Mounting evidence suggests the Obama administration engaged in serious corruption with ObamaGate. Democrats and their media allies are going spend the next few months gaslighting the public by focusing on the most feverish accusations against President Barack Obama. But fact is, we already have more compelling evidence that the Obama administration engaged in misconduct than we ever did for opening the “collusion” investigation.
It isn’t conspiracy-mongering to note that the investigation into President Trump was predicated on an opposition-research document filled with fabulism and, most likely, Russian disinformation. We know the Department of Justice withheld contradictory evidence when it began spying on those in Trump’s orbit.
We have proof that many of the relevant warrant applications 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.
The larger context only makes 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.”
Obama officials were caught monitoring the conversations of Iran-deal opponents in Congress.
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 e-mail 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 would need to mention this meeting — 15 minutes after Trump had been sworn in.
None of this means that Obama committed some specific, easily defined crime; he almost assuredly didn’t. His staff is another story. In a healthy media environment, though, the mounting evidence of wrongdoing would spark an outpouring of journalistic curiosity.
This all matters, because, 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 e-mail. 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 Democratic National Committee’s offices.
Likewise in 2016. As the FBI agents involved in the case noted, they wanted to have an “insurance policy” if the unthinkable happened. And indeed, 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.
Twitter: @DavidHarsanyi