If anything has proven true since the days of Watergate is the adage that says “it’s always the cover-up that’ll get you, not the original transgression.” It was true of Richard Nixon and more recently of Bill Clinton and the question is will it now also prove true of Barack Obama?
The memo from Representative Devin Nunes and other Republicans sitting on the House Intelligence Committee is proving to be a starter match for what could end up being a blazing fire. At the heart of that memo is the indictment that Obama’s top advisors willfully used unvetted information produced by a now debunked source and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
One presidential candidate leveraged elements of the federal law enforcement and intelligence to illegally spy on the opposition. That in itself is troubling but the growing proof that a sitting president knowingly allowed the DOJ and the FBI to work in concert with Clinton to derail her opponent may prove to be cataclysmic. So much so that several have asked if this is Obama’s Watergate.
Speaking to Patriot Channel on SiriusXM 125, Republican National Committee (RNC) spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said:
Every day it becomes more and more troubling and more people from the Obama era get tied up into this. Today is our first indication that perhaps President Obama himself was involved in this. These text messages are so disturbing. Let’s remember that Peter Strzok was the lead investigator into Russia and into Hillary Clinton’s emails and he received a text in September of 2016 that said President Obama ‘wants to know everything we are doing.’ Let’s remember, one month earlier, this same individual Peter Strzok sent a text about creating an ‘insurance plan’ about President Trump in Andy’s office, presumably Andy McCabe, the now former Deputy FBI Director. So, did he brief President Obama on this ‘insurance plan’? Obama wanted to know everything. Was he involved in it? These are deeply, deeply disturbing questions—and when you look at the history of the Obama administration with the IRS and the gunrunning scheme and the lying about Benghazi, this might be another instance where President Obama himself was caught up in it.
Even some in the mainstream media have questioned why former FBI Director James Comey and recently removed Deputy Director Andrew McCabe justified requests they put before Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) with information offered by Christopher Steele.
It is and was public knowledge that Steele worked for the firm Fusion GPS on behalf of the Clinton campaign. Steele had an inside track with the Justice Department through Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr. To make matters more suspicious, Ohr’s wife also worked for Fusion GPS with her task being as an expert on Russia matters for anti-Trump opposition research.
The FISA court declined only 11 of the more than 33,900 requests received in 33 years as of 2013. No requests were turned down in the two years previous to the election of 2016, then why did a federal judge require more than one from Obama administration’s FBI-DOJ?
When then-candidate Trump tweeted that Trump Towers was bugged most in mainstream media mocked him saying Donald Trump was paranoid and Obama White House officials issued condescending denials. Now, there is little doubt that Trump’s counter-intelligence specialist knew what they were talking about.
Now Republican establishment types like Senators Lindsey Graham (SC) and Chuck Grassley (IA) have confirmed the key findings from the Nunes memo have led them to make a criminal referral of Christopher Steele.
But what of Barack Obama? One of his final executive orders was yet another expansion of the Reagan-era Executive Order 12333 that dramatically enlarged 17 government agencies’ legal authority to surveille U.S. citizens. One has to wonder why such a far reaching act in this last days in office?
Mark Levin noted: “There’s no way Obama didn’t know about the applications and the actual securing of the warrant. There’s no way. And yet he’s never asked about it. And he’s the one the Democrat Party’s protecting. And he’s the one the Praetorian media are protecting.”
Writing for National Review, Victor Davis Hanson observed:
At some distant point, investigators and the media will conclude that the nexus of wrongdoing was likely Barack Obama himself. Aside from the massaged investigations of Hillary Clinton’s wrongdoing, during the election of 2016 and the Trump transition … Obama allowed his DOJ and the FBI to manipulate the FISA courts to surveille an American citizen and indirectly target others. He then made sure such data were disseminated among as many administration hands as possible. And he further allowed his subordinates to unmask surveilled citizens, whose identities and (in some cases conversations) were ultimately leaked to news organizations.
How all of this plays out depends on how long Republicans can maintain the pressure on the former Obama administration. A number of influential Obama officials believed they had both a moral right and the power of the White House to take down Donald Trump. And they had no problem with breaking the law to accomplish their goal.
Obstruction of justice and perjury have already been demonstrated under the Obama administration. All that remains is to see whether the Lady Justice still wears a blindfold.
