Commentary: The Scandal Obama Still Won’t Acknowledge

 Tennessee Star

"Barack Obama has long bragged about his supposedly scandal-free presidency, a claim that conveniently ignores a host of ethical problems, from Hunter Biden profiting off access to Obama’s White House to the IRS harassing conservative activists. But the biggest scandal of Obama’s presidency is still coming into focus: his administration’s spying on a political opponent, Donald Trump, based on nothing more than a dirty trick deployed by Obama’s former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

"On the speaking circuit these days, Obama lectures Americans on dangers to democracy. But he presided over the most significant one in recent memory: an utterly bogus investigation that hobbled Trump’s campaign and presidency. Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, had informed him by at least July of 2016 that Hillary was pushing a Trump-Russia collusion claim. Obama could have instructed his agencies to steer clear of this nonsense. But he didn’t.

"John Durham, the Justice Department special counsel who is examining this debacle, has shown in his filings the ease with which Hillary got friends in the Obama administration to investigate Trump. Christopher Steele, her chief opposition researcher, was peddling the Trump-Russia hoax across the Obama administration in the months before the election.

"Obama has never rebuked Hillary for prodding his administration to spy on her opponent. His surrogates still speak of it as a warranted investigation, even as more and more evidence accumulates to discredit it. The anti-Trump partisans at the FBI swallowed Steele’s lies whole, using them as the basis to secure FISA warrants on Trump officials. Trump has said that Obama “wiretapped” his campaign. Obama did. Those FISA warrants gave the Obama administration the power to intercept communications at Trump Tower.

"The collusion in the 2016 election was not between Trump and Russia but between Hillary and the United States government under Obama. The final Durham report will presumably detail the full extent of that collusion. In some cases, it can be plausibly argued that the Hillary campaign simply duped government officials. Durham, for example, has established convincingly that FBI counsel James Baker took a meeting with lawyer Michael Sussmann without knowledge of his work for Hillary’s campaign.". . .