Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (11 page)

On March 10, 2009, Freeman’s “inventive mind” was on full, festering display in an open letter blasting the “Israel Lobby” for “character assassination” upon his withdrawal:

I have concluded that the barrage of libelous distortions of my record would not cease upon my entry into office. The effort to smear me and to destroy my credibility would instead continue. I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country. I agreed to chair the NIC to strengthen it and protect it against politicization, not to introduce it to efforts by a special interest group to assert control over it through a protracted political campaign.

The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.
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The screed says less about Freeman than it does about the Obama administration’s AWOL vetting system. Where were the watchdogs to guard against terror-friendly, conspiracy-minded kooks slipping into sensitive intelligence positions? Like so many of the other withdrawal cases that plagued the White House, Freeman’s appointment never should have happened in the first place. Incompetence, inattention to detail, and apathy were common threads—running stitches—that carried through the Richardson and Daschle cases to the Killefer ship-jumping to the Treasury and EPA dropouts. The Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney summed up the Freeman fiasco in four words: “Garbage in, garbage out.”
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This was fast becoming the epigram for the White House. And no amount of media photoshopping, airbrushing, and diversionary fluff could cover the stench.

Which brings us to Michelle Obama. Behind the glamorous exterior and soft-focus lens is a hardened influence-peddler on par with Obama’s dropouts. Lucky for the Mrs. Obama, first ladies don’t require Senate confirmation.

CHAPTER 2

BITTER HALF

FIRST CRONY MICHELLE OBAMA

W
hoopi Goldberg was giddy with laughter in June 2008 as she introduced “our very special guest co-host, who actually could be the next first lady of the United States of America, Michelle Obama!” After the studio audience for ABC’s
The View
had given her a standing ovation, the honored guest said, “I have to be greeted properly—fist-bump, please,” exchanging the gesture with her hostesses. The first question went to Barbara Walters, who asked about that day’s
New York Times
story that Mrs. Obama’s appearance on the show was aimed at “softening her reputation.”
¹

Hard-hitting questions aren’t what
The View
is about, but the chummy treatment Michelle Obama got from Whoopi, Barbara, and the gang was hardly different than the adulatory coverage she has received from the rest of a supposedly skeptical press corps. Nothing revealed the news media’s love-struck idolization of Barack Obama more than the way they constantly compared him to their favorite president JFK, with Michelle cast in the role of the media’s favorite first lady. In January 2008, shortly after Obama was endorsed by the Kennedy clan—Teddy, his son Patrick, and JFK’s daughter Caroline—Helena Andrews of
Politico
invoked the Jacqueline Kennedy comparison: “Michelle cut the faultless figure of the quintessential president’s wife last Saturday in South Carolina—the president, of course, being John F. Kennedy and the wife being Jackie.”
²
CBS News gushed after the election: “Change is definitely coming to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., as our next first lady, Michelle Obama, is bringing a new sense of style to the White House. Obama follows in the fashion footsteps of first ladies like Jackie Kennedy, who was known for her sophistication and elegance.”
³

The glamorous “Camelot” aura of the Kennedy administration was obviously what the media had in mind with this comparison, rather than more recent revelations about JFK’s ties to the Chicago mob. As with her husband, however, the new First Lady’s media-generated image doesn’t quite match the reality of her life.

Beneath the cultured pearls, sleeveless designer dresses, and false eyelashes applied by her full-time makeup artist, Michelle Robinson Obama is a hardball Chicago politico. Star-struck liberal journalists swoon over Michelle O.’s bare arms, but it’s her bare knuckles they should be watching. Anyone who criticizes her is at risk of being labeled a racist. The First Lady long ago showed a willingness to employ accusations of racial oppression as a defense against criticism. Mrs. Obama’s senior thesis at Princeton University, titled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” bemoaned her racial otherness. The aggrieved Ivy Leaguer accused her university of pushing her down the dreaded path toward “further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.”
⁴

Rather than remaining “on the periphery,” however, Mrs. Obama climbed the crooked Chicago ladder on a rapid ascent to the top. She hopped from Princeton to Harvard to prestigious law firms, cushy non-profit gigs, and an exclusive Hyde Park manse, before landing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the greatest of ease. While regaling campaign crowds with complaints about her burdensome education loans and unhappiness with the lily-white corporate world, she neglected to mention that it was a white male Princeton alum, Sidley & Austin corporate law partner Stephen Carlson, who went beyond the call of duty to bring her from her imagined “periphery” to the center of power. He gave her career advice and summer work suggestions while she was an undergrad, and then reached out to her again when she was at Harvard Law. She had a grand time as a summer associate in 1987, accepted a full-time job upon graduation, and never looked back.
⁵

In the Chicago patronage culture that made Michelle Obama, the color that matters most is neither black nor white, it is green—the color of money. Mrs. Obama was literally born into the Chicago political corruptocracy. Her father, Fraser Robinson, was a volunteer precinct captain for the Democrat Party.
Washington Post
writer Liza Mundy called him “an essential member of the powerful political machine run by [Richard J.] Daley, who, in addition to being mayor, was the chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee, meaning he controlled both the government and the political party, and could use one to do the other’s bidding.” Former alderman Leon Despres bluntly told Mundy that it was “overwhelmingly likely” that Robinson’s job at the city water department was a reward for his loyalty. “The water department, where Fraser Robinson worked, was a renowned repository of patronage jobs.”
⁶

Why such little scrutiny of Michelle the Merciless (or “That Other Michelle,” as she’s known in my house) and her crony-aided rise to power? Like her husband, Mrs. Obama is quick to play the victim card when her ill-considered statements and her dealings come under scrutiny. I don’t call her President Obama’s bitter half for nothing.

Remember when the Tennessee Republican Party ran a hard-hitting ad in spring 2008 skewering Mrs. Obama’s patriotism-impaired remark at a Wisconsin campaign rally (“For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country”)? The Obamas took to ABC’s
Good Morning America
to bemoan the “low class” and “detestable” criticisms. Obama insisted indignantly that “these folks should lay off my wife.” Mrs. Obama laughed softly at his side.
⁷

Perhaps the self-proclaimed “South Side girl” chuckled because she knew how transparently ridiculous her hubby’s spousal defense really was. Mrs. Obama, he argued to
Glamour
magazine, was an innocent bystander untrained in the rough and tumble ways of political life:

SENATOR OBAMA: It’s infuriating, but it’s not surprising, because let’s face it: What happened was that the conservative press—FOX News and the
National Review
and columnists of every ilk—went fairly deliberately at her in a pretty systematic way... and treated her as the candidate in a way that you just rarely see the Democrats try to do against Republicans. And I’ve said this before: I would never have my campaign engage in a concerted effort to make Cindy McCain an issue, and I would not expect the Democratic National Committee or people who were allied with me to do it. Because essentially, spouses are civilians. They didn’t sign up for this.
⁸

Mrs. Obama most certainly signed up for heightened public scrutiny of her public words and deeds. She signed up for it the minute she voluntarily stepped on the campaign trail to sell her husband as America’s soul-fixer. She signed up for it when she made herself a public spokeswoman for working mothers and chief public surrogate for her husband’s legislative agenda. She signed up for it when she consciously and continuously milked liberal bitterness on the campaign trail to drum up votes for her husband. If she couldn’t stand what little heat she was exposed to during the presidential election season, she should have refrained from grabbing the closest microphone to complain repeatedly about America’s health care, lack of compassion, and the evil lure of corporate America.

Exposing the First Lady’s crony history is vital to understanding the depth and breadth of her hubby’s ethical corruption. The couple’s political and financial fortunes have been intertwined since their earliest days together in Chicago. Their marital partnership is a business partnership that has profound domestic policy consequences. Like Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama intends to play a hands-on role as a policy advocate the next four years—and she has filled her staff with seasoned Chicago operatives like herself with longtime big business ties and left-wing agendas. (As you’ll see throughout this book, the two are far from mutually exclusive.)

Even the most seemingly innocuous of Mrs. Obama’s aides in the White House is a credentialed crony. Take the First Lady’s social secretary, Desirée Rogers. Mrs. Obama heaped praise on her dear friend’s “phenomenal job” of creating a “People’s House.”
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Fawning profiles of Rogers focused on the aide’s taste in clothes and art. But in true Obama fashion, the first lady chose a hometown political pal who is an expert in much more than china patterns and scheduling matters. Rogers sees herself not merely as a party planner, but as the overseer of the White House “strategy for events.” While she pays lip service to exercising restraint in Washington (“As we go through our struggle, there is a need to be prudent”), Rogers defended the lavish “Camelot” scene that quickly became an Obama hallmark in the economically stressed first 100 days. The celebrity-filled cocktail nights and conga lines are a means to end, she explained to National Public Radio:

My belief is that we don’t always get everything accomplished over a meeting table,” Rogers says. “Many times it’s over cocktails, it’s over dinner and so the other piece to our work will be what kind of events can we create?
¹⁰

Rogers received unwanted attention in the fall of 2009 after reality TV wannabes Michele and Tareq Salahi crashed a state dinner and shook hands with President Obama and the prime minister of India. In the subsequent hubbub, it became clear that Rogers had failed to place staffers at security checkpoints as her predecessors had done. A few months later, Rogers resigned.

Rogers, whose personal motto is
laissez les bon temps rouler
(let the good times roll)
¹¹
, was too busy partying with guests and talking to reporters about her designer gown to worry about security. A former first lady chief of staff told ABC News she could not recall a social secretary attending a dinner rather than working it.
¹²
The House Homeland Security Committee, chaired by Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) asked Rogers to answer questions about what happened that night. Naturally, the most transparent White House in American history invoked Executive privilege. “I think you know that based on separation of powers, staff here don’t go to testify in front of Congress,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs explained.
¹³

Legal analysts could hardly believe it. “I’d completely fall out of my chair if they invoked Executive privilege with regards to a social secretary arranging a party,” George Mason professor Mark Rozell told
Time
magazine.

But then Ms. Rogers was no ordinary White House staffer. With her savvy fundraising skills, she had helped keep Team Obama rolling in dough during the 2008 presidential campaign. According to left-wing watchdog Public Citizen, Rogers bundled more than $200,000 for Obama and contributed $28,500 to committees supporting her good friend.
¹⁴
A Harvard MBA and former Allstate Financial executive, Rogers spent 2004 to 2008 as head of Peoples Gas and North Shore Gas, a $1.1 billion natural gas utility in Chicago. During her tenure, the utility’s parent company was sued for artificially inflating gas prices; a settlement with Illinois regulators required the firm to refund $100 million to consumers. Separate actions resulted in fines of $500,000 for a backlog of overdue meter safety inspections and $1 million for failing to properly inspect distribution pipes.
¹⁵
In April 2009, financial disclosure forms revealed that Rogers “collected more than $1 million for her work as president of two gas companies for part of 2008. Later, she earned a $350,000 salary from Allstate Financial as president of its social-networking division, and $150,000 in board fees from Equity Residential, a real-estate investment trust in which she also holds at least $250,000 in stock.”
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