Civil Liberties

A serious concern is the recent targeting of whistleblowers who expose government corruption like Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden. In spite of whistleblower protection laws, those who expose government corruption are targeted by corrupt politicians on both sides of the aisle working in concert to prevent public knowledge of what they are doing.

Targeting of Whistleblowers
When the criminals are government officials abusing the public trust, those who expose their corruption should be considered patriots, not criminals. Nonetheless, in spite of whistleblower protection laws, those who expose government corruption are consistently targeted by other corrupt government officials.

Jim Taricani
Award-winning reporter Jim Taricani was sentenced in 2004 to four months home confinement for refusing to disclose the source of an FBI videotape leak showing a Providence, RI official taking a $1,000 bribe. The videotape resulted in prison time for former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci.

Protect Whistleblowers
On the campaign trail candidate Obama promised to "strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government." In reality, as pointed out by Jake Tapper of CNN, "the Obama administration has used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists ... more than all previous administrations combined." Even Attorney General Eric Holder has bragged that the administration has brought more leak cases than all previous administrations. Holder's Department of Justice also secretly seized two months of phone records without notification from the Associated Press, one of the largest international organizations of journalists. The White House has even forced changes to press pool reports, altering the news as it pleases.

Diversity in Media Ownership
On the campaign trail Obama promised to "encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media, promote the development of new media outlets for expression of diverse viewpoints, and clarify the public interest obligations of broadcasters who occupy the nation's spectrum." As noted by PolitiFact this promise has been clearly and substantially broken. In fact, Obama has declared war on conservative news outlets, using the power of his administration to try and silence FOX News. The Obama administration even sought to get FOX removed from the White House Press Pool.

NSA Spying on 35 World Leaders
The Democrats hacked Russia before Russia hacked them. The Obama administration was caught spying on 35 world leaders and hacking the Google and Yahoo servers to steal hundreds of millions of global emails. I guess it was alright for the Democrats to hack Russia but not the other way around?

Obama Denial of NSA Abuse
Obama claimed the NSA was not abusing its powers, stating:

"If you look at the reports, even the disclosures that Mr. Snowden's put forward, all the stories that have been written, what you're not reading about is the government actually abusing these programs and, you know, listening in on people's phone calls or inappropriately reading people's e-mails. What you're hearing about is the prospect that these could be abused. Now part of the reason they're not abused is because they're — these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court]."

NSA Audit Shows Otherwise
However, a NSA audit has discovered the NSA violated privacy rules or court orders 2,776 times in less than a year's time, from April 2011 to March 2012. Nor was Obama's claim a one-time statement, he made this claim repeatedly to various news organizations, a systematic pattern of deliberate dishonesty. As observed by Salon's David Sirota, "But he's too smart not to understand the truth... I don’t buy that a constitutional lawyer and legal scholar didn’t know that the FISA court is secret — aka the opposite of 'transparent.' I don’t buy that he simply didn’t see any of the news showing that spying is happening in the United States. And I don’t buy that he didn’t know that there is evidence — both public and inside his own administration — of the NSA 'actually abusing' its power."

Clinton Collusion
The Wikileaks emails showed very real corruption on Hillary's part. Hillary was colluding with CNN's Donna Brazile, the former DNC head, to steal the debate questions, and with the DNC to keep Bernie Sanders from winning. Maybe if the Obama administration honored our own Whistleblower protection laws, Snowden and Assange wouldn't have been forced to seek asylum in Russia in the first place.

Podesta and the Russians
Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, was himself involved in corruption with the Russians, as was Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Steele Dossier Originated from Foreign Sources
As has been pointed out by Rush Limbaugh, whereas no evidence has been provided that Trump himself colluded with Russia to produce foreign election interference, the dossier used to accuse him of colluding with Russia was itself produced by Hillary and the Democrats in cooperation with British intelligence agents to affect the elections.

The Steele Dossier used as the basis for the Mueller Investigation itself began from foreign sources. Christopher Steele originally was a British intelligence agent, working for MI6 from 1987 to 2009, who formed Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. with fellow MI6 agent Chris Burrows, to provide intel on both Russia and Ukraine. The dossier and Christopher Steele were funded in 2016 by Hillary Clinton and the DNC.

No IRS Corruption
Obama dishonestly denied any corruption whatsoever in the IRS scandal, claiming there was "not even a smidgen of corruption" and admitted the head of the IRS Doug Shulman had been to the White House over 100 times, but said he didn't remember any of the conversations.

"If there were not even a 'smidgen of corruption,' as Obama insisted, it is hard to understand what outraged him, or at least seemed to, when news of the IRS scandal first broke. 'It’s inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it,' Obama said in May 2013. Obama routinely expressed anger when some new scandal erupted on his watch — IRS, the failed ObamaCare website, the VA scandal, Fast and Furious — but never before had he shoved a scandal down the memory hole so quickly. And how could Obama know there wasn’t a smidgen of corruption before the investigation was even over? Perhaps because the administration knew that any proof of that was gone with deleted emails and destroyed hard drives?"

-Jack Cashill, The New York Post

However, the IRS a few months later paid $50,000 to the National Organization for Marriage to settle a lawsuit over the IRS leaking a confidential donor list to homosexual activists. Meanwhile, Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the heart of the scandal, has refused to testify unless given immunity, pleading the Fifth Amendment after admitting the IRS subjected groups to additional scrutiny if they had the words "tea party" or "patriots" in their names.

Most Groups Targeted Were Conservative
While Democrats have attempted to dishonestly claim liberal groups were targeted as well as conservative groups by the IRS, the overwhelming majority were clearly conservative. As noted by John D. McKinnon of the Wall Street Journal, "Of the 298 applications that were collected and put on hold by the Internal Revenue Service between mid-2010 and mid-2012, 248, or 83%, were right-leaning, while 29, or 10%, were left-leaning."

George also noted that while 16 groups with 'progressive' in the name showed up among the 298 cases, that represented just 30 percent of all 'progressive' applications. That is in stark contrast to groups with 'tea party,' 'patriot,' or '9/12' in their name, of which 100 percent saw their applications held up."

-Steve Contorno, PolitiFact

Obama's Broken Promise
In 2008 Obama campaigned on revising the Patriot Act and restricting warrantless wiretapping. Obama even specifically campaigned against the national security letters used by the Patriot Act, stating,

"I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom. That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient." -Barack Obama, 2007

Obama has extended and defended the wiretapping he once condemned.

"Five years into his presidency, Barack Obama presides over a national security apparatus that in many ways still resembles the one left behind by President George W. Bush. Drones are killing terrorism suspects, the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, holds 'enemy combatants' and the government secretly collects telephone records of millions of Americans. This from a president who in 2008 ran as the anti-Bush candidate who would get the U.S. out of Iraq, put an end to torture and redefine U.S. policies abroad."

-The Associated Press