By Monica Showalter
Has Barack Obama gone from ex-president to Democrat party crime boss?
It sure looks like it, based on a new report about his treatment of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Investigative reporter Lee Smith has got a stunning report that ran this week in Tablet, comparable in impact to that report by Molly Ball at Time who wrote about how elites conspired to “fortify democracy” by rigging the election against President Trump in 2020 and afterwards thought it was a smart thing to crow about.
Smith’s report beginns with how the FBI “hacked” Twitter, not just engaging in a “master-canine” relationship as Twitter files reporter Matt Taibbi put it in one of his reports, but actually infiltrating the company and controlling it from within, rendering it a corporate Zombie.
According to Smith:
The Twitter files’ disclosures about the coordination between the company and spy agencies to fix presidential elections sheds light on the nature of Twitter v. Holder, which was eventually decided in the government’s favor shortly before Baker joined the company.
…
But something else was going on behind the scenes: Social media platforms were already being assimilated into the intelligence services.
That Twitter section alone is well worth reading, very well-explained by Smith for its details on the collusion that was deeper than many suspected — leading to a never-told-before story about how Obama muscled Facebook like a mafia don.
The Obama administration also realized that it could lean hard on monopoly social media platforms in order to gain political advantages—and it could make companies that weren’t compliant pay a price.
Here’s how it worked, emphasis mine:
First strike got you a dressing down from the White House: Weeks after the 2016 vote, for instance, Obama pulled Mark Zuckerberg aside at a conference in Peru and read him out about not doing more to keep Russian disinformation off Facebook. The reality is that Russia spent around $135,000 on Facebook ads, a small percentage of what presidential campaigns typically spend on a single day before lunch. But Obama wasn’t worried about Russia—he struck deals with Vladimir Putin to advance his own idiosyncratic foreign policy goals, like the nuclear agreement with Russia’s ally Iran. Obama’s problem was Trump.
As he was leaving office, Obama stamped the U.S. government’s seal of approval on Russiagate, ordering his spy chiefs to draft an official assessment claiming Putin helped put Trump in the White House. Since then, in Deep State parlance, “Russia” equals Trump and stopping “Russian disinformation” means censoring Trump, his supporters, and anyone else opposed to the national security apparatus’s takeover of the public communications infrastructure. Since Zuckerberg didn’t keep Trump off Facebook in 2016, he had to put up $400 million to drive votes to Democrats in 2020—and even that wasn’t enough. In 2021, Democratic Party insiders working together with Zuckerberg’s Big Tech competitor, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, sent a fake whistleblower after him to testify before congress that Facebook was bad for teenage girls.
Suddenly all the pieces fit together — the Obama pieties about Russia he knew couldn’t be true; the forced cash cough-up for Zuckerberg’s Democrat operatives to take over election apparats even as elected officials protested — which was actually declared bribery in Wisconsin; the phony whistleblower.
Smith continued, telling us how it all came together (emphasis mine):
In April, as Musk first said he wanted to buy Twitter and save free speech, Obama embarked on a “disinformation” tour, which took him to several college campuses to promote the un-American virtues of censorship. He first visited his hometown to speak at a University of Chicago conference, “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy.” Other guests included Anne Applebaum, an early advocate of the collusion conspiracy theory who pushed the spy-service fiction in dozens of her Washington Post columns. Also in attendance was former CISA head Chris Krebs, now famous for congressional testimony in which he claimed the 2020 election was the most secure ever.
EIP principals from the Stanford Internet Observatory were featured speakers at the daylong seminar at the Palo Alto university where Obama made the second stop on his April “disinformation” tour. Regulation, Obama told the Stanford audience, has to be part of the answer to solve the disinformation crisis. In other words, he went to Silicon Valley to threaten his listeners that he would ruin their financial model by stripping away social media’s liability exemptions.
The purpose of Obama’s speech was to present a choice to his audience: Either you impose a scorched-earth policy against the establishment’s opponents, or else you will face the kind of regulation that every company knows will be its death knell. Moreover, if they made the right choice, Obama showed, there was money in it for them.
“In effect, Obama announced that the funding channels are open for people who want to do disinformation work,” said Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. “It’s like what happened with climate change. If you were an academic who wanted federal funding for anything, you made sure you made reference to climate to get grants. Same now with disinformation. Obama was saying, ‘here’s where the puck is moving, so skate here if you want federal funding.’”
So like a crime boss, Obama made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. And for good measure, he made an example out of Zuckerberg, effectively ensuring that Zuck woke up with a horse’s head in his bed.
But oh, he added sweeteners to the obedient. And yes, he was powerful enough to control distribution of federal funding, even out of office with his little operatives still in place. Obama determined who’d get what, distributing the spoils to loyalists on the very fakey-fake matter of “disinformation” which is why we saw freaks like that Mary Poppins woman, Nina Jankowicz, show up as a “disinformation expert” for a federal job as Joe Biden’s “disinformation czar” even though she had an account on TikTok of all places, a Red Chinese data-gathering operation that spies on its users and builds profiles on them. Jankowicz didn’t know much about disinformation, at least not enough to avoid some very avoidable spying on her by China. It was the money, honey, where Obama said the money was.
And Smith noted that there was a lot of money shoveled out for this purpose by the Biden administration on various characters in attendence at universities who attended this Obama speech tour. In some cases, it was a surge of federal money.
So, fail to censor President Trump, get dressed down, get “fined” $400 million to rig the next elections, get a phony whistleblower coming after your company. Sign up for the phony disinformation gig, hit the swamp jackpot.
What an ugly picture this paints for how the federal government has been transformed by leftists. Once upon a time, one could trust that the government would try to do the right thing. Now, all we can see is that Obama still runs the government from his retirement, plays a key role in muscling corporations into wokedom, including the all-important business of electing Democrats and nothing is beyond bounds, nor being done about it.
Is this an ex-president or a crime boss? It’s pretty obvious what the answer to that is.
Read the whole thing here.