Obama spied on Trump’s campaign. Where’s the outrage?

OPINION:

It’s been nearly 24 hours since it has been revealed to the world that President Barack Obama’s Justice Department conducted a counterintelligence investigation on the Trump campaign. The investigation began 100 days before the presidential election and was executed with all the traditional tools of spy trade-craft including  informants (spies) and electronic surveillance (wire tapping.) 

These stunning revelations were memorialized in the bible of the Mainstream Media: It was written in the Gospel According to the New York Times. 

After two years of every sentence of Trump’s rhetoric being shot through the lens of “Hitler” or “1930’s style fascist” or “Banana Republic dictator” it’s fair to ask where is the universal condemnation of the Obama/Lynch/Brennan/Clapper/Comey cabal’s Stalinesque escapade on behalf of their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton? 

In short, and with apologies to Bob Dole: Where’s the outrage?How has the brain-trust that powers the endless, navel-gazing round table discussions on Morning Joe, Hardball and every single program on CNN (shouldn’t some of their shows dabble in a varied format?) not found a way to muster the slightest inquisitive segment on what is clearly a historic story comparable to Watergate, Iran/Contra-gate or any other “hyphen gate” they’ve thrown at us n the past several decades?

The collective yawn from the same news outlets who ran around with their figurative hair on fire for days over a Saturday Night Live sketch featuring a porn star remarkable and, at the same time, utterly predictable. 

Frankly, the absence of coverage of the Times’ game-changing expose reveals the political bias in America’s electronic newsrooms more than the “Trump called all immigrants ’animals’” lie they pushed on us this week. What television news chooses to ignore is the best evidence of their bias than the fake news they choose to broadcast. 

Let’s just reflect for a moment (with the help of Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist) on the damning revelations in this 4,000-plus article which paint a picture of an Obama White House meddling in a presidential election at a level that would make Vladimir Putin green with envy:

• “The story says the FBI was worried that if it came out they were spying on Trump campaign it would “only reinforce his claims that the election was being rigged against him.” It is easy to understand how learning that the FBI was spying on one’s presidential campaign might reinforce claims of election-rigging.”
• “Now we learn that it wasn’t just Page, but that the government was going after four campaign affiliates including the former campaign manager, the top foreign policy advisor, and a low-level advisor whose drunken claim supposedly launched the investigation into the campaign. The bureau says Trump’s top foreign policy advisor and future national security advisor — a published critic of Russia — was surveiled because he spoke at an event in Russia sponsored by Russia Today, a government-sponsored media outlet.”
  
• “The surveillance didn’t just include wiretaps, but also national security letters and at least one government informant to spy on the campaign”

After going through these details with National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, a former Assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of New York, I asked him the question that seems to be ignored in the New York Times’ article: Is there any way this kind of counter-intelligence operation would go on without the White House knowing of it or approving it?

No! No. no. Everybody knew about it. The agents’ texts made that clear. The Susan Rice, the memo she wrote, the “CYA” memo she wrote going out the door makes that clear. The White House had to know about this from the start. And look, Larry, it’s the kind of thing… An important thing about counterintelligence… there’s nothing wrong with the president knowing about it. Because, unlike criminal investigations and prosecutions where we don’t want the political people interfering in the four corners of the case,  counterintelligence is done for the president. the purpose of it is to gather intelligence, to gather information to enable the president to carry out his most important constitutional responsibility which is protecting the country from foreign threats to national security. 

Listen to the whole interview from my radio program on WMAL in Washington here: 

Indeed. What did President Obama know and when did he know it? 

Why wouldn’t the New York Times ask that of their plugged-in, exclusive, anonymous sources? It seems like the most important question in this entire episode, wouldn’t you think? Since Sen. Howard Baker uttered the question in the height of the Watergate hearings in the early 1970s we’ve been told that this was the most fundamental question when breaking down a presidential scandal. Yet the word “Obama” only appers once in the Times article and is only used to reference the president for appointing Sally Yates as Deputy Attorney General. 

Not only did the Times neglect to pursue this inquiry, America’s 24-hour, non-stop cable news analysis programming has been relatively bereft of such discussions as well. We’ve talked to death the subject of Trump’s knowledge of (or lack of) paying his attorney for an alleged bimbo eruption, but no one seems the slightest bit curious over when President Obama knew that his FBI was spying on his chosen successor’s political opponent just weeks before the 2016 election. 

The bottom line remains: President Obama spied on the Trump campaign using wire taps, moles and spies, and James Comey’s FBI hid the fact from congress for nearly a year. 

Where’s the outrage?