President Obama has made a habit of playing fast and loose with the facts in order to promote his agenda. In fact, he’s been so good at manipulating Americans with half-truths and outright falsehoods that he’s been the proud recipient of PolitiFact‘s inglorious Lie of the Year award. A congressional committee has just issued a report adding another big lie to the list.
The House Financial Services Committee recently completed a report that proves that the Obama administration repeatedly lied to the American people in 2011 and 2013 about the dreaded “government shutdown” and deliberately blocked Congress’s attempts to inquire about the administration’s real-time policies.
The report—which will be unveiled during a public hearing held by the committee Tuesday—claims that while Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told citizens and lawmakers that a temporary government shutdown was completely “unworkable,” officials were secretly conducting exercises that demonstrated that they could in fact handle such a result.
The Daily Caller , which gained access to a copy of the report, explains that it alleges that Federal Reserve Bank of New York officials “secretly conducted real-time exercises during the 2011 and 2013 debt-limit crisis that demonstrated the federal government could function during a temporary shutdown by prioritizing spending.” The committee “charges that Lew and other Obama administration officials deliberately misled Congress and the public during the federal budget and debt limit showdowns in both years.”
Not only did the administration create contingency plans to handle Social Security and veterans benefits, its also devised a plan to pay for the national debt in case of a shutdown. Despite knowing the scenario was in fact “workable,” the Obama administration repeatedly told the American public and lawmakers that they had no capacity to handle it.
The congressional committee comes to the conclusion that the Treasury Department deliberately “obstructed” efforts by Congress to learn about the administration’s policies in the face of a shutdown and “held the country’s creditworthiness ‘hostage’ by claiming default was the only possibility if the debit ceiling was not raised.”
Read TheDC’s full summary of the report here.