Everyone has known long before Barack Obama took office that he was a narcissist. Now a former senior executive of the National Security Agency and a whistleblower is claiming that that entire administration are exhibiting narcissistic tendencies as demonstrated in their targeting of journalists and their sources.
In an interview with the Daily Caller, Thomas Drake, a former senior executive of the National Security Agency and a whistleblower who was prosecuted by the Obama administration, said “This administration is evidencing what many would call very significant narcissistic tendencies, meaning, when narcissists are confronted by themselves looking in the mirror, they want to smash the mirror.”
“It’s extremely uncomfortable to have to look at what you are actually doing,” he said, “and so they’re projecting, they project onto the source of what is making them look bad.”
“Reporters have shared with me privately that some of their most trusted sources within government are increasingly afraid to speak with them, even off-the-record, for fear that they will be monitored and surveilled… That’s self-censorship.”
Josh Peterson writes,
Such a fear of speaking to the press, he said, interferes with the freedom of association — recognized in the First Amendment as an essential component of free speech.
Reporters are then left with talking points and privileged access to government officials, he explained, all amounting to government propaganda.
Drake was first caught up in the whistleblower investigations of the second Bush administration, but was indicted and prosecuted under the Espionage Act by the Obama administration in 2010.
Drake passed along unclassified information about wasteful spending on the development of the National Security Agency’s post-9/11 secret surveillance program. For that, he was singled out by the Obama administration for indictment and prosecution.
“We were the canaries in the coal mine,” Drake said.
Mr. Drake fought against the charges. They were ultimately dropped in 2011 in exchange for a guilty plea to a misdemeanor. “I became a criminal and was labeled an enemy of the state because I was calling out government wrongdoing and illegality,” he said.
When Drake heard of the Obama Justice Department’s targeting of Associated Press reporters and editors, he took to his Twitter account.
4all hypertwitterlating abt gov’t spying on AP. Wake up Amerika! Welcome 2 NatSec surveillance state! Just the tip. Whereya been past 10yrs?
— Thomas Drake (@Thomas_Drake1) May 14, 2013
Drake did get one reply that went even further:
@thomas_drake1 Where have they been for the last 50? Government has been spying illegally on the media and citizens since the 1960s!
— Lisa Pease (@lisapease) May 14, 2013
Fox News indicated that the DOJ’s seizing of one of their reporters was a serious abuse of power.
The Justice Department did more than seize a Fox News reporter’s emails while suggesting he was a criminal “co-conspirator” in a leak case — it did so under one of the most serious wartime laws in America, the Espionage Act.
It’s the same law used by the Nixon administration to go after The New York Times and Daniel Ellsberg over the leak of the Pentagon Papers. It’s the law used to charge the Rosenbergs, American communists, for allegedly passing secret information to the Soviet Union — they were executed for the offense in 1953.
One Washington attorney, who represents two defendants recently charged under that World War I-era law, told FoxNews.com that the decision by the Justice Department to invoke it in the current case is “beyond chilling” — and could set a dangerous precedent for going after reporters.
The current administration has targeted whistleblowers more than any previous administration. The Obama administration is not just narcissistic. They are tyrannical.
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