Obama Knew About Details of Clinton Email Probe
As revealed by recovered FBI text messages, the president was involved more than he admitted.
While senior FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page were engaged in an illicit affair, their texts contain a bombshell with some big implications. Not only do they now raise the question about what Barack Obama knew and when he knew it regarding the FBI’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails, but they also lead us to wonder whether he really found out about other stuff “through news reports,” as he routinely claimed. Out on a limb, he was lying every time.
Obama famously claimed in an April 2016 interview with Chris Wallace he wasn’t talking to the attorney general or FBI director about the Clinton investigation. Then-FBI Director James Comey denied during congressional testimony that he’d talked with Obama about the case in October 2016. But those were specifically worded denials that didn’t rule out Obama knowing via other avenues.
Now those texts indicate Obama either decided to change his mind about his “no talking” policy with the Justice Department and/or FBI about this, or he was lying. We know this because on Sept. 2, 2016, Page texted Strzok and said, “POTUS wants to know everything we’re doing.” POTUS stands for president of the United States. Comey, by the way, doesn’t have a best-case outcome, because Page’s text means he apparently did lie to Congress the next month.
However, the implications of Page’s text go beyond the Clinton email scandal. There was another scandal — the targeting of Tea Party groups by the Internal Revenue Service — and there were some fishy things going on. A lot of Lois Lerner’s emails vanished, and the devices and hard drives were destroyed. What was on those hard drives and devices will never be known for sure, but it’s quite possible there is a similar smoking gun regarding the IRS Tea Party targeting.
Keep this in mind: During the timeframe of the worst of the scandal, then-IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman visited the Obama White House 157 times.
So, what did Obama know about the IRS targeting the Tea Party, and when did he know it wasn’t just a screwup by low-level employees in Cincinnati? And what did he know about the investigation into Clintons emails? The same investigation that he publicly said was unnecessary because Hillary didn’t do anything wrong.