Over the course of the last six months, former President Obama has not been maintaining a profile that’s typical for most American ex-presidents. Rather than quietly retiring to a life of relaxation and leisure (former President George Bush famously took up painting after leaving office), he’s been keeping up a busy schedule of very actively and publicly combatting the policies and actions of the new Trump administration, both in Washington and elsewhere.
And rather than leaving the nation’s capital as most other ex-presidents have done, Obama has purchased a high-walled, 8,200-square-foot compound in the city’s posh Kalorama neighborhood previously belonging to ex-President Bill Clinton’s press secretary Joe Lockhart. It’s from herer that he reportedly commands an activist army of more than 30,000 hardcore liberal supporters, along with a “shadow government” staffed by his allies, friends and ex-officials of his administration whose mission it is to undermine, infiltrate and co-opt the various agencies, departments and bureaus of the Trump government.
It’s via these tentacles into the “Deep State” that Obama has been able to keep millions of dollars flowing to both himself and his family as the former president’s connections to his party and to globalists both inside and outside the United States make him an all-important figure who still wields considerable influence in Washington.
While a former politician’s connections to his or her party are typically nothing to look askance at, the fact that Obama has been outed recently as traveling to multiple foreign countries, such as South Korea (twice), Italy and Germany and meeting with the presidents or prime ministers of those nations, in some cases just hours after or before President Trump has met with those same leaders means that he could well be in violation of what’s known as the Logan Act.
The Logan Act is a longstanding law originally enacted in 1799, which says that no ordinary citizen of the United States may act on behalf of the U.S. government without explicit permission to do so. The fact that Obama has no official title in our government other than “former president” is specifically the trouble here; if he was just paying a courtesy call to heads of state in foreign countries, that would be one thing, but based on recent reports and conversations from these leaders themselves, it appears that the former president has been discussing U.S. policy and goals. If this is the case, then it may in fact be necessary for Obama to stand before the U.S. Congress and give answers as to what exactly he’s been talking about with these dignitaries.
Has Obama been presenting himself as a surrogate leader of the U.S. whose party will once again sweep into power in a few short years? Is Obama making promises based on people he appointed to roles in the government who still to this day retain their jobs as holdovers from the previous administration? Is he presenting himself as a representative of powerful globalist interests through whom foreign leaders can liaise? If the answers to any of these questions are “Yes,” there could be hell to pay for the ex-president, and even a jail sentence is not out of the realm of possibility.
Just imagining all the possible scenarios is enough to make one’s head spin. Suppose Obama has been telling world leaders that Trump will be impeached in a short time, and the Democrats will once again rule both houses of Congress. In Indonesia several weeks ago, Obama praised the Muslim country on July 4th while castigating the United States for its alleged “nationalism” and “isolationism.” Obama also reportedly blasted Trump’s decisions to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords, implement a travel ban to and from six Muslim countries and recommend the repeal of Obamacare.
Has Obama also been trying to gather dirt on Trump by meeting so soon after or before the new president’s official visits to these countries? Has he been attempting to make Trump look bad by presenting himself by comparison? Try to imagine this same scenario playing out in any other country.
For instance, in Great Britain, imagine the leader of the currently out-of-power Labor Party, Jeremy Corbyn, jetting off to visit world leaders within hours of official visits by the UK’s conservative Prime Minister Theresa May; this would be a scandal for which Corbyn would practically be tarred and feathered by that nation’s press. And yet, as Obama has done the same thing, our national media has been nearly silent on the issue, with only conservative outlets running articles about this behavior.
According to some of those same outlets, these cases of “freelance diplomacy” are also allegedly not the first time Obama has engaged in such shenanigans. Author Michael Ledeen, who wrote the bestselling book Field of Fight with former National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, says that in 2008 before he became president, Obama went to Iran “to assure the mullahs that he was a friend of the Islamic Republic and that they would be very happy with his [future] policies.” Obama also visited Germany, France, the UK, Isreal, Jordan, Afghanistan and Iraq. At the time, a spokesman for Obama’s presidential race competitor Senator John McCain said these trips were about “politics.”
Newt Gingrich recently stated on Fox News that Obama will have to testify to Congress about Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Obama may also have to answer charges that the Department of Justice (DOJ) under his last Attorney General Loretta Lynch did the bidding of the Democratic Party.
There is some indication that still-present Obama-era DOJ staffers have been involved in accusations over Russian influence on the Trump campaign. Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina has been grilling Obama’s Director of National Intelligence John Brennan and has vowed that certain surveillance programs authorized by Congress will not be allowed to be renewed until Obama testifies who authorized the “unmasking” of Trump campaign officials by former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice.
Will Obama also be forced to answer questions about his overseas trips? That’s a $64,000 question in Washington right now. Here’s hoping that Obama’s imperious behavior will be punished according to the dictates of U.S. law or at the very least be reigned in, reminding the former president that he is no longer acting in any official capacity and remains, like most Americans, simply an ordinary citizen.
