The mainstream media have had a field day regarding the sudden resignation of former White House National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, who was exposed via illegal anonymous leaks to have not been forthcoming to Vice President Mike Pence regarding the content of Flynn’s conversations with a Russian diplomat during the transition period.
Critics of Flynn claimed what he did in speaking with the Russian diplomat, potentially discussing the revisiting of economic sanctions imposed on Russia, was simply beyond the pale, utterly unprecedented and perhaps even a violation of federal law, albeit an obscure and possibly unenforceable law known as the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from engaging in diplomacy or policy talks with foreign powers.
But according to Breitbart, those critics would be wise to look back about eight and a half years to the presidential campaign of then-Sen. Barack Obama in 2008 to find a situation that, while somewhat similar, appears even more ominous than what Flynn is alleged to have done.
During Obama’s first campaign for the presidency, reports leaked out that representatives of his team had contacted both the terrorist group Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran to discuss policy issues, acts that would be just as much in violation of the Logan Act as Flynn’s conversation with Russia about sanctions.
According to an op-ed published in The New York Times in May 2008, an informal foreign policy adviser to Obama named Robert Malley explained why he had suddenly “resigned” his unofficial position with the campaign following the publicizing of his recent meetings with the Hamas terrorist group in the Gaza Strip.
Malley insisted he had done nothing wrong and that he hadn’t even tried to keep his meeting with Hamas a secret, as it was a regular aspect of his actual job as Middle East program director for the International Crisis Group.
Nevertheless, he wrote, “I ultimately thought it best to resign from a post I never enjoyed after a newspaper revealed actions I had already long publicized. I did so because it was becoming a distraction to me and to Sen. Obama’s campaign, and to avoid any misperception — misrepresentation being the more accurate word — about the candidate’s position regarding the Islamist movement.”
However, Malley later joined Obama’s administration in an official capacity and led the Middle East desk of the National Security Council by 2015, also being named as special adviser to Obama regarding the Islamic State group.
As for Iran, it was suspected that Obama had contacted Iran during the 2008 campaign, but that suspicion wasn’t confirmed until 2014, when a former consultant for the National Security Council and the Defense Department named Michael Ledeen published an op-ed with PJ Media that revealed how Obama had set up a “back channel” to the Iranian mullahs before becoming president.
In resisting the media’s unquestioning acceptance of Obama stating there was no real strategy to confront the rising Islamic State group, Ledeen insisted there really was a strategy, though not one Obama wanted the American public to understand.
Ledeen wrote, “The actual strategy is detente first, and then a full alliance with Iran throughout the Middle East and North Africa. It has been on display since before the beginning of the Obama administration.”
“During his first presidential campaign in 2008, Mr. Obama used a secret back channel to Tehran to assure the mullahs that he was a friend of the Islamic Republic, and that they would be very happy with his policies,” he continued. “The secret channel was Ambassador William G. Miller, who served in Iran during the shah’s rule, as chief of staff for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and as ambassador to Ukraine. Ambassador Miller has confirmed to me his conversations with Iranian leaders during the 2008 campaign.”
These two shocking instances of representatives of Obama contacting arguably two of America’s worst enemies before Obama was sworn into office should have given the media far greater pause than anything Flynn did, but they were instead virtually ignored or deliberately covered up by a willingly complicit biased media.
It would be nice if the media treated Republican and Democrat presidents and politicians the same, but alas, their double standard is glaringly obvious, which is at least in part why the media are becoming increasingly un-credible and irrelevant in the eyes of the American public.
http://conservativetribune.com/media-flynn-wont-obama-8-years/