Glenn spoke with TheBlaze national security editor and host of Real News Buck Sexton about the horrific week the Obama administration is having as several lies and scandals are finally becoming front page news. Most of the time the press feigns interest for a day or two and moves on - why will this time be different?
Read Buck's Op-Ed on the White House scandals HERE.
GLENN: Buck Sexton is here. He is our national security editor for TheBlaze. He just wrote a piece: Obama under siege from scandals. And it's ‑‑ you seem to be saying here, Buck, that you think this could take the administration down?
BUCK: Hey, Glenn. Yeah, there's no way that they will be able to get out of this unscathed meaning that the, at a minimum, nevermind what the actual mechanisms could be in play here for resignations and perhaps even ‑‑ I've never said that anyone ‑‑ that I thought that President Obama was at risk of impeachment. Depending on what we find out from this, I can't say that I don't think that's a possibility anymore. It depends on what these investigations show us. But the ‑‑
GLENN: Yesterday I ‑‑ yesterday I didn't call for it. I called for a thorough investigation and an independent committee to look at because let's see if they rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors provable, provable high crimes and misdemeanors. But I think he's absolutely impeachable on this if you can get enough whistleblowers to actually testify, if they don't scare them all away.
BUCK: I'm absolutely with you on that, Glenn. That's the question. What's provable here. What this administration is incredibly adept at is making sure that the bureaucracy is a place where they can hide, you know, the midlevel people and no one ever thinks that they are really going to get in trouble. It's easy to blame them and they always cut off the top level guys from that direct exposure. But, you know, the character and the intent of the administration now, I think for really any American who's ever going to open their eyes ‑‑ and there are some who won't ever do it. I know that. You know that. There's some who will just, they will be on the hope and change train until it goes off the cliff. They don't care. But anyone who's actually paying attention knows now that Benghazi has proved they will lie, the IRS scandals prove they will cheat, and the AP has proved they will steal, at least when it comes to records of journalists. So it's really astounding that all these things have come together at once and I think no matter what happens now, Glenn, nobody is ever going to be able to look at the Obama administration the same way. Claiming grotesque incompetence and negligence to get you out of scandal after scandal at some point changes people's opinion of you at a minimum if they can't prove, as you point out, that there was direct White House orders given for any of these issues.
GLENN: Okay. So let me take Benghazi. Let's play this audio from Panetta. This was the first real red flag. I mean, we were getting sources on this the night that it happened, but I ‑‑ for the regular people, if you're watching, when Leon Panetta went to congress and said, "Here's what happened on that day." Listen to this little piece of information.
PANETTA: But as to specifics about time, et cetera, et cetera, no, he just left that up to us.
AYOTTE: Did you have any further communications with him that night?
PANETTA: No.
AYOTTE: Did you have any other further communications, did he ever call you that night to say how are things going, what's going on, where's the consulate?
PANETTA: No.
AYOTTE: Did you communicate with anyone else at the White House that night?
PANETTA: No.
AYOTTE: No one else called you to say, "What ‑‑ how are things going?"
PANETTA: No.
AYOTTE: But just to be clear, that night he didn't ask you what assets we had available and how quickly they could respond and what we could do to help those individuals?
PANETTA: I think the biggest problem that night, Senator, was that nobody knew really what was going on there.
AYOTTE: And there was no followup during the night, at least from the White House directly?
PANETTA: No.
GLENN: Okay.
PAT: Wow.
GLENN: So when I heard that, Buck, I thought, okay, we're in the middle of a presidential campaign. What he is saying is the president, while an ambassador was being killed and we had an embassy under siege, you want to make the president look like this robust hero. You want to make him look ‑‑ I mean, he was practically PhotoShopped into the picture in the Osama Bin Laden compound, and what do they do here? They make sure to announce clearly to everybody he was nowhere near. He had nothing to do with it, no calls, no nothing. I knew immediately, gun‑running. There's something very, very bad going on in this embassy and they know if it comes out, it will taint him. So he just disappeared that night. Am I reading this wrong?
BUCK: Yeah, I don't want to be flippant about this, but I was willing to stay up all night many times to study for sociology tests when I was in college. And the fact that the president didn't roll up his sleeves and didn't not go to sleep at all until he found out exactly what was happening with the U.S. ambassador. I mean, he's the commander this chief.
PAT: Incredible.
BUCK: It's so beyond the pale of what's acceptable and even the ideas that you've laid out now about how he may have been ‑‑ I think there were two things going on. There was a panic, if you will, a panic that came from the possibility that maybe things would come to light that they did not want to come to light and, you know, I'm being circumspect about these things on purpose. There's also the other side of this which is just the recognition that if the president accepted the fact, accepted his responsibility that he was in ‑‑ he was the head of the military that night, he is the leader of this country, then he would have to make decisions that would be attributable to him. Instead ‑‑ because you understand how the machinery works ‑‑ he allowed subordinates to handle this. I'm sure he gave them direction, don't get me wrong, but he just left enough plausible deniability so that we are where we are now, which is a place where we recognize all these decisions that were made were political. We left people out there to die. We did not call in the cavalry but, oh, the president, we don't know what he was doing then. They managed to do what they intended to do that night.
GLENN: I tell you that doesn't make any sense to me and here's why: Because, you know, if somebody is on the scene of the ‑‑ now, here's the scary thing. It doesn't seem to matter to America. But if you're really, if you're the president of the United States, it is better to have tried and failed than to not try at all. And our president walked away and said, "I'm going to bed, guys. Goodnight." I'm telling you, what they did was they had to isolate.
Buck, I know you're being circumspect of all of this stuff, and it's the right thing to do, but I'm telling you we were running guns and missiles over to Turkey. We know about the boat, we know about the captain, we know about all of it. Between what was happening with the ambassador and what was happening with gun‑running ‑‑ and I'll let the press figure that one out ‑‑ between those two things, they told the president, "You can't be anywhere near this." He knew. He knew. So Buck, you have faith that this is ‑‑ this somehow or another is actually going to be pursued, that the media is not somehow or another, they actually get it this time?
BUCK: Glenn, if it's not now, it's never. If the American people, if the media specifically in this case ‑‑ I mean, this isn't a shot across the bow for the media. I mean, this is a full volley into their hole. I mean, this is absolutely a declaration that you have no rights whatsoever under the First Amendment as a press organization. If the federal government believes that you have this was that it wants, it's going to get it, and it doesn't matter if they bring in a whole lot of innocent people in the process. There is so little dignity left, I think, Glenn, for the big media. And by the way, I know you must have felt a tremendous amount of pride, I know I did just being a member of TheBlaze team when this IRS story breaks and we're like, "Hey, yeah, TheBlaze, we were writing about this over a year ago. We were telling you about this, you know, this organization that's relatively new compared to the New York Times. And they now, if they want to get any shred of credibility back, if they want anyone to think that they are, in fact, worthy of the title "journalist," they will go after this like it is the D‑day invasion. I mean, they will put all their resources into exposing the administration on this.
Will they do it, Glenn? At this point it's hard for me to be disappointed in the media and it's hard for me to be disappointed in honestly Americans who just refuse to accept what this administration is, which is an administration that is completely lacking in character, that politicizes everything, and views its hold on power as the single most important end that it has.
GLENN: Real quick I've only got about a minute but there is one other factor in them not covering things and that is fear. This administration is going after whistleblowers and they are destroying. And you being a guy in the CIA and have worked at the White House, you know what happens to everybody underneath. You just said it: They take care of everybody on top an they destroy anybody underneath.
BUCK: It couldn't be any easier, Glenn, for them to intimidate. You said whistleblowers coming forward, you are absolutely right. There are people right now I think who have information that could fill in the blanks that could change our ‑‑ already, I mean the perception, how much worse can it get? Oh, it can get worse.
GLENN: Oh, it's much worse.
BUCK: But there are people right now with that information who are facing financial ruin, the loss of their career and the loss of their freedom. They are not above doing that. They will put people in federal prison who speak out of turn, and they have ways of doing this. I mean, they can hold over. They can say, "We're not going to bring the charges now. We're going to bring them in a year when no one's paying attention to this issue." So anybody who comes out is taking a tremendous personal risk, they know that, and they threaten people. They threaten people all the time in the bureaucracy. And what do you have? You're a guy, you're not making that much money. You're going to go up against the federal government. They get paid to ruin your life. They don't care how much it costs. Meanwhile you've got a family to feed. So Glenn, this he know that they can probably stifle some whistleblowers but at this point some people may just say, "You know what? America's too precious and I don't even care anymore." And that's the wild card that they can't account for.
GLENN: I hope you're right, Buck. Thank you very much. The article is up on TheBlaze now: Obama under siege from scandals by Buck Sexton, why he thinks that this will neuter and forever change, scar, and neuter the White House, if not kick them out of the White House. Thanks, Buck. Talk to you again.
BUCK: Thank you.
