Barack Obama unilaterally tries to recuse Susan Rice from #Benghazi testimony.

Via Ed Driscoll comes something I hadn’t considered: Susan Rice as National Security Advisor means that Barack Obama thinks that he can claim executive privilege to keep her from testifying.

A Google News search on [“Susan Rice” “executive privilege”] (typed exactly as indicated between brackets) returns two stories. The main one is at Fox News, where K.T. McFarland pointed out that President Obama, now that he has appointed Susan Rice to be his National Security Adviser, can invoke executive privilege to keep her from testifying before Congress. The second is at Mediate, and notes that McFarland said the same thing to Fox News Channel anchor Martha MacCallum earlier today.

So I think that we have established here that the President is hiding something about Benghazi; we’re now just trying to figure out what Barack Obama is hiding*.

Although… it may simply be that Barack Obama is engaged in running out the clock.  There are days when I think that the President would be perfectly content to speed up time between now and January 2017; after all, once he leaves office the man has a pleasant two decades or so scheduled of people giving Obama quite large sums of money for the privilege of kissing up to him.  It’s the ultimate earthly paradise for a man who has aggressively avoided responsibility and industriousness; as someone who aspires to dizzying new heights of laziness and irresponsibility himself, it’s hard not to feel at least a little admiration for somebody this good at the con game.

Moe Lane

*If someone out there doesn’t like this characterization of mine… why, it’s falsifiable!  All Barack Obama has to do is to stop stonewalling the people who are (quite rightly) trying to do some long-overdue oversight of the Executive Branch.

13 thoughts on “Barack Obama unilaterally tries to recuse Susan Rice from #Benghazi testimony.”

  1. A minor quibble. While Obama himself may wish to run out the clock and retire to a nice sinecure as a college president or UN secretary general, the mendacious twatwaffles (hat tip to Protein Wisdom for that turn of phrase) he surrounds himself with are not nearly so .. lazy.
    .
    Mew

    1. We all look forward to the days when Obama can return to his old Chicago home…

        2. Well, don’t look at me. I have Ashley Judd to deal with…since my evil plot to pawn off her of on Kentucky failed because of Mitch McConnell.

  2. I have a feeling if Republicans in Congress pushed it, they could get a federal court to say that while Obama can shield Rice about the stuff she did/is doing as Nat’l Security Advisor, anything before that is fair game and refusing to testify about that risks contempt of Congress charges.

    1. If any of the young firebrands (Rand, Lee, Johnson, Cruz, hell I’ll include Rubio if he wants to do some fence-mending) are on the right committee .. just force her to take the 5th or cite executive privilege *on the record*.
      .
      There are plenty of wedges that can be used to peel off Dems in the Senate from Obama .. that the GOP isn’t using them …
      .
      Mew

    2. Republicans lack that kind of spine. All they have is McConnell’s jowls quivering in anger.

  3. “… and refusing to testify about that risks contempt of Congress charges.”
     
    You mean contempt of Congress charges of the sort that’s ruined — just ruined! — Eric Holder’s career? I’m sure that Rice and Obama would be quaking in abject terror.

  4. I suspect he doesn’t want her to testify as to her knowledge about “trading high level hostages” that AQ Egypt just let slip as the goal of the attack.

  5. Thanks for pointing this out Moe, personally my first thought to this appointment was that Obama is going to try to run the State Department with the NS Advisor and bypass the Secretary of State similar to what Nixon did with Kissinger, or at least what Dems CLAIM Nixon did with Kissinger.

    1. My first thought is Susan Rice was promised a plum government job (Secretary of State) for going out to the Sunday morning shows on all the networks and beclowning herself on Benghazi. She and BO didn’t count on John Kerry and his buddies in the Senate pulling a machiavelli to get often wrong but never in doubt Kerry is plum send off. So BO just paying a debt like he always does with some taxpayer dollars…well that was my thought.

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