Obama Loses the New York Times

Katie Pavlich | June 07, 2013 7:42 AM

President Obama and the Department of Justice have received much criticism over the past few weeks for secret surveillance and dishonesty about multiple scandals surrounding the administration. But after news of the NSA collecting hundreds of millions of phone calls of American citizens broke earlier this week, even the

New York Times is fed up.

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it.

You can bet calls for Attorney General Eric Holder to resign will only grow louder from this point forward despite the President reaffirming his full support for Holder earlier this week.

The editorial originally declared that the Obama “administration has lost all credibility” as a result of the recently revealed news that the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been secretly collecting call data from American users of Verizon under the authority of the Patriot Act.

But hours later the stinging sentence had been modified to read the Obama “administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.” [Emphasis added]