What Did Obama Know — and When Did He Know It?

Editorial of The New York Sun | May 11, 2020
   
What did President Obama know and when did he know it? That famous formulation is emerging as the question in the wake of new disclosures in respect of a meeting that took place inside the Oval Office in the closing days of Mr. Obama’s presidency. The meeting included not only his national security adviser, Susan Rice, and the head of the FBI, James Comey, but also Vice President Biden, now the prospective Democratic nominee.

This is laid out in, among other places, a dispatch by Mollie Hemingway in the Federalist. Ms. Hemingway reckons the meeting is turning out to be, as her headline puts it, “key” to the “entire anti-Trump operation” launched two weeks before the end of the Obama administration. She’s not the only one laying this out; a veteran of the Sun, Eli Lake, now of Bloomberg, has been all over the story; the Wall Street Journal, as well.

Ms. Hemingway presents a terrific timeline. It starts on January 4, 2017, at a time when the FBI was scrambling, as the Federalist’s scribe puts it, to reopen a case against General Flynn. The January 5 meeting started as a briefing for the President and also included Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, the CIA director, John Brennan, and the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper..............

“What did the president know and when did he know it?” is the phrase that history offers up. It was first uttered during Senator Sam Ervin’s Watergate hearings by Senator Howard Baker, Republican of Tennessee. It starts to look ever more apt as investigators, put on the case by Attorney General Barr, finally start to focus on who it was who laid the long train of powder against the incoming Trump administration............ To Read More....