A Flood of Scandals Engulfs Obama

The Week ^ | May 14, 2013 | Edward Morrisey

[lbryce]

From spinning Benghazi to politicizing the IRS to spying on the AP, a raft of embarrassing revelations is crippling the president

President Obama has had a tough week, and it's about to get a lot worse.

The past few days have seen a cascade of evidence that the administration not only feigned transparency, but may have covered up the politicization of the IRS and the response to the terrorist attack on the Benghazi consulate. Whistle-blowers on the Benghazi response moved that story back into the headlines, but not for long. Because on Friday, the IRS admitted that it had targeted conservative groups for aggressive investigations. And that wasn't even the worst of the scandals.

On top of everything, Obama's Department of Justice spied on the AP, and may have found a way to alienate a national press that had done its best to downplay any hint of corruption in this White House.

Let's start with the Benghazi attack and the issue of what the White House knew and when. This scandal has bubbled below the surface for the past few months, but the embarrassing shift more than a week after the attack from the fiction that the attack started as a demonstration over a YouTube video to a belated acknowledgment that it had been a planned terrorist attack — and that there had been no demonstration at all — had not been forgotten on Capitol Hill.

Three State Department career employees finally came forward to tell Congress last week that no one had even suggested to the State Department that a demonstration had taken place. Gregory Hicks, who was the deputy chief of mission in Libya, told the House Oversight panel that he personally briefed Hillary Clinton during the attack, and that no demonstration had taken place, and that the supposedly catalytic YouTube film about Mohammed was a "non-factor" on the ground. Hicks also said that his "jaw dropped" when he heard Susan Rice tell five different Sunday talk shows that the attack started with a spontaneous demonstration at the consulate, directly contradicting what Libya's president was telling U.S. news outlets at the same time.

Eric Nordstrom undercut the White House defense of relying on a rather soft scolding from its Accountability Review Board by accusing the panel of deliberately overlooking the role of senior State Department officials in ignoring a string of urgent requests for more security. That has also happened before, and resulted in attacks on American embassies in 1998. Who was in charge of security issues then? Why, the same man who holds the position today — Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy, Nordstrom pointed out:

[lbryce]

Cute. LOL.