Oops!
So there was former President Barack Obama speaking to his peeps — the Obama Alumni Association. Alas if not inevitably, someone had their audio recording function of their cell phone running and — presto! — the ex-president’s musings on the dropped prosecution were out there in public. Presumably whoever did so thought they were lashing out at the hated President Trump — and distracting from another Obama story out there.
Here’s the headline on Fox:
Obama knew details of wiretapped Flynn phone calls, surprising top DOJ official in meeting with Biden, declassified docs show
The Fox story by Gregg Re begins,
President Obama was aware of the details of then-incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn’s intercepted December 2016 phone calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, apparently surprising then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, according to documents released Thursday as exhibits to the government’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case.
Obama’s unexpectedly intimate knowledge of the details of Flynn’s calls, which the FBI acknowledged at the timewere not criminal or even improper, raised eyebrows because of his own history with Flynn — and because top FBI officials secretly discussed whether their goal was to “get [Flynn] fired” when they interviewed him in the White House on January 24, 2017.…
On January 5, 2017, Yates attended an Oval Office meeting with then-FBI Director James Comey, then-Vice President Joe Biden, then-CIA Director John Brennan, and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, according to the newly declassified documents, including an FD-302 FBI witness report. They were discussing Russian election interference, along with national security adviser Susan Rice and other members of the national security council.
After the briefing, Obama asked Yates and Comey to “stay behind,” and said he had “learned of the information about Flynn” and his conversation with Russia’s ambassador about sanctions. Obama “specified that he did not want any additional information on the matter, but was seeking information on whether the White House should be treating Flynn any differently, given the information.”
Uh-oh.
By Saturday night Fox’s Jesse Watters hammered away at what he quite accurately called “Obamagate,” saying that “the Obama people got caught this week. And it looks like it goes straight to the top.” Exactly.
By Monday morning there was this headlining on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal:
Barack Obama on Michael Flynn
The lawyer President misstates the crime and the real threat to justice.
The editorial says, in part, this:
Barack Obama is a lawyer, so it was stunning to read that he ventured into the Michael Flynn case in a way that misstated the supposed crime and ignored the history of his own Administration in targeting Mr. Flynn. Since the former President chose to offer his legal views when he didn’t need to, we wonder what he’s really worried about.
“There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free,” Mr. Obama said in the Friday call to about 3,000 members of the Obama Alumni Association. The comments were leaked to Yahoo News and confirmed by Mr. Obama’s spokeswoman to the Washington Post and other outlets. Mr. Obama added: “That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”
Even discounting for Mr. Obama’s partisan audience, this gets the case willfully wrong. Mr. Flynn was never charged with perjury, which is lying under oath in a legal proceeding. Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty to a single count of lying to the FBI in a meeting at the White House on Jan. 24, 2017 that he was led to believe was a friendly chat among colleagues.
Hmmm. The ex-president did indeed get the facts “willfully wrong.” As his supporters never ceased to remind, Mr. Obama was elected in 1990 as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. Which makes his basic misstatement of the legal facts in the Flynn case something of a, shall we say, curiosity.
Unless.
Unless, as noted right here in The American Spectator by Jed Babbin, there is this, bold print supplied:
The people who knew about “Crossfire Hurricane” included James Comey, then director of the FBI, his deputy Andrew McCabe, John Brennan (Obama’s CIA director), and James Clapper (Obama’s Director of National Intelligence), as well as several of their subordinates who were conducting the investigation.
In the world of government bureaucracies — which includes the FBI, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the Justice Department — the investigation had to have been approved of by the attorney general. The FBI and the CIA could not have undertaken the investigation without the knowledge of top White House officials, as well, including National Security Adviser Susan Rice. In that world, it is inconceivable that both President Obama and Vice President Biden did not know about it and at least gave their tacit approval (though Biden has probably forgotten it by now).
Thanks to one of the documents revealed in the Department of Justice (DOJ) motion to dismiss the Flynn case, we know that on January 5, 2017, after Trump’s election and before his inauguration, then–Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates learned about the Flynn investigation not from Comey, but from President Obama. Obama’s active involvement in the Flynn case — which must have been at Comey’s behest — speaks loudly of his knowledge and probable involvement in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. What was Obama’s involvement?
Indeed.
As noted here and elsewhere, this is exactly what Sean Hannity’s “ensemble cast” of investigative journalists and others have spent the last three years of relentless digging to find out. What happened? Who was involved?
In fact, the question that Babbin raises — “What was Obama’s involvement?” — echoes the legendarily famous question posed about another president — Richard Nixon — by then–Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker in the Senate Watergate hearings. That question would be: “What did the president know and when did he know it?”
Rush Limbaugh spent time on his Monday show zeroing in on this exactly:
Anyway, my point here is that none of this Trump–Russia collusion stuff could have happened without Obama knowing about it. These people that perpetrated it — the FBI and the DOJ, the Comeys, the McCabes, the Clappers, the Brennans, none of them could have done it without Obama knowing about it, at bare minimum knowing about it, and at worse directing it.
And it turns out he was directing it. It’s that famous Oval Office meeting on January 5th of 2017. I spent many minutes talking about that on Friday. After the program ended on Friday, I saw a post at The Federalist by Mollie Hemingway. And she focused on that. And of course the Trump Tower meeting the next day, which the Oval Office meeting on January 5th was to set up. In other words, Obama led a meeting on January 5th, 2017, to plan how to sabotage Trump with the Russia collusion narrative and get it out there the next day in a Comey and Brennan meeting with Trump at Trump Tower.
So it is not a stretch. In fact, it’s factual to say that Obama collaborated to invent the Russian collusion narrative. That’s why Obama is taking all of his time and trying to focus on Trump and his supposedly horrible, chaotic response to the coronavirus. Obama knows he’s got buddies. He knows he’s got sycophants. He knows he’s got butt kissers in the Drive-By Media. But he still needs to give them somewhere to go. So harping on Trump and Trump’s supposed incompetence is Obama’s way of deflecting.…
There are people who literally ought to be in jail!
There are people who literally need to be indicted. There are people who need to have everything taken away from them like Flynn and Manafort have had taken away from them, the people that ran this operation. There are American citizens including Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Peter Strzok Smirk, Lisa Page, Bill Priestap, I go through the list of people, who all participated in the willful destruction of lives of their fellow American citizens.
Rush is exactly right.
The bottom line here is simple. This was an attempt at a silent coup orchestrated by government officials to take down first a presidential candidate, and then when that failed, to take down a sitting president of the United States — with that predecessor’s complicit knowledge if not his direction. Which was it? That’s what the Durham investigation hopefully will find out.
Now? Now, as Jesse Watters has noted, the Obama people have been caught. And trying to wave attention away by talking instead about the Trump handling of the virus won’t cut it.
Finally, we have a Department of Justice and an attorney general that are all about what they are collectively and individually supposed to be all about: finding the truth.
All of it.
What a disgrace.
