Thread: The Top Twenty Obama Administration Scandals

The Top Twenty Obama Administration Scandals

June 13, 2013

RedFlag News

BY KEITH KOFFLER

It’s easy to forget that the three scandals currently swirling about President Obama are just the latest episodes of potential misdoings by the scandal-plagued Obama administration.
As a refresher, here is a full list of the administration’s most egregious scandals.

1. IRS targets Obama’s enemies: The IRS targeted conservative and pro-Israel groups prior to the 2012 election. Questions are being raised about why this occurred, who ordered it, whether there was any White House involvement and whether there was an initial effort to hide who knew about the targeting and when.

2. Benghazi: This is actually three scandals in one:

• The failure of administration to protect the Benghazi mission.
• The changes made to the talking points in order to suggest the attack was motivated by an anti-Muslim video
• The refusal of the White House to say what President Obama did the night of the attack

3. Watching the AP: The Justice Department performed a massive cull of Associated Press reporters’ phone records as part of a leak investigation.

4. Rosengate: The Justice Department suggested that Fox News reporter James Rosen is a criminal for reporting about classified information and subsequently monitored his phones and emails.

5. Potential Holder perjury I: Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress he had never been associated with “potential prosecution” of a journalist for perjury when in fact he signed the affidavit that termed Rosen a potential criminal.

6. The ATF “Fast and Furious” scheme: Allowed weapons from the U.S. to “walk” across the border into the hands of Mexican drug dealers. The ATF lost track of hundreds of firearms, many of which were used in crimes, including the December 2010 killing of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

7. Potential Holder Perjury II: Holder told Congress in May 2011 that he had just recently heard about the Fast and Furious gun walking scheme when there is evidence he may have known much earlier.

8. Sebelius demands payment: HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius solicited donations from companies HHS might regulate. The money would be used to help her sign up uninsured Americans for ObamaCare.

9. The Pigford scandal: An Agriculture Department effort that started as an attempt to compensate black farmers who had been discriminated against by the agency but evolved into a gravy train delivering several billion dollars in cash to thousands of additional minority and female farmers who probably didn’t face discrimination.
10. GSA gone wild: The General Services Administration in 2010 held an $823,000 training conference in Las Vegas, featuring a clown and a mind readers. Resulted in the resignation of the GSA administrator.

11. Veterans Affairs in Disney World: The agency wasted more than $6 million on two conferences in Orlando. An assistant secretary was fired.

12. Sebelius violates the Hatch Act: A U.S. special counsel determined that Sebelius violated the Hatch Act when she made “extemporaneous partisan remarks” during a speech in her official capacity last year. During the remarks, Sebelius called for the election of the Democratic candidate for governor of North Carolina.

13. Solyndra: Republicans charged the Obama administration funded and promoted its poster boy for green energy despite warning signs the company was headed for bankruptcy. The administration also allegedly pressed Solyndra to delay layoff announcements until after the 2010 midterm elections.

14. AKA Lisa Jackson: Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson used the name “Richard Windsor” when corresponding by email with other government officials, drawing charges she was trying to evade scrutiny.

15. The New Black Panthers: The Justice Department was accused of using a racial double standard in failing to pursue a voter intimidation case against Black Panthers who appeared to be menacing voters at a polling place in 2008 in Philadelphia.

16. Waging war all by myself: Obama may have violated the Constitution and both the letter and the spirit of the War Powers Resolution by attacking Libya without Congressional approval.

17. Biden bullies the press: Vice President Biden’s office has repeatedly interfered with coverage, including forcing a reporter to wait in a closet, making a reporter delete photos, and editing pool reports.

18. AKPD not A-OK: The administration paid millions to the former firm of then-White House adviser David Axelrod, AKPD Message and Media, to promote passage of Obamacare. Some questioned whether the firm was hired to help pay Axelrod $2 million AKPD owed him.

19. Sestak, we’ll take care of you: Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel used Bill Clinton as an intermediary to probe whether former Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) would accept a prominent, unpaid White House advisory position in exchange for dropping out of the 2010 primary against former Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.).

20. I’ll pass my own laws: Obama has repeatedly been accused of making end runs around Congress by deciding which laws to enforce, including the decision not to deport illegal immigrants who may have been allowed to stay in the United States had Congress passed the “Dream Act.”

H/T White House Dossier

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All In the Family

Column: Why the mainstream media failed to break Obama scandals

Obama answers questions during news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room / AP

BY: Matthew Continetti
June 14, 2013 5:00 am

Last week John Nolte of Breitbart observed that the mainstream media had failed to break any of the controversial news occupying Washington. This week Paul Farhi of the Washington Post, without intending to, explained why.

There are four stories harming President Obama’s approval rating, and the heirs of Tarbell and Woodward and Novak uncovered none of them. The long-simmering tale of what happened before, during, and after the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, was all but ignored by media other than Fox until Gregory Hicks’ blockbuster testimony before the House Oversight Committee last month. It was the IRS, in a carefully planned “apology,” that revealed to the world it had targeted the applications of conservative and Tea Party groups for special scrutiny. The Justice Department, not the press, announced it had been scouring AP phone records to plug national security leaks. And Edward Snowden, the contractor who exposed secret intelligence, went to the Guardian, a left-wing British rag, with his scoop. (Only when Snowden’s anti-anti-terror accomplice Laura Poitras suggested, in the words of Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald, “It would be good to have the Washington Post invested in the leak, so it wasn’t just us—to tie in official Washington in the leak” did the three filtradorsapproach former Post reporter Barton Gellman.)

Four stories, four separate races in which the establishment press, the major print dailies and the heavily watched network broadcasts, are sweating to catch up. “We are getting big stories wrong, over and over again,” said Scott Pelley, the anchor of the CBS evening news, in a speech at Quinnipiac University in May. Did he, did anybody, read the June 13 Washington Post, I wonder; did Pelley’s eye scan the innocuous headline—“Media, administration deal with conflicts”—and the well-kneaded copy below? If so he would have learned much about life in the capital city.

“Conflicts” is not the best description of Farhi’s subject. His topic is marriages, unions, and blood, legal and romantic and familial connections between individuals where one party works in media and another works in politics. The extent of such links is staggering. Farhi has to interrupt his story to announce, in a parenthetical, that Post reporter Sari Horwitz, who covers the Justice Department, is married to William B. Schultz, who is Kathleen Sebelius’ top lawyer at the Department of Health and Human Services.Ben Sherwood, the president of ABC News, is brother to Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, “a top national security adviser to President Obama.” Another Obama national security aide, Ben Rhodes, is brother to David Rhodes, president of CBS News. One of CNN’s top D.C. hacks is married to Tom Nides, whose upward career trajectory has taken him from the office of Democratic congressional powerbroker Tony Coelho to, where else, Fannie Mae, Credit Suisse, and Morgan Stanley, as well as a two-year stint as an undersecretary of state for Hillary Clinton. Whose daughter is on contract with NBC.

White House spokesman Jay Carney, who worked for many years at Time magazine, is married to Claire Shipman, a correspondent for ABC News. The White House correspondent for NPR, Ari Shapiro, has been married to former White House counsel Michael Gottlieb since 2004. Longtime NPR personality Michele Norris went on leave in 2011, when her husband Broderick Johnson, a corporate lawyer who served in the Clinton White House, joined the Obama reelection campaign as a full-time adviser. Wall Street Journal political reporter Neil King is married to Shailagh Murray, who serves as communications director for Vice President Joe Biden, and who used to report on Congress for the Post. Savannah Guthrie of NBC recently became engaged to Mike Feldman, a former Gore aide who is now part of the Democratic Glover Park Group consultancy. Syndicated columnist Connie Schultz is married to Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

Tracing these associations is enough to keep busy any student of the caste. Assurances from mainstream media outlets that “they’ve worked out the conflicts” that might arise from deep ties between reporters, editors, and government employees, Farhi reports, “hasn’t stopped a few eyebrows from being raised.” You can guess whose eyebrows are those. Farhi quotes the great Mark Steyn, who wrote on National Review Online in May,“The inbreeding among Obama’s court and its press corps is more like one of those ‘I’m my own grandpaw’ deals.” The journalists, though, aren’t laughing. “Such insinuations make media types bristle.”

And oh, how they bristle. “There is zero evidence, zero, that [Sherwood’s relationship to his sister] has had any impact on our coverage,” ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider tells the Post. Employing the old reporter mind trick of using paraphrase to inject one’s viewpoint into an article, Farhi writes of “media types” who “take exception to the notion that complicated judgments about the news—often made by others within an organization—have anything to do with personal favorites or familial relationships.” Media types take precautions. Work is “closely monitored.” Recusals are sometimes demanded. Journalists can be reassigned.

The mainstream media says it goes to great lengths, then, to avoid the whiff of bias, to guard against a reputation for compromised integrity. But there are no prophylactic measures against living in a shared culture, attending the same schools, uttering the same clichéd small talk, and breathing the same atmosphere of conventional wisdom. What matters here are not the relationships themselves but the closed and impenetrable bubble in which they exist. Why would network executives and New York Times editors put resources into investigating Benghazi when their friends and relatives and trusted informants tell them the only people who care about the story are the cranks at Fox? Why would journalists adopt an adversarial relation to the government for which their spouses, relatives, romances, friends, and social betters work? No specific conflict can be easily identified because all of the bias occurs prior to the actual manufacturing of news: in the punches pulled, in what stories are selected, in what position is assumed by writers and editors, in which experts are judged knowledgeable, “objective,” “straight-shooters” and which are not.

So closed-minded is the community of right-thinkers who live in the Northeast corridor, who work at our banks and universities and media outlets and governments, that the slightest hint of alternative thinking causes them to spasm in revolt. At times the revolt can be petty and snarky and mocking, as in this recording of journalists laughing at Weekly Standard writer John McCormack’s serious questioning of Nancy Pelosi on late-term abortion. At times the revolt is furious and unrelenting, bringing political measures such as boycotts, firing, even legislation to bear to suppress dissent—as in the hysteria that has accompanied discussions of Charles and David Koch possibly buying the Los Angeles Times.

What unites these reactions is the shared sense of tribal affiliation. We, the objective, the rational, the scientific, must not be tainted by the faithful, the irrational, the zealous.

Overprotective, over-solicitous, making excuses, indulgent, sympathetic, understanding, partial, antagonistic to outsiders—this is how the mainstream media has behaved during the years Barack Obama has been president. And it is exactly how you would behave, too. If your family were at stake.
http://freebeacon.com/all-in-the-family-3/