Legacy

[Snake]

 

 

 

 

 

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Obama’s Legacy: A Historic War On Whistleblowers

RASHED MIAN

JANUARY 14, 2017

 

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As President Barack Obama soared into office eight years ago, he promised, on his first day in the White House, to launch “a new era of open government.”

“The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears,” Obama said in a Jan. 21, 2009 memorandum.

Obama was urging the attorney general to issue new guidelines protecting The Freedom of Information Act. “In the face of doubt,” Obama proclaimed, “openness prevails.”

Notably, Obama’s transparency pledge came on the heels of President George W. Bush’s administration, which kept state-sponsored torture of alleged enemy combatants, a nascent drone assassination program, and covert eavesdropping of American citizens hidden from the eyes of the American public.

Aside from an economy teetering on the edge of collapse, Obama was inheriting two bloody and expensive wars, a bloated national security state that emerged from the “War on Terror,” and several controversial policies championed by his Republican predecessor.

Now it was the former constitutional law professor’s turn to respond.

As our country takes stock of Obama’s tenure as commander-in-chief, the Pressdetermined it appropriate to scrutinize his record on press freedoms and his ongoing and unprecedented federal crackdown of whistleblowers.

While countless Americans may judge Obama’s performance based on their own current economic standing or their ability to find affordable health insurance, some have grown so dissatisfied with the outgoing president’s handling of transparency that they think his legacy has been tarnished. Reviewing the two-term Democrat’s record on this issue is especially relevant now given President-elect Donald Trump’s hostile attacks on journalism during his recent presidential campaign. At the reality TV star’s rallies, reporters were on the receiving end of venomous jeers as he whipped his supporters into disparaging the “vicious” mainstream media. If Obama, as some press advocates have claimed, rivals Nixon in his use of secrecy and abuse of executive power, then what do the last eight years portend for the next four under Trump? The signs do not look good for the Fourth Estate or the nation’s intelligence community for that matter.

Even before his inauguration, Trump called on Congress to investigate press leaks regarding Russia’s alleged hacking of the Democratic and Republican national political committees as well as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta during the presidential campaign.

Donald J. Trump

 

✔@realDonaldTrump

 

 

I am asking the chairs of the House and Senate committees to investigate top secret intelligence shared with NBC prior to me seeing it.

 

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Most striking was President-elect Trump’s first press conference since being elected. After congratulating some news outlets for showing restraint, he went on to slam those that reported on an unsubstantiated intelligence report about the Russians possessing compromising information about Trump’s allegedly scandalous behavior in St. Petersburg and Moscow in 2013. He specifically blasted Buzz Feed and CNN.

As for Obama’s record, here’s what history will show: In his eight years in office, the Obama Justice Department spearheaded eight Espionage Act prosecutions, more than all US administrations combined. Journalists were also caught in the crosshairs: Investigators sought phone records for Associated Press journalists, threatened to jail an investigative reporter for The New York Times, and named a Fox News reporter a co-conspirator in a leak case. In Texas, a journalist investigating private defense contractors became the focus of a federal prosecution and was initially charged for sharing a hyperlink containing hacked information that had already been made public.

 

[Anler]

Obama prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined. Seems you should like Obama more since you agree with him so much!