Never let it be said that the folks at the Associated Press aren't on top of the news, making sure that readers as well as subscribers who use AP copy in their radio and TV broadcasts learn the most important developments of the day.
That's sarcasm, folks. Friday evening, in a story primarily about the FBI's grant of immunity to longtime Hillary Clinton assistant Cheryl Mills, the AP's Michael Biesecker blandly informed readers — in Paragraph 22 of 25 — that, in regards to her illegal and improperly secured private server, "The new FBI documents (released Friday) also reveal that Clinton occasionally exchanged messages with President Barack Obama, who used a pseudonymous email address." That's it. Nothing unusual here. Now move along.
Biesecker's is the only mention of this startling news I could find at the wire service's main national site, even though it directly contradicts President Obama's early 2015 statement concerning how he first learned of Mrs. Clinton's private email server.
Here is that Obama 2015 statement, included in the video excerpt which follows from the Fox News program The Five. The video also includes a reference to the reaction of another longtime Clinton aide, Huma Abedin:
Transcript (bolds are mine throughout this post):
THE FIVE's DANA PERINO: The FBI released more notes on its investigation of the former Secretary of State. One of the findings: President Obama used a pseudonym to email Mrs. Clinton on her non-secure server.
That raises questions about this previous claim from the President:
(clip from March 2015)
CBS NEWS REPORTER: Mr. President, when did you first learn that Hillary Clinton used an email system outside the U.S. government for official business while she was Secretary of State?
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Uh, the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.
(end inserted clip)
UNIDENTIFIED PANELIST: Woooow.
PERINO: During its investigation, the FBI showed one of the exchanges between the Secretary and the President to Clinton's top aide Huma Abedin. And she reportedly expressed shock, exclaiming, "How is this not classified"?
The agency then say Ms. Abedin then expressed amazement at the President's use of a pseudonym, and asked if she could have a copy of the email.
In a Monday morning column at National Review, Andrew McCarthy explained the significance of this news on several levels, including why Abedin wanted a copy of the email:
Obama’s Conflict Tanked the Clinton E-mail Investigation — As Predicted
... If Obama himself had been e-mailing over a non-government, non-secure system, then everyone else who had been doing it had a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Thanks to Friday’s FBI document dump — 189 more pages of reports from the Bureau’s year-long foray (“investigation” would not be the right word) into the Clinton e-mail scandal — we now know for certain what I predicted some eight months ago here at NRO: Any possibility of prosecuting Hillary Clinton was tanked by President Obama’s conflict of interest.
As I explained in February, when it emerged that the White House was refusing to disclose at least 22 communications Obama had exchanged with then-secretary Clinton over the latter’s private e-mail account, we knew that Obama had knowingly engaged in the same misconduct that was the focus of the Clinton probe: the reckless mishandling of classified information.
To be sure, he did so on a smaller scale. Clinton’s recklessness was systematic: She intentionally set up a non-secure, non-government communications framework, making it inevitable that classified information would be mishandled, and that federal record-keeping laws would be flouted. Obama’s recklessness, at least as far as we know, was confined to communications with Clinton — although the revelation that the man presiding over the “most transparent administration in history” set up a pseudonym to conceal his communications obviously suggests that his recklessness may have been more widespread.
... It would not have been possible for the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton for her offense without its becoming painfully apparent that 1) Obama, too, had done everything necessary to commit a violation of federal law, and 2) the communications between Obama and Clinton were highly relevant evidence.
Indeed, imagine what would have happened had Clinton been indicted. The White House would have attempted to maintain the secrecy of the Obama-Clinton e-mails (under Obama’s invocation of a bogus “presidential communications” privilege), but Clinton’s defense lawyers would have demanded the disclosure of the e-mails in order to show that Obama had engaged in the same misconduct, yet only she, not he, was being prosecuted. And as most experienced criminal-law lawyers understand (especially if they’ve read a little Supreme Court case known as United States v. Nixon), it is an argument that Clinton’s lawyers would have won.
... this is why the prosecution of Mrs. Clinton never had a chance of happening. It also explains why, in his public statements about the matter, Obama insisted that Clinton’s e-mailing of classified information did not harm national security. It is why Obama, in stark contrast to his aforementioned executive order, made public statements pooh-poohing the fact that federal law forbids the mishandling of any intelligence secret. (“There’s classified, and then there’s classified,” he said, so cavalierly.) He had to take this position because he had himself effectively endorsed the practice of high-level communications through non-secure channels.
This is also why the Justice Department and the FBI effectively rewrote the relevant criminal statute in order to avoid applying it to Clinton.
It's hardly hyperbole to assert that the FBI's and Department of Justice's failure to do their jobs and indict a former Secretary of State for crimes of gross negligence everyone now knows she committed (explained further by McCarthy in unexcerpted material), and to refer a sitting President to Congress for impeachment proceedings for committing similar crimes is unprecedented in our history, and dangerously undermines the very foundations of the Republic.
But the AP nonchalantly buried the news of Obama's pseudonymous communications in the 22nd paragraph of a story which was primarily about something else.
A Monday Investors Business Daily editorial on media coordination of hits against Donald Trump also mentioned the shocking news discussed in this post (links are in original):
(The establishment press) made up excuses for President Obama's "you can keep your plan" lie and his other false claims about ObamaCare. As we noted in this space in 2013, "Obama says so many false things about ObamaCare that it's hard to keep up." Obama routinely makes demonstrably false claims about his record, about the economy, about his foreign policy, about guns, which get virtually zero press attention.
Just this Friday, Obama was caught in a flagrant lie about Hillary Clinton's private email account. When the story broke last year, Obama said he didn't know anything about Hillary's email set up until he read about it in the newspaper, but it turns out he repeatedly emailed her at that account using a pseudonym. Media reaction: Yawn.
From the very start, the Obama administration has known that it would get a free pass from the establishment press, and that it was virtually free to lie at will, almost invariably without being called to account, except on those rare occasions when enough noise bubbled up from center-right New Media.
We should also recall that the Obama administration has occasionally tested the waters to see if intimidating the center-right into silence might work. Fortunately, so far, it mostly hasn't. But anyone looking at the growing Orwellian tactics used at social media sites — which, though private entities, act as if they're the nation's liberal Thought Police — can't help but be worried. Oh, and there's this "little" thing about handing over control of the Internet to "the international community," whose last interest is in preserving free speech and expression.
We've had nine years (going back to the early days of Obama's campaign) of the press failing to do its constitutionally envisioned job on an unprecedented scale. Though corrupt people in government are the primary culprits, their enablers in the press have let it happen, almost gleefully, and deserve a large share of the blame for why the country is in such perilous circumstances.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
