Tag Archives: Barack Obama

News

Should we really have expected FBI Director James Comey to enforce the law?

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Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help
Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help

The Wall Street Journal explains why the FBI and DOJ exist primarily to help the Democrat Party, and not to enforce the laws of the nation. (H/T Jay Richards)

Excerpt:

The Justice Department never went to a grand jury in the case, which was needed to gather all appropriate evidence and vet the legal charges. Judge Mukasey’s judgment was vindicated on Sunday when Mr. Comey sent a letter to Congress saying that the FBI had reviewed the new emails and “we have not changed our conclusion that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.”

To rehearse Mr. Comey’s actions: In July he publicly exonerates Mrs. Clinton in an extraordinary press event, two weeks before she is to be nominated for President, though that is not his responsibility. He thus liberates Attorney General Loretta Lynch from her decision-making obligations as the nation’s chief prosecuting official. Later we learn Justice cut needless and generous immunity deals with Mrs. Clinton’s advisers.

Then 11 days before Election Day Mr. Comey sends a letter to Congress saying the FBI has found new email evidence. He comes under ferocious Democratic assault for meddling in the final days of the campaign. His boss, President Obama, joins the criticism and says Mrs. Clinton has already been exonerated. Then two days before the election Mr. Comey sends another letter exonerating Mrs. Clinton again. And Washington’s political class wonders why Americans don’t trust government?

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the main point of Mr. Comey’s many political interventions has always been to protect Mr. Comey’s job and political standing. Certainly Mrs. Clinton will have cause to be grateful to Mr. Comey if she wins on Tuesday. The price to the country is the damage he has done to the reputation of the FBI as an apolitical law-enforcement agency.

And this isn’t the first time that Comey has used law enforcement as weapon against conservatives:

In better news for the cause of justice related to Mr. Comey, the D.C. Court of Appeals last week reinstated Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s law license. Readers will recall that as Deputy Attorney General in the Bush Administration, Mr. Comey named his buddy Patrick Fitzgerald as a special prosecutor in connection with the leak of Valerie Plame’s CIA identity. Mr. Comey then stood by as Mr. Fitzgerald pursued Mr. Libby, who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, even after he knew that someone else had leaked Ms. Plame’s name.

Mr. Fitzgerald won the conviction based on testimony that a key witness, journalist Judith Miller, has since recanted. The office of the D.C. disciplinary counsel recommended that Mr. Libby’s law license be reinstated in part due to Ms. Miller’s recantation. The hyperpolitical Mr. Comey has left a trail of legal messes wherever he has worked, but at least Mr. Libby can earn a living at his chosen profession again.

Judith Miller is a former journalist for the far left New York Times (a former newspaper).

So often when I blog on these news stories, I don’t really comment about how I feel about them. I guess I should say something about how this refusal to enforce the law for the sake of career makes me feel.

What happened to the rule of law in this country? What happened is that the university classrooms in non-STEM areas became political in the last few decades. Professors in the liberal arts who went through school achieving good grades in areas of knowledge that had no value in the private sector became bitter against their culture. They were so good at agreeing with their teachers, and they got good grades for it – how could it be that they were not as wealthy as people who invented smartphones? Their reports cards assured them that they were smarter than everyone. They blamed the marketplace for their failure to succeed. And in their classrooms, they started to teach against Judeo-Christian values, the Constitution, the free enterprise system and the history of the United States. Basically, they blamed their failure to succeed as well as technical entrepreneurs on everyone but themselves, and they wanted to use government as a tool to equalize life outcomes with the people who invented things that consumers actually want to buy. It was these professors who taught the people who went into the public sector. They taught them the values of their tribe: secularism and leftism. Nothing was taught to them about the foundations that allowed Western Civilization to be great.

So, when you see people like Lois Lerner, James Comey and Loretta Lynch working for the IRS, the FBI and the DOJ, (respectively), then you must understand that they have never been taught to see their role as impartial law enforcement. They are unfamiliar with the phrase “rule of law”, and the importance of the rule of law for Western Civilization. Basically, you can go right through the Constitution, and they disagree with every sentence of it, because that’s what their secular leftists professors taught them to hate. You can’t expect secular leftists to act morally when they are given power – there is no foundation for moral behavior in a secular worldview. As my friend Ari likes to say “there is no law, there is only vendetta”. That’s what you get when you allow tax dollars to subsidize secular leftist wordsmiths in the public schools and public universities.

News

Who halted the FBI investigation of Hillary’s private unsecure e-mail server?

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Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?
Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?

That’s the question I’ve been asking myself: who killed the FBI investigation of Hillary’s e-mail server and the Clinton Foundation?

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey has an answer to the question in the Wall Street Journal.

First a quick review of the facts:

Nonetheless, in July [FBI director Comey] announced that “no reasonable prosecutor” would seek to charge [Hillary Clinton] with a crime, although Mrs. Clinton had classified information on a private nonsecure server—at least a misdemeanor under one statute; and although she was “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information such that it was exposed to hacking by hostile foreign nations—a felony under another statute; and apparently had caused the destruction of emails—a felony under two other statutes. He then told Congress repeatedly that the investigation into her handling of emails was closed.

Those decisions were not his to make, nor were the reasons he offered for making them at all tenable: that prosecutions for anything but mishandling large amounts of classified information, accompanied by false statements to investigators, were unprecedented; and that criminal prosecutions for gross negligence were constitutionally suspect.

Members of the military have been imprisoned and dishonorably discharged for mishandling far less information, and prosecutions for criminal negligence are commonplace and entirely permissible. Yet the attorney general [Loretta Lynch], whose decisions they were, and who had available to her enough legal voltage to vaporize Mr. Comey’s flimsy reasons for inaction, told Congress she would simply defer to the director.

That July announcement of Mr. Comey, and that testimony by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, also had a history.

When the FBI learned that two of the secretary’s staff members had classified information on their computers, rather than being handed grand-jury subpoenas demanding the surrender of those computers, the staff members received immunity in return for giving them up. In addition, they successfully insisted that the computers not be searched for any data following the date when Congress subpoenaed information relating to its own investigation, and that the computers be physically destroyed after relevant data within the stipulated period was extracted.

The technician who destroyed 30,000 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails after Congress directed that they be preserved lied to investigators even after receiving immunity. He then testified that Clinton aides requested before service of the subpoena that he destroy them, and that he destroyed them afterward on his own initiative.

Why would an FBI director, who at one time was an able and aggressive prosecutor, agree to such terms or accept such a fantastic story?

 

Yes, why did Comey stop the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton given all of these facts?

Mukasey explains who called off the investigation and why:

The search for clues brings us to an email to then-Secretary Clinton from President Obama, writing under a pseudonym, that the FBI showed to Ms. Abedin. That email, along with 21 others that passed between the president and Secretary Clinton, has been withheld by the administration from release on confidentiality grounds not specified but that could only be executive privilege.

After disclosure of those emails, the president said during an interview that he thought Mrs. Clinton should not be criminally charged because there was no evidence that she had intended to harm the nation’s security—a showing required under none of the relevant statutes. As indefensible as his legal reasoning may have been, his practical reasoning is apparent: If Mrs. Clinton was at criminal risk for communicating on her nonsecure system, so was he.

That presented the FBI director with a dilemma that was difficult, but not complex. It offered two choices. He could have tried to proceed along the course marked by the relevant laws. The FBI is powerless to present evidence to a grand jury, or to issue grand-jury subpoenas. That authority lies with the Justice Department, headed by an attorney general who serves, as her certificate of appointment recites, “during the pleasure of the President of the United States for the time being.”

[…]Instead, Mr. Comey acceded to the apparent wish of President Obama that no charges be brought. 

Obama would have wanted the FBI investigation stopped because if the Department of Justice decided that Clinton “was at criminal risk” for communicating on Clinton’s nonsecure system, then so was he. Fortunately for Obama, he appointed Loretta Lynch as attorney general, and we know she won’t prosecute Democrats, because she refused to go after the IRS for persecuting conservative organizations ahead of the 2012 election, so that Obama would win.

So, did Obama know that he was communicating to Secretary Clinton on an unsecure private e-mail server?

"We need to clean this up" = We need to cover this up
“We need to clean this up” = We need to cover this up

His own staff sent e-mails confirming that he knew.

The far-left New York Times reports:

In a March 2015 interview, President Obama said that he had learned about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state “the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.”

But that assertion concerned aides of Mrs. Clinton, who knew that the president himself had received emails from the private address, according to a hacked email made public on Tuesday by WikiLeaks.

“We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov,” Cheryl D. Mills, a top aide, wrote to John D. Podesta, another senior adviser, on March 7, 2015.

Two days later, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Josh Earnest, tried to clarify the president’s remarks, saying that he had, in fact, exchanged emails with Mrs. Clinton through her private account.

And far left CNN confirms:

A top Hillary Clinton adviser said President Barack Obama’s answer on Clinton’s private email use as secretary of state needed “clean up,” according to hacked emails from her campaign chairman released Tuesday.

In a March 2015 email chain, Cheryl Mills, a top legal adviser and longtime member of Clinton’s inner circle, told campaign Chairman John Podesta of an interview in which Obama said he learned about Clinton’s private email setup from news reports.

“We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov,” Mills wrote to Podesta.

So, who ordered the FBI to stop investigating Hillary’s private e-mail server? Who ordered the Department of Justice not to proceed with the criminal investigation? Obama was the one with the authority to call it off, and Obama had a reason for calling it off: he was at risk of criminal charges himself.

News

Federal judge asks why Obama isn’t admitting Christian refugees from Syria

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Democrats think that the real threat to America is not radical Islamic terrorism
Democrats think that the real threat to America is not radical Islamic terrorism

This is from the Daily Signal.

Excerpt:

In an otherwise unremarkable opinion over the federal Freedom of Information Act, a federal appellate court judge has issued a sharp rejoinder to the Obama administration over an issue that has been discussed in the news—the almost complete lack of Syrian Christian refugees being brought over to the U.S.

[…]However, in a spirited concurrence written by Judge Daniel Manion, the judge expressed his “concern about the apparent lack of Syrian Christians as a part of immigrants from that country.”

According to Manion, it is “well-documented” that the refugees are not representative of that “war-torn area of the world.” Ten percent of the Syrian population is Christian and “yet less than one-half of 1 percent of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States this year are Christian.”

President Barack Obama set a goal of resettling 10,000 Syrian refugees in the U.S., and by August that goal had already been exceeded. But of the “nearly 11,000 refugees admitted by mid-September, only 56 were Christian.”

Yet Christian Syrians have been one of the primary targets of the Islamic jihadists infesting Syria and butchering, murdering, and killing civilians. The Islamic State has made it clear that it is going after Christians because it intends to “conquer Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women.”

Thus, one would expect that Christian Syrians would represent a significant portion of the Syrians being accepted into the U.S. as refugees. But that hasn’t been the case, and, according to Manion, the Obama administration has no “good explanation for this perplexing discrepancy.” Thus, we “remain in the dark as a humanitarian catastrophe continues.”

This is also relevant to the complaints of various states about the Obama administration settling Syrian refugees in them without providing any information about the people arriving. As Manion points out, “the good people of this country routinely welcome immigrants from all over the world. But in a democracy, good data is critical to public debate about national immigration policy.”

The courts and the Obama administration “demand high evidentiary burdens for states seeking to keep their citizens safe, and then prevent the states from obtaining that evidence” on these refugees. That creates a catch-22 for state governments.

So while the administration brings Syrian refugees into the country by the thousands, it is concealing basic information about those refugees behind a wall of government secrecy. This, despite the fact that the Syrian refugee crisis has been the catalyst for the infiltration of terrorists into Western Europe.

Yet the administration refuses to tell the American public or the states how it is making its decisions on who it is accepting for resettlement in the U.S., or even what steps it is taking to ensure we don’t have the same infiltration here.

Or why, in a religious civil war where Christians are one of the main targets of the Islamic terrorists engaging in indiscriminate slaughter, it is bringing in almost none of those victims of one of the worst human rights atrocities of the new century.

It’s no surprise to me that the Obama administration prefers Muslim refugees to Christian refugees, even though the Christian refugees are the ones who are more in danger, in predominently Muslim countries.  But siding with Christians is not something that you would expect a secular leftist like Obama to do.