President Barack Obama announces he will nominate U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch, right, to be the next Attorney General, Saturday, Nov. 8, 2014 (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
As shocking as the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the Hillary email investigation released earlier this week was, the truth is none of us should be surprised by it. I certainly wasn’t. Anyone who paid any attention at all to what was going on during the Obama years would know that what happened in the summer of 2016 within Obama’s Justice Department was the climax of an eight-year crescendo of partisan corruption, intent on protecting Obama’s legacy from Donald Trump.
Eight years is a short time for the FBI to go from a respected institution to a partisan arm of the White House, but it happened right under our noses, with the media doing its best to keep us in the dark.
From the earliest days of the Obama administration, the Obama/Holder/Lynch Justice Department protected political allies from justice. A slam-dunk case of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party during the 2008 presidential election was inexplicably dropped, resulting in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights declaring in the summer of 2010 that there was evidence of “possible unequal administration of justice” by the Justice Department. Obama also blocked a corruption probe that implicated former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for bribery. He also illegally fired an inspector general who was investigating a friend and donor of Obama’s. Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder worked in concert to protect each other. Holder would stonewall congressional investigations into Obama administration corruption and Obama would assert executive privilege to keep damaging information away from the eyes of investigators, such as crucial documents in the Fast and Furious investigation.
The Obama Justice Department also targeted Obama’s enemies. When conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza was prosecuted for making $20,000 in straw donations to a friend’s U.S. Senate campaign, many legal experts saw it as partisan selective prosecution, including liberal Harvard Law School professor and Obama supporter Alan Dershowitz. James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was placed on a terrorist watch list in order to limit his international travel after posting a viral video showing himself dressed like a terrorist crossing back forth over the U.S. border with Mexico to demonstrate the horrible state of our nation’s border security.
There are dozens of scandals in the Obama administration that never resulted in any of the key players being prosecuted. No special counsels were ever appointed. By the end of the Obama administration, they’d been able to get away with so much because the media refused to give anything damaging to Obama the coverage it deserved for eight years.
So, is it really that surprising that anti-Trump FBI agent Peter Strzok was leading both the Trump investigation and the Hillary Clinton email investigation? There was no justification for this, but yet, it happened. And the impact of their political bias is undeniable. We now know from text messages between Strzok and his fellow FBI agent and lover Lisa Page (who also was involved in the investigations) that Strzok was going to do whatever he could, with the power of the FBI, to keep Trump out of the White House:
Page: [Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!Strzok: No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.
There are other anti-Trump text messages from several FBI agents and lawyers as well, all of which raise legitimate concerns that the FBI’s investigation of Trump was a political witch hunt, and that there was a concerted effort to protect Hillary Clinton.
Dinesh D’Souza, speaking with Laura Ingraham on Fox News earlier this week, believes that the ”tremendous kind of glee and sense of immunity with which these agents at the high level of operating” suggests they were ordered by someone high up. Who gave the order? The answer to that, according to D’Souza, is the answer to the question, who benefits?
“Hillary benefits, but Hillary clearly couldn't have given the order," D'Souza said. "She was secretary of state and then she was out of the government. Obama, on the other hand, very much did not want Trump to win. He knew that Trump would try to erase his legacy. It's very embarrassing for him to be succeeded by Trump. I wonder if Obama is the one who gave the order.”
The reputation and our faith in the FBI have been severely compromised by eight years of politicization under the “leadership” of Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and Loretta Lynch. That is a legacy of Obama’s that must be fixed. I have no doubt that most of the agents in the FBI, regardless of their political leanings, are upstanding individuals who believe in equal justice. But, somehow a slew of hyper-partisan anti-Trump agents all ended up running the most pivotal investigations leading up to the 2016 election by aggressively pursuing the dubious link between Trump and Russia, while simultaneously easing up on the Clinton email investigation.
We must make sure that the right people are held accountable, and safeguards are put in place to make sure such terrible abuses never happen again. But our faith in the FBI won’t be so easily restored.
Matt Margolis is the author of the new book, The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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