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Thespotlight is now onPresident Barack Obama and his administrations allegedsurveillance ofthe Trump campaign, as well as his aides reported efforts to spread damaging informationaboutTrump throughout government agencies to facilitate laterinvestigations and, possibly, leaks to the media.

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On Sunday morning, the White House released a statement indicating that the president would ask the congressional committees investigating Russian hacking theories to add the question of whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016.

Media outlets continued to repeat that the story wasbased on no evidence, though the evidence was plain.

President Donald Trump originallytweeted about the alleged surveillance which radio host Mark Levin called a silent coup by Obama staffers keen toundermine the new administration on Saturday. Levins claims, reported at Breitbart News early Friday, were in turn based on information largely frommainstream outlets, including theNew York Timesand theWashington Post. Heat Street was one non-mainstream source, but the BBC also reported similar information in January. So, too, did the UKGuardian, which is a mainstream source (albeit with a decidedly left-wing slant, hardlyfavorable to Trump).

All day Saturday, former Obama staffers tried to put out the fires. A spokesperson for President Obama responded and Obama aide Valerie Jarrett tweeted:

A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice.As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor anyWhite House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.

As Breitbart News Matthew Boyle noted, however, it was a non-denial denial. It is worth examining the statement in detail.

Note that this sentencedoes not disputeany of the key factual allegationsat issue: that the DOJ approached the FISA court for permission to spy on Trump aides; that surveillance, once granted, continued after no evidence was found of wrongdoing; that the Obama administration relaxed National Security Agency rules to facilitate the dissemination of evidence through the government; and that Obama staffers allegedly did so, the better to leak damaging (and partial) information to the media.

In addition, there is reason to doubt the claim that the White House never interfered: theNew York Timesreported in January that intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House.

Moreover, the first part of the sentence raises doubts about Lewiss entire statement. Lewis could simply have said: NoWhite House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the DOJ. That would have been a clear denial. Instead, hereferred toa cardinal rule that supposedly existed.

All that does is create deniability for the rest of the White House in the event that evidence turns up that someonewas, in fact, involvedwith a Department of Justice probe. (No doubt Obama will be outraged to find out if someone broke the cardinal rule, and will claim to havefoundout through the media, rather than directly.) The Obama communications operation is notoriouslycareful with the way denials are worded.

As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor anyWhite House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.

This is a meaningless denial, since the FISA court deals with communications with foreigners, with U.S. citizens potentially swept up in the investigation. It would have beenpossible for the DOJ to approach the FISA court with a request to monitorforeignentities allegedly communicating with the Trump campaign, using those intercepts as a wayto monitor the Trump campaign itself. According to news reports cited by Andrew McCarthy, that couldhave been precisely what happened.

And, again, this sentence does not deny that someone in the Obama administration may have ordered such surveillance.

Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.

What we have here is a blanketdenial craftedto protect President Barack Obama himself,but allowing him to admit later once the facts emerge that his administration was, in fact, up to something. In addition,the Democrats have been adept at constructing elaboratechains of communication to create plausible deniability for higher-ups. That is how the bird-dogging scheme through which left-wing activists instigated violence at Donald Trumps rallies was arranged for the Clinton campaign. (The organizer behind that scheme visited Obamas White House 340times, meeting Obama himself 45 times.)

As theNew York Times supposedly the paper of record recently reported, there is no evidence that the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election. But there is ample evidence that the outgoing Obama administration could have used intelligence agencies to carry out a political agenda against Trump. The media, as Mark Levin pointed out again on SundaysFox and Friends, simply refuse to report their own earlier reports.

Even without Trumpsmore sensational accusationsof wiretapping, it is, so far, undisputedthat there have been manyleaks of classified information to damage Trump, and that the Obama administration took steps that couldhavemade such leaksmore likely. (Charles Krauthammer who is skeptical of deep state theories called this the Revenge of the Losers on Friday.)Those are serious allegations that the former administration is likely going to have to explain to Congress.

But if the Obama administration did order surveillance of the Trump campaign during the election; and if Obama or any other White House officials knew about it (or created a plausible deniability scheme to allow such surveillance while preventing themselves from knowing about it directly); thenthere is an even bigger problem.

It would then seem that the Russia hacking story was concocted not just to explain away an embarrassing election defeat, but to cover up the real scandal.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the most influential people in news media in 2016. His new book,How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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DeepStateGate: Democrats' 'Russian Hacking' Conspiracy Theory Backfires - Breitbart News

JACKSONVILLE, Ala. If the Democratic Party is ailing after losing the presidency to Donald Trump, state parties are on life support.

Here in the long-ago Democratic stronghold of Alabama, the party is all but dead, say some of its disheartened members. Consider: Not a single statewide office is held by a Democrat; the state Legislature is dominated by Republicans with just 33 Democrats out of 105 House seats and eight of 35 Senate seats.

Democrats havent won a U.S. Senate election in the state since 1992 or the governorship since 1998. There are no Democratic appellate judges, nor any Democratic members of the states Public Service Commission. Democrats also are becoming scarcer in county offices.

The Democratic Party in Alabama is on a crash-and-burn track unless something drastic happens to stop this runaway train, according to Sheila Gilbert, chair of the Calhoun County Democrats, who hand-delivered a letter outlining the partys problems following a speech I gave at Jacksonville State University as the Ayers lecturer.

The letter was signed by Gilbert as a leader of the Alabama Democratic Reform Caucus (ADRC) and 17 other members in attendance. The group, which formed two years ago to try to help revive the state party, wasnt coy about its reason for approaching me.

We need a spotlight on Alabama and some outside effort to avoid becoming a totally one-party state, Gilbert said.

I didnt bother to mention that the current U.S. attorney general, former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, was shining quite a spotlight on their home state. Whether Sessions is forced to resign after already recusing himself from any investigation into Russias role in the 2016 election campaign remains to be seen. The fall of such a high-profile Republican could be useful to Democrats back home trying to defibrillate the party.

But Gilberts group has been critical of state Democratic Party officials for missing an opportunity to recruit candidates when other Republican politicians were in trouble, including the governor and House speaker. A recent meeting of county and state party leaders reportedly became heated, as when state Chairwoman Nancy Worley offered to call police to escort one county chairman from the room and may be emblematic more broadly of the partys disintegration from within.

The GOP went through this same sort of infighting and navel-gazing on the national level several years back. After losing the presidency to Barack Obama in 2008, it regrouped, reformed itself, became disciplined and has taken the House, Senate, the White House and most of the nations governorships, while also successfully gerrymandering congressional districts that have given Republicans the advantage in many states at least until the next redistricting in 2020.

Democrats are readying themselves for that fight, but theyll need to do more than try to redraw the map. While Democrats were basking in Obamas sunny smile, Republicans were busy building benches of future leaders, especially at the state attorney general level, where they are now in the majority. The strategy has been to recruit and help elect strong attorneys general who could be groomed to become governors, senators and possibly president.

What, meanwhile, can Democrats do, a fellow in the audience asked me.

There was a plaintive tone in his voice and I wanted to help, though the truth is, Im not accustomed to Democrats asking my advice. But in the spirit of it takes two to tango and the fact that Id rather not live in a country exclusively run by either party Ill give it a fresh, morning-after stab.

Whats really ailing Democrats is theyve fallen in love with abstract principles, as reflected on an ADRC handout, without building a foundation where such goals as fair pay, transparency, diversity and such can be played out. Trump may have been coarse and loose at times during the campaign, but he spoke in plain language with plain meaning: Jobs, jobs, jobs.

Whether Trump can fix trade, create jobs and make money for the rest of us was a gamble people were willing to take. Fixing the economy was Obamas mandate, too, but he decided to focus on health care instead. This is where lust for legacy interferes with good governance. Obama did manage to help turn the economic steamship around the market bounced from just under 8,000 when he took office to nearly 20,000 but Wall Streets recovery didnt trickle down to the middle class, where Trump planted his flag.

When in doubt, look to the victor.

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.

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Dispirited Democrats desperately seek revivial - The Spokesman-Review

Numerous commentaries from both the left and the right have expounded the parlous state of the Democratic Party. And, to be sure, the Democrats have been working on extinguishing themselves in vast parts of the country, and have even managed to make themselves less popular than the Republicans in recent polls.

Yet, in the longer term, the demographic prospects of a Democratic resurgence remain excellent. Virtually all of the growing parts of the electorate millennials, Latinos, Asians, single women are tilting to the left. It is likely just a matter of time, particularly as more conservative whites from the silent and boomer generations begin to die off.

But, in politics, like life, time can make a decisive difference. Its been almost a decade since the Atlantic proclaimed the end of white America, but Anglos will continue to dominate the electorate for at least the next few electoral cycles, and they have been trending to the right. In 1992, white voters split evenly between the parties, but last year went 54 percent to 39 percent for the GOP.

To win consistently in the near term, and compete in red states, Democrats need to adjust the cultural and racial agenda dominating the resistance to one that addresses directly the challenges faced by working- and middle-class families of all races. This notion of identity politics, as opposed to those of social class, is embraced by the progressives allies in the media, academia, urban speculators, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, since environmentalism, gender and race issues do not directly threaten their wealth or privileged status.

The rise of identity politics, born in the 1960s, has weakened the partys appeal to the broader population, as Columbia University humanities professor Mark Lilla argued in a November New York Times column. But most progressives, like pundit Matthew Yglesias, suggest that there is no other way to do politics. To even suggest abandoning identity politics, one progressive academic suggested, is an expression of white supremacy, and she compared the impeccably progressive Lilla with KKK leader David Duke.

This hurts the Democrats as they seek to counter President Donald Trump. Americans may not be enthusiastic about mass deportations, but the Democratic embrace of open borders and sanctuary cities also is not popular not even in California. And while most Americans might embrace choice as a basic principle, many, even millennials, are queasy about late-term abortions.

Democrats also need to distance themselves from the anti-police rhetoric of Black Lives Matter. Among millennials, law enforcement and the military are the most trusted of all public institutions. Rabid racial politics among Democrats, notes Lee Trepanier, political science professor at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan and editor of the VoegelinView website, is steadily turning white voters into something of a conscious racial tribe.

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Finally, Democrats have now embraced a form of climate change orthodoxy that, if implemented, all but guarantees that America will not have a strong, broad-based economic expansion. The economic pillars of todays Democratic Party may thrive in a globalist, open-border society, but not many in the more decidedly blue-collar industrial, agricultural or homebuilding industries.

To appeal to the middle and working classes, the Democrats need to transcend cultural avant-gardism and embrace a more solid social democratic platform. Inequality and downward mobility have grown inexorably under both parties, which is why Bernie Sanders, and his eventual mini-me, Hillary Clinton, essentially ran against the Obama administrations economic record.

On immigration, they dont have to embrace Trumps misguided views, but they should seek policies that dont displace American workers. High-tech oligarchs may love H1-B visas that allow them access to indentured foreign geeks, but replacing middle-class IT workers with these foreign workers seems certain to alienate many, including the majority of white, college-educated people who voted for Trump. In contrast to oligarch-friendly Clinton, Bernie Sanders questioned both open borders and H1-B visas.

Sanders key plank a single-payer, Canadian-like health care system also could appeal to many small businesses, consultants and the expanding precariat of contract workers dependent on the now imperiled Obamacare. Critically, both health care and economic mobility priorities cross the color line, which is crucial to spreading social democracy here.

The key remains embracing growth and expanding opportunity. A pragmatic and work-oriented form of social democracy, as seen in Scandinavia, could be combined with a growth agenda. The Nordics may preen about their environmental righteousness, but their economies depend largely on exploiting natural resources wood, iron ore, oil as well as manufactured exports.

Opposing Trumps plan to expand opportunity and bring jobs back to the country just to spite the president may not play so well in the long run. Most Americans may disapprove of Trump, the person, but they seem far more open to his policies, and are more optimistic than under the far more popular Obama. Trumps defense of popular entitlements and infrastructure spending should garner some Democratic approval.

Rather than resist and posture in megadollar glitter, Democrats would be better served by developing their own middle-class-oriented growth program. This would be nothing unique for Democrats, and was central to the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and, most recently, Bill Clinton. If Donald Trump gets sole credit for a massive infrastructure expansion and a robust economy in the face of hyperpolarizing resistance histrionics, then the timeline for a Democratic resurgence could be put off for a decade or more.

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).

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How the Democrats can rebuild: Joel Kotkin - LA Daily News

State legislators across the country are debating new measures that would require candidates running for president to publicly disclose their tax returns to qualify for the ballot.

The measures are aimed at President Trump, who became the first White House candidate in recent times refuse to release his tax documents to the public.

Democrats, incensed by Trumps false claims of being prevented from releasing the documents because of an IRS audit, see the legislation on the state level as a way to force the presidents hand when he seeks reelection in 2020.

Tax return information would provide some transparency there to give voters the assurance that they need that the president is acting on behalf of us, said Kathleen Clyde, an Ohio state representative who recently introduced a version of the bill. It is problematic that he is the only candidate in 30 or 40 years not to provide that information.

Similar measures requiring candidates to file with Secretary of State offices have been introduced in California, Oregon and Tennessee. Candidates would be required to file tax documents with state boards of election under bills filed in Illinois, Maryland, New York and Rhode Island.

Other versions of the legislation would require presidential candidates to disclose their tax records in public, though not necessarily through state offices, before they qualify for the ballot. All told, 32 versions of tax disclosure bills have been filed in 19 states.

Most of the measures introduced this year have come from Democrats. Only one version of the bill, in Minnesota, was introduced by a Republican.

In states with Republican-led legislatures, the tax bills are as good as dead. Virginias legislature killed a disclosure bill in committee. Similar laws have been sent to die in committees in Arizona, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.

But in other states, mostly those run by Democrats, some bills are making progress. Committees have approved versions in New Jersey and New Mexico. A legislative committee in Hawaii advanced their version of the bill this week.

Legislators in Maryland and Connecticut held hearings on their measures last month. Oregons version, sponsored by House Majority Leader Jennifer Williamson (D), will likely advance to the floor.

And in California, where Democrats own a super majority of legislative seats, the bills prime sponsors expect it to advance after hearings are held in April. Mike McGuire, the California state senator who sponsored the bill, said he hopes his state will inspire others to action.

The office of the president is the only office in America that is exempt from conflict of interest laws, said Mike McGuire, the California senator who sponsored the bill. We believe that, as California goes, so many times, so goes the nation.

Legal experts said it is unclear whether requiring a candidate to disclose his or her tax returns would withstand legal scrutiny. Rick Hasen, a campaign legal expert at the University of California-Irvine and author of the Election Law Blog, wrote that U.S. Supreme Court cases have blocked states from adding qualifications for congressional candidates to ballot access rules, though those cases did not cover presidential elections.

If those cases applied here, it would be tough to argue that laws requiring presidential candidates to produce tax returns are constitutional as they would be adding to qualifications, Hasen wrote on his blog. However, those cases did not involve presidential elections, and perhaps state legislatures have much broader power under Article II.

McGuire said he had consulted with constitutional experts, andthat courts have approved other ballot access requirements, like collecting signatures or paying a fee.

States clearly have the ability to require a filing fee and other requirements before someone can be placed onto the ballot, McGuire said. Courts have upheld these requirements over the past several decades, and were sure theyre going to uphold this law as well.

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Democrats try new tactic to get Trump's tax returns | TheHill - The Hill

Democrats are pushing back on President Trumps Saturday morning claims that President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower offices before the election.

While at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida for the weekend, Mr. Trump fired off a series of early morning tweets accusing President Obama, without citing evidence, of wiretapping Trump Tower. He described this as Nixon/Watergate, calling Mr. Obama a bad (or sick) guy.

Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser under Mr. Obama, denied Mr. Trumps accusations and responded by saying presidents cant order wiretaps:

And House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called for an investigation by an independent commission into Mr. Trump and his campaign ties to Russia:

Others, including former Vermont Gov. and DNC Chairman Howard Dean and Rep. Ted Lieu, D-California, pointed out on Twitter that if Mr. Trumps allegations are true a judge would have had to find probable cause to approve the wiretap request:

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Democrats respond to Trump's wiretapping claim - CBS News