On January 17, 2017, just three days before President-Trump was sworn into office, outgoing President Obama had a secret conference call with progressive media allies.
A long battled FOIA request by Jason Leopold was finally able to receive documents and within the documents the transcript of the phone call is revealed. [Documents Here]
Again, this is three days before Trump took office, when the Obama White House and Intelligence Community were intentionally pushing the Trump-Russia conspiracy story into the media in an effort to disrupt President Trump’s transition to power. President Obama is essentially asking his progressive allies to help defend his administration. Part of the 20-page transcript is below:
Barack Obama – […] “I think the Russia thing is a problem. And it’s of a piece with this broader lack of transparency. It is hard to know what conversations the President-elect may be having offline with business leaders in other countries who are also connected to leaders of other countries. And I’m not saying there’s anything I know for a fact or can prove, but it does mean that — here’s the one thing you guys have been able to know unequivocally during the last eight years, and that is that whether you disagree with me on policy or not, there was never a time in which my relationship with a foreign entity might shade how I viewed an issue. And that’s — I don’t know a precedent for that exactly.
Now, the good news there, I will say, is just that there’s a lot of career folks here who care about that stuff, and not just in the intelligence agencies. I think in our military, in our State Department. And I think that to the extent that things start getting weird, I think you will see surfacing objections, some through whistleblowers and some through others. And so I think there is some policing mechanism there, but that’s unprecedented.
And then the final thing that I’m most worried about is just preserving the democratic process so that in two years, four years, six years, if people are dissatisfied, that dissatisfaction expresses itself. So Jeff Sessions and the Justice Department and what’s happening with the voting rights division and the civil rights division, and — those basic process issues that allow for the democratic process to work. I’d include in that, by the way, press. I think you guys are all on top of how disconcerting — you guys complain about us — (laughter) — but let me just tell you, I think — we actually respected you guys and cared about trying to explain ourselves to you in a way that I think is just going to be different.
On balance, that leads to me to say I think that four years is okay. Take on some water, but we can kind of bail fast enough to be okay. Eight years would be a problem. I would be concerned about a sustained period in which some of these norms have broken down and started to corrode.
Q Could you talk a bit more about the Russia thing? Because it sounds like you, who knows more than we do from what you’ve seen, and is genuinely —
(more…)
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