President Obama’s closest adviser Valerie Jarrett, said on Sunday that Obama has led a scandal-free administration and hasn’t done anything to embarrass himself’.
Really, how about when the ‘Groveller-in-Chief’ bowed to Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko as he arrived at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo in 2009. Akihito is the son of the ruler who authorized the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that killed over 2,000 people.
Or when he bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the G-20 meeting in London in 2009.
Jarrett made that claim despite the nation’s years-long focus on embarrassing episodes like the Operation Fast & Furious ‘gunwalking’ program, the swap of U.S. Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl for five high-risk Taliban terror suspects, and a laundry list of other deadly and politically damaging public controversies. Daily Mail reported.
‘The president prides himself on the fact that his administration hasn’t had a scandal and he hasn’t done something to embarrass himself,’ she said in an interview broadcast Sunday on CNN’s ‘Fareed Zakaria GPS.’
‘That’s because that’s who he is – that’s who they are – and I think that’s what really resonates with the American people,’ Jarrett continued.
She also ignored the lengthy drama surrounding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s efforts to keep all her emails far away from archived government computer servers, a saga that may have cost Democrats their control of the White House.
Fully 74 per cent of Americans in early 2009 had high expectations of Obama’s ability to avoid major scandals during his presidency, according to polling conducted by the Gallup Organization.
A Gallup poll released Monday morning showed just 44 per cent have similar confidence in President-elect Donald Trump’s future White House tenure.
Obama said during a November press conference at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Lima, Peru that he was ‘extremely proud of the fact that over eight years we have not had the kinds of scandals that have plagued other administrations.’
But Jarrett’s eight-year look backward created controversy on Sunday.
Her rose-tinted accounting of the Obama years left out the IRS playing favorites with nonprofit tax exemptions, slow-walking or burying applications from dozens of conservative organizations while fast-tracking liberal groups.
And she omitted mention of the September 11, 012 terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya that left a US. ambassador and three other American personnel dead. That deadly day’s carnage came as a result of the Clinton’s State Department’s lax oversight of diplomatic security.
The cover-up afterward involved Clinton publicly blaming the deaths on an anti-Islam YouTube video despite her private admissions at the time that terrorists were to blame. Then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice promoted the same falsehood in five television interviews just days later.
A conservative watchdog group fired back at Jarrett.
‘This is delusional,’ Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told the New York Post.
‘The Obama administration has a scandal rap sheet longer than my arm. Between just the IRS abuses, Benghazi, and the Hillary Clinton scandals, this administration was even more corrupt than Nixon’s,’ Fitton said.
