EDITORIAL I INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
Obama Scandal: Former
President Obama and his political supporters have repeatedly stated that his
administration was scandal-free, unlike administrations before and
after. "We're probably the first administration in modern history
that hasn't had a major scandal in the White House," Obama himself said. A
new book puts the lie to that statement.
Never mind that the left-leaning big media basically
ignored major scandals during the Obama years, ranging from the IRS targeting
scandal and the VA's deadly waiting lists for veterans to Hillary Clinton's
illegal use of an unsecured, hackable home-brew server for her official duties
as secretary of state and the Fast and Furious gunwalking program.
These and others were epic scandals that the media simply
ignored or downplayed.
The media have contrasted Obama's supposed honesty and
forthrightness with President Trump's supposed venality and political
unscrupulousness, as embodied in the year-and-a-half long Russia-Trump scandal
investigation that shows few signs of letting up.
But now comes Peter Schweizer's new book, "Secret Empires: How Our Politicians Hide Corruption and
Enrich Their Families and Friends," which shows that the Obama
administration and its cronies were up to their necks in questionable business
deals and may even have intentionally distorted public policy to accommodate
their own profit-making.
The book claims "Obama and his administration would
deem industries either destructive to the environment or exploitative for the
financial and professional gain of his freines, including industries such as
coal mining, offshore drilling, cash advance companies, and for-profit
colleges. wrote Katelyn Caralle of the Washington Examiner.
Schweizer's book, based on extensive research, says that
Obama acted to regulate certain industries in such a way that it lowered the
value of some of the companies, wrote Katelyn Caralle of the Washington Examiner. These
actions let two family friends to profit handsomely on deals through their own
investment firm.
Here's how it worked: Obama buddies Marty Nesbitt and
Harreld Kirkpatrick III formed a private equity investment firm called Vistria,
right around the time Obama was re-elected in 2012.
Nothing wrong with that, except, as Schweizer notes in
his book, "A curious pattern began to emerge. Obama and his administration
would attack industries with government power, which led to substantially lower
valuations for these companies. Nesbitt and Vistria, or others close to Obama,
could then acquire those assets for pennies on the dollar."
As an example, Schweizer cites the case of for-profit
higher education schools like University of Phoenix, ITT Technical Institute,
and DeVry University. In 2013, Obama blamed the schools for taking advantage of
students by saddling them with massive amounts of student debt, ruining their
credit and making a profit on it. He ordered the Federal Trade Commission
to go after them.
In the case of the University of Phoenix, its parent
Apollo Education Group was suspended after a Federal Trade Commission
investigation in 2015. The following year, three companies, including Vistria,
swooped in to buy what remained of Apollo at a price 90% below its share price
before the investigation.
As Vistria's education investment portfolio bulged, a
number of Obama Education Department officials, including Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan, ended up taking high-level jobs with Vistria.
That's just one example. There are others.
Schweizer noted in his book, for instance, that both Vice
President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry were deeply involved in trade and security talks with China even
as that country began its aggressive campaign to expand its military and
physical presence in the South China Sea.
Contrary to standard diplomatic
practice, however, both played "good cop," not seriously confronting
China on its misbehavior.
Remember, Biden and Kerry were close friends from their
years spent together in the Senate. So there was little surprise when Biden's
son, Hunter, and Kerry's stepson, Christopher Heinz, one of the heirs to the
Heinz ketchup fortune, went into business together in 2009.
They created a number of equity and real estate
investment firms allied to Rosemont Capital, "the alternative investment
fund of the Heinz Family Office."
So far so good. Except, "Over the next seven years,
as both Joe Biden and John Kerry negotiated sensitive and high-stakes deals
with foreign governments, Rosemont entities secured a series of exclusive deals
with those same foreign governments."
In December of 2013, for instance, Biden traveled to
China for talks. He brought Hunter Biden along. While there, the senior Biden
soft-pedaled China's clear aggression, and played up the bilateral trade
partnership. Ten days after the trip concluded, China's central bank, the Bank
of China, set up a $1 billion investment joint venture called Bohai Harvest
RST. For the record, the "RS" referred to Biden's son's firm,
Rosemont Seneca.
That's questionable enough.
But months later, in July 2014, Secretary of State John
Kerry traveled to China, also for talks. Kerry talked little of China's clear
aggression, but did conspicuously note that "China and the United States
represent the greatest economic alliance trading partnership in the history of
humankind."
He should know. In the ensuing months, Chinese
government-linked firms took major stakes in several of the firms owned or
controlled by Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz, and provided them with massive
funding totaling billions of dollars. Nor is this the only scandal involving John Kerry.
And this just scratches the surface. The book is a
catalog, a virtual roadmap, to the way corrupt business gets done in Washington
— and why Americans are smart to question why their representative go to
Washington as paupers, and return as millionaires.
We can only hope that as Biden or Kerry gears up for a
challenge to Trump in the 2020 presidential contest, they will receive the same
relentless scrutiny that a Republican with the same record of venality would
get. But we won't hold our breath.
______________________
IN
OTHER NEWS
Trump Hits China For Stealing U.S. Intellectual Property
By Katie
Pavlich | Townhall
President Trump signed another round of tariffs at the
White House Thursday afternoon, this time targeting Chinese intellectual
property theft.
Citing a threat to American innovation, the
administration "will propose for public comment adding 25 percent
additional tariffs on certain products that are supported by China’s unfair
industrial policy" with "sectors subject to the proposed tariffs will
include aerospace, information communication technology, and machinery."
"We're doing things for this country that should've
been done for many, many years," Trump said before a brief signing
ceremony. "We have a tremendous intellectual property theft going on,
which likewise is hundreds of billions of dollars and that's on a yearly
basis."
"It [China] is the largest deficit of any country in the history of our world," he continued. "This has been long in the making. We've lost, over a fairly short period of time, 60,000 factories in our country, six million jobs at least. Gone."
"It [China] is the largest deficit of any country in the history of our world," he continued. "This has been long in the making. We've lost, over a fairly short period of time, 60,000 factories in our country, six million jobs at least. Gone."
"The era of economic surrender is over," Vice
President Mike Pence added.
Trump also addressed NAFTA, which he has repeatedly threatened
to walk away from unless Mexico and Canada can come up with a better deal for
the United States.
"NAFTA's been a very bad deal for the United
States," Trump said.
____________________
Wait, What? Andrew McCabe Launched an FBI
Investigation Into Attorney General Sessions Because Dems Asked Him To?
By Katie
Pavlich | Townhall
It's been less than a week since former FBI Deputy
Director Andrew McCabe was fired by Attorney General Jeff Sessions after a
recommendation for termination from the Inspector General and Office of
Professional Responsibility.
The drama surrounding the lawful and justified firing
hasn't stopped since and late Wednesday night, ABC News dropped a bombshell story alleging Sessions was under FBI
investigation last year for perjury. The man leading the charge? Andrew McCabe.
Nearly
a year before Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired senior FBI official Andrew
McCabe for what Sessions called a "lack of candor," McCabe oversaw a
federal criminal investigation into whether Sessions lacked candor when
testifying before Congress about contacts with Russian operatives, sources
familiar with the matter told ABC News.
One
source told ABC News that Sessions was not aware of the investigation when he
decided to fire McCabe last Friday less than 48 hours before McCabe, a former
FBI deputy director, was due to retire from government and obtain a full
pension, but an attorney representing Sessions declined to confirm that.
Last year, several top Republican and Democratic lawmakers were informed of the probe during a closed-door briefing with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and McCabe, ABC News was told.
Last year, several top Republican and Democratic lawmakers were informed of the probe during a closed-door briefing with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and McCabe, ABC News was told.
According to the report, the investigation came after Democrat Senators
requested the FBI look into contacts Sessions had with the Russians during the
course of the 2016 presidential campaign and the White House transition between
November 2016 and January 2017.
According
to the sources, McCabe authorized the criminal inquiry after a top Democrat on
the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, and then-Sen. Al
Franken, D-Minn., wrote a letter in March 2017 to the FBI urging agents to
investigate "all contacts" Sessions may have had with Russians, and
"whether any laws were broken in the course of those contacts or in any
subsequent discussion of whether they occurred."
Yikes.
As Mollie Hemingway notes over at The Federalist, this story was likely leaked to ABC
by team McCabe or McCabe himself in an effort to undermine Sessions in the wake
of his firing. That strategy is backfiring and instead bolsters accusations the
FBI is highly politicized and allowing Democrat Senators, with whom they agree,
to drive criminal investigations.
__________________
John Bolton: The Wisdom of This Choice Is
Made Clear in the Panic of Liberals
By Mark
Davis |Towhall
Photo: John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and Trump's new National Security Adviser
With one presidential decision, America gained one of its
boldest National Security Advisers, and lost one of its best cable news guests.
Roughly an hour after John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador
to the U.N., was named as the replacement for the outgoing adviser H.R.
McMaster, he appeared on Fox News with “The Story” host Martha MacCallum, who
was loaded with great questions for a man known for his blunt assessments of
the world scene and sharp views on the policies that best serve America.
She learned quickly that the new position changes
everything for Bolton.
Amid stories of inner-circle discord over President
Trump’s praise for freshly re-elected Russian President Vladmir Putin, she had
to wonder if Bolton would speak disapprovingly of the congratulatory words that
have alarmed so many, despite Barack Obama having done the same six years ago.
The adviser-designate made clear that his years of
writing and speaking about countless issues have left a record he is proud of,
but that his job now is to subjugate his views to the president’s. He did let
on that the whole flap struck him as overblown: “I don’t consider it a
significant point… I’ve said congratulations to a lot of people, foreign
diplomats and officials, it’s a matter of being polite...It’s a matter of
courtesy more than anything.”
Having gleaned a sliver of an answer on one issue,
MacCallum plowed forward, seeking newsworthy specifics on how Bolton’s strong
views might inform the advice he gave the president. “I don’t think it’s
appropriate to tell you what advice I would give him,” he replied.
Would he continue to oppose the Iran nuclear deal,
creating conflict with Defense Secretary James Mattis, who has shown more
tolerance for it? Does he expect his views on that, or anything else, to create
conflict among the Trump national security team? Should we keep the military
option on the table with regard to North Korea? Is meeting with Kim Jong-un a
good idea?
“Same question, same answer,” he replied. Always with a
smile, Trump’s newest team member made clear his thoughts and analysis were no
longer for the benefit of the general public, but for his new boss.
He did intimate that he would not be shy in that setting:
“If the government can’t have a free interchange of ideas among the president’s
advisers, the president is not well served.”
He also shared a story revealing
that if his opinion did not prevail, he would always maintain awareness of his
role, as implementer of presidential will.
Harry Truman’s Secretary of State,
Dean Acheson, he recalled, would often describe why they got along so well: “Neither
one of us ever forgot who was president.”
Then, a story from his own service: If, as an Assistant
Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush, some idea of his was simply not
holding sway, James Baker would remind him: “The guy who got elected doesn’t want
to do it.”
So as John Bolton the spirited commentator fades from
view, I take comfort in the knowledge that if his views and passions will no
longer be heard by me, they will surely be heard by the president during what
should be a chapter that leads to even clearer evidence that this is an
administration serious about the threats of a dangerous world.
There is something else Bolton is serious about, the one
area he was not hesitant in addressing—leaks, of the sort that enabled the
absurd Putin congratulation uproar to become a brushfire.
“I was outraged by
it,” he told MacCallum, “It recalled earlier in the administration when
somebody was leaking transcripts of the president’s conversations with foreign
leaders. It’s completely unacceptable; you cannot conduct diplomacy, you cannot
expect other foreign leaders to be candid and open in their conversations with
the president if some Munchkin in the executive branch decides they’re going to
leak the talking points or the transcript or any other aspect of it.”
Now there’s the John Bolton we know.
America will now come to know him with greater
familiarity in his service to the nation and the administration, which will
hopefully last longer than the tenure of his two predecessors.
There is healthy evidence of the wisdom of this choice in
the panic of liberals who convulsed the moment it was announced. But there is
also a part of the Trump base that might be uneasy, the voters who viewed him
as unlikely to entangle America in further extended deployments in various hot
spots.
Make no mistake, Bolton believes in the American military
as a force for good around the world. He will never share the Trump view that
going to war in Iraq was a mistake. But if he is to be taken at his word, he
knows that he is not “the guy who got elected.” There is no evidence that his
hawkish nature contains some strong urge toward new, large troop deployments
anywhere.
But he shares the Trump view that the Iran nuclear deal
is a disaster, and that North Korea should know every day that a military option
is always on the table to address his missile adventures. That strong position,
both men would say, has contributed to better North Korean behavior of late,
and even the prospect of a Trump/Kim meeting.
Ronald Reagan famously said that no war in his lifetime
ever started because America was too strong.
If that is instructive, war is in
fact less likely with a president unafraid to give voice to such strength, and
a National Security Adviser willing to inform it.
