Five Times The Obama Administration Investigated Itself

Last week, Twitter declared that their own study of tweets by Democrats and Republicans last year proved there was no anti-conservative bias on their social media platform. It was amusing to see how the folks at Twitter considered this definitive proof that they don’t hold a bias against conservatives. It reminded me of how many times the Obama administration attempted to control the narrative of their own scandals by investigating themselves and then clearing themselves of wrongdoing, with the expectation that the matter would be settled. Here are five examples of times the Obama administration investigated itself in the hopes of burying a scandal.

5. The Senate seat for sale scandal Few people seem to remember that even before Obama took office his presidential transition was under a cloud of scandal. Just over a month before he was to take office, Obama was implicated in a scandal involving his soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat. Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich had hoped to get a cabinet position or ambassadorship in exchange for appointing an Obama-backed individual to replace him in the Senate. Obama’s top choice had been Valerie Jarrett, and he offered to appoint Jarrett “in exchange for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services in the President-elect’s cabinet,” but she eventually opted to follow Obama to the White House as his top advisor.

4. The "accidental" outing of a CIA spy in Afghanistan In 2014, when Barack Obama made a surprise Memorial Day weekend trip to Afghanistan, the Obama administration “accidentally” revealed the name of a CIA official serving in Afghanistan in an email sent to the White House press pool—a list of as many as 6,000 journalists. The intentional disclosing of the name of an undercover operative is a federal crime, and people have been tried and sentenced to prison for it. You can probably guess what happened as the result of the probe… nothing! No one was held accountable for the releasing of the name. Not a single person was disciplined or fired, but Obama White House Counsel Neil Eggleston instead recommended changes to administration protocol while the president is traveling abroad.

3. The Secret Service prostitution scandal In 2012, members of the Secret Service were caught up in a prostitution scandal during Obama’s visit to Columbia. A member of the White House advance team was reportedly also caught up in the scandal, and the White House responded with an internal White House investigation into the matter… which predictably found that no White House staffers were involved in the scandal. Except evidence emerged that a White House staff member may have been involved and the White House tried to cover that up. Remember when Obama promised his White House would be the most transparent in history? Covering up a staffers' involvement in a prostitution scandal doesn’t exactly say “transparency” does it?

2. The Benghazi attack cover-up The terror attack at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, less than two months before the 2012 president election threatened the Obama administration narrative that they’d been crippling al Qaeda and making progress in the War on Terror. Congress rightfully investigated, and as I’ve previously noted, the Obama administration obstructed their investigations. The Obama administration partially justified their obstruction because they’d launched their own internal investigation, and so they refused to allow State Department employees to testify before Congress. “We think that we've done an independent investigation, that it's been transparent, thorough, credible, and detailed, and that we've shared those findings with the U.S. Congress,” said Patrick Ventrell, a State Department spokesman. “And that should be enough.” Given the Obama administration’s record of clearing itself every time it investigated itself one doesn’t need to be a genius to figure out what was really going on. Their internal probe found “systemic failures and leadership deficiencies at senior levels,” and four State Department officials were “relieved from their duties” as a result, but all were later cleared by Secretary of State John Kerry. Big shock, right?

https://pjmedia.com/trending/five-times-the-obama-administration-investigated-itself/

McCabe: Mueller Finding No Collusion Doesn’t Mean Probe Was a ‘Waste of Time or Unwarranted’

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said Attorney General Bill Barr’s summary of Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s two-year Russia collusion probe, which indicated that Mueller found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, doesn’t mean the investigation was a “waste of time or unwarranted.” “Am I satisfied? I expect to be satisfied when I get to see the report and I should hope that all people think about it that way, so I think it’s really important to remember that we don’t know yet. We understand how Attorney General Barr has characterized what’s in that 400-page report, but to draw your own conclusions about it, I think, you have to do that only have after you see the report,” McCabe said during a recent discussion hosted by Duke University’s Political Science Department.

“The fact that Director Mueller has supposedly concluded that he found no evidence of collusion, so he didn’t find enough evidence to indicate the existence of a conspiracy at the level that you would need to bring some sort of, I guess, a federal charge, does that mean we shouldn’t have investigated it? Absolutely not. We don’t start investigations driving at a conclusion. We don’t consider investigations to be a waste of time or unwarranted simply because they ended up in a place where you didn’t expect them to end up. You start investigations because you have an obligation to do your job,” he added. McCabe, author of The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump, said the current situation regarding the public release of the Mueller report is similar to the FBI’s handling of the Clinton private email server investigation.

“Now we’re in a very similar situation. We’re struggling with that same idea, like, how much of the detail do you release about people who are not being charged? I’m glad I’m not the attorney general. I don’t have to decide that,” McCabe said. “I do think there is a compelling public interest in understanding what the special counsel team found in one direction or the other. Now, how much of the granularity of people’s identities and things like that do you reveal? That’s a sensitivity that I think DOJ is best positioned to figure out.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/mccabe-mueller-finding-no-collusion-doesnt-mean-probe-was-a-waste-of-time-or-unwarranted/

The Real Takeaway of the Failed Mueller Investigation: Washington Is Crawling with Foreign Influencers

The Mueller investigation into foreign collusion in the 2016 presidential election may set off a chain reaction that threatens the way Washington does business. The New York Times reports that in going after Trump, the special prosecutor opened a whole can of worms for the lobbyists. In an indictment that seized the attention of the capital’s K Street lobbying corridor, Gregory B. Craig, a White House counsel in the Obama administration, was charged on Thursday with lying to the Justice Department and concealing information about work he did in 2012 for the government of Ukraine. The indictment of Mr. Craig, 74, stemmed from an investigation initiated by the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. The charges represented a continuation — and an expansion — of a new focus on a long-neglected law governing foreign influence operations in the United States, which the Justice Department has begun prioritizing in part because of scrutiny related to Mr. Mueller’s investigation.

The weaknesses of Washington go beyond the particular cases of Craig and Manafort. The career Tony Podesta exemplifies how extensive the foreign presence D.C. has become. "In 1988 Tony and John Podesta founded Podesta Associates … By 2015, the Podesta Group was the third largest in Washington D.C. … The firm had a number of foreign governments as clients, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Republic of Iraq and the government of South Sudan." According to The Wall Street Journal, Podesta's lobbying firm performed well in 2015, because clients believed that he had access to a future Hillary Clinton administration. In the 2016 presidential election, he raised money for Clinton. Fundraising records show that over the course of a decade Podesta and his wife Heather donated more to the Democratic Party and its candidates than any other lobbyists … In 2017, Tony Podesta came under scrutiny for failing to disclose the extent of his political work for a Ukrainian group tied to both adviser Paul Manafort and to the pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2012.

Foreign entities seek entry at all levels. A 2016 New York Times article described how "as chief of staff and counselor to Hillary Clinton at the State Department, Cheryl D. Mills worked ceaselessly to help a South Korean garment maker open a factory in Haiti … despite criticism of its labor record elsewhere. … During Ms. Mills’s tenure at the department, Mr. Kim’s company, Sae-A, became a donor to the Clinton Foundation." "Foreign powers" may now come in the guise of companies. The Lawfare Blog notes that "the Justice Department filed two notices under Section 1806(c) in the Huawei case … we learned that the U.S. government at some point had obtained FISA surveillance orders targeting both companies". [T]hat means that the government first had to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to show not merely that a purpose of the collection would be foreign-intelligence gathering but also that there is probable cause to believe that the specific target of the collection was a “foreign power” or an “agent of a foreign power.”

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/protecting-the-capital-of-the-world/

>>6196482

Indeed, and rather nice one, now we can get them all out of there, by having the people demand..they are no longer legal or wanted.

Bernie Sanders Has Combative Moments During Fox News Town Hall

Independent Vermont Sen. and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders had a multitude of combative moments during his Monday night town hall on Fox News. Sanders got snippy during a back-and-forth when the topic of his taxes came up, which coincidently occurred only a short time after he released 10 years of tax returns and it confirmed his status as a millionaire.

''MacCallum: “So would you be willing to pay 52% on the money that you made? You can volunteer, you can send it back” ''Bernie: “You can volunteer too…why don’t you give? You make more money than I do” ''M: “I didn’t suggest a wealth tax” ''Baier: “And she’s not running for POTUS”

The moderators then went to the audience for a question. A woman brought up socialism, read the definition of it, and asked Sanders, “How can you challenge the idea that socialism is bad in the minds of the public?” ''Sanders pointed to Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the two Fox News anchors moderating the event, and said, ''“Ask them, not me.” Baier then asked if this is “going to be a constant thing.” “You ask me fair questions, I will give you fair answers,” the Democratic presidential candidate answered, before going into a diatribe about how Fox News “does not necessarily have a great deal of respect in my world.”

Minutes later, Sanders became critical of the media as whole, suggesting that the issues individuals bring up to him are not the ones that the media covers. Following that criticism, Baier shot back, “We’re very grateful that you’re here,” Baier said. “We are giving you an hour of substance and talk on our airwaves. So we can get over the Fox thing. If you’re alright with that?”

Sanders was the first declared presidential candidate to have a town hall on the network. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz had a town hall on the network earlier this month, but he has not yet declared a formal run. The Vermont senator’s decision to have this event on Fox News bucks the Democratic National Committee’s decision not to allow the network to host a presidential debate. DNC Chairman Tom Perez released a statement about the DNC’s decision last month, saying that Fox News is “not in a position to host a fair and neutral debate,” citing a New Yorker report, which alleged that Fox News has become a propaganda outlet for the Trump administration.

https://www.dailycaller.com/2019/04/15/sanders-town-hall-fox-news-presidential-campaign/

>>6196567

I am familiar with it albeit vaguely as it's been quite sometime since I have read any of his books. That said, I don't think its unreasonable at this point to get them out, nothing that they are they for is to further the interests of the American people..it's either corporate or self interest..they are all in it for something other than the average person. Wonder how much money the country could save having them gone?…

Students Rebel Against Transgender Ideology in Nebraska, Alaska

American students in Alaska and Nebraska are protesting the official insistence that people can change their sex by declaring they feel like members of the opposite sex. The pro-biology rebellion reflects the deep public support for the reality that men and women, boys and girls, are equal yet different and complementary, and it follows protests at two schools in Vermont and Missouri.

In Omaha, Neb., WOWT.com reported that one girl led a walkout when a “transgender” boy was allowed by the adults to use the girls’ bathroom: The walkout was triggered by a female student who believes her privacy is being invaded by a student who recently began to identify as a girl. At around 10:30 A.M. students started leaving the building. They separated into two groups. A group of approximately 20 girls started chanting for privacy in the restrooms saying they don’t want boys transitioning into being girls to be in the restroom with them.

The presence of a boy in the girls’ bathroom threatens to humiliate girls who are made vulnerable by a lack of clothing. In North Pole, Alaska, boys satirized the transgender demand by declaring they had a right to use the women’s bathroom. The Washington Post said, “a student transitioning from female to male” used Sanpchat to post a selfie from the boys’ bathroom: Some boys at the high school who saw the selfie, however, were angry, and decided they would walk into the girls’ bathroom to take their own Snapchat selfie “as a form of protest,” Fairbanks North Star Borough School District Superintendent Karen Gaborik told The Washington Post.

The boys were planning to take their own Snapchat image to protest the school’s endorsement of the sex-change claim, which demands that all people be forced to agree to the political claim that a person changes sex whenever they say so, even during science class. Seven boys decided to go into the girls’ restroom and take a group selfie of their own to post on Snapchat, a social media app. The protest was stopped, however, when one girl in the bathroom showed her agreement with single-sex bathrooms by kneeing one of the seven boys in the groin and then pressuring the others out of the girls’ bathroom.

The girl’s violent enforcement of women’s right to privacy was endorsed by a local GOP politician, Rep. Tammie Wilson. “‘Good for her,’ I would have taught my daughter to do the same … She was where she belonged. They were not.” School officials followed procedure and penalized the girl for protecting the girls’ bathroom. The girl’s sister reported on Twitter that she was expelled.

In May 2016, students protested the ideology at Green Mountain Union High School in Chester, Vermont. In September 2015, 150 students in Missouri organized their own protest against their school principal’s decision to impose the “gender identity” ideology on them, after one student — Lila Perry — insisted that he felt like a member of the opposite sex.

The protest comes as Democrats unify behind the transgender ideology. For example, Rep. Joe Kennedy, the chairman of the transgender task force, told Breitbart News that men and women should be allowed into sports leagues for women and men. “Human beings are human beings, man, that’s exactly what I’d say,” he said April 9. “Human beings are 100 percent entitled to compete with whatever sport they want to compete with. Human beings are humans beings … That’s your problem.”

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/15/students-rebel-against-transgender-ideology-in-nebraska-alaska/