Unless we assume the FBI went completely rogue, it is inconceivable that the deployments of personnel to spy on the Trump campaign and make provocative contact with its lesser members could have occurred without the full knowledge and control of the occupants of the Oval Office.

Obama may claim a scandal-free administration, but after Fast and Furious, the targeting of the Tea Party by the IRS, the Benghazi cover-up, Hillary’s emails, to name a few, Spygate is just the latest.  I use the plural “occupants” because while Barack Hussein Obama may have been nominally the president of the United States, at the heart of every one of these scandals and virtually every administration move was Valerie Jarrett, who arguably could be considered our first female president.

Jarrett, born in Iran to American parents, has been with the Obamas since her days as deputy chief of staff in the office of Chicago mayor Richard Daley, the younger.  She hired Michelle Obama, then Michelle Robinson, to fill an opening in the mayor’s office.  As WikiLeaks describes the beginning of a long relationship (citations omitted):

In 1991, as deputy chief of staff to Mayor Richard Daley, Jarrett interviewed Michelle Robinson for an opening in the mayor’s office, after which she immediately offered Robinson the job.  Michelle Robinson asked for time to think and also asked Jarrett to meet Robinson’s fiancé, Barack Obama.  The three ended up meeting for dinner.  After the dinner, Michelle took the job with the mayor’s office, and Valerie Jarrett reportedly took the couple under her wing and “introduced them to a wealthier and better-connected Chicago than their own.”  Jarrett later took Michelle with her when Jarrett left the mayor’s office to head Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development.

The rest, as they say, is history.  Not only did Valerie Jarrett  become a mentor to the young Barack Obama, but she soon became what some have called Obama’s Rasputin, someone who had more security than our personnel did in Benghazi.

She receives more protection than our Libyan ambassador, calls the president by his first name, dines and vacations with the First Family and had the power to call off three strikes against Osama bin Laden.

Ambassador Chris Stevens did not have a Marine detail in Benghazi, Libya.  But White House senior adviser and Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett reportedly had a full Secret Service detail on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard.

“Jarrett seems to have a 24-hour, around-the-clock detail, with five or six agents full time,” Democratic pollster Pat Caddell said in an interview recently with Breitbart news.  If Stevens had a similar escort, he’d probably be alive today.  Such protection isn’t usually available to senior advisers, but Jarrett is no ordinary adviser[.]

Indeed, she is not. She arguably has had more influence over Obama than anyone with the possible exception of Michelle Obama herself:

Her influence is shown by an account in Richard Miniter’s book “Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him.”

It relates that at the urging of Jarrett, Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden on three occasions before finally approving the May 2, 2011, Navy SEAL mission.  Seems she was concerned about the possible political harm to Obama if the mission failed[.] …

Edward Klein, author of the best-selling book about Obama, “The Amateur,” once asked Obama if he ran every decision by Jarrett, and the president responded, “Absolutely.”  A former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor of the New York Times Magazine, Klein describes Jarrett as “ground zero in the Obama operation, the first couple’s friend and consigliere.”

If Obama ran every decision past Jarrett, the decision to plant spies in the Trump campaign certainly was among the most important.  Obama’s legacy was important to Jarrett, perhaps even more important than to Obama himself.  She had to preserve it and ensure that the fundamental transformation of America continued.  If Hillary could not win, Trump must be destroyed.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich also finds it inconceivable that the spying operation was launched without Jarrett signing off on it:

In a Tuesday appearance on Fox News, Newt Gingrich said that he believed former President Barack Obama and some of his top officials – including Valerie Jarrett – were involved in spying on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign[.] …

“Presently, someone will figure out to ask what did Valerie Jarrett know and when did she know it?” Gingrich said.  “What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it?  Because what you’re seeing happen is, on every single level – and this is what happens with really big scandals – they keep on folding and they keep on folding and they keep on folding.”

Former press secretary Ari Fleischer agrees that such an operation could have been authorized only with the full knowledge of Jarrett and Obama:

Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said Thursday he believes it’s highly unlikely that President Obama did not know an FBI informant was in the Trump campaign.

“We need to know why did it begin, who authorized it and what role did Barack Obama have.  Did he know the FBI had informants there?  I’ll guarantee you the answer is yes.  No FBI would put informants in another presidential campaign without permission from the White House, including the president,” he said on “Outnumbered.”

Can it be believed that, as key players in the Obama administration like Strzok and Page, as well as FBI director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, number four at Justice Bruce Ohr, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and many others were linked in a vast criminal conspiracy to keep Hillary Clinton out of prison and Donald Trump out of the White House, Barack Obama was blissfully unaware of all this?  Rather, it can be plausibly argued that he was orchestrating it – perhaps not directly or by explicit orders, but rather by discussing the threat to his legacy Trump represented with his progressive minions and then simply saying, as crime bosses throughout history have done, “You know what needs to be done.  Do it.”

This scandal did not occur in a vacuum any more than did the weaponizing of the IRS to target the Tea Party and other conservative groups before Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign occurred in a vacuum.  The agencies under Obama’s control have been politicized before and used to intimidate and destroy his political opponents

This fish is also rotting from the head.  Back in April 2016, President Obama gave an interview in which he seemed to have foreknowledge that Hillary Clinton would be exonerated for her “carelessness” and did not “intentionally” mishandle classified emails, words that Comey would use just a few months later:

President Obama said Sunday that Hillary Clinton showed “carelessness” by using a private email server, but he also strongly defended his former secretary of state, saying she did not endanger national security, while also vowing that an ongoing FBI investigation into the matter will not be tainted by politics.

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Obama seemed to prejudge the outcome of the ongoing inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s email scandal, and he disputed the notion that any of the emails contained classified information of true importance.

“She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy,” he said.  “What I also know is that there’s classified and then there’s classified.  There’s stuff that is really top secret top secret, and then there’s stuff that is being presented to the president, the secretary of state, you may not want going out over the wire.”

National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy has long argued that Obama was the ringleader in obstructing justice in the Hillary email investigation:

From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton-emails caper was President Barack Obama’s call – not the FBI’s, and not the Justice Department’s[.] … The decision was inevitable.  Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.

Why would Obama use a fake email account to communicate with Hillary Clinton?  Granted, classified communications between a president and a secretary of state are normal, but not via a fake email account.  Were they discussing the fix that was in during her email investigation?  McCarthy suggests just such a reason:

If Clinton had been charged, Obama’s culpable involvement would have been patent.  In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton-Obama emails would have been in the spotlight.  For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence.  More significantly, for Clinton’s defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges.

After Trump’s victory, Jarrett moved in with Obama and Michelle in their new Washington-area home with the express purpose of organizing the “resistance.”  Obama’s D.C. home was to serve as the nerve center to the resistance to the presidency of Donald Trump.  As the Daily Mail reported:

Barack Obama is turning his new home in the posh Kalorama section of the nation’s capital – just two miles away from the White House – into the nerve center of the mounting insurgency against his successor, President Donald J. Trump.

Obama’s goal, according to a close family friend, is to oust Trump from the presidency either by forcing his resignation or through his impeachment.

And Obama is being aided in his political crusade by his longtime consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, who has moved into the 8,200-square-foot, $5.3-million Kaloroma mansion with the former president and Michelle Obama, long time best friends.

Her power and influence extended from staffing the White House to virtual veto power over foreign policy decisions.  Valerie Jarrett undoubtedly had significant input into President Obama’s Munich-like deal with Iran, which kicked the nuclear can down the road to assured detonation over Israel, which Iran continues to threaten to wipe off the map when it is not wishing “death to America.”  Her influence over President Obama is legendary:

The Iranian-born Jarrett (her parents were American-born expatriates) is the only staff member who regularly follows the president home from the West Wing to the residence and one of the few people allowed to call the president by his first name.

Noam Scheiber, writing in the November 9, 2014 New Republic, called Jarrett “The Obama Whisperer,” noting her power and influence and the fear she instilled in other staffers:

Even at this late date in the Obama presidency, there is no surer way to elicit paranoid whispers or armchair psychoanalysis from Democrats than to mention the name Valerie Jarrett.  Party operatives, administration officials – they are shocked by her sheer longevity and marvel at her influence.  When I asked a longtime source who left the Obama White House years ago for his impressions of Jarrett, he confessed that he was too fearful to speak with me, even off the record.

This is not as irrational as it sounds.  Obama has said he consults Jarrett on every major decision, something current and former aides corroborate.  “Her role since she has been at the White House is one of the broadest and most expansive roles that I think has ever existed in the West Wing,” says Anita Dunn, Obama’s former communications director.  Broader, even, than the role of running the West Wing.  This summer, the call to send Attorney General Eric Holder on a risky visit to Ferguson, Missouri, was made by exactly three people: Holder himself, the president, and Jarrett, who were vacationing together on Martha’s Vineyard[.] …

Jarrett holds a key vote on Cabinet picks (she opposed Larry Summers at Treasury and was among the first Obama aides to come around on Hillary Clinton at State) and has an outsize [sic] say on ambassadorships and judgeships[.] …

And Jarrett has been known to enjoy the perks of high office herself.  When administration aides plan “bilats,” the term of art for meetings of two countries’ top officials, they realize that whatever size meeting they negotiate – nine by nine, eight by eight, etc. – our side will typically include one less foreign policy hand, because Jarrett has a standing seat at any table that includes the president.

Valerie Jarrett’s hold over President Obama is as mysterious as it has proven dangerous.  She is Obama’s Rasputin and will have great influence as the former community organizer wages guerrilla warfare from his Washington, D.C. bunker, an operation that includes Spygate.

Correction: Valerie Jarret worked for Chicago Mayor Daley the younger

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.    

Tommy Robinson, a well-known political activist warning of the dangers of Islamic extremism, was arrested Friday while doing a live-feed report online about the trial of Muslim gang members accused of grooming young girls for a prostitution ring.  Metro UK reports:

The co-founder of EDL[i] livestreamed ‘reports’ from outside Leeds Crown Court for an hour this morning. He showed men entering the court on Facebook until he was approached by officers telling him to stop. In a separate video, the far-right activist is filmed being led away by police, arresting him for an alleged breach of the peace and incitement. He’s heard asking one of his supporters: ‘Can you get me a solicitor?

‘This is ridiculous, I haven’t said a word. I’ve done nothing.’ He’s then filmed asking the police officers if he’s being arrested on ‘contempt of court’. Before he’s bundled into the van, he says: ‘Someone laid their hand and assaulted me outside court.

‘Other people have sworn at me and threatened me about my mother and here I am being arrested for saying nothing.’

A tweet from Nick Monroe captures a now-deleted tweet from Caolan Robertson in which he reports that Tommy Robinson was sentenced to 13 months in prison, which would imply either a ridiculously speedy trial or no trial at all. This sentence has not been confirmed in any reports that I can find, although Ezra Levant of Canada’s Rebel Media references it in a vidoe embedded at the bottom of this report.

Today Tommy Robinson was arrested and sentenced to 13 months in jail for the simple act of reporting on the grooming gang situation in Britain.



I wrote about the police’s history of abusing their powers with Tommy Robinson here https://t.co/CxPI0OHH3g pic.twitter.com/1IKmFltzyb

— Nick Monroe (@nickmon1112) May 25, 2018

Katie Hopkins has tweeted her fears (shared by many others) that Robinson will be murdered in custody, as he is an object of hate by many Muslims:

Tommy warned us about these rape gangs.



You laughed and called him a racist



Tommy will die in prison at the hands of these gangs.



You will laugh and say it served him right



Then you will remember YOU have a daughter #TommyRobinson https://t.co/CkT9s3UA5i

— Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) May 25, 2018

The Rotherham child exploitation scandal referenced in the call Hopkins takes in the video on her tweet was a horrific example of British police deliberately ignoring widespread exploitation of young girls by Muslim gangs. Wikipedia has a summary, and Google will rveal much more on this earlier example of official repression of those who would “disturb the peace” with truthful accounts of misbehavior by Muslims in Britain.

Asmost people know, there is no First Amendment in the UK. Nick Kangadis of the Media Research Center pulls no punches:

The U.K. has become an authoritarian state. While everyone ridiculously fawns over royal weddings, authorities in Britain are arresting people for shedding light on atrocities that the government doesn’t want people to know about.

Here is Ezra Levant’s commentary on the arrest:

 

Photo credit: Facebook

Mouthing an old trope dating from his time in office and ever since, former President Obama declared at a Vegas conference that he had a scandal-free administration, quite unlike President Trump. Supposedly, it was now a joke.

According to Newsweek:

“I didn’t have scandals, which seems like it shouldn’t be something you brag about,” Obama joked.

President Donald Trump’s presidency has thus far been racked with scandalous allegations, but Obama later hedged his barb. “But actually,” he said, “if you look at the history of the modern presidency, coming out of the modern presidency without anybody going to jail is really good. It’s a big deal.”

I don’t see anything to joke about with that phony claim, given that he’s mouthed it quite a few times before and not as a joke. What’s more, he made that mendacious claim just as he was being paid big dollars at the Las Vegas conference itself, which as most Americans know, is typically a disguised bribe for some favors performed earlier, and in itself a scandal. His fees are reportedly $400,000, which is nice money for a few minutes of speaking work.

Saying his administration was scandal-free is something he says every few weeks, it seems – he said it in March, here, and in February, here; in January, here, and in quite a few other instances, such as shortly after President Trump was elected, here. Even the Washington Post’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, declines to give Obama a pass on that one, citing differences in point of view.

But more to the point, his claim isn’t even true: It was rife with crony business deals, described here. There were major policy scandals, such as the subordination of embassy security abroad to the need to shill a ‘narrative’ about al-Qaida being on the run in time for elections, as happened in Benghazi. There was the monstrous Solyndra green energy scandal where business cronies left taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars and made out like bandits themselves. There was the gunrunning scandal of Fast and Furious which allowed guns to move into the hands of Mexican cartels, leading to the death of a U.S. border agent. Nobody was punished, of course. There was the scandal of the emails at the Environmental Protection Agency, where officials illegally used pseudonyms to evade Freedom of Information Act laws and got away with it. There was Hillary Clinton’s illegal private server set up to evade laws the same way and created a vast opening for foreign hackers and espionage of top secrets, with Obama willingly participating in the communications. There was the IRS targeting of political dissidents and the lies to cover it up, again, completely unpunished. There were the ‘lost’ emails – of the FBI, of the IRS, and Hillary Clinton herself while she was at the Department of State. There were the smashing of Blackberries with hammers, again, to evade transparency laws and lawmen, too. There was Clinton’s pay-to-play foundation-State Department nexus, corruption of the highest variety, and an investigation squelched due to Obama’s politicization of the FBI. There was Obama’s politicization of intelligence reports to say what he wanted on the war front, as well as his weaponization of the intelligence agencies to spy on political opponents and reporters. It turns out some of his people did go to jail, or were headed there for leaks – and he pardoned them to keep them out. Such as his “favorite” general here.

But according to Obama, the fact that no one was ever punished is the actual justification for his claim that he never had scandals. The fact that no one was ever punished is perhaps the biggest scandal of his administration.

What we are seeing here are three things:

One, Obama is not embarassed by any of his scandals, Chicago-style or otherwise. As the blogger at ThyBlackMan writes:

Obama’s claims always come with a subtle caveat. His administration didn’t have “a scandal that embarrassed us,” or they didn’t have “a majorscandal.” But, my favorite nuance from his super-secret appearance in Boston was when he said, “Generally speaking, you didn’t hear about a lot of drama inside our White House.” He’s right about that point. As I document in my forthcoming book, The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama, there were over two dozen scandals over the course of Obama’s presidency, and they were all downplayed or ignored by the mainstream media.

Two, Obama claims he had no scandals because he allowed no consequences, no matter what anyone ever did, no matter what laws they broke, which is not an argument to claim he had no scandals. In fact, as a leftist, he tended to let all kinds of miscreants and plagues on society out scot-free, starting with Bradley Manning, and moving on to all the criminals he let out via pardons, at least some of whom have resumed their lives of crime. It was quite a pattern with him, and signaled an inclination toward lawlessness, which only grew as his administration continued.

Three, Obama had a pliant press covering up for him, as the Washington Times notes in an op-ed about the latest garbage from him, headlined:

Not so fast Obama, your biggest scandal is unfolding before our eyes

Yet, to paraphrase the immortal words of Chelsea Clinton, he persists.

Why does he keep claiming he had no scandals? It’s obvious his administration had scandals. He seems to think that by repeating a lie over and over again, he can eventually make it true, in an echo of the Nazi and Stalinist wisdom. He’s all about ‘narratives’ after all.

But in laying down the marker that scandals are only scandals if someone goes to jail – and he, in his Chicago-style governance, always kept his lawbreaking friends out of jail and seems to be proud of it – he also lays a trap for himself.

How does President Trump smack this liar down and shut down his lies?

By launching prosecutions of his top miscreants, something Obama is convinced will never happen, making his claims a sort of dare.

Apparently, he doesn’t know Trump very well, because Trump is the kind of guy who might just do it.

With the stream of lies about a scandal-free administration, the path is now clear that it’s time to clean house on the continuous lawbreaking of Obama officials that hasn’t been punished a whit. It’s time to create consequences for those who thumb their nose at the law, justified only by a compliant press and their own leftwingery. Obama just gave President Trump the green light.

 

The FBI has admitted that it ‘over-counted’ the number of mobile devices connected to criminal investigations that it said were not accessible because of encrypted data.

Endgadget:

For the last two years, the FBI has repeatedly claimed that thousands of phones linked to criminal investigations were inaccessible due to locks and encryption. Last year FBI Director Christopher Wray said it had failed to access 7,800 mobile devices, but tonight a Washington Post report reveals that number is incorrect. According to the Post, the accurate number is between 1,000 and 2,000, with a recent internal estimate putting at about 1,200 devices, and in a statement, the FBI responded: “The FBI’s initial assessment is that programming errors resulted in significant over-counting of mobile devices reported.”

The official excuse is that errors caused by multiple databases resulted in devices being counted more than once, but the issue has been an FBI and DOJ pursuit of backdoor access to locked phones. Then-director James Comey cited the inflated figure during a debate over the San Bernardino shooters’ locked iPhone, and it has come up again in relation to similar incidents. Without being provided any backdoor by Apple, law enforcement gained access to that device anyway, and as we’ve recently learned, there are tools it can use for newer phones.

In effect, what the FBI described as a big problem in recovering data from mobile devices belonging to criminals is hardly a problem at all. The pressure law enforcement was putting on cell phone makers and other technology companies to give them the keys to open any cell phone was apparently a ruse.

The government has repeatedly referred to “Going Dark” as a major problem it faces in investigations, suggesting tech companies are enabling criminals by strengthening privacy protections that they can’t get around. But privacy advocates have long thought the agency was pumping up its numbers, and now it’s case has taken a significant hit.

There will always be tension between the right to privacy and the ability of law enforcement agencies to protect us. This is inevitable given our fundamental rights and the real world needs of police.

But when a federal agency basically lies about a problem in order to force companies to give them a workaround, this is unacceptable.

For the FBI, it’s just one more indication of how its credibility is now in tatters as a result of its overreach on any number of issues, not the least of which is the Russian collusion investigation.