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It should come as no surprise that an Obama political appointee (with the cooperation of the media) would try to create a phony scandal out of a routine event. With every new administration, the incoming president asks all U.S. attorneys appointed by the prior administration to resign. After all, they are political appointees, just like cabinet officials and the attorney general, other cabinet members and literally thousands of other jobs within the executive branch.

In 2009, President Barack Obama asked for the resignation of George W. Bush-appointed U.S. Attorneys. When he replaced virtually all of them, it was treated as nothing out of the ordinary. Thats because it wasnt.

In March 1993 President Bill Clinton had Attorney General Janet Reno fire 93 of the 94 U.S. Attorneys appointed by the prior administration. (Only Michael Chertoff was retained, apparently at the request of Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J.) Again, there was no outrage over these firings.

Yet today, Preet Bharara, Obamas U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, is being portrayed by some as a political martyr because he was fired after he refused the Trump administrations request to resign along with the remaining 45 Obama appointees in the U.S. Attorney slots. The fuss being made about this is just as phony as the outrage ginned up in 2006 by political opponents of President George W. Bush. They were shocked, SHOCKED!, that Bush had dared replace eight U.S. Attorneysall of whom had been appointed by Bush himself.

All the sensational coveragepast and presentignores one simple and controlling fact: All political appointees, including U.S. Attorneys, serve at the pleasure of the president.

All the sensational coveragepast and presentignores one simple and controlling fact: All political appointees, including U.S. Attorneys, serve at the pleasure of the president. That is why only 46 Obama appointees were asked to resign last week; all the others had already left.

That is why only 46 Obama appointees were asked to resign last week; all the others had already left.

They knew, as does everyone else in Washington politics and the media that they were expected to resign as soon as the new president was inaugurated and move on to the no doubt very lucrative jobs they are now being offered in big law firms all over the country.

The moment a U.S. Attorney leaves, the First Assistant in that officea career prosecutortakes over until a new U.S. Attorney is confirmed by the Senate. All of that offices investigations and prosecutions continue uninterrupted. There is no partisan interference going on.

All of us can agree that law enforcement should be nonpartisan and carried out in an objective manner that meets the best interests of the administration of justice. But new presidents and new attorneys general are entitled to put in U.S. Attorneys who will carry out their policies and their priorities when it comes to enforcing the myriad federal laws covering everything from terrorism and organized crime to immigration and election fraud.

On many of these issues, the Trump administrations policy varies widely from the previous administration. For example, President Trump wants to enforce our immigration laws rather than ignore them. A cadre of U.S. Attorneys appointed to accommodate the old policy would make it virtually impossible to implement the new.

We know exactly what to expect from these holdovers because weve seen what happened when the Trump administration allowed Obama political appointees to remain at the Justice Department.

The prime example is Sally Yates, the former Deputy Attorney General, who enhanced her reputation (and her job prospects) with the progressive left when she announced that she would not defend President Trumps executive order on immigration. Her political allies portrayed her as a martyr, even though she let her political views interfere with her sworn duty to defend an executive order that her own department had already concluded was lawfully issued.

Preet Bharara, the now former U.S. Attorney for Southern New York, seems to be trying to stage the same type of media spectacle. Like all of the other remaining Obama political appointees, he was asked to resign. Unlike all the others, he refused to do so.

The administration then did the most natural thing in the world: it dismissed him. Bharara broke the news himself, tweeting out that he had been fired almost as soon as he got off the telephone call with Main Justice. This little bit of political theatre is apparently calculated to raise his profile, his cred and perhaps his market value among the Resist wing of the Left.

I am told by a knowledgeable media source that Bharara is extremely ambitious. New York papers have speculated that he may be ramping up for a run for governor or mayor. Another former Justice Department source confirmed that Bharara has grand political aspirations, adding that he is also extremely partisan.

The only real outrage here is that a politically ambitious prosecutor and his friends in the media are taking a totally routine event the request that a political appointee resign the post he was given under a prior administrations patronage and trying to turn it into a scandal.

Hans A. von Spakovsky is a Senior Legal Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and former Justice Department official. Along with John Fund, he is the coauthor of Whos Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk and Obamas Enforcer: Eric Holders Justice Department.

Originally posted here:
Preet Bharara 'fired': A phony scandal created by an Obama appointee - Fox News

The Obama administration doled out more than $77 million to promote the former presidents signature health-care legislation in what could be its final full year of existence, contracts obtained by The Post on Sunday reveal.

They show the federal government contracted with Democratic-leaning p.r. firm Weber Shandwick to spend $74.15 million on July 28, 2016, and another $3.69 million on Sept. 9, 2016, promoting the plan.

Of that, $64 million funded an advertising blitz including TV, digital and radio $4 million went to creative development and production, $5 million to direct response marketing, $2 million to campaign strategy, $1 million to branding and $1.5 million to encourage small business enrollment.

An official of the current White House dismissed the Obama administrations last-ditch efforts to try to swell enrollment numbers.

Tens of millions in hard-earned taxpayer funds spent on TV ads wont sell a fundamentally flawed approach to health care, the official told The Post.

The Weber Shandwick contract was signed by Pam Jenkins, president of the firm. Its chairman, Jack Leslie, was picked by Obama in 2009 to be chairman of the US African Development Foundation.

Leslie donated $1,000 to Obamas 2012 re-election campaign and $2,700 in December 2015 to Hillary Clintons failed presidential campaign.

Jenkins and Leslie did not provide comment.

I firmly believe that nobody will be worse-off financially in the process that were going through, Price said on NBCs Meet The Press. Understanding that theyll have choices that they can select the kind of coverage that they want for themselves and for their family, not the government forces them to buy.

But Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) urged his House colleagues not to walk the plank and pass the bill because the GOP would suffer the consequences in the next election. Cotton told ABCs This Week that he believes the measure will cause premiums to rise and price people out of the health-care system.

Im afraid that if they vote for this bill, theyre going to put the House majority at risk next year, he said.

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Obama admin spent $77M to hype ObamaCare in 2016 - New York Post

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Former President Barack Obama was in San Jose on Sunday night for a meeting with tech leaders, sources told NBC Bay Area.

The details of the meeting at the Fairmont hotel in downtown San Jose were not known. It's Obama's first visit to the Bay Area since he left office in January.

Several Secret Service agents could be seen around the hotel, and some guests said they saw the former president's motorcade and bomb-sniffing dogs. Other guests said the interior hallways of the hotel were swarming with security.

Obama flew from Washington, D.C., early Sunday and made a stopover in Omaha, Nebraska, for a quick lunch with billionaire business magnate Warren Buffett at a private country club, according to the Omaha World-Herald. Obama ate a taco salad at the Happy Hollow Country Club, and Buffett picked up the tab, the newspaper said.

Details of that meeting also were not provided.

While he was in office, Obama made numerous visits to the Bay Area, mostly for private fundraising events or meetings with business leaders.

It was not known how long the former president's latest visit would last.

Published at 10:03 PM PDT on Mar 12, 2017 | Updated at 11:57 PM PDT on Mar 12, 2017

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Obama in San Jose For Private Meeting With Tech Leaders: Source - NBC Bay Area

In the blue state of Illinois, where President Barack Obama launched his historic career, served as a senator and is widely lauded as a Chicago hometown hero, you would think proposing a holiday honoring him would be an easy call.

Instead, state Rep. Andrew Thapedi was bombarded with a stream of death threats, venomous emails and phone calls in the days after he introduced legislation for an Obama state holiday in Illinois.

Story Continued Below

Were digging a grave especially for you, Thapedi, a Chicago Democrat, said one of the emails warned after the bill was written up in a story on Breitbart.com. It has been a hodge-podge of responses, from one end of the spectrum to the other: joy, jubilation on one side; absolute, unadulterated venom on the other side.

The business of honoring Obamas legacy is turning out to be another reminder of the nations bitter divide, with one side eager to salute the first black president and another positioned in stark opposition.

Illinois isnt the only place where efforts are underway to memorialize Obama, who closed out his eight-year tenure with high favorability ratings.

In California, a state senator recently proposed naming a portion of the Ventura Freeway President Barack H. Obama Freeway, as a way of flagging that the president had attended Occidental College in Eagle Rock in 1979. In New Jersey, the Jersey City school board agreed last fall to name a public school after Obama but only after a political clash on the board and a series of public meetings. In January, New Albany, Indiana, renamed one of its streets Barack Obama Way with the mayor crediting Obamas stimulus plans with helping the town create jobs and redevelop a 40-acre site into an industrial park.

Even if a full-fledged state holiday doesnt happen anytime soon in Illinois, lawmakers have alternatives in the pipeline: bills to name two different highways after the president and a proposal to have an Obama Day without the day off from work. And, most prominently, the Obama presidential library and museum is slotted for a South Side locale, amid criticism that the cost could climb to an eye-popping $1.5 billion for building and endowment. That's not all: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel proposed naming a new elite Chicago high school after Obama in 2014, but the idea was torpedoed amid anger that the school was to be located on the citys mostly white North Side.

Opposition to the accolades, of course, isnt specific to Obama. Attempts to honor the legacies of past presidents have also faced stumbling blocks. When congressional Republicans renamed Washington National Airport as Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in 1998, D.C.-area local leaders and congressional Democrats decried the effort. Nearly two decades later, the controversy continues to smolder a liberal political group initiated a petition campaign in 2015 to remove Reagans name.

California, the state where Reagan served two terms as governor roughly a half-century ago, is still trying to pass a law creating a state holiday in his honor.

In San Francisco, an inverse honor was even attempted: A proposition was put on the ballot to rename a sewage plant after President George W. Bush, who was wildly unpopular in the area. That effort failed in 2008.

The situation is different in Illinois, a heavily Democratic state where Obama, the states adopted son, remains popular. It seems likely hell get a highway named after him the only real question is what stretch will bear his name. And Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner has said he would support a day commemorating Obama though he would not agree to a state holiday that involved a day off from government work.

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Pat Brady, a former state GOP chairman, said most people in his party at least in Illinois wouldn't argue with recognizing Obama.

"The reality is he's the first African-American president in the history of the country. I think Democrat or Republican, we should take some pride in that," Brady said, adding that while commemorative holiday or other recognitions are appropriate, having a government day off is a stretch.

A government day off in Illinois would cost $3.2 million, according to the state budget office. "The most important issue is the financial crisis here, Brady said. I think most people see [a debate over a day off] as: 'Why are we talking about this now?'"

San Francisco attorney Harmeet Dhillon, a California representative on the Republican National Committee, raised a more common objection to commemorations its too soon.

I dont have any principle objections to naming the institutions after Obama, but I believe that privilege should really be reserved for people who have passed away, Dhillon said. I would take the same view on naming things after the Bush presidents, or after Clinton.

To give living politicians such honors, she said, is contrary to our concept of citizen-servants.

Carla Marinucci contributed to this report.

See the original post:
Attempts to honor Obama legacy generate fury - Politico

Beyond weakening the administration, the seemingly incessant wave of Trump scandals seems to reinforce liberals narrative of the previous president. As The New Republic remarked after the resignation of Michael Flynn, Obama went eight years without a major White House scandal. Trump lasted three weeks. Or as Obama himself boasted in December, were probably the first administration in modern history that hasnt had a major scandal in the White House. To the horror of conservatives, who can cite a litany of official misdeeds during the Obama years, the apparent integrity of that era will feature prominently as historians evaluate that presidency. (Spoiler: as those historians are overwhelmingly liberal, they will rate it very highly indeed.)

In a sense, though, both sides are correct. The Obama administration did a great many bad things, but it suffered very few scandals. That paradox raises critical issues about how we report and record political events and how we define a word as apparently simple as scandal.

Very little effort is needed to compile a daunting list of horror stories surrounding the Obama administration, including the Justice Departments disastrous Fast and Furious weapons scheme, the IRSs targeting of political opponents, and a stunningly lax attitude to security evidenced by Hillary Clintons email server and the hacking of millions of files from the Office of Personnel Management. Even on the available evidence, the IRS affair had most of the major elements of something like Watergate, and a detailed investigation might well have turned up a chain of evidence leading to the White House.

But there was no detailed investigation, and that is the central point. Without investigation, the amount of embarrassing material that emerged was limited, and most mainstream media outlets had no interest in publicizing the affair. Concern was strictly limited to partisan conservative outlets, so official malfeasance did not turn into a general public scandal.

Misdeeds themselves, however, are not the sole basis for official statistics or public concern. To understand this, look for instance at the recently publicized issue of sexual assaults on college campuses. The actual behaviors involved have been prevalent for many decades, and have probably declined in recent years as a consequence of changing gender attitudes. In public perception, though, assaults are running at epidemic levels. That change is a consequence of strict new laws, reinforced by new mechanisms for investigation and enforcement. A new legal and bureaucratic environment has caused a massive upsurge of reported criminality, which uninformed people might take as an escalation of the behavior itself.

Political scandal is rather like that. To acknowledge that an administration or a party suffers a scandal says nothing whatever about the actual degree of wrongdoing that has occurred. Rather, it is a matter of perception, which is based on several distinct components, including a body of evidence but also the reactions of the media and the public. As long ago as 1930, Walter Lippman drew the essential distinction between the fact of political wrongdoing and its public manifestation. It would be impossible, he wrote, for an historian to write a history of political corruption in America. What he could write is the history of the exposure of corruption. And that exposure can be a complex and haphazard affair.

We can identify three key components. First, there must be investigation by law enforcement or intelligence agencies, which can be very difficult when the suspects are powerful or well-connected. Facing many obstacles to a free and wide-ranging investigation, the agencies involved will commonly leak information in the time-honored Washington way. The probability of such investigations and leaks depends on many variables, including the degree of harmony and common purpose within an administration. An administration riven by internal dissent or ideological feuding will be very leaky, and the amount of information available to media will accordingly be abundant.

Second, a great deal depends on the role of media in handling the allegations that do emerge. Some lurid tidbits will be avidly seized on and pursued, while others of equal plausibility will be largely ignored. That too depends on subjective factors, including the perceived popularity of the administration. If media outlets believe they are battering away at an already hated administration, they will do things they would not dare do against a popular leader.

Finally, media outlets can publish whatever evidence they wish, but this will not necessarily become the basis of a serious and damaging scandal unless it appeals to a mass audience, and probably one already restive and disenchanted with the political or economic status quo. Scandals thus reach storm force only when they focus or symbolize existing discontents.

The Watergate scandal developed as it did because it represented a perfect storm of these different elements. The political and military establishment and the intelligence agencies were deeply divided ideologically, both amongst themselves and against the Nixon White House. Leaks abounded from highly placed sources within the FBI and other agencies. Major media outlets loathed Nixon, and they published their stories at a time of unprecedented economic disaster: the OPEC oil squeeze, looming hyper-inflation, and even widespread fears of the imminent end of capitalism. The president duly fell.

But compare that disaster with other historical moments when administrations were committing misdeeds no less heinous than those of Richard Nixon, but largely escaped a like fate. Victor Laskys 1977 book It Didnt Start With Watergate makes a convincing case for viewing Lyndon Johnsons regime as the most flagrantly corrupt in U.S. history, at least since the 1870s. Not only was the LBJ White House heavily engaged in bugging and burgling opponents, but it was often using the same individuals who later earned notoriety as Nixon-era plumbers. In this instance, though, catastrophic scandals were averted. The intelligence apparatus had yet to develop the same internal schisms that it did under Nixon, the media remained unwilling to challenge the president directly, and the war-related spending boom ensured that economic conditions remained solid. Hence, Johnson completed his term, while Nixon did not.

Nor did it end with Watergate. Some enterprising political historian should write a history of one or more of Americas non-scandals, when public wrongdoing on a major scale was widely exposed but failed to lead to a Watergate-style explosion. A classic example would be the Whitewater affair that somewhat damaged Bill Clintons second term but never gained the traction needed to destroy his presidency. In that instance, as with the Iran-Contra affair of 1987, the key variable was the general public sense of prosperity and wellbeing, which had a great deal to do with oil prices standing at bargain-basement levels. Both Reagan and Clinton thus remained popular and escaped the stigma of economic crisis and collapse. In sharp contrast to 1974, a contented public had no desire to see a prolonged political circus directed at removing a president.

So we can take the story up to modern times. The Obama administration did many shameful and illegal things, but the law-enforcement bureaucracy remained united and largely under control: hence the remarkably few leaks. The media never lost their uncritical adulation for the president, and were reluctant to cause him any serious embarrassment. And despite troublingly high unemployment, most Americans had a general sense of improving conditions after 2009. The conditions to generate scandal did not exist, nor was there a mass audience receptive to such claims.

So yes, Obama really did run a scandal-free administration.

What you need for an apocalyptic scandal is a set of conditions roughly as follows: a deeply divided and restive set of bureaucrats and law-enforcement officials, a mass media at war with the administration, and a horrible economic crisis. Under Trump, the first two conditions assuredly exist already. If economic disaster is added to the mix, history suggests that something like a second Watergate meltdown is close to inevitable

Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.

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Scandal-Free Obama - The American Conservative