By David Harsanyi
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
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.
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