Hillary Clinton famously tried to move past the Obama administration’s mistakes in Benghazi by claiming, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
Now another former Obama official wants to pretend nothing happened just because a few years have passed. Former Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett suggested Tuesday we all move on from how the previous administration used the FBI to spy on its opponent, then-candidate Donald Trump, in 2016.
Appearing on Fox Business with host Maria Bartiromo, Jarrett tried to absolve the FBI investigators who looked into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election – an investigation that resulted in a two-year special counsel investigation that found no collusion.
“Well, Maria, look, I have a high degree of confidence that our of intelligence community, our investigators comported themselves responsibly,” Jarrett said. “Look, Lindsey Graham is the one that encouraged Senator McCain to turn over the dossier in the first place to the FBI.”
McCain was involved in jumpstarting the allegations that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia, but Jarrett ignores the major role the Obama FBI played in inappropriately surveilling campaign adviser Carter Page. As The Daily Wire previously reported, the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found 17 “inaccuracies and omissions” in FISA warrant applications to spy on Page. The FBI blatantly ignored information from a U.S. government agency that said it had a prior relationship with Page involving contacts with Russian intelligence officers. An FBI agent went so far as to alter an email to make it look like this agency said Page did not work with them.
The FBI hid this information from the FISA court in order to obtain another warrant to continue investigating Page, even though it knew there was nothing to investigate. By spying on Page, the FBI gained access to other Trump associates to spy on in order to find some evidence that could be used against Trump.
Jarrett then pushed the blame for the dubious investigation onto former FBI Director James Comey, who was a major player in the whole situation, but she again pushes the blame from the Obama administration.
“So, I can’t tell you all of the reasons why Comey went forward with his investigation. Maybe this was one piece of a bigger puzzle. But I do know that it’s nearly four years ago and I don’t understand why our focus isn’t on what’s happening right now and today. That’s the investigation I would like to see going on,” Jarrett said.
Jarrett is essentially demanding we move on from the biggest scandal in political history since Watergate because it happened four years ago. She neglects that two years were spent investigating Trump, while DOJ-appointed investigators are continuing to work on how that dubious investigation began. Newly declassified documents continue to paint a picture of an FBI that knew there was no evidence of collusion, but continued to investigate and leak information to the press to create a narrative that Trump stole the election. The real scandal is the investigation itself, which started at the behest of the Obama administration.