by campus sexual assault claims.”
“Six years’ worth of dismal due process rights for the accused has led to hundreds of young men fighting sexual assault claim allegations in court,” wrote The College Fix’s Michael Jones. “Even more concerning, this lack of protection has rendered one group particularly vulnerable — young black men.”
Jones cited a report from Center for Prosecutor Integrity, a nonprofit group that fights the “over-criminalization” of sexual activities. The report argues there are “parallels between the treatment of Black men accused of rape during the infamous Jim Crow period, and the adjudication of sexual assault cases in the current era.”
Jones also referred to Harvard Law School Professor Janet Halley, who has helped represent both alleged victims and alleged perpetrators in campus sexual-misconduct investigations. Halley testified before Congress in 2015 that male students of color are accused and punished at “unreasonably high” rates.
In her written testimony to Congress, which was an article she’d written for The American Prospect Magazine, former federal judge Nancy Gertner, a retired Harvard Law professor, also pointed to “the racial implications of rape accusations, the complex intersection of bias, stereotyping, and sex in the prosecution of this crime.”
The Trump campaign noted that multiple journalists and political analysts have called attention to Biden’s politically selective standards for weighing guilt and innocence in sexual assault cases
“It’s despicable that Joe Biden lowered the standards for accusations on college campuses to basically install a presumption of guilt for the accused,” Paris Dennard, Black Voices for Trump Advisory Board member, told Just the News. “There is no doubt these policies disproportionally impacted students of color. Now that he is in the hot seat, Biden doesn’t want that same standard applied to him, and that is the height of hypocrisy. I am confident the black community will see the arrogance of Joe Biden for thinking the same rules don’t apply to him.”
John Burnett, a Republican strategist and African-American activist based in New York City, told Just the News that the Trump administration’s new campus rules dovetail with prior actions Trump has taken to reform the criminal justice system, including a law known as the First Step Act. A report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that 91% of the 1,051 people who received retroactive prison sentence reductions under the act were black.
“Biden is the liberal that Malcolm X warned black America about over 50 years ago,” Burnett said. “The Trump administration made criminal justice reform a priority by passing the First Step Act, and currently working on a Second Step Act, while undoing the Title IX campus initiative to curtail due process rights that disproportionately impacted black men. Hence, he is dismantling Biden’s legacy of mass incarceration.
The Biden campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News. Biden has enjoyed strong support among black voters during the Democratic presidential primary, with key support from Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), a well-known black civil rights leader, playing a pivotal role in turning Biden’s political fortunes around after stinging defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Supporters of the new Trump-era regulations, which carry the force of law, say they will help both alleged victims along with the accused.
“The new rules protect survivors by making college disciplinary decisions more likely to withstand legal scrutiny and by emphasizing the need for supportive measures for victims — even for those who choose not to file a formal complaint,” Jennifer C. Braceras, director of the Independent Women’s Law Center, said in a statement. “Only by addressing claims of sexual misconduct and providing due process can colleges begin to restore faith in the system.”
Barack Obama Goes Golfing at Country Club the Day After Michelle Urged African Americans to Stay Home
April 29, 2020
On Friday, two PSAs featuring former first lady Michelle Obama urging African Americans to stay home in order to prevent the spread of the coronavirus were released. Prominent African American radio hosts who have nationally syndicated shows shared the PSAs with their audiences.
“Hi everybody, it’s Michelle Obama. Our communities are among the hardest hit by the coronavirus, and we’ve got to do everything we can to keep each other safe,” says the former first lady in the 30-second PSA. “And that means staying home because even if we are not showing any symptoms, we can still spread the virus to others. Let’s keep each other safe by just staying home. Thank you so much and God bless.”
The Robert Trent Jones Golf Club is a private, member-owned golf club and is at least a 45-minute drive from the Obamas’ home in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Membership at the club is by invitation only, according to its website. When Obama joined the club in 2017, an anonymous source told CNN that annual membership fees and dues to the club are about $15,000—though every former U.S. president reportedly has an honorary membership and those fees are waived.
Politico did not seem at all interested that Barack Obama was not staying at home to keep others safe.
Meanwhile, the rest of us little people are under threat of arrest and/or fines for nonessential travel or for violating social distancing practices. In Idaho, for example, a mother was arrested for taking her child to a closed playground.
It’s not surprising that the Obamas are typical Do-As-I-Say-Not-As-I-Do Liberals, but, come on! A day after MO says “stay home” to be safe, BO goes out golfing? Seriously? Of course, this is the same guy who went golfing the same day that his administration declared the H1N1 a public health emergency, so I guess it makes sense. But, seriously, imagine if Donald Trump did what Obama did. He’d never hear the end of it. Barack Obama needs to be called out for his blatant disregard for, as Michelle Obama would say, not “keeping us safe.”
Obama’s Oscar-Winning ‘American Factory’ Omits His Own Role in Ohio Factory’s Closing
February 9, 2020
Former President Barack Obama played a direct role in the hardships of the workers featured in American Factory, the Oscar-winning documentary his new production company produced.
The former president and First Lady Michelle Obama are celebrating the Oscar win for their new production company, Higher Ground, which saw American Factory win Best Documentary Feature on Sunday evening.
The film follows the travails of a shuttered General Motors factory in Ohio that is re-opened by Chinese investors, who save American jobs but encounter cultural and economic clashes with American workers.
But as Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), the former mayor of nearby Dayton, Ohio, wrote last year, the movie leaves out President Obama’s own role in making life worse for the GM workers who lost their jobs.
Obama’s auto bailout, he recalled, helped force the plant’s closure and made it harder for the workers to find new jobs because his administration was dealing political favors to its favored union allies — and they were in the “wrong” union.
Turner wrote in the Wall Street Journal last September, after the film’s release:
It’s a fascinating and at times moving film. What’s interesting about it, though, is that it never once alludes to the part Mr. Obama played in diminishing the ability of Moraine’s laid off workers to transfer to other GM plants. The president’s role wasn’t indirect and isn’t a matter of dispute: His administration’s bailout deal for GM included a backroom exclusive agreement with the United Auto Workers.
A quick refresher. The Obama administration’s auto bailout highly favored the UAW and its members. The GM plant in Moraine was unionized by the IUE-CWA. So—despite being one of the top GM facilities for quality, efficiency and production in the country—it was shuttered, and its employees were put at the back of the line when requesting transfers to other GM plants. Any non-UAW employees looking to transfer were forced to start as new hires, wiping clean any wages, tenure, and benefits built up during careers at other GM plants.
“American Factory” documents the UAW’s efforts to unionize the reopened auto glass factory without any mention of the same union’s direct role in the GM plant’s closure. The Dayton community was left out in the cold—thousands of jobs lost, families devastated, longtime GM workers out on the street looking for work.
The hypocrisy of this Obama-backed film is astounding. Mr. Obama fails to acknowledge his direct role in creating the hardships the Moraine workers weathered. He had nothing whatsoever to do with the plant’s reopening—that was all the work of state and local officials and community leaders.
As Rep. Turner recalled, his retired father — who had once worked at the plant — lost his health insurance in Obama’s auto bailout.
It was only because of bipartisan efforts, assisted by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), that the plant was re-opened with Chinese help, Rep. Turner wrote.
Turner was incredulous at the film’s silence about the Obama administration’s policies. “How does a nearly two-hour film telling the story of these workers fail even to mention the direct role the co-owner of the film’s production company played in creating their hardships? Did the filmmakers think no one would remember?”
Evidently, they did — at least no one in Hollywood. And they were right.
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 