The People Vs. Barack Obama
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This was an eminently reasonable position for a layperson. It was also illegal for the president of the United States to say it.
In June 2013, Navy judge Commander Marcus Fulton issued a ruling stating that Obama’s comments could let two alleged sexual assault defendants off the hook thanks to Obama exerting unlawful command influence. The judge wrote, “A member of the public would not hear the President’s statement to be a simple admonition to hold members accountable. A member of the public would draw the connection between the ‘dishonorable discharge’ required by the President and a punitive discharge approved by the convening authority. The strain on the system created by asking a convening authority to disregard [Obama’s] statement in this environment would be too much to sustain public confidence.” In short, Obama’s words brought into doubt the objectivity of the military courts, which fall directly under Obama’s jurisdiction. His words could be taken as an order rather than a commentary.24 Defense attorneys for those accused of sexual assault in the military immediately announced they would cite Obama’s words in defense of their clients.25
That same week, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel quietly sent out a one-page memo attempting to mitigate the damage Obama had done. The memo stated, “There are no expected or required dispositions, outcomes or sentences in any military justice case, other than what result from the individual facts and merits of a case and the application to the case of the fundamentals of due process of law.” Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti, director of the Joint Staff, explained that as a result of Obama’s comments, “we believed it was necessary . . . to make a statement, simply to ensure that commanders understood that they act independently, based on the merits of a case, and to ensure that there’s no taint in any of the jurisdiction that takes place or any of the cases that are ongoing now.” The memo, lawyers said, likely wouldn’t accomplish its goal, leaving sexual assault perpetrators the Obama Defense.26
“THE ONLY THING BETWEEN YOU AND THE PITCHFORKS”
President Obama’s threats aren’t relegated to members of the military, inspectors general, or Cambridge police officers. President Obama is all too happy to use the power of his office to leverage concessions from the business community. With the economy in shambles thanks to the economic collapse of 2008, President Obama decided to target businesses. On April 3, 2009, Obama met with thirteen bank CEOs. There was no food, one glass of water per person, and no refills. He casually informed the bank CEOs that they would have to slash salaries. “My administration,” Obama sneered, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”27
And the administration wasn’t shy about ginning up the pitchforks.
To that end, Obama’s government did nothing to investigate seven hundred Service Employees International Union members invading the front yard of bank executive Greg Baer, deputy general counsel of Bank of America, whose son, Forbes’ Nina Easton reported, “locked himself in the bathroom.” When Baer’s son called the police, they didn’t even respond. “Intimidation was the whole point of this exercise, and it worked—even on the police,” Easton later wrote. “A trio of officers who belatedly answered our calls confessed a fear that arrests might ‘incite’ these trespassers.”28 Union violence has become disturbingly common under President Obama, and has gone largely unprosecuted.
President Obama also praised the Occupy Wall Street movement. Even as they illegally occupied public areas, destroyed private property, and engaged in crimes ranging from rape to attempted terrorism, Obama said that he was “on their side.” He contrasted those selfless Occupiers with “people who are irresponsible, who are reckless, who don’t feel a sense of obligation to their communities and their companies and their workers. . . .” Those Wall Street folks, he added, could not be “rewarded.”29
But while Obama encouraged animus toward the 1 percent, he used the power of the government to protect his rich Wall Street friends. Despite the fact that some of the worst offenders in terms of taking unsustainable risks were located at major Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, the Obama administration shied away from prosecuting any of those firms. That’s because those same firms were some of Obama’s biggest campaign donors: in 2008, Goldman’s political action committee and individual contributors gave nearly $1 million to Obama.30 Overall, the Obama campaign raised $16 million from Wall Street, compared to $9 million for that evil Republican corporate fat cat John McCain.31
During the recession, Goldman Sachs cleaned up thanks to its short-selling, even as it took $12.9 billion in a bailout of American International Group in 2008. If AIG had been allowed to go bankrupt, Goldman would have made just $2.3 billion.32 In 2009, Goldman had one of the most profitable years in its history, and forwent billions in cash bonuses only thanks to public outrage.33 How did Goldman clean up during one of the worst economic crises in American history? A congressional report found that the company “used net short positions to benefit from the downturn in the mortgage market, and designed, marketed, and sold CDOs [collateralized debt obligations] in ways that created conflicts of interest with the firm’s clients and at times led to the bank’s profiting from the same products that caused substantial losses for its clients.” Goldman had to pay a $550 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission for misconduct.
But that didn’t mean that the Justice Department would prosecute. Instead, they released a statement: “Based on the law and evidence as they exist at this time, there is not a viable basis to bring a criminal prosecution with respect to Goldman Sachs or its employees in regard to the allegations set forth in the report.” David Wells, spokesman for Goldman Sachs, smiled and said, “We are pleased that this matter is behind us.”34
What happened to the prosecution? Peter Boyer and Peter Schweizer reported for Newsweek that just as the congressional report was released, suspiciously, “several Goldman executives and their families made large donations to Obama’s Victory Fund and related entities, some of them maxing out at the highest individual donation allowed, $35,800, even though 2011 was an electoral off-year. Some of these executives were giving to Obama for the first time.”35
It wasn’t just Goldman getting off the hook. Virtually no Wall Street executives were prosecuted, despite routinely lying to clients about the risk inherent in their investment recommendations. Overall, financial fraud prosecutions dropped dramatically, a full 39 percent since 2003. Eric Holder’s job prior to joining the Obama Justice Department as attorney general had him working at white-shoe law firm Covington & Burling, which just happened to represent Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Deutsche Bank. Lanny Breuer, who ran the Criminal Division at Justice, came from Covington, too.36
As Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian wrote, “the Obama justice department, in particular the Chief of its Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, never even tried to hold the high-level criminals accountable. . . . Obama justice officials both shielded and feted these Wall Street oligarchs.” This despite the fact that even Alan Greenspan, a libertarian-leaning, easy-money former chair of the Federal Reserve Board, said that a lot of Wall Street financial activity in the lead-up to the recession “was just plain fraud.” Even the New York Times complained that the Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute “defied common sense.”37
It’s good to be a Friend of Obama. But getting on Obama’s wrong side means facing the wrong side of the law for business.
The Obama administration has used its regulatory power to blackmail businesses into handing over cash for Obamacare. In May 2013, after Congress refused to appropriate funds to help implement the gargantuan tar pit that is Obamacare, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius went to officials in the health industry to “request” donations for publicizing Obamacare. The Washington Post reported, “Over the past three months, Sebelius has made multiple phone calls to health industry executives, community organizations and church groups and asked that they contribute whatever they can to nonprofit group
s that are working to enroll uninsured Americans and increase awareness of the law, according to an HHS official and an industry person familiar with the secretary’s activities.”
The department claimed it did nothing wrong. But under the law, requesting donations from companies under your jurisdiction is problematic. “To solicit funds from health-care executives to help pay for the implementation of the President’s $2.6 trillion health spending law is absurd,” Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) complained. Justice Department regulations prohibit fund-raising from “a subordinate or from someone who has or seeks business with the Department.” One of the Post’s sources stated that “there was a clear insinuation by the administration that the insurers should give financially to the nonprofits.”38
Then there was the infamous British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar immediately stated, “our job basically is to keep the boot on the neck of British Petroleum.” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs agreed: “We will keep our, as Secretary Salazar said, our boot on the throat of BP to ensure that they’re doing all that they—all that is necessary, while we do all that is humanly possible to deal with this incident.” British prime minister David Cameron complained that Obama’s thuggish behavior over BP would shortchange British pensioners.39 Finally, Obama called BP executives to the White House, where he blithely informed them they would pony up $20 billion to pay damages. No trial, no due process. Just cash up front. “The president said he’s concerned about those workers. He asked if there was something we could do as a voluntary gesture,” said BP lawyer Jamie Gorelick. In return, Obama gave a brief statement talking about the financial health of BP, which had been in a stock nosedive.40
EXECUTIVE TYRANNY
The Obama administration’s obstruction of justice has been most egregious with regard to enforcement of federal and state immigration law. Early on in his presidency, President Obama decided that he would fight against federal immigration law as hard as possible. When Arizona passed a series of state laws attempting to help the federal government enforce state law, Obama’s Justice Department promptly sued the state. Obama accused Arizona of making it “really tough on people who look like they, quote, unquote look like illegal immigrants. . . . Now suddenly if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed, that’s something that could potentially happen.”41 Obama said that Arizona law designed to help the feds would actually “undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans.”42 Attorney General Holder then admitted he hadn’t read the Arizona law, but would sue anyway; homeland security secretary and former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano said she hadn’t read it, either, but called it “bad law enforcement law.”43
The Obama administration’s decision to fight state law cracking down on illegal immigration contrasted sharply with Obama’s illegal decision to stop the federal government from prosecuting so-called DREAMers, young illegal immigrants who had come to the country as children. In June 2012, with no authorization from Congress to do so, Obama simply declared that the executive branch would cease deporting anyone who had come to the country under age sixteen, had been in the country for over five years, and was under age thirty. Those convicted of small misdemeanors would not be deported. “They pledge allegiance to our flag,” Obama said. ‘They are Americans in their hearts, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper.” Incredibly, Napolitano simultaneously claimed that this did not constitute “amnesty.” Instead, she said, “It is an exercise of discretion so that these young people are not in the removal system. It will help us continue to streamline immigration enforcement and ensure that resources are not spent pursuing the removal of low-priority cases involving productive young people.” Obama then blamed Congress for his own executive tyranny: “I’ve said time and time again to Congress, send me the Dream Act, put it on my desk, and I will sign it right away.”
Nothing in the Constitution gave Obama the authority to allow selective prosecution of different types of illegal immigrants. If he wanted to push immigration reform, he could have done it throughout his presidency. Instead, he acted unilaterally in order to boost his reelection effort, in the process cutting the ground out from under law enforcement. Representative Peter King (R-NY) said that he would seek “an immediate review into the possibility that DHS will direct Border Patrol agents to conduct selective enforcement.” And Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) said that the decision “blatantly ignores the rule of law that is the foundation of our democracy.”44 According to Chris Crane, president of the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council, the union for border agents, “There is no burden for the alien to prove anything.” Crane said that prosecutors were treating DREAMers as immune to virtually all prosecution. One illegal immigrant, Crane recalled, had been arrested on four charges, including felonies. Prosecutors said, “He’s a DREAMer. Release him.”45
President Obama’s view that he could unilaterally decide which criminal laws to enforce extended to marijuana, as well. Despite blatant conflict between federal marijuana laws (idiotically declared constitutional by the Supreme Court in 2005’s Gonzales v. Raich)46 and state laws allowing marijuana, the Department of Justice declared that it would not challenge state laws allowing pot use and distribution. Federal prosecutors were told to let certain crimes go based on the Obama administration’s sole determination that duly-enacted law simply wasn’t important. “While the prosecution of drug traffickers remains an important priority, the president and the administration believe that targeting individual marijuana users, especially those with serious illnesses and their caregivers, is not the best allocation of federal government resources,” said White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest. Peter Bensinger, former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, rightly said, “He’s not just abandoning the law, he’s breaking the law. . . . He’s telling the world we don’t really follow the law here.”47
For good measure, Obama also unilaterally delayed the implementation of the most important part of Obamacare—the employer mandate, the section of Obamacare requiring employers to cover their employees’ health care—until beyond the 2014 election cycle. Obama’s national waiver violated every element of the law. Congress did not give the Obama administration the ability to waive enforcement of Obamacare by the Treasury Department; in fact, the statute contained specific penalties designed for 2014. That didn’t stop Obama’s Treasury Department from declaring that “the employer shared responsibility payments . . . will not apply for 2014. Any employer shared responsibility payments will not apply until 2015.” Congress also didn’t give Treasury the ability to waive reporting requirements by business. But that didn’t matter to the Obama administration. Treasury stated, “The Administration . . . will provide an additional year before the [Affordable Care Act] mandatory employer and insurer reporting requirements begin.”48
PROTECTING THE PIMPS
Barack Obama got to know the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now early in his career in Chicago. He represented them in cases as a lawyer. He worked at the ACORN offshoot “Project Vote,” training workers. He served on the board of the Woods Fund when that group gave ACORN grants. In 2007, Obama spoke to ACORN directly. “I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career,” he said. “Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”49 Andy Stern, head of the SEIU and board member at ACORN,50 was the single most common visitor to the White House early in Obama’s presidency.
ACORN was publicly funded. But its political wing endorsed Obama in February 2008 for the presidency. And it had a long history of association with voter fraud.51 In July 2007, ACORN was forced to settle Washington’s case against it for voter fraud after seven workers submitted thousands of false registrations. The names included “Frekkie Magoal�
� and “Fruto Boy Crispila.” As Michelle Malkin points out, “The group’s vandalism on electoral integrity is systemic. ACORN has been implicated in similar voter fraud schemes in Missouri, Ohio, and at least 12 other states.” The group was also involved in mortgages using cash not reported to the IRS.52 In brief, ACORN was one of the worst political groups in the country.
It took two citizen journalists to take them down. When Andrew Breitbart distributed a series of video exposés on ACORN’s activities produced by activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles—videos depicting O’Keefe and Giles portraying themselves as a pimp and prostitute, and receiving tax advice from ACORN employees on setting up a brothel for underage girls—Congress quickly withdrew funding. The feds quickly absolved ACORN of criminal wrongdoing with federal funds.53
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Not only did the Obama administration not investigate ACORN’s activities in any serious way for violations of federal law, but the Obama administration attempted to resurrect ACORN through its various fragmented offshoots. In March 2011, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development gave $80,000 to the Affordable Housing Centers of America, a onetime ACORN affiliate. Naturally, the Government Accountability Office said that AHCOA wasn’t “directly or indirectly under the control of ACORN.” The government website, however, said differently, listing the organization as “ACORN Housing Corporation Inc.,” and giving the same address as ACORN’s old New Orleans office. An internal HUD report from September 2010 said ACORN Housing was “now operating as Affordable Housing Centers of America.”54