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FORMER ASSISTANT FBI DIRECTOR: Clinton Crimes 20 Times Bigger than Watergate.
OBAMA’S WATERGATE: Six months later, CNN confirms what was widely reported — and ignored on the left — last March. “Vladimir Putin did not hack the election. Barack Obama did. . . . The all-smoke-no-fire Russia investigation looks increasingly like a smoke screen aimed to put out a very different fire. Rather than an investigation into malfeasance by the Trump campaign, does the Robert Mueller inquiry serve as a clean-up operation to justify Obama administration malfeasance? The bugging of the opposition party’s presidential campaign, at least when done by Republicans, ranks not only as criminal but as the biggest political scandal in American history. . . . The Obama administration using the considerable powers of the federal government to spy on a hated critic’s campaign sets a dangerous precedent. It provides future administrations a means to infiltrate the innermost circle of the opposition party’s presidential campaign. This merely requires the pretext of wrongdoing to engage in wrongdoing.”
RUSH LIMBAUGH ON THE WIRETAP NEWS: “This is much worse than Watergate, folks. That was a third-rate burglary that went awry.” “Trump was called a liar. He was mocked for tweeting about Trump Tower being wiretapped. David Gergen, you’ll hear on the sound bites today, practically chokes when confronted with the news that Trump was right and doesn’t quite know what to say about it. But, I tell you what, folks, in many ways it’s worse than Watergate, and it’s still going on even with Trump in the White House. Richard Nixon was accused of spying on the DNC, but Nixon never ordered any such spying. In fact, he didn’t know anything about it. He was accused of using the IRS against his political opponents, but he never did. We know for a fact that Obama did both of these things, used the IRS against political opponents and probably more. There’s no outrage in the media on this. They think it’s great that Manafort’s lock was picked. The New York Times reports this as though it’s something that happens every day. Yep, the FBI showed up, they picked the lock of Manafort’s front door in Virginia and walked in and woke him up along with his family and then started demanding things and taking things….”
THE WEEK: This isn’t Watergate. This isn’t treason. And there’s still no smoking gun.
The unflagging tedium of the Trump-Russia-Manafort-Guccifer 2.0-Kushner-Page-Comey-Flynn-Steele-Stone-Lavrov-Mueller-WikiLeaks-Fancy Bear-Intercept-CIA-FBI-NSA-BBC-Don Jr. saga refuses to go away. Every day there are new breathless reports, fresh for-initiates-only micro-revelations that inspire screeches of “Treason!”
But there is still no smoking gun. . . .
This is hardly the first This is it moment the media has begged us to acknowledge. Please remember that a year ago we were expected to believe that Donald Trump had committed treason by begging the Russian government to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails live on cable television, before an audience of millions. We all know that this is exactly how espionage works and that there is no way that the smiling ex-reality television show host was making a joke about the actual documented collusion between the former secretary of state’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, which marshaled their forces against an honest public servant who could arguably have beaten Trump in a general election if the primary had not been rigged.
And so it has continued, uninterrupted without so much as a hint of self-reproach or critical reflection, and so it will continue, presumably, “from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time,” in saecula saeculorum.
Let’s find out their names. You know, in the interest of policing “collusion.”
NO MATTER HOW BADLY THE DNC-MSM WISHES IT TO BE SO: Why Trump-Russia is still not Watergate redux.
PERSPECTIVE: Comey sacking doesn’t rise to Watergate levels.
Nixon was fighting a pitched battle with Archibald Cox and the courts.
Cox, a Harvard professor who had been appointed as special prosecutor in May that year, had issued a subpoena ordering the White House to hand over nine tapes of phone calls and West Wing conversations in connection with the Watergate break-in. Nixon’s legal team argued the principle of executive privilege should apply, and the tapes should remain private.
On 12 October, however, the Court of Appeals in Washington upheld a lower court’s ruling granting Cox’s request. Rather than comply, Nixon decided to fire the special prosecutor, something his Attorney General Elliot Richardson had promised Congress would never happen.
A president stood in defiance of the courts, putting himself above the law of the land. It was a textbook constitutional crisis.
Donald Trump’s sacking of his FBI director, while highly unusual and deeply controversial, is constitutionally permissible. No court orders have been flouted. The president, while breaking with the norm of allowing FBI directors to serve out their 10-year terms unimpeded, is not putting himself above the law.
ASSASSINATION OF KENNEDY AND LINCOLN, DEATH OF FDR, WATERGATE ALL PALE IN COMPARISON: ‘The View’ Co-Hosts Ask If Palin, Nugent, Kid Rock Visit the ‘Saddest Day’ at White House Since the British Burned it Down?
Or as Sean Davis of the Federalist tweets, “Close, but no cigar.”
HILLARY BLAMES THE RUSSIANS FOR HER LOSS: ‘More effective theft even than Watergate’
Notice, please, the smug implication that the White House was somehow hers already and that it was stolen from her by others — others who weren’t the American voters.
ANDREW MCCARTHY: A Watergate-style Scandal.
In general, it is the FBI that conducts investigations that bear on American citizens suspected of committing crimes or of acting as agents of foreign powers. In the matter of alleged Russian meddling, the investigative camp also includes the CIA and the NSA. All three agencies conducted a probe and issued a joint report in January. That was after Obama, despite having previously acknowledged that the Russian activity was inconsequential, suddenly made a great show of ordering an inquiry and issuing sanctions.
Consequently, if unmasking was relevant to the Russia investigation, it would have been done by those three agencies. And if it had been critical to know the identities of Americans caught up in other foreign intelligence efforts, the agencies that collect the information and conduct investigations would have unmasked it. Because they are the agencies that collect and refine intelligence “products” for the rest of the “intelligence community,” they are responsible for any unmasking; and they do it under “minimization” standards that FBI Director James Comey, in recent congressional testimony, described as “obsessive” in their determination to protect the identities and privacy of Americans.
Understand: There would have been no intelligence need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked. If there had been a real need to reveal the identities — an intelligence need based on American interests — the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies.
The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president’s staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests.
I’m so old I can remember when the Obama Administration was “amazingly scandal-free.”
THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S WATERGATE-LEVEL SCANDAL?: Peter J. Wallison at RealClearPolitics examines that question.
The smoking gun in Watergate was President Nixon’s effort to use the CIA to impede an FBI investigation. What kind of “gate” is the misuse of the intelligence community to get inside information on an opposing presidential candidate?
It may turn out that the Democrats, so eager to prove that the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians, have unknowingly blundered into a matter that will come back to damage both their party and the Obama administration.
Read the whole thing.
MATTHEW VADUM: Obama’s Wiretaps? Details of a Watergate-style conspiracy against Trump emerge. With Obama’s record of promiscuous spying and politicized bureaucracy, it’s entirely believable that he was spying on Trump. But just because it’s believable doesn’t prove that it happened. To determine that, we probably need a special prosecutor — whose brief, honestly, should be expanded to cover all political spying in the Obama Administration, not just spying on Trump.
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: If It Happened, Trump Wiretapping Makes Watergate ‘Look Like a Joke.’
‘REPORTER’ EMPLOYED BY THE PAPER THAT BROKE WATERGATE: If You Ask Questions About Anti-Trump Riots, You’re A Crazy Conspiracy Theorist.
WATERGATE REPORTER CARL BERNSTEIN: FBI Would Not Reopen Case Unless New Evidence Was “A Real Bombshell.” “We don’t know what this means yet except that it’s a real bombshell. And it is unthinkable that the Director of the FBI would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to the Congress of the United States saying there is more information out there about classified e-mails and call it to the attention of congress unless it was something requiring serious investigation. So that’s where we are… Is it a certainty that we won’t learn before the election? I’m not sure it’s a certainty we won’t learn before the election.”
Plus: “But this is her achilles heel and we have to remember that it also comes on the — back to the word heel — of the revelations about the Clinton Foundation.”
JAMES COMEY: The Watergate Variations.
Related: Comey: I am not a weasel!
WATERGATESKI: Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump.
Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.
The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.
The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some GOP political action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not available.
Of course Moscow got the really juicy stuff off of Hillary Clinton’s personal and illegal email server years ago.
WATERGATE’S CARL BERNSTEIN ON HILLARY: “The vast right-wing conspiracy didn’t put the server in her damn closet. She’s going to have to get by this thing, and she’s going to have to acknowledge a terrible misjudgment it seems to be here.”
Related: Spillage: Up to 30 accounts on Hillary server interacted with top-secret data.
More: “When Hillary accidentally hits Reply All, she doesn’t muck around.”
STORM CLOUDS FORM: Bob Woodward Compares Hillary Scandal to Watergate.
No wonder, when they were still at the Post, before Jeff Bezos banished them to Siberia Vox.com, the juicebox mafia was so eager to destroy Woodward.
ROGER SIMON: Hillary’s Watergate Looms.
SYRIA IS OBAMA’S WATERGATE, Michael Goodwin writes:
What did he know and when did he know it? The immortal question about Richard Nixon and Watergate should be posed to Barack Obama about Syria. What and when did he know about Vladimir Putin’s axis-of-evil coalition?
The significance is not limited to Syria. The question goes to the heart of the Iran nuclear deal, especially the timing of the congressional votes.
Imagine Obama trying to sell the Iran deal now. With Russia, Iran and Iraq working together to muscle the United States aside and defend Bashar al-Assad, the president couldn’t possibly argue that the nuke deal would help stabilize the Middle East. Nor could he argue that Russia could be trusted to help enforce restrictions on Iran.
The strong likelihood that Obama would have lost the Iran vote if Congress knew then what the world knows now suggests the possibility the president concealed the Russian plan until the Iran deal was done. That view fits with his single-minded determination to get a deal at any price, including making key concessions and downplaying Iranian threats to Israel and the United States.
After all that, what’s another lie?
Don’t think of Obama’s approach to the Middle East as a lie — think of it merely as a series of promises reaching their expiration dates.
“I AM NOT AN EMAIL CROOK!” The server fracas isn’t Watergate, yet, but the Democratic front-runner is starting to sound a little like Richard Nixon. More than a little, I’d say.
ROGER SIMON: Watergate Redux? Will Sid ‘Vicious’ Upend Hillary?
Emails have surfaced from long-time Clinton bag man Sid Blumenthal indicating the whole Libya debacle was instigated by a cast of sleazy lowlife profiteers out of an Elmore Leonard novel. Smarmy Sid was pumping info from this dramatis personae to Hillary (at more than one email address) about goings on in that benighted country and our then secretary of state believed him — at least most of the time — passing his “knowledge” on to her underlings.
And this is a woman who wants to be president?
We know the results of this insider information: Gaddafi gone, four Americans killed in Benghazi, including an ambassador, with Libya a massively failed state overrun by ISIS goons who lop the heads off Christians by the seaside for sport. Good work, Hillary. Good work, Sid.
Ouch.