Obama treats the US Constitution like kindling.
As the Journal report put it, “White House officials believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign [to convince Congress to scuttle Obama’s nuclear capitulation to Tehran]. They also recognized that asking for it was politically risky. So, wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold, officials said. “We didn’t say, ‘Do it,’ a senior US official said. ‘We didn’t say, “Don’t do it.”’” Cute. But probably illegal.
OBAMA’S CONSTITUTIONAL OVERREACH…AND ISRAEL
What should happen to a President who spies on America’s lawmakers and her allies?
Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.
It is far from clear why senior Obama administration officials told The Wall Street Journal that under President Barack Obama, the National Security Agency has been aggressively spying not only on Israeli officials but on US citizens and lawmakers who communicate with Israeli officials. Perhaps they were trying to make Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu look like a fool.
After all, the article concludes that the NSA intercepts of these communications “revealed one surprise.”
“Mr. Netanyahu and some of his allies voiced confidence they could win enough votes” in Congress to scuttle Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
Ha ha. What dummies.
If their goal was simply to show that the White House has more leverage over Democratic lawmakers than the Israeli government does, then the article overshot the mark.
Beyond expressing the administration’s contempt for Netanyahu, the Journal’s article showed that Netanyahu isn’t the only one the administration sneers at.
It sneers at the American public and at members of Congress as well. And in so doing, it sneers at and deliberately breaks US law and tramples the US Constitution.
Under US law, American intelligence gathering agencies, including the NSA, are only permitted to spy on US citizens in order to protect US national security.
Under the US Constitution, the administration is arguably prohibited from spying on US lawmakers.
And yet, according to the Journal report, to advance its diplomatic opening to Iran, the administration has knowingly and deliberately spied on both law-abiding US citizens who posed no risk to US national security and on US lawmakers engaged in their lawful, constitutional duties.
