The People Vs. Barack Obama

by Ben Shapiro

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  To my daughter, Leeya Eliana, who deserves the country of God-given rights promised in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE CASE AGAINST THE PRESIDENT

  COUNT 1: ESPIONAGE

  COUNT 2: INVOLUNTARY MANSLAUGHTER

  COUNT 3: VIOLATION OF INTERNAL REVENUE LAWS

  COUNT 4: UNAUTHORIZED DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION

  COUNT 5: DEPRIVATION OF RIGHTS UNDER COLOR OF LAW

  COUNT 6: BRIBERY

  COUNT 7: OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE

  CONCLUSION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT BENJAMIN SHAPIRO

  NOTES

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  THE CASE AGAINST THE PRESIDENT

  On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. It was a time of hope. It was a time of restoration. Three months later, President-elect Obama stood at the podium before cheering throngs, and he raised his right hand. “I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

  Fast-forward five years. White House press secretary Jay Carney takes to the podium in the press briefing room. The Obama administration, now in its second term, has been plagued by scandal after scandal:

  • On September 11, 2012, the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked by terrorists after months of desperate pleas for more security from Ambassador Christopher Stevens and his staff; Stevens and three other Americans were murdered as American forces remained mere hours away. Now State Department witnesses from Libya have testified that higher-ups at the department tried to stifle them from speaking with Congress.

  • The IRS has admitted that its nonprofit division targeted conservative groups in the years leading up to Obama’s reelection effort; further evidence showed that conservative nonprofits were subjected to costly audits.

  • The Associated Press has revealed that the Department of Justice had secretly obtained months’ worth of call logs from its reporters. A few days later, reports emerged that the Department of Justice had obtained a warrant for Fox News reporter James Rosen’s personal emails and tracked his movements at the State Department.

  • Within a few days of that, Congress sends a letter to the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, asking why she had solicited donations from nonprofit organizations to push Obamacare—the same organizations responsible for directly implementing Obamacare and therefore subject to HHS oversight.

  • At virtually the same time, Republican lawmakers send a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency asking why the EPA has forced conservative groups to pay fees for Freedom of Information Act requests while simultaneously waiving those fees for liberal groups.

  • In early June, former Booz Allen Hamilton employee Edward Snowden, who worked with the National Security Agency, reveals that the NSA PRISM program is tracking all American phone calls. Soon, revelations emerge that the NSA collects “nearly everything a user does on the Internet.” Snowden says that the government has the ability to collect your keystrokes as they appear.

  Facing down this cornucopia of political horror, Carney peers through his MSNBC glasses and begins to speak. Carney has already become infamous for spewing gobbledygook at the press—so infamous that the left-leaning parody site The Onion prints a mock op-ed by Carney playfully titled “Well, Time to Go Out in Front of a Bunch of People and Lie to Them.”1

  On this day, July 22, President Obama is preparing to relaunch another failed attempt at economic mumbo jumbo, a desperate try at shifting the narrative from the bevy of scandals. Unprompted, Carney spouts that thanks to “some phony scandals that have captured the attention of many here in Washington only to dissipate, there has not been enough attention paid, in the President’s view, to this central idea that we here in Washington ought to be doing everything we can to help the middle class. . . .”2

  Phony scandals. All phony scandals.

  A few hours later, President Obama himself repeats the “phony scandal” meme. “With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball. And I am here to say this needs to stop. Short-term thinking and stale debates are not what this moment requires,” Obama intones.

  What, exactly, made these scandals “phony”?

  According to the administration, these scandals are phony because they say so. According to the White House, White House–initiated investigations had shown that President Obama didn’t personally engage in any of them. Though the White House still hasn’t revealed President Obama’s whereabouts during the seven-hour Benghazi attacks, Obama, his investigative team assured us, did everything necessary to save the men in harm’s way. And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assured us that while there was negligence, there was no need for firings—for, after all, “what difference, at this point, does it make?” Meanwhile, Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew told Fox News that there was “no evidence” that the White House was involved with improper targeting—as though absence of evidence were evidence of absence, especially given the fact that the investigators were from the Obama administration itself. Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress about targeting the Fox reporter, then somehow got away with claiming it wasn’t a lie at all. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper did the same with regard to the NSA’s surveillance programs. Sebelius and the EPA didn’t even bother making excuses for their actions.

  All of this was nobody’s fault. Wrongdoing, if it existed at all, took place at the individual level. Low-level staffers were responsible. Mistakes were made. We don’t know what happened, but we’ll initiate an investigation. We can’t comment on pending investigations, even if we control them. These are not the droids you’re looking for. Move along.

  Only nobody ever got fired, many people got promoted, and all of those mistakes by all of those low-level staffers just happened to synchronize precisely with the wishes of the White House. Every day, Obama’s knights were ridding him of meddlesome priests—but that was all just a big coincidence.

  There’s only one problem with Obama’s routine: it’s not just a lie, it’s a crime.

  The Obama administration has become a full-fledged criminal enterprise. Riddled up and down with executive branch appointees engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors, the administration has not merely failed to cleanse itself, it has incentivized ambitious bureaucrats throughout the government to take action on behalf of the Obama political agenda.

  PROSECUTING THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

  The crime of conspiracy has typically been defined at the state level as the agreement of two or more people to commit a crime. There is little question that some of the crimes of the Obama administration have been coordinated at the highest level, as the evidence will show. But when it comes to huge organizations, conspiracy has historically been tough to charge. That’s because large organizations rarely have direct chains of command—and in an organization as enormous and classified as the United States executive branch, tracing such chains of command becomes nearly impossible.

  Which is not to say that legal responsibility does not exist. In 1
946, the U.S. Supreme Court legally established the principle of “command responsibility”—the idea that a commander bears responsibility for the actions of his subordinates during times of war.3 As the commander in chief, President Obama bears responsibility for the acts of his subordinates, particularly with regard to crimes against Americans under the auspices of war.

  That would be difficult to prove in a court of law. What isn’t difficult to prove is that the Obama administration is a quasi-criminal syndicate, a top-down system in which policies are decided at the highest levels, signals are sent, and low-level bureaucrats receive and implement them.

  In 1970, in an attempt to curb organized crime in general and the mafia in particular, Congress passed the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, also known as the RICO Act. The goal of RICO is to make it easier for prosecutors to cast the net in indictments, placing evidence in “the broader context in which the crime was committed, along with the pattern of conduct that led up to the crime,” according to Professor Samuel Buell of the Duke University School of Law.4 In other words, it was designed to fill a loophole in the law—the problem of plausible deniability, in which the man at the top can foist responsibility off on his subordinates (or plausibly call everything under the sun a “phony scandal”).5 RICO, according to former Department of Justice director of research Donald J. Rebovich, provides the prosecutors the ability to “abandon a reliance on discrete statutes. Instead, they can prosecute patterns of criminal acts committed by direct and indirect participants in criminal enterprises.”6

  RICO provides that any person who is part of an organization that commits any two on a list of crimes can be prosecuted for racketeering, fined up to $25,000, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison per count. Those charges include murder, kidnapping, gambling, arson, robbery, bribery, extortion, dealing in obscene material, dealing in drugs, bribery, counterfeiting, embezzlement, extortionate credit transactions, wire fraud, witness tampering, retaliating against a witness, victim, or informant, and dozens of other crimes—some of which, as we’ll see, have been committed by the Obama administration. RICO, according to its language, was supposed to be “liberally construed to effectuate its remedial purpose.”7 The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has described the list of predicate offenses under RICO as “exhaustive.”8

  Politicians aren’t immune to RICO charges. When Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick conspired with contractor Bobby Ferguson, he was charged with RICO Act violations. Together, Kilpatrick; his father, Bernard Kilpatrick; and Ferguson faced forty-five charges, including racketeering, extortion, bribery, and mail fraud. As the Detroit Free Press reported, “The most weighty of the charges was the one levied under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO), a 1970 law that was initially designed to combat organized crime but has since been used in several public corruption trials. In the Detroit case, prosecutors charged the group they called the ‘Kilpatrick Enterprise’ engaged in a pattern of criminal activity—one of the requirements of RICO—that included at least two criminal acts.”9

  While prosecutors routinely use RICO to go after criminal enterprises, RICO extends beyond criminal prosecution to include civil suits. That means that you can sue a criminal enterprise, and receive triple your damages—you don’t have to wait for President Obama’s corrupt Department of Justice to do the work they’re being paid not to do. The victims of Bernie Madoff, for example, have targeted Madoff’s associates under RICO. (It’s worth noting that Bernie Madoff’s fraud pales in comparison to the federal government’s fraudulent social programs.) As the Supreme Court has written, the goal of civil RICO filings is to deputize the public to enforce the law against corruption, to make citizens into “ ‘private attorneys general’ on a serious national problem for which public prosecutorial resources are deemed inadequate.”10 Plaintiffs in civil RICO actions must show by a “preponderance of the evidence” that defendants bear guilt. That’s different than “beyond a reasonable doubt”—it’s a much lower burden of proof.

  To bring a RICO case, plaintiffs must be able to show that an “enterprise” exists, and that there is a “pattern” of criminal activity. To show that an “enterprise” exists, plaintiffs must demonstrate that there is a “continuing unit that functions with a common purpose.” That unit, in this case, can’t be the entire federal government or the entire executive branch—it has to be separate and apart from the normal functioning of those organizations. That’s a problem in and of itself, given that with the massive growth of government, it’s arguable whether the executive branch has become a quasi-criminal syndicate, no matter who runs it (when is the last time a president didn’t oversee massive corruption and criminality?). But if a pattern of criminal activity is shown by members of a group, and that activity always benefits their common interest, it will be difficult to argue that there was no “enterprise” in place.11

  Now, prosecuting an administration as a criminal syndicate presents certain challenges—first and foremost, the fact that the Department of Justice is responsible for administering the RICO statute. That puts any RICO prosecution in the hands of the Eric Holder Justice Department, which is to say, it kills any chance of real consequences for the Obama administration. But that’s not to say that Holder shouldn’t investigate. Under the law, the attorney general is supposed to investigate whenever there are “reasonable grounds to believe there has been a violation of criminal law.” That’s an incredibly low bar.12

  But let’s take this out of the hands of Eric Holder. Assume for a moment that President Obama’s administration were in the private sector. He’d be in court so fast it would make his head swim. Were Obama a civilian in the business world he so despises, and were he stripped of his executive privilege, there is no doubt that not only would many of his bureaucrat lieutenants find themselves in jail, but that he would be hard pressed to prove his innocence. Either he would be culpable of presiding over a criminal enterprise, participating in obstruction of justice and becoming an accessory after the fact, or he would be the kingpin.

  THE ANOINTED ONE

  The first secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, worried in Federalist No. 70 that if America were to embrace a council of executives, that would leave room for virtually any wrongdoing to go unpunished. Nobody would be able to be held accountable, because there would be too many people with conflicting areas of responsibility.13 Accountability was the hallmark of the founding ideal. As Harry Truman would later put it, the goal was for the buck to stop on the president’s desk.

  That vision went out the window with the rise of Woodrow Wilson and the administrative government. Wilson believed that the legislative branch was an obstacle to change (sound familiar?) and that the presidency represented the collective will of the people. But the president couldn’t do everything on his own. He needed helpers. Lots of helpers. America, he wrote, should be run not by millions of citizens, but by “hundreds who are wise.” Those hundreds would not be selected by the people. They would be selected by the president. “Self-government,” Wilson scoffed, “does not consist in having a hand in everything, any more than housekeeping consists necessarily in cooking dinner with one’s own hands.”14 This vision would usher in a glorious age in which the Constitution was scrapped and the executive branch experts would run things.15

  It took a hundred years, but Wilson got his wish: a president with almost ultimate power and a huge cadre of agents to implement it, a horde of servants so huge that the president can always place blame with a low-level flunky. The number of agencies of the federal government has increased exponentially; there are literally thousands of agencies and subagencies of the federal government, not to mention the nearly 2.8 million civilian employees of the executive branch.16 In 1900, there were approximately 300,000 such employees.17

  That’s a lot of people to hide behind.

  And President Obama is an expert at hiding from his own crimes. That’s doubly true, given the bizarre worship
of Obama himself.

  There has never been worship for a president like the worship for President Obama. It is not merely political admiration; it borders on the psychosexual. The 2012 Democratic National Convention featured the wholesale abandonment of the donkey logo for the Democratic Party, supplanted instead by the fascist-nouveaux Obama logo, complete with a blue O overarching a subjected-but-celebrating red population. A giant sand statue of Obama adorned the sidewalk near the arena. Teary-eyed women wearing homemade Obama T-shirts thronged together, cheering wildly for abortion—not for the right to choose, but for the moral righteousness of the murder of the unborn. Street vendors selling gear plastered with Obama’s visage—illegally, no doubt, and without any taxes paid—grinned as they passed out the outerwear of redistributionism. Posters of Barack and Michelle adorned the streets like paintings of Mary and Joseph in Rome. While Bill Clinton drew attention for his presence, it was Obama who drew obeisance.

  And when Obama appeared onstage, the atmosphere in the room was near orgasmic. Women screamed and jumped up and down as though they had just seen Jim Morrison reappear from the dead. Hands reached out as though to touch him, to put their fingers on the cult figure who could lead them to the promised land. And Obama did not disappoint. He turned himself into a Messiah-mirror who could grant salvation simply by allowing citizens to believe in him: “So you see, the election four years ago wasn’t about me. It was about you. My fellow citizens—you were the change.”

  This was the message Obama put forth in his second inaugural address as well. He was the wellspring from which liberty could be drawn. He was the source of all rights. He could change human nature—and he could grant absolution, for in joining him, you embraced that world-altering Change: “When times change, so must we. . . . Being true to our founding . . . does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way or follow the same precise path to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time.” Liberty means whatever Barack Obama thinks it means. But we can all join him in his quest for meaningless liberty. For it is the quest itself that grants meaning, and cleanses sin.