Commitment to Transparency, My Ass

After a protracted court battle, the US Government has turned over documents regarding the WWII prosecution of a journalist for publishing classified information.

There was never an indictment, because it was determined that this would serve to alert the Japanese that their codes had been broken, but what was interesting to me was that, 70 years after the fact, the government was still trying to keep this cloaked in secrecy:

Newly published documents by the National Security Archive reveal why a grand jury refused to prosecute a Chicago Tribune reporter during World War II for a leak.

Correspondent Stanley Johnston was accused of revealing the United States cracked a Japanese code, which alerted the military to Japanese war plans before the Battle of Midway. A Tribune editor attributed the source of information to “naval intelligence.”

A prosecution was contemplated under the Espionage Act, but the government backed off because they feared what may happen if a trial publicized that the U.S. compromised the Japanese code.

The Justice Department under President Barack Obama fought against a lawsuit filed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. It lost when a district court ruled in 2015 that disclosure would “result in a more complete public record of this historic event” and affirm the government is “open, in all respects, to scrutiny by the people.”

Yet, the government appealed, and it was not until September 2016, when the appeals court ruled against the government’s claim that a federal court had no jurisdiction to order the release of transcripts, that an effort to keep 75 year-old documents secret came to an end.

This is a 75 year old secret, and Barack Obama and his Evil Minions^™ felt compelled to keep it under wraps, because ……… Worst Constitutional law professor ever.^™

One would think that Obama was working for the US state security apparatus, not the other way around.

Headline of the Day

Thanks, Obama: Trump Plans to Make It Easier to Kill Civilians with Drones

True dat.

Ka-Ching!

Less than a year, and Obama is getting hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches to the banksters:

Hillary Clinton says she made a mistake when she gave speeches on Wall Street after leaving government. Taking money from banks, she writes in her new memoir, created the impression she was in their pocket.

Her old boss doesn’t seem to share her concern.

Last month, just before her book “What Happened” was published, Barack Obama spoke in New York to clients of Northern Trust Corp. for about $400,000, a person familiar with his appearance said. Last week, he reminisced about the White House for Carlyle Group LP, one of the world’s biggest private equity firms, according to two people who were there. Next week, he’ll give a keynote speech at investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald LP’s health-care conference.

So much for hope an change.

When Does the Petition About Obama Start?

In response to a petition by over ¼ million people, the Nobel Prize committee has announced that cannot strip Aung Sang Suu Kyi of the prize for her support of genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar:

The organization that oversees the Nobel Peace Prize said Friday the 1991 prize awarded to Myanmar’s Aung Sang Suu Kyi cannot be revoked.

Olav Njolstad, head of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, said in an email to The Associated Press that neither the will of prize founder Alfred Nobel nor the Nobel Foundation’s rules provide for the possibility of withdrawing the honor from laureates.

“It is not possible to strip a Nobel Peace Prize laureate of his or her award once bestowed,” Njolstad wrote. “None of the prize awarding committees in Stockholm and Oslo has ever considered revoking a prize after it has been awarded.”

An online petition signed by more than 386,000 people on Change.org is calling for Suu Kyi to be stripped of her Peace Prize over the persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority.

Suu Kyi received the award for “her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights” while standing up against military rulers.

………

Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh have reported being ordered to leave Myanmar under the threat of death. They have described large-scale violence allegedly perpetrated by Myanmar troops and Buddhist mobs that included homes being set on fire and bullets sprayed indiscriminately.

Suu Kyi has dismissed the Rohingya crisis as a misinformation campaign.

I'm wondering where the outrage is over a program of targeted assassination by flying robots, including the deaths of thousands of non combatants hasn't generated a f%$#ing petition.

Seriously, the Nobel prize committee is really the gang that cannot shoot straight.

Something Seriously Weird

The indespensible Matt Tiabbi has looked into the Government takeover of the government-sponsored entities (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and found it odd.

Not only is it odd, but it runs completely counter to the normal way that the Treasury Department handled rescues during the financial crisis.

For the bailouts of both the auto companies and AIG, the Secretary of the Treasury Timothy "Eddie Haskell" Geithner could not get the government out of those businesses, but with Fannie and Freddie, they retained a permanent ongoing interest:

In August 2012, a few months before Barack Obama told Mitt Romney the Eighties had called and wanted their foreign policy back, the U.S. government made a momentous and little-discussed decision. It unilaterally changed the terms of the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, seizing all of the companies' profits.

The government originally insisted on a 10 percent annual dividend in exchange for what ultimately became a $187 billion rescue. In 2012, the government quietly changed that 10 percent deal to one in which the state simply seized all profits. Government regulators euphemistically described this as "fully capturing financial benefits." The press paid almost no attention to this event.

………

They had gone bust during the crash years for a variety of reasons, mostly due to incompetent and corrupt management. But by the summer of 2012, with the real estate market in recovery, the companies weren't bust anymore. On the contrary, they were about to start making money again – enormous piles of it, in fact.

The government has always insisted it didn't know this. Not just in the summer of 2012 but numerous times since, officials have insisted that they needed 100 percent of Fannie and Freddie's profits because they wanted to protect taxpayers from likely future losses, and because Fannie and Freddie would otherwise be unable to pay back what they owed.

Mario Ugoletti, a special adviser to the director of the federal housing agency, said in 2013 of the companies' debts that it was "unlikely that [Fannie and Freddie] would be able to meet that amount consistently without drawing additional funds from Treasury."

But documents just released in a court case show that the government privately believed just the opposite before it made its historic decision to "sweep" the GSE revenues.

One key document is a memo from Mary Miller, assistant Treasury secretary for the financial markets, to then-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Dated December 11th, 2011, Miller writes to Geithner that "Freddie is expected to be net income positive by the end of 2012, and Fannie by the end of 2013."

………

The only reason this story is hitting the headlines at all this week is because the government's 2012 decision triggered an all-out pitched battle between two investor groups. Those who bet on Fannie and Freddie's revival were wiped out by the government's 2012 decision, while those who shorted the firms have made fortunes.

The documents that came out this week were released in a lawsuit brought by Fannie and Freddie shareholders who believe that the government stole billions of dollars in profits from them.

Well, that last bit explains cui bono, doesn't it.

I'm wondering if the firm Warburg Pincus, where Geithner secured a job as president, had short positions on Fannie and Freddie, but I am a cynical SOB.

Then I decided to put on my cynical hat, and thought perhaps the Obama administration was attempting to move the GSE's function, and their government backing, to Wall Street, so as to privatize the profits and socialize the risks, to benefit the finance industry at the expense of ordinary Americans.

This did seem to be the modus operandi of the Obama and his Evil Minions^™, and that the easiest way to take down the GSE's would be to eliminate the major constituency for the supporting them, their investors.

It appears to have worked:

Lurking underneath the scandal derisively termed "Fanniegate" is a monstrous struggle for future profits. The fight here is not just about the profits generated by the GSEs, but what to do about them generally. Finance lobbyists have successfully forged a bipartisan consensus that the companies need to be privatized. Essentially, Wall Street wants to step into the shoes of Fannie and Freddie.

In most versions of GSE reform currently winding their way through Congress, the same too-big-to-fail banks that blew up the mortgage markets in 2008 would assume most of the responsibilities of Fannie and Freddie. Crucially, securitized mortgages would continue to enjoy government backing under many of these proposals.

Privatized profits, socialized losses. Who doesn't love that formula?

It would be the ultimate triumph for Wall Street, and the ultimate shocker ending to the crash era. After nearly blowing up the planet with a mortgage bubble and getting bailed out by taxpayers, banks would now be handed control of the real estate markets and granted permission to reap massive profits trading government-backed mortgages until the end of time.

I kind of hope that it's petty corruption by Geithner, who, after all, is a rather petty fellow, because the other alternative is that the policies of the Obama administration with regard to the finance industry were at their core ineluctably evil.

The counter argument to this theory is the massive program of prosecuting the Wall Street banksters for their crimes, but even George W. Bush prosecuted more aggressively than the Obama administration did.

Well What Do You Know. Obama May Have Spied on Trump………

And thousands of other Americans as well, as is revealed in a recent FISA court decision excoriating the practices of the NSA under the Obama administration:

U.S. intelligence agencies conducted illegal surveillance on American citizens over a five-year period, a practice that earned them a sharp rebuke from a secret court that called the matter a “very serious” constitutional issue.

The criticism is in a lengthy secret ruling that lays bare some of the frictions between the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and U.S. intelligence agencies obligated to obtain the court’s approval for surveillance activities.

………

The document, signed by Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, said the court had learned in a notice filed Oct. 26, 2016, that National Security Agency analysts had been conducting prohibited queries of databases “with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the court.”

It said a judge chastised the NSA’s inspector general and Office of Compliance for Operations for an “institutional ‘lack of candor’ ” for failing to inform the court. It described the matter as “a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”

The Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, and is a constitutional bedrock protection against intrusion.

Parts of the ruling were redacted, including sections that give an indication of the extent of the illegal surveillance, which the NSA told the court in a Jan. 3 notice was partly the fault of “human error” and “system design issues” rather than intentional illegal searches.

………

Data captured from both upstream and downstream sources are stored in massive databases, available to be searched when analysts need to, often months or as much as two years after the captures took place.

The prohibited searches the court mentioned involved NSA queries into the upstream databanks, which constitute a fraction of all the data NSA captures around the globe but are more likely to contain the emails and phone calls of people in the United States.

Federal law empowers the NSA and CIA to battle foreign terrorist actions against the United States by collecting the electronic communications of targets believed to be outside the country. While communications of U.S. citizens or residents may get hoovered up in such sweeps, they are considered “incidental” and must be “minimized” – removing the identities of Americans – before broader distribution.

The court filing noted an NSA decision March 30 to narrow collection of “upstream” data within the United States. Under that decision, the NSA acknowledged that it had erred in sweeping up the communications of U.S. citizens or residents but said those errors “were not willful.” Even so, the NSA said it would no longer collect certain kinds of data known as “about” communications, in which a U.S. citizen was merely mentioned.

The NSA announced that change publicly on April 28, two days after the court ruling, saying the agency would limit its sweeps to communications either directly to or from a foreign intelligence target. That change would reduce “the likelihood that NSA will acquire communications of U.S. persons or others who are not in direct contact with one of the agency’s foreign intelligence targets.”

The court document also criticized the FBI’s distribution of intelligence data, saying it had disclosed raw surveillance data to sectors of its bureaucracy “largely staffed by private contractors.”

This is a particularly scathing ruling when one considers the generally lackadaisical approach to the 4^th amendment taken by the FISA court.

There is a reason why I call Barack Obama, "Worst Constitutional law professor ever.^™"

This is why we need checks and balances.

Almost, but Not Quite a Stopped Clock Moment

The reliably wrong "Very Serious Person" (VSP) Matthe Yglesias,  is justified in his condemnation of Obama's $400,000 payday Wall Street speech, but his statement that this, "Will undermine everything he believes in," is wrong on a number of levels.

First, there is no way to determine what any public figure truly believes, so couching this in those terms is wrong, and second any examination of the Obama administration would lead one to conclude that his public acts had the effect of pleasing and protecting the "Malefactors of Great Wealth", (Timothy Geithner, anyone?) and this action is consistent with his behavior while in office.^*

The revolving door, and people cashing in after their time in his administration, were a fixture in his two terms of office, and this, along with his policies, are entirely consistent with his paid speaking gig.

I agree with Yglesias that it's sleazy as hell, but I tend to find it consistent with his actual behavior, and not at odds with what he did as President.

^*Note the difference between Yglesias comment and mine.  I talk about the effects, and do not imply that I know the the inner dialogue of Obama and his Evil Minions^™.

Good Point

Marcie "Emptywheel" Wheeler gives us a bright side to the Trump administration:

I have a confession.

There’s something I like about the Trump Administration.

It’s the way that his unpopularity taints long-standing policies or practices or beliefs, making people aware of and opposed to them in a way they weren’t when the same policies or beliefs were widely held under George Bush or Barack Obama. Many, though not all, of these policies or beliefs were embraced unquestioningly by centrists or even avowed leftists.

I’ve been keeping a running list in my mind, which I’ll begin to lay out here (I guess I’ll update it as I remember more).

• Expansive surveillance
• The presumption of regularity, by which courts and the public assume the Executive Branch operates in good faith and from evidence
• Denigration of immigrants
• Denigration of Muslims
• Denigration health insurance

As an example, Obama deported a huge number of people. But now that Trump has expanded that same practice, it has been made visible and delegitimized.

In short, Trump has made things that should always have been criticized are now being far more widely so.

It's true.  Obama's war on whistle-blowers is unprecedented, he was the deportation president, he terrorized half a dozen with drone strikes, and he expanded surveillance beyond Dick Cheney's wildest dreams.

The so-called left never had an objection to what Obama was doing, but now, even the far right is wondering about things like the surveillance state.

Obama normalized a lot of bad things, and now Trump is abnormalizing those same excesses.

It's kind of like watching your mother-in-law going over a cliff in your brand new car.

Snark of the Day

POLL: Did Vice President Pence deserve the ‘Working for Women’ award?” Salon.

Judy B: “No more than Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.”

—Naked Capitalism

Tweet of the Day

Net wealth of poor families went from around 0 to minus $15k
(US CBO) https://t.co/xGhuTTn6Yz pic.twitter.com/dmOPME74u6

— Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan) February 20, 2017

This might explain why so many people were unmoved by Hillary Clinton's message that things are fine as well as the relative hostility of people in the lower half of the income distribution to Barack Obama.

When Barack Obama approved Timothy Geithner's policy of using HAMP to "Foam the Runway" for the banks, in so doing they reduced a significant proportion of the populace to penury.

H/t naked capitalism

Quote of the Day

McConnel’s obstructionism and Trump’s birtherism were obnoxious but they didn’t destroy Obama’s agenda. Failure to push for card check, Medicare for all, voter registration, prosecuting Wall Street fraud and war crimes, new trade deals, authorizing the extra-judicial murder of US citizens, and overthrowing the government in Guatemala, Ukraine, and Libya were the real disasters.

—James F.

He also notes that, "In 2008, Obama was really popular and he had the support of his own party. Obama failed to ram through his agenda because he refused to rally the people who put him into office."

There is a saying in politics, that Republicans fear their base, and Democrats hates their base.

Obama is a fairly strong argument for the final clause in that statement.

Obama Just put the Lie to the Clinton's Red Baiting

In his final Presidential press conference, Barack Obama said that the DNC emails were leaked, not hacked:

Three U.S. Intelligence Agencies (CIA, NSA and FBI) claim that IT-Systems of the Democratic National Committee were "hacked" in an operation related to the Russian government. They assert that emails copied during the "hack" were transferred by Russian government related hackers to Wikileaks which then published them.

President Obama disagrees. He says those emails were "leaked".

Wikileaks had insisted that the emails it published came from an insider source not from any government. The DNC emails proved that the supposedly neutral Democratic Party committee had manipulated the primary presidential elections in favor of the later candidate Hillary Clinton. This made it impossible for the alternative candidate Bernie Sanders to win the nomination. Hillory Clinton, who had extremely high unfavorable ratings, lost the final elections.
………

Here is President Obama in his final press conference yesterday (vid @8:31):

First of all, I haven't commented on WikiLeaks, generally. The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether Wikileaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC emails that were leaked.

The DNC emails "that were leaked" - not "hacked" or "stolen" but "leaked".

One wonders if this is a parting shot is primarily aimed at the involved Intelligence Agencies led by James Clapper and John Brennan. Or is dissing Hillary Clinton and her narrative the main purpose?

Dissing Hillary is the main purpose.

If Obama weren't thoroughly in the pocket of Clapper and Brennan, he would have fired them when they lied to and spied on members of Congress.

More importantly, it indicates that the DNC email leaks were an inside job, not the work of the GRU (read the reports, the FSB may have gotten into the DNC, but they did not redistribute the results, basic spycraft).

I'm Cynical, so My Question is, "What's Obama's Vig?"

I gotta figure that the news that Barack Obama has commuted Chelsea Manning sentence is more about Barack Obama than it is about Chelsea Manning:

President Obama on Tuesday commuted all but four months of the remaining prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the Army intelligence analyst convicted of a 2010 leak that revealed American military and diplomatic activities across the world, disrupted Mr. Obama’s administration and brought global prominence to WikiLeaks, the recipient of those disclosures.

The decision by Mr. Obama rescued Ms. Manning, who twice tried to kill herself last year, from an uncertain future as a transgender woman incarcerated at the men’s military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. She has been jailed for nearly seven years, and her 35-year sentence was by far the longest punishment ever imposed in the United States for a leak conviction.

At the same time that Mr. Obama commuted the sentence of Ms. Manning, a low-ranking enlisted soldier at the time of her leaks, he also pardoned Gen. James E. Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who pleaded guilty to lying about his conversations with reporters to F.B.I. agents investigating a leak of classified information about cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear program.

The two acts of clemency were a remarkable final step for a president whose administration carried out an unprecedented criminal crackdown on leaks of government secrets. Depending on how they are counted, the Obama administration has prosecuted either nine or 10 such cases, more than were charged under all previous presidencies combined.

My guess is that this has something to do  Obama's quest for legacy.

He does not want Manning's suicide to be in his historical footnotes, and for the speaking circuit, he needs to get along with former military speakers, and he could not pardon Cartwright without commuting Manning.

It is completely out of character for Obama though.

Barack Obama, Shut the F%$# Up

Barack Obama has a sad, because it's all liberal's fault that Obamacare is unpopular.

Yeah, I guess the fact that he killed the public option and spent the entire process fellating big insurance and big pharma, giving people rate increases, narrow networks, and balance billing had nothing to do with this:

President Barack Obama said on Friday that criticism from the left wing of his own Democratic Party helped feed into the unpopularity of Obamacare, his signature healthcare reform law.

………

But Obama also said Liberals like former Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders had contributed to the program's unpopularity.

During Sanders' campaign for the presidential nomination, he proposed replacing Obamacare with a government-run single-payer health insurance system based on Medicare, the government plan for elderly and disabled Americans.

"In the 'dissatisfied' column are a whole bunch of Bernie Sanders supporters who wanted a single-payer plan," Obama said in the interview.

"The problem is not that they think Obamacare is a failure. The problem is that they don't think it went far enough and that it left too many people still uncovered," Obama said.

"They" are right.

If you had been more interested in a good policy than you had been to check off a box on your Presidential legacy, the program would have been better, less expensive, and more universal, and far less unpopular.

You improved on the status quo, but you did so in a way calculated to make minimum changes and to keep the malefactors of the US health insurance system in the driver's seat, because ……… markets.

What's more, your program was structured in a way to make it as opaque and politically unpopular as possible.

Look in the mirror, dude.

Same as It Ever Was………

It appears that ground troops are back in combat in Iraq:

U.S. forces assisting Iraqi troops to retake Mosul from Islamic State are embedding more extensively, a senior commander said on Friday, a move that could accelerate a two month-old campaign which has slackened after quick initial advances.

More than 5,000 American service members are currently deployed in Iraq as part of an international coalition that is advising local forces in a bid to recapture the third of the country the jihadists seized in 2014 when Iraq's army and police dropped their weapons and fled.

Coalition advisors were initially concentrated at a high-level headquarters in Baghdad but have fanned out over the past two years to multiple locations to stay near advancing troops.

Now, as Iraqi forces controlling around a quarter of Mosul - Islamic State's last major stronghold in Iraq - proceed deeper into the northern city and encounter fierce counter-attacks that render progress slow and punishing, U.S. troops are stepping up their involvement.

………

"We have always had opportunities to work side-by-side, but we have never been embedded to this degree," he [U.S. Army Colonel Brett G. Sylvia, commander of Task Force Strike] said. "That was always a smaller niche mission. Well, this is our mission now and it is big and we are embedded inside their formations."

Obama said that he would get us out of Iraq.

Not so much.

Tweet of the Day

Democrats in the Obama years pic.twitter.com/Wy3v74cQhi

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) December 19, 2016

As much as I hate the hacks at Morning Joe, they are right.

Barack Obama was a catastrophe for the Democratic party.

So was Bill Clinton. (lost the house for the first time in nearly 40 years)

So was Jimmy Carter. (Lost the Senate for the first time in over 20 years)

We need to stop electing people who spend all their time pretending to be Republicans.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever? Maybe He's Just a F%$#ing Idiot.

Barack Obama has spent most of the last 8 years expanding the powers of the Presidency, because, after all his motives are virtuous.

This is, of course is the very antithesis of the reasoning of the founding fathers, who endeavored to create a system where the bulwark against tyranny DIDN'T depend on the good intentions of those holding power.


I put Obama's relentless quest for more executive power down to hypocrisy and narcissism.

I may have been wrong, maybe he's just an idiot.

Obama has just expanded his powers as Commander-in-Chief when he knows that Donald Trump will be succeeding him:

The Obama administration is giving the elite Joint Special Operations Command — the organization that helped kill Osama bin Laden in a 2011 raid by Navy SEALs — expanded power to track, plan and potentially launch attacks on terrorist cells around the globe, a move driven by concerns of a dispersed terrorist threat as Islamic State militants are driven from strongholds in Iraq and Syria, U.S. officials said.

The missions could occur well beyond the battlefields of places like Iraq, Syria and Libya where Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has carried out clandestine operations in the past. When finalized, it will elevate JSOC from being a highly-valued strike tool used by regional military commands to leading a new multiagency intelligence and action force. Known as the “Counter-External Operations Task Force,” the group will be designed to take JSOC’s targeting model — honed over the last 15 years of conflict — and export it globally to go after terrorist networks plotting attacks against the West.

The creation of a new JSOC entity this late in the Obama’s tenure is the “codification” of best practices in targeting terrorists outside of conventional conflict zones, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss administration deliberations. It is unclear, however, if the administration of President-elect Donald Trump will keep this and other structures set up by Obama. They include guidelines for counterterrorism operations such as approval by several agencies before a drone strike and “near certainty” that no civilians will be killed. This series of presidential orders is known as the “playbook.”

Essentially, this will put JSOC on a direct channel to the White House, making it easier for the White House to initiate such actions with only the barest review from the rest of the military or from the Pentagon bureaucracy.

Obama just stood this up, and he's going to be handing it to Donald Trump.

This is so stupid on so many levels that it buggers the mind.

Insanity Is Defined as Doing the Same Thing over and over Again and Expecting Different Results

Barack Obama has decided that terrorizing the population of Yemen with drones, and allowing the House of Saud to indiscriminately bomb civilians is a successful antiterrorism strategy.

The net effect has been to quadrupling the size of al Qaeda in Yemen:

On September 10, 2014, President Obama gave a speech advocating for the same kind of approach to counterterrorism against ISIL his Administration had been using with Yemen (and Somalia).

………

Today, the Soufan Group wrote up an alarming detail from the State Department Country Report on Terrorism for last year: AQAP has quadrupled in size since Obama’s speech.

This is what happens you have a failed policy, and you stick with the conventional wisdom.

It is a failure of intellect.

It is a failure of imagination.

It is an unalloyed failure.

OBama Really Wants His Poodle to Stay in the EU

Obama is now saying that if Britain votes to leave the EU, there won't be a free trade deal with Britain for over 10 years.

This is, of course, a shameless attempt to threaten the British voters into staying in the EU, so that US influence on this body is not diminished.

The US (IMNSHO correctly) that the UK will blindly promulgate US policies and US interests within the European Union:

The UK could take up to 10 years to negotiate trade deals with the US if it leaves the EU, Barack Obama has said.

In a BBC interview, the US president said: "It could be five years from now, 10 years from now before we were able to actually get something done."

Britain would also have less influence globally if it left, he added.

His warning over trade has angered UK campaigners for leaving the EU - with UKIP leader Nigel Farage dismissing Mr Obama's comments as "utter tosh".

As much as it pains me to agree with him, Nigel Farage is right.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever

Barack Obama just admitted that mishandling of classified data is OK for his friends:

In an interview Sunday with Fox News, President Obama indicated he doesn't think Hillary Clinton really truly shared top secret government information on a private email server while she was secretary of state. "There's classified, and then there's classified," Obama said.

This is another version of Nixon's comment to David Frost, "If the President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal."

He has gone after critics that has led to more prosecutions than every single president since the creation of the Republic, but when Hillary mishandles information, or when Leon Panetta leaks classified infomation to Kathryn Bigelow, the CIA's version of Leni Riefenstahl, it's OK, because it is his Evil Minions^™.

The terms corrupt and hypocritical come to mind, and this is just repulsive.