‘Obamagate’ Isn’t A Conspiracy Theory, It’s The Biggest Political Scandal Of Our Time

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/13/obamagate-isnt-a-conspiracy-theory-its-the-biggest-political-scandal-of-our-time/

‘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.

May 13, 2020. Tags: Barack Obama, Obama, ObamaGate, Politics. Barack Obama. Leave a comment.

Welcome to #Obamagate, Everybody!

https://spectator.org/welcome-to-obamagate-everybody/

Welcome to #Obamagate, Everybody!

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.

May 13, 2020. Tags: Barack Obama, Obama, ObamaGate, Politics. Barack Obama. Leave a comment.

How the Obama Administration Shattered the Rule of Law

https://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2020/05/13/how-the-obama-administration-shattered-the-rule-of-law-n2568699

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.

May 13, 2020. Tags: Barack Obama, Obama, ObamaGate, Politics. Barack Obama. Leave a comment.

Obamagate Is Not a Conspiracy Theory

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/trump-russia-investigation-obamagate-not-conspiracy-theory/

Obamagate Is Not a Conspiracy Theory

By David Harsanyi

May 12, 2020

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.

May 13, 2020. Tags: Barack Obama, Obama, ObamaGate, Politics. Barack Obama. 2 comments.