Obama's Watergate

                    On June 17, 1972, a security guard at the Watergate complex discovered tape on the lock of one of the doors.  A fervent media investigation began, most notably by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post.  President Richard Nixon might not have been involved in the decision to burglarize the headquarters of the Democrat Party, but he was involved in the cover up of the event.  The members of the media wanted to know:  What did Nixon know, and when did he know it?  When associates in Congress advised Nixon that he most likely would be impeached, Nixon chose to resign the office of President in disgrace rather than go through an impeachment trial.

                    President Barack Obama may also be involved in a scandal; the only difference is that Obama's scandal could be three times as bad as Nixon's problem.  If our mainstream media were as fervent in investigating Obama as it was while investigating Nixon, they would be digging furiously into the background of the $535 million loan to Solyndra, the cronyism involved with LightSquared, and the gun-running debacle known as Operation Fast and Furious.

                    Solyndra is a company that made solar-power panels in a factory in California.  President Obama praised the company when he visited the factory in May 2010.  He claimed that the factory subsidized by U.S. taxpayers showed "the promise of clean energy isn't just an article of faith."

                    PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP warned two months earlier that Solyndra had deep financial troubles.  Jim Snyder and Christopher Martin of Bloomberg wrote on September 12, 2011:  "The Obama administration stood by Solyndra through the auditor's warning, the abandonment of a planned initial public offering and a last-ditch refinancing where taxpayers took a back seat to new investors.  That unwavering commitment has come under increasing scrutiny since the company's travails culminated in its filing for

bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6 and a raid on its headquarters by the Federal Bureau of Investigation two days later."

                    The FBI and a committee in the House of Representatives are now investigating the loan to Solyndra.  What did Obama know, and when did he know it?

                    Apparently the Pentagon has been worrying for months about a project that might interfere with the military GPS.  The concerns are about a satellite broadband company in Virginia called LightSquared.  An investment fund run by Democrat donor Philip Falcone is the majority owner of this company.

                    General William Shelton is a four-star Air Force general who oversees Air Force Space Command.  When General Shelton walked into a highly secured room on Capitol Hill a couple of weeks ago to give a classified briefing to members of Congress and their staffs, he dropped a big surprise.  When legislators pressed him, General Shelton told them that he was pressured to change his testimony by the White House who wanted his testimony to be more favorable to the company.

                    The Daily Beast  reported:  "There was an attempt to influence the text of the testimony and to engage LightSquared in the process in order to bias his testimony," Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) said in an interview.  "The only people who were involved in the process in preparation for the hearing included the Department of Defense, the White House, and the Office of Management and Budget."

                    Rep. Turner is the chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee that oversees the space command and GPS issues.  The issues between LightSquared and the Pentagon were explored at a panel hearing on Thursday, September 15, 2011.   General Shelton gave his testimony to Turner's committee and shared the Pentagon's concern that the LightSquared project would cause significant disruptions to the military GPS.

                    The White House confirmed that its Office of Management and Budget had suggested changes to the General's testimony but insisted that the changes were not politically influenced.  LightSquared admitted that its representatives had met with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for guidance in getting their project approved.  They said that their project is consistent with President Obama's goal to expand the access to the broad band wireless nationwide.

                    The DailyBeast reported on September 20, 2011, that a second government official came forward alleging that the White House tried to influence his testimony concerning LightSquared.  Anthony Russo, director of the National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing, told the Daily Beast that he had received "guidance" rather than "pressure" from the White House's Office of Budget and Management concerning his testimony.  He rejected the suggestion for him to testify that the government's concerns with LightSquared could be resolved in 90 days because he thought the testing would take at least six months.

                    Is LightSquared more of a scandal than Solyndra?  What did Obama know, and when did he know it?

                    The Operation Fast and Furious gun running scandal has been in the news since at least the first part of the summer.  According to Wikipedia, Operation Fast and Furious "was the name of a sting run by the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) between 2009 and 2010 as part of Project Gunrunner in its investigations into illegal gun trafficking.  The stated purpose of the operation was to permit otherwise-suspected straw purchasers to complete the weapon's purchase and transit to Mexico, in order to build a bigger case against Mexican criminal organizations suspected of being the ultimate buyer.  The operation started in the fall of 2009 and ended in late 2010 shortly after the death of Brian Terry, a US Border Patrol Agent and has since become the subject of controversy and a U.S. congressional investigation.  During the operation, the sale of at least 2,000 guns was facilitated by ATF knowing most would be trafficked to Mexico.  By June, 2011, the guns have been linked (through eTrace, ATF's electronic tracing program) to some 179 crime scenes in Mexico.  The remaining 1,400 guns have not been recovered."

                    United States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was gunned down in Rio Rico, Arizona, on December 14, 2010, while trying to apprehend a group of armed suspects.  U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Jaime Zapata was killed by one of the gun-walker weapons in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi on February 15, 2011.  An investigation revealed that many agents on the U.S./Mexico border intended to apprehend gun smugglers attempting to take weapons across the border but were told to let the smugglers pass.

                    

                   U.S. Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, held hearings on the gun running problem in June 2011.  During the hearing an agent from the ATF testified, "I cannot begin to think of how the risk of letting guns fall into the hands of known criminals could possibly advance any legitimate law enforcement interest."

                    Operation Fast and Furious is being investigated jointly by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

                    Former BATF Agent John Dodson testified that he and other agents were ordered to observe the activities of gun smugglers but to not intervene.  He said, "Over the course of the next 10 months that I was involved in this operation, we monitored as they purchased hand guns, AK-47 variants, and .50 caliber rifles almost daily.  Rather than conduct any enforcement actions, we took notes, we recorded observations, we tracked movements of these individuals for a short time after their purchases, but nothing more.  Knowing all the while, just days after these purchases, the guns that we saw these individuals buy would begin turning up at crime scenes in the United States and Mexico, we still did nothing."

                    After William G. McMahon, William D. Newell and David Voth, three supervisors of "Fast and Furious," appeared at a Congressional hearing, the Los Angeles Times reported that they were being transferred and promoted by ATF.  ATF denied that the transfers were promotions.

                    Kenneth E. Melson was relieved as the Acting Director of the ATF and moved to the DOJ's Office of Legal Policy as a "forensics" expert.  Assistant U.S. Attorney Emory Hurley was transferred from the criminal division into the civil division.  Dennis K. Burke, the Obama-appointed U.S. Attorney in Phoenix, resigned.

                    We don't know what else will come out of the congressional investigations, but I think we should be asking, What did Obama know, and when did he know it?

                    Since our mainstream media is working with the liberals/progressives, we cannot depend on them to help in the investigations of Solynda, LightSquared, and Operation Fast and Furious.  We can only wait for Congress to work through their investigations. Will the investigations be finished before the 2012 elections?  Will Obama decline a second term as President?  Will he be pressured by the Democrat Party to not seek a second term?  Will all these scandals just blow over and not have any effect on Obama?  Only time will give the answer to the questions:  What did Obama know, and when did he know it?