Obama’s self-revealing final act

"Even the word “leaker” is misleading. “Leak” makes it sound like a piece of information a whistleblower gives Woodward and Bernstein to expose misdeeds in high office. This was nothing of the sort. It was the indiscriminate dumping of a mountain of national security secrets certain to bring harm to American troops, allies and interests."

Charles Krauthammer  "Barack Obama did not go out quietly. His unquiet final acts were, in part, overshadowed by a successor who refused to come in quietly and, in part, by Obama’s own endless, sentimental farewell tour. But there was nothing nostalgic or sentimental about Obama’s last acts. Two of them were simply shocking.  


"Perhaps we should have known. At the 2015 White House correspondents’ dinner, he joked about whether he had a bucket list: “Well, I have something that rhymes with bucket list.”

"Turns out, he wasn’t kidding. Commuting the sentence of Chelsea Manning, one of the great traitors of our time, is finger-in-the-eye willfulness. Obama took 28 years off the sentence of a soldier who stole and then released through WikiLeaks almost half a million military reports plus a quarter-million State Department documents." . . .

By Commuting Bradley Manning’s Sentence, Obama Broke Faith with the Military  . . . "By minimizing Manning’s crimes, [Obama] violated his own obligation to men and women in uniform. It was his job to enforce the lawful military norms that have been forged through centuries of bitter battlefield experience. Instead, he violated those norms, ensuring that Manning will serve no more time than men convicted of far more mundane crimes."  David French, NRO.