Shortly after Barack Obama was elected president and before he took office, he and key members of his transition team were vulnerable. Unknowingly, they were walking right into wiretaps of now imprisoned IL Governor Rod Blagojevich, who was under federal investigation for trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat (Obama’s).
This operation was overseen by the George W. Bush Department of Justice.
Had GWB and his brass determined Barack Obama was a threat to the Republic, he could have actively tried to ensnare Obama in the trap using some phony pretense. He could have sent government spies to gather information. He could have ordered FBI agents to amble over to the transition office to chat with Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett and other key Obama figures, and try to catch them in a lie.
He could have leaked some of the damning results to the press and put the entire incoming administration under an ethical cloud.
But guess what? Bush’s DOJ, instead of pressing forward, pulled the plug on the Blagojevich investigation and arrested him Dec. 9, 2008. The stated reason was concern that Blagojevich would actually award a tainted U.S. Senate nomination (Obama’s seat) that would be hard to pull back. Another factor, and perhaps the main reason, is that the wiretaps were threatening to singe Obama’s team.
In other words, Bush protected the legitimacy of Obama’s election by protecting him from a legal scandal. The exact opposite of what Obama’s DOJ did to the incoming Trump administration.
Obama’s DOJ and national security apparatus put Trump campaign and other officials under investigation in 2016 based on an unproven and absurd opposition research smear “dossier” paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC. Despite massive efforts, law enforcement and the anti-Trump media still haven’t verified any of the document’s main assertions.
On the way out the door, Obama also laid ever trap he could — declassifying documents, ratcheting up the largely phony Russia narrative, sending FBI agents to trap incoming Trump officials days after he took office, and leaking nearly every document in Washington to his obedient, incurious lapdogs in the press.
Meanwhile, Bush’s DOJ backed off and spared Obama. But the heat was so close that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald interviewed Obama, Rahm Emanuel, and Valerie Jarrett in mid-December 2018, a bit of news probably less than 1 percent of Americans know about. Despite dogged efforts by Judicial Watch, reports from those interviews remain sealed by the DOJ. Also, curiously, the Chicago Tribune refuses to release audio of the Blagojevich wiretaps it appears to possess, maybe because they are embarrassing to Obama.
After all, Obama had talked to a key union official on election night who promised to relay BO’s preference that Blagojevich appoint Jarrett to his Senate seat. Emanuel talked to Blagojevich directly multiple times. The incoming White House attorney produced a laughably flimsy report “clearing” all Obama officials of wrongdoing and that was good enough for the Obama-adoring press, which dropped the matter forever.
Keep in mind that although the public didn’t know about the wiretaps, it knew that Blagojevich was heavily under an expansive federal corruption investigation that likely was going to indict the flamboyant governor. So, Obama was negotiating for a valuable Senate seat for his good friend Valerie Jarrett with a man that his incoming DOJ was about to indict. A minefield of quid pro quo opportunities, indeed, and one that Obama never should have gone anywhere near.
But, as usual, a minefield that Obama walked right through without scrutiny.
Eight years later, Obama showed none of the class and decency Bush had bestowed on him. Bush didn’t try to undo the will of the people by corruptly contorting the nation’s legal and national security machinery to undo the results of an election. Obama did just that.
Such an obvious abuse of power can only survive with a corrupt liberal press, which pretends the above events never happened even though we all witnessed them.
When is Barack Obama going to be held accountable for anything?