by Ben Shapiro
Each one of those green groups endorsed President Obama. The environmental lobby spent millions pushing forward Obama’s reelection campaign. No wonder Obama quickly began stumping for climate change legislation upon reelection.
Meanwhile, Jackson tried to hide her correspondence, using a secondary EPA address labeled “Richard Windsor,” and an outside email account as well. Such emails would have been untraceable for purposes of FOIA requests.71
OBAMACARE
The stimulus package represented the tip of the iceberg. The Obama crime machine swept into full gear in President Obama’s signature legislation: Obamacare. To begin, the bill couldn’t have been passed through the Senate without outright bribery. In order to get a Senate cloture vote, Harry Reid loaded up the original Obamacare bill with goodies for his friends, with special provisions applying to Nebraska, Vermont, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, New York, Louisiana, Hawaii, Connecticut, and Montana. Every vote eventually received for Obamacare was Democratic.72 Initial Obamacare waivers went directly to the entire state of Nevada—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s home state—and to an inordinate number of businesses in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s district in California.73
The greatest kickback to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle came in the form of Obamacare waivers applied to congressional staffers. Each staffer would have been forced to spend an extra $5,000 to $11,000 under Obamacare. But thankfully, Obama was there to pay off his congressional supporters: his Office of Personnel Management waived congressional restrictions on federal government cash to help those poor Washington, D.C., insiders.74
Obama’s allies in the media also received sweeteners. The Labor Department dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stimulus cash on MSNBC, the Temple of Obama Worship. Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann were the chief beneficiaries of those dollars during 2009, with dozens of commercials running in their time slots to push “green training” jobs. How many such jobs were created overall? Zero. The cost of the commercials? Four hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars. Repaying undying support for the hard left agenda? Priceless.75
One of the great puzzles of Obamacare’s rollout sprang from the fact that unions largely supported Obamacare. Many of the public sector unions were enthused about Obamacare thanks to the growth of government—government is significantly more unionized than the private sector, and Obamacare would allow government to effectively swallow one-sixth of the private economy. But what about private sector unions? If Obamacare passed, union members were set to lose their Cadillac coverage. Wasn’t that a problem?
Not really.
In January 2012, as Obamacare began to kick into place, so did the union bribes to the Obama administration. Obama officials quickly began issuing waiver after waiver for unions, so that they could keep their health insurance plans even as more and more Americans were thrown off their own health insurance plans. Between June 2011 and January 2012, the Obama Department of Health and Human Services granted Obamacare waivers to unions representing 543,812 workers. Private employers received just 69,813 waivers. Just 12 percent of the American workforce is unionized.76
Those who helped the Obamacare rollout also ended up with special goodies. Hollywood received a massive payoff for putting up with Obamacare propaganda in prime time. In August 2009, as Obama faced down town halls full of angry Americans raging against the Obamacare machine, he desperately wanted to do a public press conference on all the networks over his beloved health-care overhaul. So he had then White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel call up all the corporate owners of all the networks: Les Moonves of CBS, Jeff Immelt of GE (NBC), and Bob Iger of Disney (ABC). All the networks made the call to break through the prime-time lineup for a boring news conference. The Obama administration then forced the pharmaceutical industry to spend $150 million on television commercials for Obamacare. That’s what the Obama administration calls a win-win!77
Thanks in part to Hollywood’s love affair with President Obama, and thanks in part to Obama’s all-too-obvious pandering on same-sex marriage, Tinseltown is one of Obama’s chief sources of cash as well as in-kind donations. On one trip to Hollywood in September 2008, Obama raised $11 million.78 In 2012, Obama similarly cleaned up. Hollywood still backs President Obama to the hilt, of course—and they’ve reenlisted in the Obamacare Propaganda Army. In July 2013, with President Obama attempting to convince the American people that Obamacare wasn’t a disastrous mistake, Hollywoodites ranging from emissaries of Oprah Winfrey to messengers from the website Funny or Die and the YouTube comedy channel came to the White House to offer their aid. So did Amy Poehler, the woman behind Parks and Recreation; as well as singer Jennifer Hudson; also a lackey for Alicia Keys; Jon Bon Jovi; and former White House staffer and House dead guy Kal Penn.79 Naturally, the Obama administration has been just as generous in return, with a massive tax incentive—a deduction of up to $15 million for film production, or $20 million in low-income areas—for Hollywood loaded into the fiscal cliff legislation passed at the beginning of 2013.80
CLOSING ARGUMENT
Fabulously wealthy industrialist Simon Cameron served as secretary of war under Abraham Lincoln. He served one year before being ousted over corruption charges. He then ended up back in the Senate. “An honest politician,” he once remarked, “is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.”
By that measure, the Obama administration is chock-full of honest politicians.
It is admittedly very difficult to determine, in a day and age of behemoth government, where impropriety ends and actual criminality begins. But there is no question that the Obama administration’s approach to governance—spreading the wealth around—benefits its friends, and that when donors funnel cash to President Obama, they benefit from it. There is also no question that that approach violates the RICO Act, which explicitly provides for RICO prosecution where bribery is in play. And bribery isn’t the only charge available; illegal gratuities do not require the same level of quid pro quo specificity as bribery charges. When we view the Obama administration through the lens of giving out benefits and expecting favors in return, or vice versa, an unshakable pattern of illegality emerges.
In 1921, President Warren G. Harding decided to hand over supervision of naval oil reserve lands—lands held by the U.S. Navy for security purposes—to the Department of the Interior. That department was run by former Senator Albert Bacon Fall, who promptly handed cheap leases on the land to Mammoth Oil, run by one Harry Sinclair, and Pan American Petroleum, run by Edward Doheny. The lease terms made Fall extraordinarily wealthy, since Sinclair and Doheny handed him gifts worth more than $5 million in today’s dollars. Sinclair was convicted of bribery in 1929 and served one year in prison.
The members of the Obama administration make Fall look like a piker. Whether it is the unions handing hundreds of millions of dollars over to the Obama 2008 and 2012 campaigns in return for favorable legislation, the secretary of health and human services seizing nonprofit cash under duress, or President Obama’s friends getting rich via the stimulus program, this administration is riddled with corruption and bribery.
“In the end, if the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists—to protect them and to promote their common welfare—all else is lost. And this is why the struggle against corruption is one of the great struggles of our time,” then-senator Obama said in Kenya in 2006. There is a reason that American confidence in government has sunk to all-time lows, with under 20 percent of Americans trusting government in Washington to do the right thing always or even most of the time.81 President Obama should have heeded Senator Obama’s advice. Unfortunately, Barack Obama was, is, and always will be Barack Obama—and those who surround him will always be crony political hacks looking for the nearest taxpayer wallet to steal.
COUNT 7
OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE
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Whoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by a
ny threatening letter or communication, endeavors to influence, intimidate, or impede any grand or petit juror, or officer in or of any court of the United States, or officer who may be serving at any examination or other proceeding before any United States magistrate judge or other committing magistrate, in the discharge of his duty . . . or corruptly or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication, influences, obstructs, or impedes, or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede, the due administration of justice, shall be punished . . . [with] imprisonment for not more than 10 years, a fine under this title, or both.
—18 U.S. CODE § 1503
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OPENING ARGUMENT
On July 13, 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman of Sanford, Florida, was acquitted of all charges in the killing of seventeen-year-old black suspended student Trayvon Martin. The case never should have gone to trial. The state presented virtually no evidence for its contention that Zimmerman stalked Martin with reckless intent to kill him. Instead, it presented an agglomeration of conjecture and speculation masquerading as a legal case.
An hour after Zimmerman’s acquittal, his defense attorney, Mark O’Mara, spoke to the media. “Things would have been different for George Zimmerman if he was black for this reason: he would never have been charged with a crime,” he said. “This became a focus for a civil rights event, which again is a wonderful event to have. But they decided that George Zimmerman would be the person who they were to blame and use as a creation of a civil rights violation, none of which was borne out by the facts. If only those who decided to condemn Mr. Zimmerman as quickly and as viciously as they did would have taken just a little bit of time to find out who it was they were condemning, it never would have happened. And it certainly wouldn’t have happened if he was black, because those people who decided that they were going to make him the scapegoat would not have.”1
Who were “those people” who decided to make George Zimmerman a racial scapegoat? And who, exactly, had the power to leverage a prosecution of an innocent man without evidence of wrongdoing?
To answer that question, we only need to take a look at the timeline of events. On February 29, 2012, George Zimmerman got in his car to head to the grocery store when he saw Trayvon Martin in the neighborhood. He called the Sanford Police Department, informed the dispatcher that there had been a series of recent break-ins in Sanford, Florida, and reported that the “guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something.” When prompted, Zimmerman said that Martin “looks black,” and was wearing “[a] dark hoodie, like a gray hoodie, and either jeans or sweatpants and white tennis shoes.” Zimmerman stayed on the phone with dispatch as he followed Martin. Zimmerman’s phone then cut out. The next events remain in controversy; the prosecution charged that Zimmerman tracked down Martin, provoked a confrontation, and then shot Martin. Zimmerman claimed, with no evidence to the contrary, that he began walking back to his vehicle when Martin confronted him, initiated a fight, punched him in the face breaking his nose, and put him on his back on the ground. Witness testimony then states that Martin began pounding Zimmerman’s head into the pavement. At that point, Zimmerman shot Martin once in the chest.
The police quickly arrived on scene, and took Zimmerman in for questioning. He was released based on self-defense.
For the next week and a half, nothing happened. On March 8, the Associated Press wrongly reported the killing as a racial incident perpetrated by a “white” man against a “young black man.” Al Sharpton headed down to Florida to bring his very special brand of race-baiting to the proceedings. The media firestorm grew and grew, with the media painting Zimmerman as a racist, editing his 911 call to make him seem like a closet KKK member, and using dated photos of Trayvon as a twelve-year-old clean-cut kid and a police photo of Zimmerman from 2005 looking swarthy in his orange shirt. The New Black Panthers showed up in Sanford, as did the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Urban League.
On March 19, 2012, with the media and Obama supporters everywhere baying for Zimmerman’s blood, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it would investigate the Martin killing. The Sanford police continued to maintain that there just wasn’t evidence to support an arrest. But by now, the story was national. And so Democratic politicians who had a stake in race-baiting ran to the cameras to push for Zimmerman’s arrest. Representative Frederica Wilson (D-FL) said on the House floor, “Mr. Speaker, I am tired of burying young black boys. I am tired of watching them suffer at the hands of those who fear them and despise them. I am tired of comforting mothers, fathers, grandparents, sisters and brothers after such unnecessary, heinous crimes of violence,” adding, “Trayvon was running for his life. He was screaming for help, fighting for his life, and then he was murdered, shot dead. . . . I am tired of fighting when the evidence is so clear, so transparent.” Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) called the killing a “hate crime.” Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) called for Zimmerman’s arrest. Representative Corrine Brown (D-FL), who represented the area including Sanford, stated, “I don’t know whether it’s incompetence, or whether it’s a cover-up, or all of the above. But we have got to make sure that what has happened in Sanford, with the police department and how they have handled this situation, never happens again in the United States.”2
On March 22, state attorney Norm Wolfinger recused himself from the case. Sanford police chief Bill Lee said he would “temporarily resign.”
On March 23, 2012, Florida governor Rick Scott appointed state attorney Angela Corey to prosecute Zimmerman. He also formed a task force on the Florida “stand your ground” law, a bugaboo of the left, but a law that was never applied in the Zimmerman case.
Just coincidentally, that very same day, President Obama decided to get directly involved. He said that America needed to undergo some “soul searching.” Then he inserted himself into the criminal justice process.
“Well, I’m the head of the executive branch, and the attorney general reports to me so I’ve got to be careful about my statements to make sure that we’re not impairing any investigation that’s taking place right now,” Obama admitted. “But obviously, this is a tragedy,” he continued. “I can only imagine what these parents are going through. And when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids. And I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together—federal, state, and local—to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened. So I’m glad that not only is the Justice Department looking into it, I understand now that the governor of the state of Florida has formed a task force to investigate what’s taking place.” This would be violating all applicable law. But Obama had one more point to make, just to ensure that the country turned against Zimmerman: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. And I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”3
What was Obama’s motivation for getting his minions involved? He was in the midst of a tough reelection race with Mitt Romney, and it was important for him to continue to push the notion, especially among his black supporters, that America is an irretrievably racist place—and that he was the cure for such racism.
The price was George Zimmerman’s freedom.
Federal involvement quickly ratcheted up—in support of the anti-Zimmerman lynch mob. The Justice Department’s so-called Community Relations Service (CRS) headed down to Sanford, Florida, where it expended thousands of taxpayer dollars helping to facilitate “marches, demonstrations, and rallies.” The peacekeepers attended events at which attendees called for Zimmerman’s arrest and Lee’s firing.4 Regional director Thomas Battles went to one meeting at which he stated, “We work with communities where there is real or perceived racial tensions. If a community pe
rceives that there’s something wrong in the black community, there’s something wrong.”
This is the height of racial paternalism—instead of objectively assessing the facts, the CRS was there to throw gasoline on the fire. Judicial Watch, which obtained the documentation about the CRS, alleged that CRS “actively worked to foment unrest, spending thousands of taxpayer dollars on travel and hotel rooms to train protestors throughout Florida.”5 Former CRS director Ondray T. Harris said that he “regularly had to warn or take corrective action against career employees for acting as advocates instead of mediators.” Those employees, he said, “talked neutrally in public and spoke in the tenor of mediators in public, but behind the scenes, when they talked to the civil rights groups or the perceived aggrieved parties, they’ll say, essentially, ‘Don’t worry. The Department of Justice is here and we’re going to get to the bottom of it.’ ” Harris, who is black, said that Battles was “black, and very pro-black,” and accused him of “racial favoritism.” He said that Battles pushed his “extremely pro-minority [views] at the expense of the majority views.”6
On April 3, 2012, the FBI announced it had opened its own investigation.
On April 11, 2012, Corey announced Zimmerman would be charged with second-degree murder.
When Zimmerman was acquitted more than a year later, the Justice Department continued to press forward an investigation into a possible hate crime—a crime for which there was no evidence. They even went so far as to seize the evidence from the incident, depriving Zimmerman of his handgun.7 The department also set up a special tip line just for information about possible evidence of George Zimmerman’s racism. The DOJ held a conference with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law asking for the group “to actively refer anyone who had information” on Zimmerman. “They said they would very aggressively investigate this case,” said the group’s president and executive director. Other groups included on the call: the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.8