Archive for the ‘Obama’ Category

How the Obama administration’s Spygate trumps Watergate – Washington Times

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Last week toward the end of the week, there appeared in our finest newspapers The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal a spate of news stories that set official Washingtons mind at ease.

As one of the great gazettes put it, The Justice Departments internal watchdog [that would be Inspector General Michael Horowitz] is expected to find in a forthcoming report that political bias did not taint top officials running the FBI investigation into possible coordination between Russian and the Trump campaign in 2016 .

Nonetheless, the report will be criticizing the bureau for systematic failures in its handling of surveillance applications, according to two U.S. officials.

We shall have to wait until Dec. 9 to hear from Inspector General Horowitz as to what those systematic failures were. Do these early reports on his work forecast a whitewash? It would appear so. But can anyone really take seriously that those systematic failures took place in the absence of bias?

Such a claim requires a great deal of contortion. And the spate of the stories last week suggest the form that contortion will take: Blame will fall not on Peter We Will Stop Him Strzok, the virulent Trump hater who orchestrated the spying on the Trump campaign, but on a low-level lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith.

We are led to believe by these stories that while Mr. Clinesmith was biased against Mr. Trump Mr. Trumps victory had devastated him, he wrote in an email that bias never tainted his work or infected any of his colleagues. Many of whom, incidentally, are on record as sharing his bias. He was, you see, simply sloppy or so the report is purported to say.

I read these happy, trouble-free news stories very carefully, and one thing struck me. Nowhere in any of the stories did anyone bother to ask the question: What precisely triggered the need for this investigation of the investigators? It did not start in a vacuum. Was it not largely precipitated by the discovery of the FBIs pervasive use of the Hillary-financed Steele dossier upon which the Strzoks of this world relied on for their spying on Trump officials, all of whom turned out not to be Russian agents, as the FBI alleged.

Naturally these stories skirt that issue. If Mr. Horowitz skirts that issue too, his report will not amount to much, and we will have to look to Justice Department prosecutor John Durham for real answers. In April, Attorney General William Barr said, I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal. It has not ceased to be a big deal, even if Mr. Horowitz breezes over it.

What real predicate did the Obama administration have for its spying? That has never been satisfactorily explained. Consider the irony here. During the impeachment hearing, we heard Democrat after Democrat intone gravely that nothing is more abusive than a president seeking to get foreigners to spy on a political rival.

Yet is that not exactly what President Obama did in letting the Brennans and Strzoks loose to spy on the Trump campaign with the help of foreign intelligence bodies, such as MI6? If it was wrong for Mr. Trump to try to get our ally Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, as the Democrats assert, how can they possibly justify the Obama administrations use of foreign intelligence bodies to spy on Mr. Trump?

Now what youre going to see, I predict, will be perhaps the biggest scandal in the history of our country, said the president of the coming revelations from John Durham. Let us hope he is right. Spygate dwarfs Watergate in seriousness. After all, the Obama administration was not caught in a third-rate burglary but in a high-level scheme to weaponize both domestic and foreign intelligence instruments against a political opponent.

For more than two years, I have been predicting the Justice Department would find evidence of FBI and CIA agents working together to spy on Trump operatives. The Durham investigation will bear this out. The media, of course, will try to pit Mr. Horowitz against Mr. Durham. Do not fall for it.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is the author most recently of The Death of Liberalism, published by Thomas Nelson Inc.

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How the Obama administration's Spygate trumps Watergate - Washington Times

Trump, Obama story on ‘vacation scam’ was fabricated by satire website – PolitiFact

Says President Obama used government funds to pay for his personal vacations for the next 20 years and Trump sent him a bill.

Facebook posts on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019 in a Facebook post

BySamantha Puttermanon Monday, November 25th, 2019 at 4:55 p.m.

Did President Donald Trump send former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama a bill to "repay the government" for vacations they took that werent "official state business"?

The account is just as false now as it was when it first appeared in 2017.

The bogus story recently resurfaced in an Oct. 29 Facebook post that has been shared over 21,000 times. A portion of the lengthy post reads:

"... TRUMP JUST ENDED OBAMAS VACATION SCAM! Before Obama left office, he arranged with the State Department for a series of official visits to foreign countries spanning the next 20 years. Using discretionary funds from the Office of Presidential Visits and Vacations, Obama was planning to weasel what would have been another $2.1 billion in free vacations for him and up to 24 members of his family plus staff and even a dog sitter until the year 2036"

The post continues, saying that Trump canceled the Obamas plans, recalled Secret Service agents and sent the Obamas a $214 million bill for vacations they took that werent "official state business." It claims the Obamas spent 692 days on vacation.

The post was flagged as part of Facebooks efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

No, President Obama didnt take $2.1 billion from the "Office of Presidential Visits and Vacations" an office that does not exist to pay for family vacations for the next 20 years, and President Trump didnt end the "vacation scam" and bill the Obamas to repay a portion of the money.

None of this is true. The entire story was fabricated and originated from satirical website, "The Resistance: The Last Line of Defense," which is a part of a network of satire and parody sites.

We were able to track down the article, which was posted in February 2017, using the internet archive tool Wayback Machine.

The website includes a disclaimer that reads:

"All articles should be considered satirical and any and all quotes attributed to actual people complete and total baloney. Pictures that represent actual people should be considered altered and not in any way real."

According to CBS News White House reporter Mark Knoller, who keeps records of presidential travel, President Obama took 29 vacation trips over his eight years in the White House. The trips spanned all or part of 235 days (not 692). He also made 39 visits to Camp David, totaling around 93 days.

Even though the original story was published with a disclaimer, versions of the account were copied and pasted in social media posts with no such explanation and circulated as real news.

We rate this Pants on Fire!

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Trump, Obama story on 'vacation scam' was fabricated by satire website - PolitiFact

Barack Obama on climate, equity and overconsumption – GreenBiz

Whether you loved or hated President Barack Obama, you cant deny that the style of leadership and approach to environmental sustainability emanating from the White House has changed dramatically in the past three years compared with his administration. If youre like me, youve been wondering what Obama thinks about the climate crisis and other sustainability issues that have been making headlines as part of presidential campaign coverage.

My curiosity was partially sated last week during the Greenbuild conference, where the former president shared his views about leadership, sustainability and the urgency of climate change.

Below are highlights from Obamas conversation with Mahesh Ramanujam, president of the U.S. Green Building Council. Ive shared several of my takeaways, along with the direct quotes that support them, edited for clarity and length.

Obama: Climate change is an existential issue.

Tax policy, you can have bad tax policy, you can have good tax policy, but if you get that tax policy for four years, for eight years, you can correct it, reverse it. Climate change, its one of those [issues] where you can be too late and find, at least in human understanding and time horizons, it becomes irreversible. So I know of no issue that is more urgent than that.

Now I would combine it, though, with how can we construct a globalized, capitalist economy that actually provides everyone opportunity and is not continually accelerating inequality.

It is hard to figure out how we solve sustainability issues and climate change if you also have huge gaps in wealth and opportunity and education.

So were not going to solve the former unless were also intending to do the latter.

Obama: In a place like California, the way building codes have been constructed, theres almost no low-income housing in certain metropolitan areas. Not just low-income housing, theres no middle-class income housing. So teachers and police officers and others cannot live in those metropolitan areas because building codes there are so onerous it makes construction of affordable housing almost impossible.

Well, over time, those populations are going to push back. Theyre going to think that anything related to creating sustainable building codes is somehow adding to our costs, making our life more expensive.

So if we want to think about sustainability, we have to do it in a way that also is thinking about affordability. And if youre not paying attention to that, youre not going to get enough pick-up.

Obama: I do believe that the way that people are moved is by hearing stories and not facts. Now I am a fact guy, Im all about logic and reason and fact. I think those enlightenment values are really important. Obviously, thats contested these days sometimes. What moves people is stories and connection. And when we consider issues of sustainability, connecting peoples sense of place with the work that youre doing becomes critical.

What moves people is stories and connection. And when we consider issues of sustainability, connecting peoples sense of place with the work that youre doing becomes critical.

Obama: Heres the central principle about organizing communities, and Ill be honest with you, its the principle just about living and trying to have an impact. I always tell young organizers working for us, "Your first job is not to talk, but to listen."

I do think one chronic problem of do-gooders is sometimes we like to tell people what they should think is important, instead of actually asking them, 'Whats important to you?'

Obama: This is a larger cultural point how much is enough? All of you are familiar with the fact that one of the reasons that, despite huge increases in energy-efficient technologies, we still have such a big carbon footprint is our houses have gotten so much bigger.

The question is: How much space do we need?

Were America, were used to a lot of space, we dont want to have constraints, we want big everythings big. Big Macs. Whoppers. Thats big stuff.

And I get that. Thats part of our DNA in America; we like being big.

I talk about this with our daughters all the time. Were now at the point in our lives where we can have sort of as much as we want of anything, and its like a good meal. Sometimes just having a nice meal instead of keeping on going back to the buffet, you feel better at the end of it.

Obama: I think what we should all be striving for as a society is to align what we say were about and our core ideals with what we do. So if we say that our children and the next generation are the most important things, then we have to act in accordance with those values.

I worry that any society where how we live strays too far from what we say we believe in is going to have a problem. And currently, there is more divergence than I would like.

And if I profess that the New Testament says we should be worrying about the poor and the weak and the vulnerable, and you say thats what youre about, then presumably that should be reflected in your policies and the people you support.

I worry that any society where how we live strays too far from what we say we believe in is going to have a problem. And currently, there is more divergence than I would like.

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Barack Obama on climate, equity and overconsumption - GreenBiz

Chick-fil-A Foundation director donated thousands to Obama and Clinton presidential campaigns – Washington Examiner

The head of the Chick-fil-A Foundation is a donor to both former President Barack Obama's and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's presidential campaigns.

According to records from the Federal Election Commission, Rodney Bullard, the executive director of the Chick-fil-A Foundation, donated $1,000 to Hillary for America in 2016 along with $500 donations to both Obama for America and the Obama Victory Fund in 2008.

Bullard helped the restaurant company start its foundation in 2011, but Chick-fil-A is now being accused of caving to liberals by ending donations from its charitable arm to Christian charities such as the Salvation Army and Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

The company announced the decision earlier this month after pressure from gay rights activists, saying it wanted to clarify its beliefs and focus on education, homelessness, and hunger. Conservatives slammed the organization after the move, with one Republican congressman arguing that it "bowed" to the "harassment lobby" and another sarcastically congratulating "wokescolds who finally bullied Chick-fil-A into stopping donations to the Salvation Army."

The company said it is still open to donating to Christian companies in the future. The move comes after attempts to open restaurants in more liberal markets such as the U.K and Canada, where it faced resistance for its owner's Christian beliefs, including support for traditional marriage.

[ Opinion: Conservatives boycotting Chick-fil-A are silly]

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Chick-fil-A Foundation director donated thousands to Obama and Clinton presidential campaigns - Washington Examiner

To defeat Trump, Dems rethink the Obama coalition formula – POLITICO

The shift crystallized during last weeks debate as Democrats descended on the majority-black city of Atlanta and fanned out afterward in campaign appearances designed to connect with African-American audiences.

Aides and allies of Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker as well as Julin Castro have increasingly sounded alarms about whether any other candidate can beat Trump. And Harris, Booker and Castro have been telegraphing for weeks that they would take their campaigns in a more race-conscious direction.

What we need to talk about right now in this primary is which candidate can actually assemble the coalition we need to win, and thats a big concern right now with who is leading the polls, a Harris official said.

The new orientation is animated by doubts surrounding the durability of Joe Biden a candidate with a broad-based coalition, anchored by his commanding lead with black voters and a desire to blunt the momentum of a younger, white male candidate, Pete Buttigieg. The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has failed to demonstrate any ability to win over voters of color, most starkly in a recent Quinnipiac University poll that pegged his support among African-American Democrats in South Carolina at 0 percent.

Castro, the only Latino in the race, attacked Buttigiegs low polling figures with black voters last week.

If there's a candidate that has a bad track record with the biggest base of our party, Castro said, then why in the world would we put that person at the top of the ticket and risk handing the election over to Donald Trump when we need places like Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia to help us win Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania?

One day later, Booker implicitly rebuked Buttigieg when he said during the debate that nobody on this stage should need a focus group to hear from African-American voters.

Sen. Cory Booker said during the November debate that nobody on this stage should need a focus group to hear from African-American voters. | Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Harris lamented that for too long I think candidates have taken for granted constituencies that have been the backbone of the Democratic Party primarily black women.

Then came Sen. Bernie Sanders, releasing a plan to provide billions of dollars to historically black colleges and universities. He told Morehouse College students gathered in a plaza with a Martin Luther King Jr. statue at its center that his campaign has helped build and grow the culture of diversity that makes our country what it is today.

On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who from the beginning has explicitly addressed minority communities in her policies and speeches, told a crowd in Atlanta that as a white woman, I will never fully understand the discrimination, pain and harm that black Americans have experienced just because of the color of their skin. But, she said, When I am president of the United States, the lessons of black history will not be lost.

The rhetoric has shifted the debate about electability from an ideological plane where moderates and more progressive Democrats argued for months over policy to one based more on identity, and which candidate is best positioned to reassemble the Obama coalition of young people, women and nonwhite voters that proved instrumental to Democratic successes in the 2018 midterm elections.

It was an electability argument that Booker was making when he said black voters are pissed off, and they're worried.

They're pissed off because the only time our issues seem to be really paid attention to by politicians is when people are looking for their vote, Booker said. And they're worried because in the Democratic Party, we don't want to see people miss this opportunity and lose because we are nominating someone that isn't trusted, doesn't have authentic connection.

In part, the appeals of Harris and Booker are a last effort in a campaign slipping away from them. Both have less than 5 percent in national polls, and along with everyone else, are trailing Biden among black voters by huge numbers.

Part of it is trying to gain traction, said Gilda Cobb-Hunter, an influential South Carolina state lawmaker. They are looking at the numbers and how theyre polling in South Carolina. Im sure they expected to be doing better.

But the overtures by Booker, Harris and Castro also represent a slim opening that they are attempting to exploit.

Biden is slumping in Iowa, and his opponents believe he may shed support in later-voting states, including South Carolina, if he performs poorly there. Buttigieg, on the other hand, is rising in Iowa and New Hampshire, but performs abysmally with black voters outside those overwhelmingly white states.

Less than three months before the Iowa caucuses, its as though Democrats just now realized that the primarys four front-runners are all white, and that three are men.

Youre starting to see these candidates choose states and places and areas to emphasize their strengths, so its natural that thats a piece of it, said Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way. Its not just ideological. These coalitions are also demographic.

Race isnt the only issue in the conversation. During last weeks debate, Sen. Amy Klobuchar offered the campaigns sharpest critique to date of sexism in American politics, with a direct appeal to any working woman out there, any woman that's at home who knows exactly what I mean.

Harris has argued since giving a highly billed Detroit speech to the NAACP in May that electability is too often a code word for white, working-class male voters, who have emerged as the archetype of those who swung to Trump. She says a narrative centered around who can win the Midwest and who can beat Trump too often leaves out women and people of color.

In recent weeks, culminating in Wednesdays debate in Atlanta, Harris has made the case for her own candidacy more explicitly in this area, contending that the discussion in the primary should shift to which candidate can pull together the diverse coalition needed to win.

Harris called out Buttigieg as nave for citing his own experience being gay when pressed on his inability to connect with black voters, after which Buttigieg told reporters that Harris had misinterpreted him.

Theres no equating those two experiences, and some people, by the way, live at the intersection of those experiences, Buttigieg told reporters. What I do think is important is for each of us to reveal who we are and what motivates us and it's important for voters to understand what makes me tick, what moves me, and my sources of motivation in ensuring that I stand up for others.

Like Harris, Bookers focus, undergirded by fears of nominating the wrong candidate, is on forging multiracial, multiethnic coalitions that unite the progressive and moderate wings of the party.

The key is really this: We know how to win. Forty-Four showed us how, Bakari Sellers, the former state lawmaker in South Carolina, said of the road Obama carved in 2008. Others may try different paths, but thats unproven.

Its not the first time this cycle that Democrats have forced conversations about their past treatment of black and brown voters and what it will take to recreate the big tent that helped Democrats win in 2008 and 2012 previously, warnings were issued in Detroit, another predominantly black city, when the presidential candidates battled at an earlier debate this summer.

But in recent months, race and gender often became overshadowed by ideological disputes, primarily over health care, and by questions about whether a progressive Democrat or a more moderate one could run a stronger general election campaign against Trump. The partys focus on winning back Rust Belt voters who supported Obama before turning to Trump in 2016 defined much of the early campaign.

Following an event in Iowa this month, Castro said, Sometimes what seems like the safe choice is actually the riskier choice," arguing "we need to nominate a candidate who can appeal to the African-American and Latino communities.

Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julin Castro argued "we need to nominate a candidate who can appeal to the African-American and Latino communities. | Joshua Lott/Getty Images

Yet even candidates injecting issues of race and gender into the campaign acknowledge the potential shortcomings of the case they are making. Harris has talked extensively about the electability argument being a barrier for potential White House barrier-breakers like herself, saying, Folks are kind of like, I like that that can happen, Harris said of nominating a black woman. But maybe we got to go with whats safe because we got to get Ole Boy out of office I am well aware of the challenge before us.

Cobb-Hunter said, Its hard to say how effective Harris and Booker might be in raising issues of race.

Even before, she said, Its not like black voters didnt know they were black.

Biden told reporters last week that he is confident he will win both Iowa and New Hampshire. In South Carolina on Friday, Biden spoke of his lead there as durable, saying, Ive always had overwhelming support from African-Americans my whole career and actually, I do feel pretty confident.

A Biden senior campaign adviser spent several minutes in a recent briefing with reporters talking about his steady polling, with the person pointing to the resiliency of his vote.

There has been a resiliency and a stability to his vote both nationally and in individual states and its because he actually has a broad base of support, the adviser said. Unlike some of the other candidates whose votes are based on one demographic group, he actually is strong among almost every demographic group.

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To defeat Trump, Dems rethink the Obama coalition formula - POLITICO