by Frank Holmes, reporter
A shocking new report suggests that President Barack Obama knew that Russia was trying to interfere in the 2016 presidential election but ordered government officials to let Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s agents spy on America – all so Obama could keep eyes on President Donald Trump.
The Obama administration reportedly told patriotic Americans to “stand-down” and let foreign spying continue under their noses – at the same time they planted their own spy on Trump’s 2016 campaign.
A top intelligence agent made the bombshell revelation before the Senate Intelligence Committee last Wednesday – and now a Republican congressman is asking questions that could land Obama officials in hot water.
Two left-wing journalists spilled the beans in March, but Michael Daniel, Obama’s former head of cyber security for the National Security Council, just confirmed the details – and now things are looking ugly for the former president.
Sen. James Risch quoted the book “Russian Roulette” stating that one of Obama’s closest aides gave a “stand-down order,” telling intelligence agents to let the Russians continue spying.
Daniel and his team had had plans to show Russian agents they couldn’t interfere with the presidential election, but instead, Obama’s team told them to drop everything.
National Security Advisor Susan Rice – the woman who lied about Benghazi being caused by a YouTube video – personally told Daniel to “knock it off.”
“Don’t get ahead of us,” Rice told him in an angry meeting in August 2016.
“That was one pissed-off national security adviser,” Daniel said after he left the meeting – and then crawled back to tell his team that they had to stop their counter-espionage actions cold turkey.
His team responded with jaw-dropping confusion. “I was incredulous and in disbelief,” said Daniel Prieto, one of the people on Daniel’s team. “Why the hell are we standing down? Michael, can you help us understand?”
“That is an accurate rendering of the conversation at the staff meeting,” Daniel admitted.
After Rice told Daniel to stop, cyber-defense “actions were put on the back burner,” he said. “That was not the focus of our activity during that time period.”
Now, a Republican congressman is demanding answers about whether the whole effort was an elaborate, and unprecedented, attempt to interfere in the 2016 election by Obama.
Rep. John Ratcliffe is shaking up the D.C. establishment in a letter sent on Monday to National Security Adviser John Bolton and the full National Security Council.
Ratcliffe pointed out that Rice’s stand-down order and the Obama administration’s aggressive surveillance of the Trump campaign for alleged collusion happened in “nearly simultaneous fashion.”
“The ‘stand down’ order raises further troubling questions about whether Obama Administration officials appropriately carried out their duties to protect the national security of the United States,” Congressman Ratcliffe wrote, “or rather used their authority to carry out politically-motivated objectives.”
He asks the NSC three specific questions – and each one could bring the Obama administration closer to possible prosecution for abuse of justice:
- Did Susan Rice issue the stand-down order on her own volition, or at the behest of other Obama Administration officials?
- What justification, if any, did Susan Rice use to support issuance of the stand-down order?
- Did Susan Rice depart from traditional practice and procedure of the National Security Council in issuing the stand-down order?
Regardless of the answer – or whether Ratcliffe ever gets a response – the game is up for the Obama administration, which pretends it “never had a scandal.”
Even by itself, the stand-down order proves that “the Obama team used the machinery of the government to beat up its political opponents,” said Jim Varney of Fox Business. “That’s not the way this constitutional republic is supposed to operate.”
Frank Holmes is a reporter for The Horn News. He is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”