The former President now owes the country an explanation for the historic abuse of government surveillance powers.
James FreemanMarch 25, 2019 - https://www.wsj.com/
The Mueller report confirms that the Obama administration, without evidence, turned the surveillance powers of the federal government against the presidential campaign of the party out of power. This historic abuse of executive authority was either approved by President Barack Obama or it was not. It’s time for Mr. Obama, who oddly receives few mentions in stories about his government’s spying on associates of the 2016 Trump campaign, to say what he knew and did not know about the targeting of his party’s opponents.
If he was briefed, for example, on plans by the Justice Department to seek wiretaps on Trump campaign associates, it’s hard to believe Mr. Obama would not have been highly interested in the matter. Going all the way back to his campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, Mr. Obama had aggressively advocated for preventing federal abuse of surveillance powers.
In September of 2004, the Chicago Tribune reported that candidate Obama “is ripping the controversial USA Patriot Act for violating U.S. citizens’ civil liberties in the battle against terrorism.” The Tribune reported:
Answering a Tribune questionnaire on the issue of terrorism, Obama vows to support the repeal of several provisions of the act because he believes it failed to strike the appropriate balance between homeland security and protection of civil liberties.
...“The act goes too far in violating our fundamental notions of privacy, thus seriously eroding the very ideals at the heart of our country’s greatness,” Obama said in his questionnaire.
According to the Tribune, Mr. Obama said that “a cornerstone of our democracy” is “that actions of a sometimes overzealous and overreaching Executive Branch are subject to challenge.”
The next month, Madison, Wisconsin’s Capital Times reported on the Illinois candidate’s visit for a campaign event:
Barack Obama, the Illinois U.S. Senate candidate who became a national political phenomenon when he delivered the keynote address at this summer’s Democratic National Convention, says he would like to think he would be as courageous as Russ Feingold was when he cast the sole vote in the Senate against the Patriot Act...
“I like to think that, had I been in the Senate, I would have cast the second vote against the Patriot Act,” says Obama, who like Feingold is a lawyer and a passionate defender of the Bill of Rights.
It’s time for this lawyer and alleged passionate defender of the Bill of Rights to explain the actions of his overzealous and overreaching executive branch. If he didn’t find out about the wiretapping until after the fact, when exactly did he learn about it and how did he respond?
What has always seemed clear is that Mr. Obama never actually believed the now-discredited claim that the Trump campaign worked with Russia to rig the 2016 U.S. elections. In April of 2017, three months after Mr. Obama left office, this column noted that the former President had offered little criticism of the new President:
At the end of January, Mr. Obama broke his public silence, but it wasn’t to reveal a grand conspiracy among former or current Trump associates. The former president instead released via a spokesman a statement supporting protests of a new Trump executive order on immigration. “Barack Obama and his aides expected to take on President Donald Trump at some point, but they didn’t think it would happen this quickly,” Politico noted at the time. “Now they’re trying to find the right balance on issues that demand a response.” Politico further reported that from “his vacation spot in the Caribbean, Obama has been keeping up with news from Washington,” as well as following the anti-Trump protests that were occurring around the country.
If a former president, who had enjoyed unrivaled access to the relevant intelligence, believed that the country had been taken over by a cabal of Kremlin cronies, would he really be lying on a beach wondering which issues compelled him to criticize his successor—and having done so, decide that a Russia-engineered coup didn’t quite rise to that level?
If Mr. Obama never bought into the collusion conspiracy theory, then the question is why he endorsed or allowed the use of federal surveillance tools against the party out of power—a direct threat to the democratic process that is at the heart of our country’s greatness.
Mr. Obama might have room to deny any knowledge of the details of the surveillance abuses, given the story his FBI director told Congress—if anybody could believe that story.
The absolute bare minimum that Mr. Obama owes this country is an explanation of the actions of his government in spying on a presidential campaign.
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