https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/barack-obama-scandal-legacy_us_5875a0fce4b05b7a465c67ed

WASHINGTON ― Scandal has consumed the final four years of every two-term president in modern history ― George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon. Barack Obama’s administration is the exception.
While there were some minor scandals and resignations during Obama’s eight years in office, wrongdoing never fully occupied his presidency. None of it even directly touched the White House. There were no grand juries investigating his aides. There were no impeachments. There were neither convictions of White House staffers, nor pardons to protect government officials.
This was a significant departure from the previous four two-term presidents. George W. Bush’s second term featured convictions related to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, in which more than a dozen lobbyists and government officials went to jail for corruption. There were also convictions related to the politically motivated purge of U.S. attorneys and the retaliatory leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity.
As everyone who was sentient in the 1990s recalls, Clinton was impeached over his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. Reagan’s second term was plagued by corruption investigations ranging from Iran-Contra to Wedtech, a contracting scandal that led to the resignation of Attorney General Ed Meese. And, of course, there were Nixon’s final two years in office, which featured the convictions of 48 government officials and the first presidential resignation over corruption.
All of these past scandals directly involved White House staff.
Karl Rove, Bush’s top political adviser, and Lewis Libby, a senior adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, both were implicated in leaking Plame’s name to the press in retaliation for an op-ed that her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, wrote that showed that the president had lied about Iraq’s pursuit of nuclear weapons in his 2003 State of the Union address. While Rove was not prosecuted, Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice. Bush later commuted the sentence.
The Clinton administration’s major scandal was related to the president’s own actions.
The Iran-Contra scandal consumed the entire national security arm of the Reagan administration. At least eight members of the administration were indicted, and there were multiple convictions, although some were later overturned due to jury tampering, and President George H.W. Bush pardoned others.
The 1972 Watergate scandal and ensuing revelations of campaign finance violations, cover-ups and retaliations destroyed the Nixon administration.
It’s not an accident that Obama’s presidency was largely scandal-free. His former ethics adviser, Norm Eisen, began to craft an ethics plan for the administration months before the 2008 election. When Obama won, Eisen began implementing these plans with other White House aides ― including Chris Lu, who served as assistant to the president and later as deputy secretary of labor, and the late Cassandra Butts. Obama himself got engaged in the planning, reportedly making line-edits to the guidelines, according to Eisen.

Bloomberg via Getty Images
President Barack Obama signs an executive order on ethics for his senior staff during a meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 21, 2009.

The plan required every Obama administration official and employee to sign an ethics pledge that included bans on accepting certain gifts and revolving-door rules that barred former staffers from lobbying the administration until Obama’s term ended. Officials leaving for other lines of work were banned from contacting their former agency for two years.
The administration also adopted a loose ban on registered lobbyists entering the administration. Not all of these commitments stuck. Obama granted waivers that allowed some lobbyists to be appointed to government positions. And lawyers who represented banks or other industries, but were not registered as official lobbyists, moved freely from the private sector to the public sector and back again.
By no means did the Obama administration thwart the power of special interests and big money in Washington. But the administration did avoid major scandals, which Eisen attributed to the “tone at the top.”
“Everyone knows the president himself is a man of great integrity,” Eisen said. “He cares about this, he talks about it.”
Still, there were examples of wrongdoing that led to resignations. Congress held Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt in the “Fast and Furious” investigation ― a botched Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms operation against gun smugglers from 2009 to 2011 that led to the death of a border control agent. Officials also resigned over the Internal Revenue Service’s alleged targeting of conservative groups for tax scrutiny, overspending on conferences at the General Services Administration, and hacking that exposed employee records at the Office of Personnel Management.
The years-long investigations into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s response to the attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi revealed that she kept a private email server. While that did not lead to any charges or convictions, it may have contributed to her election defeat.
“Look I’m not saying everything the administration, the White House, has done is perfect,” Eisen said. But, he added, “You can’t compare those to the major scandals that have afflicted previous White Houses, where people have gone to jail. There’s been nothing like that under Obama.”
President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, is set to enter office with unprecedented conflicts of interest related to his business empire, already setting the tone for a very different administration. He appears to be doing very little to vet his cabinet appointees. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the first speaker to be punished for ethics violations and a Trump ally, called for ethics laws to be loosened for Trump, and for the president-elect to issue preemptive pardons to appointees, so they won’t be punished for breaking the law.
While Trump was looking to fill out his Cabinet, he managed to consider the only major figure convicted of a crime in Obama’s eight-year administration. That person was former CIA Director David Petraeus.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article mischaracterized the U.S. mission in Benghazi as an embassy.

I do try it everyday of my life I thank god for living in a country that allows me to come and go as I please as long as I break no laws. Your statement on the surface is stupid and lacks any common sense. But that’s the right wing leave me alone until I need you.

OMG what a response: First I am not a racist.

2nd they were surprised that Trump let the press stay in the room they never asked Trump to remove the press. Where did you come up with that foolish comment that they repeatedly asked for the press to be removed. But thank god they stayed because The Nancy And Chuck show made him look like an incompetent idiot. He admitted that he will shut down the government if he doesn't
get what he wants, he sounded like a toddler. He wants tax payer funds to pay for a wall that he said during his campaign over 230 times that Mexico will pay for it.

It sounds like a typical out of touch statement that all you want is to be left alone. Okay who educated you. What highways do you drive on, what military protects you, who protects the air you breath the food you eat, is it a good feeling to have a fire station and police department in your home town.

So nobody in your family ever got a food stamp or Medicaid, Medicare or any government subsidy. Nobody ever got a mortgage nothing you never received any kind of government subsidy.

So you want government out of your life so the rule of law should be out the window. 150 years ago people use to throw there garbage in the streets was it government getting invovled with your life. Maybe you should think a little before you make such a statement. Do you feel safe when you get on a plane. What laws are you talking about that infringe on your way of life.

And as for SS you do sure sound like you have no clue as to what your talking about. Yes when SS was first started it could not be touch and it still hasn’t been touched but being ignorant is a right wing thing. SS is in trouble because of Ronald Reagan who created the SS amendment tax in 1982 it was the largest Tax increase on the American middle class in History. But again Right wing ignorance rises to the surface. Ronald Reagan took that SS amendment tax and put in into the general fund to hide the massive deficit that hisxwealthy tax cuts were creating. He borrowed $1.2 trillion from SS. So if you want to bring that up then put the blame exactly where it belongs

https://www.politicususa.com/2018/12/07/rex-tillerson-trump-illegal.html

Former Sec. of State Rex Tillerson made a rare public appearance and said that Trump consistently tried to break the law and do illegal things.

Tillerson said the two had starkly different styles and did not share a common value system.

“So often, the president would say here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it and I would have to say to him, Mr. President I understand what you want to do but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law,” Tillerson said.
Trump would get very frustrated when they would have those conversations, he said.
“I’d say here’s what we can do,” Tillerson said. “We can go back to Congress and get this law changed. And if that’s what you want to do, there’s nothing wrong with that. I told him I’m ready to go up there and fight the fight, if that’s what you want to do.”
Tillerson has largely been invisible since being pushed out as Trump’s first secretary of state, and it was widely reported that Tillerson called Trump a moron.
Trump’s Default Mode Is Breaking The Law
Trump hasn’t tried to learn about government or governing. He trusts his “gut,” but unfortunately for America, his gut tells him to constantly break the law. Trump lacks brains. He lacks talent. His work ethic is non-existent, but he has survived for decades by breaking the law and not getting caught.
Donald Trump’s mentality is more suited to jail cell than the Oval Office. The country is being governed by a man who belongs in behind bars, not the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.

This whole fight between right and left, Dems and republicans, Trump supporters and those who don't has been fought in a way by the GOP that does not give people a chance to use their common sense and brains, seriously.

Think about this and you will see what I mean. The GOP has operated in as much secrecy as they could make happen. Look how many times dems fought with intelligence committee heads to make hearings and documents open to the public. When things are kept secret and the ones keeping them secret won't accurately represent them, the public that supports them is forced to decide who to believe. When a party says screw that, just release the documents and let people see for themselves it destroys the ability to spin that which is cloaked in mystery. Little leaks that support a narrative might look entirely different when you can see the whole thing.

Here's where using your head instead of party bias starts...which is easier to believe, your ability to read a document and see what it says, or the representation of what took place by the person you have chosen to believe? This has an obvious answer, the hard evidence you can see with your own eyes is going to trump the rhetoric that's spun without corroborating evidence that supports it. Think how many times the GOP asked their base to trust and believe their rendition of a hearing or documents.

Now if Dems come in and say lets put the BS and rhetoric away, we'll show you the documents, show you the transcripts of what's said in hearings, give people the opportunity to see for themselves and report simply on what you can see for yourself without asking for trust and belief in what they are saying...you might hate dems, think they are lying POS, but the fact remains that when things are done openly to where you can see them the thinking person has no choice but to go with the facts that they can see for themselves.

I think the right as a party has been forced to believe, and they have been misled in a way that hard cold evidence and transparency can overcome. I believe the right is fully capable of changing gears when faced with a different kind of facts and evidence, which we are going to be seeing a lot more of.

Right or left...you should be hoping I'm right

........................which is why everyone involved lied about it................repeatedly.

How many is it now who've been caught lying about Trump and his connections to Russia, 16? Let's see, there was Flynn, Sessions, Kushner, Don Jr., Manafort, Cohen..............yep, everyone even remotely connected to Trump's businesses, campaign, transition team, as well as past and current administration members.

It isn't rocket science folks, so even someone with average intelligence knows that when you believe you've done nothing wrong - you have no reason to lie about what you've done. When two people lie about the same thing, that might be a coincidence, but when three or a dozen do it......................it's a frickin conspiracy.

Put your politics and ideology back in your pocket......................wake up and smell the coffee..................or should I say...............Vodka.

Trump got rightly thumped. America is waking up to this budding autocrat. I'm waiting for others here to open their eyes and drop their Tribal blindness. However, the recent revelation that Trump wanted to prosecute his political enemies, Clinton and Comey, might end the Trump madness or any bid for 2020.

Section 4 of Article Two of the United States Constitution: "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." The charge of high crimes and misdemeanors covers allegations of misconduct by officials, such as perjury of oath, abuse of authority, bribery, intimidation, misuse of assets, failure to supervise, dereliction of duty, unbecoming conduct, refusal to obey a lawful order, chronic intoxication, and tax evasion. Trump's attempt to influence the Justice Department to pursue investigating Comey and Clinton is a clear case of "abuse of power," a high crime violation of his office. Don't believe me--but this a very bigly deal. The president is in deep, deep trouble. He has committed an impeachable offense.