President Obama expressed his “full confidence” Friday in Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan, which follows yet again the president’s pattern of defending his “confidence men” against charges and revelations of incompetence, corruption and intentional misstatements.
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This presidential “heck-of-a job, Brownie” moment came after a Brennan apology, acknowledging that CIA staffers did indeed access the computers of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Just last March Brennan asserted, “As far as the allegation of CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. That’s just beyond the scope of reason.”
A just-released CIA inspector general’s report revealed the practice wasn’t “beyond the scope of reason,” so Brennan fessed up and apologized.
How often have we seen this pattern from this administration?
Remember National Security Agency Director James Clapper? When Sen. Ron Wyden asked Clapper, under oath, if the agency collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds or millions of Americans,” Clapper responded, “No, sir.” Then Edward Snowden released documents showing that the NSA had done exactly that.
Clapper hem-hawed and tried to reframe his previous denials. But having exhausted all other plausible scenarios, he finally admitted that his answer was untruthful. A White House spokesman at the time said Obama had “full faith in Director Clapper’s leadership.”
Obama also expressed full confidence in Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, until reports of veterans dying on waiting lists, fraud and whistleblower retaliation became so numerous and outrageous that Shinseki stepped down.
And Obama expressed full confidence in Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, until the disastrous Obamacare website rollout, missed deadlines, failed promises, wasted billions of dollars, and inaccurate statements to Congress got to be more than even the Obama administration could bear.
And Obama proclaimed not “even a smidgen of corruption” at the Internal Revenue Service, even as Administrator Douglas Shulman clearly made misleading statements to Congress under oath. Subsequent Acting Administrator Daniel Werfel quietly fled the job, only to be replaced by John Koskinen, who seems befuddled, and maybe amused, by the Lois Lerner revelations of partisanship and harassment of conservative nonprofit groups.
Oh, and let’s not forget the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), that’s Obama’s pet project to make the economy more moral, at least as liberals envision it.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) announced Friday, the same day Obama was exonerating Brennan, that it was launching a new probe into “toxic workplace” allegations of racial, ethnic and gender discrimination and retaliation at the CFBP.
I could go on—e.g., Government Services Administration, the Secret Service, the State Department, etc.—but you get the point.
Time and again, Obama has stood by his “confidence men,” denying the accusations—until the damning evidence became undeniable.
But the fact that so many administration officials have made false statements, sometimes under oath, only to be caught later, makes you wonder: What else have Obama officials done that they aren’t telling us? Finding out won’t be easy or pleasant.
We might find out more if Republicans take control of the Senate in November. They, working with the House, could raise the number and intensity of investigations.
Apart from that effort, we likely won’t know the breadth and depth of the false statements and misdeeds until there is a Republican White House and Congress, so that whistleblowers feel safe enough to tell Congress and investigative reporters what they know—and what the rest of us fear.