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Comment by laverya | Hacker News Reader

> Obama is the only president in recent memory not actively involved in some scandalous behavior.

Uhhhhh... Not involved in scandalous behavior that you knew of, perhaps. Fast&Furious [0] would have been a major scandal in a Republican administration (despite the fact that it was started by a previous president), and the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki [1] was a massive step in the erosion of civil liberties in the US. These are just off the top of my head, I'm sure that there are others.

Not to say that Obama was a bad president, but "no scandals I've heard of" and "no scandals" aren't quite the same thing.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal#2009%E2...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

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Or using the IRS to target conservative organisations. Or spying on journalists to identify leakers. Plus the attempts to further destabilise the middle east and its disastrous effects.

Plus the russian collusion investigation, which is highly problematic (spying on your political opponents in the middle of an election campaign, based on some implausible allegations).

> Plus the russian collusion investigation, which is highly problematic (spying on your political opponents in the middle of an election campaign, based on some implausible allegations).

Obama might be a political opponent of Trump’s (despite not being on the ballot that year); but is the FBI not supposed to investigate these things? The Russian interference / collusion was real and lead to multiple charges and convictions

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_charges_brought_in_...

"but is the FBI not supposed to investigate these things?" They did. They concluded that the Steele dossier was probably not reliable. They investigated anyway because their agenda was to get Trump out and throw Flynn in jail.

They investigated anyways because there were plenty of other reasons to suspect that Flynn was on the payroll of foreign powers, given that he was paid by the Russian state through their state run media RT in 2014 and accepted at least one paid speaking engagement from the Russian state in 2015 without seeking US government approval. Flynn later plead guilty to having lied to the government about some of these engagements (though he recently retracted his plea agreement). https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-flynn-id...

There are a lot of primary sources detailing what happened in late 2016, early 2017, and we have no excuse not to read them to understand what happened. It’s shocking. Wikipedia is not going to be a reliable source on this, I’m afraid.

Regardless of what you think about the veracity of Wikipedia here, the list of references at the end of that article formed a tidy way to link to multiple court case primary sources.

> spying on your political opponents in the middle of an election campaign, based on some implausible allegations

Something the Justice Department have concluded an investigation into and have filed no charges. Perhaps it’s time to find a new talking point.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/13/politics/william-barr-unmaski...

Read the primary sources - the investigative reports and the material (notes, texts, etc.). The reports have on more than one occasion stated that nobody involved is talking about their actions or behavior so we have no case, but the preponderance of evidence points to some seriously bad stuff going on. If your understanding of happened is based on a quick summary from CNN, you’re doing yourself a massive disservice. Don’t forget - the reason we don’t want this crap to happen is because the shoe always ends up on the other foot.

> the preponderance of evidence points to some seriously bad stuff going on

Do you really think the Trump Justice Department would shy away from releasing a statement saying exactly that, were it to be the case?

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