Remember the 1970’s?
When society got so skeeved out by domestic spying by the CIA, and abuse of the FBI, and the Church Commission reformed the way the government intelligence was supposed to act around Americans?
Either did the Obama Administration:
A report from journalists John Solomon and Sara Carter last week, based on recently declassified documents, exposed what went on. As Solomon and Carter write:
More than 5%, or one out of every 20, searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards President Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa. …
The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying that the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor,” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26.
The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans. … The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself and safeguard Americans’ privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.
As former anti-terrorism prosecutor and national security expert Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review, this is a very serious abuse. And potentially a crime. If such material were leaked to the press for political advantage, that’s another crime.
If people can’t trust the institutions with which they share their power, then how is a representative republic possible?
And is that even the goal for many of those in power?
Time for a special prosecutor and dedicated bodyguards so nobody “gets to him” like appears to have happened with Patrick Fitzgerald just as his investigation of Blagojevich’s corruption would have given us some very, very interesting names. Oh, just then a “leak” occurred that shut it down? Really?
When Republicans said that Obama didn’t seem very American, the Left (and their media handmaids) called it racism.
But Obama really did not seem very American. He was raised in Hawaii and overseas. His parents were academics (on the Left this probably is seen as normal, but it really is not a typical upbringing).
Obama’s only exposure to “real America” was in academic settings and the Democrat party, inner city politics.
He always seemed to view the constitution as a hindrance, where most Americans (I think) see it as a bulwark of liberty. Obama also had the Chicago attitude — the idea that every part of a supposedly non-partisan bureaucracy should become a partisan tool to aid your friends and hurt your enemies.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
The department that handles that is the Office of Special investigations. If you have evidence of wrongdoing, you should forward it to them.