Larry Elder plays a great refutation of Valerie Jarrett’s assertion that the Obama administration was scandal free. In fact, this claim is demonstrably false, as THE DAILY WIRE highlights, here are four of their thirteen (with inserted media) — BREITBART lists eighteen:
1. Operation Fast and Furious. This egregious example of a reckless government endangering lives and then scrambling to cover it up has haunted Obama for years. As Daily Wire has explained, “Operation Fast and Furious involved the Obama administration arming drug cartels and thugs south of the border as a means to undermine the Second Amendment. The program resulted in the death of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. One of the Islamic terrorists in the Garland, Texas, attack also used a gun that was obtained through the Fast and Furious program.”…
2. Benghazi. The terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya resulted in four brave Americans dying despite the fact that help could have been sent, but wasn’t. Requests for security prior to the attack were repeatedly denied, and after the attack Obama and Hillary Clinton falsely blamed it on a video considered offensive to Muslims. During the election, Benghazi became associated with Clinton—and rightly so—but it is also Obama’s scandal as well. It is still not known what Obama was doing that night.
3. The IRS targeted conservative organizations. In 2013, Lois Lerner, who directed the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations Unit, admitted that Tea Party organizations were targeted under the agency, but blamed it on lower-level employees. Such organizations were heavily scrutinized with invasive questions. Since then, Lerner and IRS commissioner John Koskinen have denied any wrongdoing and have stonewalled congressional efforts to investigate the matter, citing computer crashes for being unable to turn over related emails.
Meanwhile, a federal court concluded in August that conservative groups might still be facing targeted scrutiny from the IRS. It has also been reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) knew about the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups as early as 2011.
The use of the IRS to punish political opponents is a proud Democrat tradition:
The first step of Johnson’s climb to power was accomplished by cheating during the 1948 Senate race in Texas, when he “miraculously” won the election by only eighty-seven votes.
Johnson’s dishonesty and ruthlessness were chronicled in 1964 by J. Evetts Haley in his book A Texan Looks at Lyndon as Johnson was facing Barry Goldwater in the upcoming presidential election in November of that year. Haley’s book was roundly trashed by liberals, who claimed he had gotten his facts all wrong, but decades later, after all the damage was already done to our culture, liberal historians like Robert Caro confirmed that Johnson did indeed steal his 1948 election by having his operatives stuff Ballot Box 13 with fake votes. He was called “Landslide Lyndon” for having “won” the election by only eighty-seven votes.
While in the Senate and running for reelection in 1954, Johnson faced criticism from two anti-Communist nonprofit groups that were educating the public about his liberal views. In retaliation for this attack, Johnson managed to insert language into the IRS Code that prohibits nonprofits, including churches, from endorsing or opposing candidates for political office. In effect, this corrupt man used the power of the IRS to silence his opposition. From that time forward and to the detriment of American society, the churches became less involved in public life and were too often unwilling to speak out on moral issues. Johnson would not be the last to use the IRS to silence opponents. President Obama’s operatives used the IRS to silence opposition at a level that could make an opportunist like Lyndon Johnson blush.
William J, Murray, Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World With Central Planning (Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2016), 158-159.
4. The DOJ seized Associated Press phone records as well as phone and email records from Fox News reporter James Rosen. In the AP’s case, the DOJ was investigating a story involving “a CIA operation in Yemen that foiled an al-Qaeda plot in the spring of 2012 to set off a bomb on an airplane headed to the United States,” according to the Washington Post. The DOJ seized two months of phone records from the AP without informing the news outlet. …
In the Rosen case, the DOJ was investigating a story Rosen did involving North Korea and tracked “his movements and conversations,” according to Fox News, including phone numbers belonging to Rosen’s parents. The DOJ had listed Rosen as a “co-conspirator” under the Espionage Act in regards to the story—allegedly pressing a source for classified information. Rosen was never charged with a crime….