Before leaving office, President Barack Obama said,”I’m proud of the fact that […] we’re probably the first administration in modern history that hasn’t had a major scandal in the White House.”
Paul Blumenthal for The Huffington Post said that while scandal “has consumed the final four years of every two-term president in modern history […] Barack Obama’s administration is the exception.”
David Brooks wrote in the New York Times, “Obama administration has been remarkably scandal-free.”
CNN commentator Bakari Sellers described Obama as “eight years scandal-free.”
But was it?
Matt Margolis’ book The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama purports to debunk the “phony media narrative that Barack Obama had a ‘scandal-free’ presidency.”
Margolis claims Obama brought to Washington corrupt Chicago machine politics of cronyism and corporate payoffs, combined with tactics meant to steer popular dissatisfactions toward leftist goals – using polarization as a purposeful tactic.
The attempted illegal “sale” of his former Senate seat by former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was a scandal right after Obama was elected. Obama denied involvement in any discussions yet Obama reportedly met with Blagojevich to discuss his Senate seat. A local CBS affiliate published two stories, only to remove both off their website after the scandal broke.
Form there on it was not scandal free. It was media scandal free.
Here are a few scandals that were reported but never got the media attention they likely would have received if a Republican was in the White House.
- Illegal IRS targeting of conservative groups
- NSA spying on political opponents
- The decision to block the prosecution of Iranian-backed terrorists
- Fast and Furious
- Benghazi
- The VA scandal
- Solyndra
- OPM hacking
- GSA scandal
- Iran Ransom
- Uranium One
- FISA abuse.
In December of last year, Politico published a report about how the Obama administration stonewalled an investigation of an international drug-trafficking operation of the Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah in order to protect his nuclear deal with Iran. ABC, CBS, and NBC considered this unworthy of major coverage.
The Mueller investigation exposed – although not intentionally – how politicized the Department of Justice became under Obama. It has yet to expose collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians.
Before, during and after leaving office, Obama said “We didn’t have a scandal that embarrassed us.”
He might have said it better had he said, “the media did not embarrass us for any of my scandals.”
Margolis says, “The media presented Obama as a successful, scandal-free president—a massive cover-up unprecedented in the history of modern journalism—and this amounts to an abdication of their duty to the American people to tell us the truth. … Their failure to do so with Obama is his golden ticket to historical greatness and he clearly recognizes this and is using it to his advantage…. If we don’t shine the light on the facts of Obama and his presidency now, the myth of a ‘scandal-free’ Obama administration will be written as fact for the history books.”
Maybe part of the reason the media treated him so fine was he was not accessible to them.
After early promises to be the most transparent administration in history, Obama was one of the most secretive and elusive. On-the-record interviews with hard-news, government reporters were rare. He gave almost no in-depth, on-the-record access to reporters during his two terms.
■ Excessive delays in answering interview requests that stretch past reporters’ deadlines.
■ Conveying information “on background,” and refusing to give reporters what should be public information unless they agree not to say who is speaking.
■ Federal agencies’ blackballing of reporters who write critically of them.
■ Lack of meaningful visual access to the president by an independent press pool.
That’s true we didn’t hear about it.
I think that’s Margolis’ point.
To purchase or learn more about Matt Margolis’ “The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama” click here
glowing review of Saint Barack available through Time
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