Former President Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House were marked by four huge scandals, each of which uniquely contributed to the unprecedented level of corruption now being exposed in the FBI’s Russia collusion investigation.
The four scandals include:
1.) Fast & Furious (2011), which exposed the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) selling high-powered rifles and other firearms to individuals known to be straw buyers for Mexican drug cartels.
2.) Benghazi (2012), the terrorist attack that k****d four Americans in a U.S. consulate in Libya, including J. Christopher Stevens, the country’s ambassador to Libya, and the Obama administration’s false explanation of it.
3.) IRS targeting (2013), in which the federal tax agency’s illegally singled out Tea Party, conservative, and evangelical nonprofit applicants for illegal harassment during the 2010 and 2012 election campaigns.
4.) Hillary email (2015), which included hundreds of emails containing highly sensitive classified information to and from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on her private server, which was compromised by multiple foreign powers and hackers.
Official wrongdoing seen separately in each of these four scandals came together to create the current FBI scandal.
Here’s how:
Defying Congress: When then-Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress on June 28, 2012, he became the first sitting member of a presidential cabinet to be so voted. The vote was the result of Holder’s refusal to turn over Fast & Furious documents sought by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
The committee, led by its chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), wanted to know why hundreds of an estimated 2,000 weapons — including AK-47s and .50 Calibre sniper rifles — whose sale to straw purchasers was sanctioned by DOJ, were turning up at crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S. After months of negotiations between Issa and DOJ failed, Holder simply refused to provide the requested documents.
Lying to America: For days after the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Obama, national security adviser Susan Rice, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Powers, among many others in the administration, claimed the four Americans who died were victims of a spontaneous protest of an obscure internet documentary critical of Muslims.
Rice notably repeated that claim on the five most-watched morning news programs on the Sunday following the Sept. 11, 2012 attack in Libya. Clinton also repeated it to relatives of the four men k****d when their bodies were returned to the U.S. for burial.