Foreign Sources

For John, BLUF:  The President criticized for listening to foreign sources.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Aren't delirious Democrats now accusing Team Obama of treason?

This is a couple of months old, but in our unrepentant and unforgiving culture, still relevant.

From The Hill, by Opinionator John Sullivan, 14 June 2019.

Here is the lede plus six:

If you read the newspapers, tuned into the cable TV pundits or received an email from one of the Democrats running for president, you’d swear Donald Trump was back to his treasonous ways.

All that was missing was an annoying OMG text exclamation punctuating the unfounded claims that Trump might violate the law in 2020 by accepting intelligence on a political rival from a foreign country.  The inference, of course, is that it would come from a hostile power such as Russia or North Korea or Iran.

Actually, what Trump told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos was that he’d consider taking intelligence dirt about a rival from a friendly ally.  (Norway was the actual example he used.)

Sound familiar? That is EXACTLY what the Obama administration did in 2016.  It’s something no one in the media or the political space grasped during the tsunami of breathless reaction that followed the interview.

In July 2016, the Obama administration accepted unsolicited information from Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat who just happened to have helped arrange a $25 million government donation to the Clinton Foundation years before.  Downer said that he had witnessed a Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, bragging about some dirt that the Russians supposedly had on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Though Downer’s claim was reported two-plus months after the alleged event, and was only hearsay gathered at a London tavern, the Obama administration gave it to the FBI which, in turn, thought it was weighty enough to justify opening a counterintelligence case against the lawfully elected Republican nominee for president.

In other words, the Democratic administration accepted dirt from a foreign friendly and used it to justify investigating its GOP rival.

It appears, in the eyes of Democrats, candidates for foreign office may not read foreign news sources.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff