Obamagate

[Starlight]

The burden of proof is on him and his administration to provide that proof, not a questionable news site.

Especially since Trump's wild claims appear to be based on an article peddled by said fake news site.

[Mountain Man]

The burden of proof is on him and his administration to provide that proof...

At any rate, the non-denial is certainly interesting and all but confirms Trump's allegations. It reminds me of a kid self-righteously proclaiming that he never personally stole the cookies while happily accepting stolen cookies from his friends. It's a meaningless technicality.

[rogue06]

Utterly untrue. Absolute, complete, and total BS.

Wrong yet again. Obama even sicced the IRS onto a local reporter in St. Louis because he had the audacity to give him a mildly challenging interview.

Similarly a couple of reporters with the Associated Press were tracked by the Justice Department for 2 months merely because they broke a story that Obama wanted to be the first one to tell.

And let's not forget the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) targeting scandal where they went after conservative groups (especially those with "Tea Party" or "patriot" as part of their name^[1]) either delaying their applications for 501(c)(4) tax-exemption status (only 4 of something like 400 groups were approved between April 2010 and April 2012), using intimidation tactics like demanding the names of their donors, contributors, and grantors (a great way of drying up funding) and releasing confidential information about conservative groups to third parties.

At first they tried to dismiss this as actions of a hand full of rogue agents at the Cincinnati office but it was quickly revealed to be national in scope. In the end the IRS admitted that they had targeted conservative groups for intrusive scrutiny and apologized but insisted that nothing criminal had been done.

Oh, I should note that liberals have sought to dismiss this sordid affair because a few liberal groups had also been subject to additional IRS scrutiny but it was at a far lower rate than conservative groups and more importantly analysis revealed that most of it took place after people started becoming aware of what they were doing. IOW, it appears like they quickly added some liberal groups to soften perceptions of political bias. Still, even after that ploy 83% of those targeted were conservative







1. a 2013 report released by the IRS Inspector General showed that a full 100% of groups with "Tea Party," "patriot" or "9/12" in their names had been targeted.

[Mountain Man]

Mark Levin: "The evidence is overwhelming. This is not about President Trump’s tweeting. This is about the Obama administration spying, and the question is not whether it spied. We know they went to the FISA court twice. The question is who they did spy on and the extent of the spying..."

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/...apping-claims/

[Starlight]

Mark Levin: "The evidence is overwhelming. This is not about President Trump’s tweeting. This is about the Obama administration spying, and the question is not whether it spied. We know they went to the FISA court twice. The question is who they did spy on and the extent of the spying..."

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/...apping-claims/

By the "Obama administration" does he mean the independent FBI? You realize if the FBI spied on Trump (which by all accounts it appears they didn't), and thus obtained a warrant from a FISA court then it means they were able to demonstrate probable cause to the court's satisfaction. Just stop and think what that would have said about the amount of evidence the FBI had against Trump. Trying to pretend Obama had anything to do with the situation just makes you look stupid.


rogue06,
The Obama administration's crackdown on whistleblowers in general and his treatment of the press with regard to that went totally beyond the pale and was completely unacceptable.

The quarter-truths you posted about the IRS 'scandal' are unhelpful and misleading. After the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision opened the floodgates for corruption and money-in-politics, many new groups were created to funnel the money in, and problematically many of them tried to register as charities which isn't legal and the IRS was quite reasonably and rightly very suspicious of. So the IRS added an extra level of scrutiny to any new charity being registered whose name looked political, end of story, nothing scandalous or untoward on their part. One major new political movement at the time was the Tea-Party and there were a lot of rich people trying to fund that movement, so their attempts to start charity groups to fund the new Tea-Party movement were stymied by the IRS block on political charities. And since conservatives seem to be the biggest pile of selfish crybabies imaginable with huge persecution-complexes to boot, as well as slightly dumber than fungi, they got it into their head that the IRS was out to get them, which all got proven to be totally false after a long series of investigations in which the conservatives moaned and cried and engaged in massive conspiracy theories that were all eventually found to be completely baseless as per usual (see also: Benghazi, Solyndra, Fast and Furious, Death Panels, Obama going to take away all the guns, Obama going to put people in FEMA camps, Obama going to force everyone to live in Hobbit Homes, etc.). Then they elected a conspiracy-theory president who's a moaning crybaby with a persecution complex and who's dumber than dumb, who caused this thread by saying something dumb on the internet that appears to be entirely false as per usual with him.

[shunyadragon]

Especially since Trump's wild claims appear to be based on an article peddled by said fake news site.

Yeah! Bratfart!

[rogue06]

rogue06,
The Obama administration's crackdown on whistleblowers in general and his treatment of the press with regard to that went totally beyond the pale and was completely unacceptable.

So you're now admitting that your earlier dismissal of the claim that Obama used government agencies to go after opponents was wrong?

Utterly untrue. Absolute, complete, and total BS.

The quarter-truths you posted about the IRS 'scandal' are unhelpful and misleading. After the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision opened the floodgates for corruption and money-in-politics, many new groups were created to funnel the money in, and problematically many of them tried to register as charities which isn't legal and the IRS was quite reasonably and rightly very suspicious of...

And of course 83% of them being conservative groups (even a higher percentage before the IRS realized that their antics were being made public and quickly investigated some liberal groups so as not to appear politically biased) is just a coincidence.

[Starlight]

So you're now admitting that your earlier dismissal of the claim that Obama used government agencies to go after opponents was wrong?

The earlier claim was that he went after his political opponents, which was BS.

You made an unrelated claim about his actions towards the news media and their sources/whistleblowers, which I agreed was a valid critique.

And of course 83% of them being conservative groups (even a higher percentage before the IRS realized that their antics were being made public and quickly investigated some liberal groups so as not to appear politically biased) is just a coincidence.

There was nothing nefarious about the IRS investigations. They investigated both conservative and liberal groups. Because the Tea Party happened to start up at about this time, and a whole lot of rich people suddenly started to try to funnel money into the Tea Party, the Tea Party was disproportionately impacted. But conservatives seem to have a persecution complex about it.

[shunyadragon]

So you're now admitting that your earlier dismissal of the claim that Obama used government agencies to go after opponents was wrong?


And of course 83% of them being conservative groups (even a higher percentage before the IRS realized that their antics were being made public and quickly investigated some liberal groups so as not to appear politically biased) is just a coincidence.

How about the topic of the thread.

[Tassman]

The burden of proof is on him and his administration to provide that proof, not a questionable news site.

Yes exactly. This is right up there along with "record inauguration crowds", "four million illegal voters for Hillary" and "Obama's non-US birthplace". In short, it's delusional crap from a highly thought-disordered man who, heaven help us, is president of the USA.

[Tassman]

How about the topic of the thread.

This is just a typical Rogue pivot. The general line is that the evils of Obama/ Hillary/lying liberals etc are much, much worse than those of poor maligned Donald Trump so leave to poor man alone.

[Starlight]

Yes exactly. This is right up there along with "record inauguration crowds", "four million illegal voters for Hillary" and "Obama's non-US birthplace". In short, it's delusional crap from a highly thought-disordered man who, heaven help us, is president of the USA.

John Oliver today on Last Week Tonight:

One possibility is that this [Trump's Russia scandal] all amounts to what I'm going to call "Stupid Watergate": A potential scandal with all the intrigue of Watergate, except that everyone involved [i.e. the Trump administration] is really bad at everything. And the relevant question isn't so much of "what did the President know and when did he know it?" as it is "is the President physically capable of knowing things at all?" Because yesterday he decided that this [randomly accusing Obama of wiretapping him] was the best way to dispel everyone's suspicions.

[Mountain Man]

It seems The New York Times is so desperate to wash Obama's hands of this scandal that they've inadvertently thrown themselves under the bus!

So here's the set-up:

Source: The New York Times

Mr. Trump’s demand for a congressional investigation appears to be based, at least in part, on unproved claims by Breitbart News and conservative talk radio hosts that secret warrants were issued authorizing the tapping of the phones of Mr. Trump and his aides at Trump Tower in New York.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/05/u...is-phones.html

© Copyright Original Source

You see that? They call these "unproved claims". But here's the punchline (emphasis added):

Source: Breitbart

The Breitbart article in question (which Schmidt and Shear do not link to) cites the Times’ own reporting on the intelligence community. Their January 19th article, “Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry Into Trump Associates,” also bore Schmidt’s byline.

An editorial note at this link reveals that the print version of this article was headlined: “Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides.”

It quotes an anonymous source who says that “wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House” as part of an investigation into “the business dealings that some of the president-elect’s past and present advisers have had with Russia.”

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journal...n-wiretapping/

© Copyright Original Source

Oops...

So it's not a question of if the Obama administration wiretapped Trump's communications, it's to what extent they did. And, of course, the obvious follow-up: What did Obama know, and when did he know it?

[Meh Gerbil]

Why get political power if you cannot use it to squash your enemies?

[rogue06]

The earlier claim was that he went after his political opponents, which was BS.

Those reporters were regarded as political opponents. They dared to ask him hard questions or published a story he wanted to be the first to break. The White House even declared that Fox News was "like an opponent" and then went after their State Department correspondent James Rosen ordering that his phone records be seized (even his parent's phone records!), that his movements be tracked, and went "judge shopping" until the found one willing to grant such a warrant without telling Rosen himself. Google was even ordered to not inform Rosen that the the feds were monitoring his email.

Remember, these were "opponents."

There was nothing nefarious about the IRS investigations. They investigated both conservative and liberal groups. Because the Tea Party happened to start up at about this time, and a whole lot of rich people suddenly started to try to funnel money into the Tea Party, the Tea Party was disproportionately impacted. But conservatives seem to have a persecution complex about it.

That is the liberal party line.

The fact remains that it was conservative groups that were being targeted almost exclusively until the IRS realized that their misbehavior started being exposed and then they investigated a lot more liberal groups so it wouldn't be nearly be as obvious that their investigations were politically motivated. Even then conservative groups received 83% of the scrutiny.

And the vast majority of these groups were grass roots organizations receiving their funding through small donations not through donations from the rich . You seem to have confused the Tea Party with the Occupy movement which was largely backed by Soros money.

One example that really exposed the political bias permeating the IRS scrutiny was when a Tea Party group withdrew their application for 501(c)(4) status, changed their name and reapplied. They were immediately approved.