Rand Paul Insists Obama Is To Blame for 'Undermining Democracy' with Russia Probe
Sen. Rand Paul is on a roll.
The conservative Republican has long been one of the most outspoken opponents of government limits on Americans’ liberty — his Senate clash with coronavirus czar Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday was a classic.
But the recent revelations about the extent of abuses against President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Trump presidency have the Kentucky senator incensed at what he calls an “abomination” in the previous administration.
And he’s pointing the finger directly at former President Barack Obama.
In an interview with Stephanie Hamill of The Daily Caller posted to YouTube on Wednesday, Paul left no doubt who he thinks bears the ultimate responsibility for Operation Crossfire Hurricane — the FBI’s spying on the Trump campaign authorized by the secret court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The decision to put surveillance on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, and by extension the rest of the Trump campaign, might have been made at the FBI’s level and approved by the FISA court, but it had to have been signed off on at the highest level, Paul said.
“I think that the operation ‘Crossfire Hurricane,’ where they went after and used this dossier to go to the FISA court to investigate and do wiretaps on Carter Page, who had been part of Trump’s campaign, I think that was done with President Obama’s explicit permission,” he said.
Check it out here. It’s about five minutes long but well worth the time.
And Paul’s reasoning was solid.
“Think about it,” he told Hamill. “You are the president of the United States and you’re going to allow your intelligence community, with all this secret, enormous surveillance power, this spy power, to spy on the opponent that is so sensitive, there’s no way it happened without President Obama being in charge of it.
“But I think Obama in his own self-righteousness would look at us and say, ‘But I was protecting the country and I was doing all this, you know, to protect democracy.'”
Of course, Obama would do exactly that. Putting on his former law professor manner and arrogant tone, the former president has never been shy about lecturing the American people — and his sycophants in the national media have never been embarrassed about carrying his water.
The record of the media’s coverage of eight years of the Obama White House — which still laughably claims not to have had a “whiff of scandal” — shows how little liberal media outlets are interested in actual journalism when it comes to a Democratic White House.
“In the end, he undermined it,” Paul said. “It was undermining democracy, everything he did to usurp that power and go after a political opponent.”
He compared what he said Obama did with what Democrats claimed Trump did during the winter’s impeachment trial.
“They kept saying, remember all this talk about President Trump? ‘Oh, he used government to go after an opponent with withholding aid to Ukraine.’ Well, what do you think President Obama did?
“He used the apparatus of the intelligence community, abused it, to go after a political opponent — in the middle of a campaign!”
Paul was pessimistic about any legal punishment for any of those involved in the travesty of the Trump investigation, but there are still potential political consequences that should come into play.
The revelations keep coming out: From the old, scandalous texts between FBI lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, to the FBI’s faulty FISA warrants revealed by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz in the “Russia collusion” probe, to Wednesday’s news that former Vice President Joe Biden was among the Obama administration officials who sought “unmasking” information about Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn in the waning days of the Obama White House.
And with each one, it becomes clearer just how badly the Obama presidency was an attack on the heart of the American political system.
Biden built his Democratic primary campaign around representing himself as a continuation of the Obama legacy. He’s almost certainly going to do the same in the general election campaign, if he ever gets out of his basement to do it.
American voters need to remember that when November rolls around.
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