Were President Trump actually guilty of the horrible things Adam Schiff has accused him on Wednesday, his particular offense would not make Barack Obama’s top-10 list.
Although the competition for most impeachment-worthy offense by Obama is a stiff one, let me offer my contender for the most offensive one of all.
Much has been written about the various blunders that led to the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.
Not until 2016, however, when Ken Timmerman released his book “Deception,” did anyone write in depth about the filmmaker Obama held responsible for those attacks, Nakoula Bassely Nakoula.
Timmerman describes the White House response to Nakoula’s video as “disgraceful, un-American, illegal, and a clear violation of Nakoula’s constitutional rights.” He does not overstate the case.
The dissembling began on Sept. 11, 2012, while the consulate was in flames and the attack still underway. Shadow adviser to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, shared with Hillary a report he helped prepare.
The report claimed that the inspiration for the imagined protests in Benghazi was “a sacrilegious internet video on the prophet Muhammad originating in America.”
The “sacrilegious” material actually was a trailer for Nakoula’s amateurishly produced movie, “Innocence of Muslims.” The trailer showed what Timmerman calls ”a remarkably faithful reenactment” of a classic scene in Muslim lore, the one in which Muhammad marries the pre-pubescent Aisha – not that there’s anything wrong with that.
That same night Hillary Clinton released a memo blaming the attack on some “inflammatory material posted on the internet.”
In the memo, Hillary feigned outrage. “The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” said the woman who gave “Book of Mormon” a standing ovation on Broadway.
As Timmerman explains in convincing detail, the video had nothing to do with the pre-planned assault on the Benghazi compound. He writes, “There were never any demonstrations in front of either U.S. diplomatic facility in Libya. Ever.”
Obama’s role in this drama has never been explored for the simple reason no one knows where Obama was that night or what he did.
Incredibly, for eight months after the attack, not a single reporter asked the president or a spokesman the simple question Chris Wallace of Fox News posed in May 2013, “What did the president do the rest of that night to pursue Benghazi?” The man Wallace questioned, senior Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer, predictably blew him off.
On Sunday, Sept. 16, 2012, National Security Adviser Susan Rice dutifully played her role in the charade, calling the attack “a spontaneous – not a premeditated – response to what had transpired in Cairo.” She repeated this obvious lie on five talks shows on that one morning.
Knowing his base, Obama went looking for a reliably clueless audience to hear his take on Benghazi and found one on Sept. 18 at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York, home of the “Late Show with David Letterman.”
“Here’s what happened,” Obama told his wide-eyed host. “You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character who – who made an extremely offensive video directed at Muhammad and Islam.”
Letterman reeled back in disbelief. “Making fun of the Prophet Muhammad!” he said solemnly. “Making fun of the Prophet Mohammad,” confirmed Obama.
Obama pulled his description of the filmmaker straight from the pages of the New York Times, which called Nakoula, “a shadowy gas station owner with a record of criminal arrests and bankruptcy.”
More troubling, from the Times perspective at least, Nakoula had reportedly “expressed anti-Muslim sentiments as he pushed for the making of the film.”
In 2011 alone, when Nakoula was making his film, there were at least 10 Muslim attacks on his fellow Coptic Christians in Egypt, several of them lethal, one resulting in the death of 24 four Copts.
This relentless persecution made “anti-Muslim sentiments” as understandable for Copts as anti-Nazi sentiments were for Jews in pre-war Germany. But Christians weren’t part of the rainbow coalition in 2012. Somehow Muslims were.
The fact that Nakoula and his family had received serious death threats, something of a norm for critics of Islam, did not deter the Times from doxing him.
The reporters tracked Nakoula to his Southern California home, staked it out and confirmed to their readers that this was indeed Nakoula’s house.
With the media cheering on the administration, federal probation officers took Nakoula into custody on Sept. 15 and held him in secret without charge or without access to an attorney, “an extrajudicial prisoner in the United States of America,” writes Timmerman.
Nakoula was vulnerable. He was on parole for his involvement in a check-kiting scheme. Compounding his worries he had quietly cooperated with the Feds and fingered the scheme’s ringleader.
Less than 48 hours after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton first alluded to Nakoula’s video, someone in the Obama administration unsealed the indictment and exposed Nakoula to retaliation.
One obvious reason for exposing Nakoula was to prod him into accepting federal protection from a prying media and an angry crime boss. The Obama administration followed this short-term strategy with the long-term one of revoking Nakoula’s parole.
The feds devised a devilish strategy for revoking it and leaked that strategy almost immediately. Just three days after the smoke cleared in Benghazi, the Times’ Ian Lovett reported that the feds were inquiring into whether Nakoula “had been the person who uploaded the video to YouTube.”
If Nakoula had uploaded the video, Lovett continued much too knowingly, he would have violated parole restrictions “against his using the internet without permission from a probation officer.”
Lovett captured the spirit of the media in the age of Obama—compliant, complicit and scarily indifferent to the First Amendment rights of anyone but establishment journalists.
That an American citizen was about to spend a year in federal custody for producing a perfectly legal satire inspired not a single major media journalist to cry foul.
But then again, they had a president to reelect. With their swooning support, that president was and would remain famously “scandal free.”
Note: Jack Cashill’s book, “Unmasking Obama: The Fight to tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency,” will be published this summer.
