Obama skullduggery

In National Review, Victor Davis Hanson writes in part,

...those who have investigated and attacked Trump nonstop probably are seeking to do in 2020 what they falsely accused Trump of doing in 2016.

Mueller’s failure to find any collusion evidence was not for want of the dream team’s “bombshell” and “walls are closing in” leaks to CNN and MSNBC talking heads, over the course of 88 weeks. Almost daily we heard ad nauseam that Trump was soon to be indicted, convicted, removed, or summarily dispatched.

If anyone should have found “collusion,” it was certainly the Mueller zealots, then de facto ramrodded by current MSNBC partisan “legal” analyst Andrew Weissmann. (How odd that John Brennan, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, and Andrew Weissmann leak to MSNBC and CNN and then, in the out-phase of their perpetually revolving-door careers, end up rewarded by their receptacles as paid TV analysts).

Its ranks, in mediis rebus, were depleted by the summary firings of unethical anti-Trump FBI officials such as Lisa Page, and Peter Strozk, who had ridiculed the target of their investigation in amorous textual exchanges. Also fired for bias was FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith (“Viva le [sic] résistance),” who had also illegally altered a document to befool a FISA judge. The entire charade finally ended with Mueller’s post facto enfeebled testimony before congressional committee, in which he mysteriously claimed little knowledge of Fusion GPS and its offspring the Steele dossier, the fonts and catalysts of his own investigation.

...In short, in today’s climate, one could argue that Team Obama functionaries, even in retirement, sought to influence the 2016 election by slandering Trump, and his holdover appointees have kept up their obsessions in order to affect the 2020 election.

Not one Democrat impeacher believes that Trump will be convicted and removed from office. All of them probably trust that impeaching him in the House will weaken his chances at reelection — and that they should, as impeachment is merely using government properly to influence an election.

Yet, under the current new standards, we might have easily impeached almost any prior first-term president on a variety of charges and certainly questioned the fairness of any incumbent’s election victory.

Take the divine Barack Obama. Obstruction of Congress?

Obama invoked executive privilege to obstruct congressional subpoenas in the Fast and Furious scandals. People died. And they died in Benghazi, a preventable debacle that was fraudulently blamed on an obscure video-maker. And some likely died as the result of the illegal Taliban–Bergdahl hostage swap.

Abuse of power? In the run-up to his 2012 reelection campaign, Obama weaponized the IRS to neuter Tea Party groups so they’d have no chance to repeat the stunning success they enjoyed in the 2010 midterm elections. And would monitoring the communications of Associated Press journalists now qualify as an abuse of power? Maybe stonewalling the Senate and passing the Iranian-deal treaty without a two-thirds ratification vote could qualify as well? Would sacrificing Eastern Europe missile defense for Putin’s temporary good behavior (prior to the 2012 election) qualify as a Trumpian impeachable quid pro quo? Not giving lethal aid to the Ukrainians in fear of Putin’s wrath?

On the further matter of warping an election, reconsider the successful reelection of Barack Obama in 2102. A number of scholars, including researchers from the Kennedy School of Government, Stockholm University, and the American Enterprise Institute, later suggested that had the Tea Party not been emasculated by systematic and politicized IRS harassment, it might have added more than 5 million voters to Republican ranks — more than the margin of Obama’s victory — in the 2012 election.

Then there was Obama’s election-year lapse when he got caught on a hot mic (on March 21, 2012), pledging to outgoing Putin surrogate Dmitri Medvedev that if Putin just gave Obama “space” before his reelection (i.e., not causing trouble in Eastern Europe and thus discrediting the entire sham of Russian “reset”), then a successfully reelected Obama in return would show “flexibility” on joint American–Eastern European missile defense — meaning that Obama would cancel the long-planned missile-defense shield).

Remember the quid pro quo context: Romney was running neck and neck in the polls with Obama and was rebuking the president for his “reset” softness about Putin’s increasing hostility to the U.S. and its interests. If Putin were to hibernate during the American election cycle, it would be easier to diminish Romney as a Cold War dinosaur. Obama later argued exactly that in a presidential debate: “When you were asked, “What the biggest geopolitical threat facing America?’ you said Russia! . . . The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” And so voters were reminded of the trademark Obama charisma that had achieved peace and mesmerized even thuggish enemies

Unlike Trump’s pseudo-scandal that never resulted in a cutoff of aid to Ukraine (indeed, Trump’s aid to Ukraine far superseded that of the timid Obama administration, which refused to sell Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine), Obama’s tit-for-tat deal delivered the politically convenient results: Putin delayed his territorial expansion into Crimea and Eastern Ukraine until after Obama’s reelection, and the U.S. did withdraw its sponsorship of Eastern Europe missile defense.

...In other words, the Obama administration, perhaps more so than prior administrations, played politics with the news cycles, abused campaign-finance laws, leveraged its powers of incumbency for partisan advantage, put reelection aims on par with or above U.S. security concerns, left hanging key U.S. allies, and sought to use the administrative state to enhance its 2012 reelection chances and to diminish the opposition’s party 2016 candidate. And all that likely helped reelect Barack Obama.

Until recently, I believed that none of this Obama skullduggery rose to the level of impeachable offenses that would have nullified the 2012 election and canceled out the votes of millions of Americans.

Now, under the new standards established by Adam Schiff, Gerald Nadler, and Nancy Pelosi, all that and more from the Obama administration were most eminently impeachable.

Read many more vitally important paragraphs here.