The Whitewashing of a Scandalous Legacy

Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Barack Obama speaks during a April 18, 2008, townhall meeting at Behrend College in Erie, Pennsylvania.
EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP via Getty Images

The Whitewashing of a Scandalous Legacy

Not only were scandals common in the Obama years, but they completely underpinned his entire presidency. They were the deliberate efforts of a man who pledged to ‘fundamentally transform America.’

The radical left has finally admitted that the New York Post’s nearly two-year-old story was accurate: The Hunter Biden laptop scandal was real. The New York Timesauthenticated” the report in a March 16 article about Hunter Biden’s mounting legal problems. They slipped the admission in as surreptitiously as they could. Yet more scandals have emerged about Hunter Biden—and the whole Biden family.

During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden dismissed the laptop scandal as a lie. Fifty former national security and intelligence officials rushed to discredit the story. For nearly two years, we were told the story was nothing more than Russian disinformation to sway the election or a crackpot concoction of Rudy Giuliani’s. The New York Post even got locked out of its Twitter account for trying to get the story out.

The mainstream media has largely stopped talking about the laptop. Soon, nobody will remember any of the many Biden scandals. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time the media swept a scandal under the rug and declared the White House tidy. This phenomenon characterizes Barack Obama’s entire presidency.

Today, Obama enjoys celebrity status as a result of a whitewashed legacy. He is lauded as having had a smooth and picturesque presidential tenure. In 2018, he was awarded the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government. The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd said the Obama administration was “without any ethical shadiness.” Valerie Jarret, Obama’s presidential adviser, said he “prides himself on the fact that his administration hasn’t had a scandal and he hasn’t done something to embarrass himself.”

History strongly disagrees.

State-Sanctioned Lawlessness

In 2009, the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (atf) worked with the Department of Justice to supply Mexican drug lords with thousands of assault rifles. They set the stage for the mass slaughter of Mexicans—more than 300 were killed.

Four months before the scandal was exposed, Obama said while in Mexico: “This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States … more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that lay in our shared border.” The actual number is so far from 90 percent, it is impossible to call Obama’s statement anything other than an outright lie. A 2009 Fox News investigation found that only 17 percent of guns recovered in Mexico actually came from the U.S.

More than a thousand of these atf-supplied assault rifles remain lost. The gun-bust operations the atf ran to recover them were ineffective. The Fast and Furious operation used operatives to open shops to lure in felons seeking to sell firearms. But these operatives routinely recruited “low IQ” drug-addicted teens to promote their shops. Many of them wound up being convicted themselves for aiding and abetting the criminals they were attracting on behalf of the atf.

Ultimately, the Obama administration justified all of this as a new “crime-fighting technique.” But it was a scandal—pure and simple. And just as the 90 percent figure wasn’t just a simple mathematical error, this wasn’t just a mistake. It was a lie.

Fast and Furious was more than a scandal—it was state-sanctioned lawlessness. But to what end?

Throughout Obama’s tenure, he advocated for strict gun control laws. What better way to force them through than by blaming Mexican drug wars on the Second Amendment? But there was no proof. So the most logical step, in their eyes, was to manufacture the proof. All this was revealed by one atf whistleblower who exposed the scandal and was fired for doing so. That doesn’t sound like it was “without any ethical shadiness.”

Department of ‘Unjustice’

Not only did the Obama administration have several scandals of its own, but it also overlapped with many others. Consider the Clinton e-mail server scandal. After Obama appointed her secretary of state in 2009, Hillary Clinton decided to set up her own e-mail using servers at home, instead of activating one hosted on U.S. government servers.

Clinton sent an estimated 62,000 e-mails from this private e-mail as secretary of state. By doing so, she sidestepped the Freedom of Information Act as well as several federal laws dictating preservation of government communication.

Through all this, Obama and his Department of Justice (doj) were heavily involved in covering up for Clinton.

Obama’s White House aide David Axelrod claimed to have known nothing about Clinton’s secret e-mail. But records prove that he specifically requested her e-mail address in 2009. E-mails also prove that the doj official overseeing the Clinton probe had close ties to her confidante, John Podesta. Another doj official involved in the investigation was found to have donated to Hillary Clinton. There is evidence that Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe donated $500,000 to the wife of the agent overseeing the investigation.

When the Federal Bureau of Investigations began looking into all of this, Obama’s doj ordered it to “stand down.”

This example of injustice wasn’t the exception—it was the rule.

Obama’s doj granted freedom to Iranian spies still under investigation as it tried to force through the Iran nuclear deal. It shut down a years-long investigation into Hezbollah’s smuggling of cocaine into the U.S. so as not to cast Iran in a bad light. It removed all references of Islam from terrorist-training manuals. It also enacted Operation Chokepoint—a secret program used to block certain businesses from the financial system based on political bias alone.

The doj spied on journalists via the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; it spied on regular Americans too. When the American Civil Liberties Union caught wind of the doj snooping on citizens’ text messages, it invoked a Freedom of Information Act request. The response was a completely redacted document.

The ‘Phony Scandal’

The Obama administration weaponized the Internal Revenue Service in a way rarely seen before. Operation Chokepoint was simply the tip of the iceberg. The irs systematically targeted conservative groups and anyone who displayed any opposition to Barack Obama. The Wall Street Journal wrote in 2018:

Imagine if liberal groups discovered that President Trump’s Internal Revenue Service was targeting them for heightened scrutiny or harassment. The media and Democrats would decry this assault on the First Amendment and declare the U.S. on the brink of autocracy. The scandal would dominate the midterms, and the legitimacy of the election would be called into question.

Strangely enough, the irs did target organs of the opposition party during the last administration, but the episode has largely faded from public memory without resolution. May 10 marks the fifth anniversary of the revelation that President Obama’s irs targeted conservative groups for more than two years prior to the 2012 presidential election.

The irs also leaked confidential information on conservative groups to the investigative journalist organization ProPublica. It leaked a conservative group’s donor list to opposition groups. And it gave Obama’s doj 21 disks with 1.3 million pages of taxpayer records.

Despite irs Director Lois Lerner publicly admitting to all of this and resigning, Obama claimed it was nothing but a “phony scandal.” But consider the facts.

Lerner still had access to irs computers after she had been placed “on leave.” The irs was required by law to print her e-mails, but it claimed they had been lost in a 2011 computer crash. The backup hard drive had apparently been “recycled.” When a third-party firm said it might be able to recover the drive’s information, the irs shredded the drive. The e-mails of six other employees were similarly lost because of six separate computer crashes. The irs then decided to destroy Lerner’s BlackBerry. Conveniently, the irs official responsible for updating Congress about the scandal also “lost” all his e-mails in a computer crash.

All this has faded from public memory. But the weaponization of the irs didn’t end there. Reporters who engaged Obama in tough interviews were hit with audits. One Catholic wrote an op-ed attacking the Obama administration and was thereafter audited. Idaho businessman Frank VanderSloot donated to a group supporting Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign; the irs and the Department of Labor responded by auditing him and his company. Obama basically turned the federal government into the mob, and the irs was his enforcer carrying a briefcase.

Benghazi

For years, the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, attracted attacks from radicals. Despite Ambassador Christopher Stevens repeatedly warning about gathering threats in the ensuing decade, the State Department failed to improve security. In an attack on the consulate on Sept. 11, 2012, requests for help were denied. That same day, he and three other Americans were murdered.

A Senate report concluded that the attack on Benghazi could have been prevented. According to Rep. Trey Gowdy, the State Department and the Pentagon watched the Benghazi attack via drone as it happened—and they did nothing.

One whistleblower claims that 400 U.S. surface-to-air missiles were stolen during the attack. It’s a remarkably similar situation to the $80 billion worth of military hardware abandoned in last fall’s Afghanistan debacle.

The day after the Benghazi attack, Obama promised swift retribution. But it would be a year before anyone was captured. In the meantime, Ahmed Abu Khattala, the alleged ringleader of the attack, was so unconcerned about a U.S. response that he regularly gave lengthy interviews from his home. Reuters actually had a copy of his daily schedule.

Obama’s State Department conducted a foreign policy that followed a similarly chaotic trend, one that largely betrayed the democratic values America should represent. At the request of Fidel Castro’s government, it turned off a billboard broadcasting pro-freedom messages in Cuba. The U.S. State Department also helped pave the way for a Communist government to take power in Honduras.

Obama made many promises declaring support for Israel. He promised to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. He promised to make it an undivided city. Instead, he allowed a United Nations resolution to pass that declared East Jerusalem “illegally occupied territory.” His administration was sued by 24 Americans living in Israel for funding Palestinian terrorist groups. Obama’s administration even spent nearly $350,000 campaigning against Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection.

Worst of all, Obama ultimately supported and enabled the nuclearization of Israel’s great enemy, the number one terrorist-sponsoring nation in the world.

Iran Nuclear Deal

In 2016, Iran was welcomed back into the international community, provided hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, and allowed to develop nuclear weapons—all because of Barack Obama.

Mr. Flurry wrote in “America’s Deadly Nuclear Deal With Iran”: “For some reason, even though Iran is a sworn terrorist-sponsoring enemy, the Obama administration aggressively wanted this deal. To ensure nobody interfered with it, Mr. Obama and his administration used the National Security Agency to find out what members of Congress were thinking and saying and trying to do. They also spied on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They wanted to make certain nobody stopped them from removing the crippling sanctions that were causing Iran such trouble and slowing down its nuclear activities. … Since ‘Implementation Day,’ Iran has accelerated its nuclear activities. The deal allows Iran to build a bomb openly within 15 years, and a secret provision actually opens the door even earlier than that.” Included in the secret provision was the allowance for Iran to inspect its own nuclear sites. That’s like letting a convict conduct his own contraband check.

The Obama administration lied to Congress about its efforts help Iran subvert sanctions. Obama created a secret pipeline to funnel cash from Oman to Iran. He sent a plane full of cash to Iran the day hostages were released, despite declaring that the U.S. does not pay ransoms. He even allowed Russia to ship uranium to Iran.

Most of this was done in secret. The public was told that this deal was intended to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons. But the evidence showed that Obama went above and beyond to put Iran in the best possible position to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Little wonder Iran declared its plans to restore its full nuclear program soon after signing the nuclear deal.

Chaos by Design

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “Your actions speak so loudly I cannot hear what you say.” Obama said his administration was scandal free. His supporters all say the same thing. But the evidence belies those assertions. Scandals were nearly ubiquitous from start to finish. These were just the tip of the iceberg. Grabien compiled a list of 783 scandals in total.

Not only were scandals common in the Obama years, but they completely underpinned his entire presidency. They were deliberate scandals of a man mentored by the rabid Communist Frank Marshall Davis from 9 years old. They were the scandals of a man who chose to befriend “Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets” in college, as he himself described them. They were the scandals of a man who pledged to fundamentally transform America.

Today, Barack Obama’s scandalous administration continues through Joe Biden. He engineered the election steal of 2020, effectively sealing a third term in office. When Biden oversaw the Afghanistan surrender, Mr. Flurry wrote, “This Isn’t Incompetence. This Is Treason!

“What Joe Biden did in Afghanistan is a continuation of the disastrous anti-American policies of Barack Obama,” Mr. Flurry wrote. “Why would he do that? There is a sinister reason. Many people can clearly see that Joe Biden is not really in charge of the government. He has filled his administration with Obama-era officials, and Mr. Obama himself is really directing the show! Some say—correctly—that this is effectively Obama’s third term. Eight years ago, during Obama’s presidency, I wrote my booklet America Under Attack. It explains the reason behind these ruinous policies.”

In America Under Attack, Mr. Flurry writes that the disastrous policies of the Obama presidency weren’t “simply the result of ineptitude” but rather the results of “a calculated, aggressive, satanic attack aimed at weakening and ultimately destroying the nations of Israel, starting with the world’s most powerful nation!”

Many scoff at the idea of the existence of a malevolent devil. But Satan is real, and his influence is real. The Bible calls him the god of this world and a serial liar and murderer (2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 2:2).

He has a burning desire to “blot out the name of Israel” (2 Kings 14:27). The United States and Britain, the modern-day nations of Israel, are therefore the focus of his hatred (request your free copy of The United States and Britain in Prophecy, by Herbert W. Armstrong, for proof).

“Somebody is trying to blot out the very name of Israel!” Mr. Flurry wrote. “That is the real aim of what Barack Obama has been doing and continues to do through the Biden administration. This gets to the truth in a way that no one else can recognize. Everything is happening in a way that causes maximum destruction to this country! The real mastermind is not even Barack Obama—it is Satan the devil!”

Many people are concerned about where the United States is headed. It looks like the scandals are only going to continue. But God promises that even though Satan is desperately trying to blot out the name of Israel, He won’t let that happen.

But we need to learn the lessons of an imploding America. Trusting in a man brings disaster. No man can solve these problems because they are spiritual in nature. Only God can save the U.S. from this bitter affliction. And He has a plan to do just that.