M edia Bias: As news outlets dissect every new crumb in the alleged
Trump-Russia-collusion scandal, they're largely ignoring other, very
troubling scandals that happen to involve the previous administration.
So far, and no doubt to the disappointment of many Trump haters, the Russia
scandal has been going nowhere fast. Eleven months of investigating has so far
turned up no hard evidence that there was any collusion between the Trump
campaign and Russia to interfere with the November elections.
While that scandal drags on, however, several others have taken surprising
turns. Not that you'd know it from the coverage these are getting from the
mainstream press.
Unmasking Scandal: On Monday, Judicial Watch announced that it hit a dead
end in its effort to dig out information about why White House advisor Susan
Rice ordered an "unmasking" of Trump campaign ofcials in classied reports.
In response to Judicial Watch's April 4 request for materials related to these
unmasking requests — to determine whether they were politically motivated
— the National Security Council said it had sent all those records to Obama's
presidential library, where they can't be released for ve years.
"Prosecutors, Congress, and the public will want to know when the National
Security Council shipped off the records about potential intelligence abuses by
Susan Rice and others in the Obama White House to the memory hole of the
Obama Presidential Library," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
Fitton ttingly left journalists off his list of those who will want to know about
this, since the latest weird twist in this story garnered precious little interest
among the mainstream media.
Nor did an earlier development in this case, when the House Intelligence
Committee issued subpoenas for information related to unmasking requests
involving Rice as well as former CIA Director John Brennan, and former U.S.
Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Power.
These subpoenas were, Rep. Devin Nunes said, "just further escalation in the
concern we have of the unmaskings of Americans by the senior leaders of the
Obama administration."
Media response: Yawn.
Loretta Lynch Scandal: Despite blanket coverage of James Comey's testimony
about his ring by Trump, few noted the bombshell Comey dropped about
Obama's attorney general, Loretta Lynch, who, Comey said, pressured him to
downplay the signicance of the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's
reckless handling of classied emails on her private server. Comey said Lynch
told him to call it a "matter," not an investigation.
Comey said this gave him a "queasy" feeling, since Lynch was specically asking
him to parrot the words the Clinton campaign was using to describe the FBI
probe. That, on top of the Lynch's private meeting with Bill Clinton, as well as
the unusually lenient immunity deals the Justice Department cut with key
witnesses in the Clinton email case, suggest Lynch had turned the Justice
Department into an arm of the Clinton campaign.
Comey's revelation was enough for liberal California Sen. Diane Feinstein to
call for an investigation into Lynch's actions. "I think we need to know more
about that, and there's only one way to know about it, and that's to have the
Judiciary Committee take a look at that," she said.
As we noted in this space recently, Comey's revelation raises other questions
as well. "Did President Obama know this? Did he approve of it? Was it his idea?
Did anyone at the White House tell Lynch to soft-pedal the investigations? Was
this all conducted in concert with the Clinton campaign?"
Media interest in getting answers to any of these questions? Zero.
NSA Spying Scandal: In late May, Circa News published a truly bombshell
report about how the National Security Agency had been conducting illegal
searches on American citizens for years, "routinely violat(ing) American
privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts." In addition,
the administration "failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the nal
days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall."
Classied documents obtained by Circa showed that "one out of every 20
searches seeking upstream internet data on Americans inside the NSA's socalled
Section 702 database violated the safeguards Obama and his
intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011."
Circa also reported that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court blasted
Obama administration ofcials, saying that the improper searches posed a
"very serious Fourth Amendment issue" and the administration's failure to
disclose the violations amounted to an "institutional lack of candor."
Media response? The three network news programs all ignored this report, and
it got little attention by any of the other mainstream news outlets.
So what we have here is evidence suggesting that the Obama administration
abused national security to damage the Trump administration, politicized the
Justice Department to subvert an active investigation into Hillary Clinton, and
routinely spied on Americans for reasons unknown. That's a lot of potentially
very serious scandals for an administration that described itself as scandalfree.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/real-scandals-the-trump-obsessed-media-are-ignoring/
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