As President Donald Trump plans a slew of policies that could dismantle key parts of Barack Obama’s presidential legacy, the former president seems to be returning to his roots as a Saul Alinsky-style radical community organizer.
This time Obama and his associates’ objective is to stop Trump’s domestic and foreign policy agendas on virtually all fronts – immigration reform, border security, the roll back of the controversial Obamacare system and more. According to some accounts, Obama and his associates may be seeking no less than Trump’s impeachment.
The strategies for disruption seem to include everything from nonprofit front-group activism and the filing of legal motions to support for protest movements targeting Trump and top administration officials.
This as Trump works to secure America’s porous borders, fix the faltering economy, replace Obama’s largely failed healthcare law, combat the scourge of radical Islamic terrorism, contend with the threat of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and address the issue of illegal immigration that was put on steroids during Obama’s two terms in office.
The latest sign of Obama’s fingerprints on Trump disruption plots comes from reports on Monday that former Obama administration staffers have formed a group to closely monitor the Trump administration.
FoxNews.com reported:
Known as American Oversight, the group will search for anything that seems amiss, whether it touches on ethics or fraud, among other potential problems, the group’s executive director, Austin Evers, told Fox News.
“We are conducting oversight because Congress won’t,” said Evers, who was a State Department lawyer in the Obama administration. “We are using tools available to American citizens to investigate instances of fraud, corruption, violation of ethics rules, you name it. If there’s something that Congress should be investigating, we will be.”
Earlier this month, the Daily Mail reported that Obama’s top adviser, Valerie Jarrett, has moved into Obama’s multi-million dollar rental home in the nation’s capital. The newspaper claimed Obama is turning his home “into the nerve center of the mounting insurgency against” Trump.
“Obama’s goal, according to a close family friend, is to oust Trump from the presidency either by forcing his resignation or through his impeachment,” reported the Daily Mail.
Evidence of Obama’s close associations with efforts to oppose Trump emerged two weeks ago when a group of former top lawyers for the Obama administration formed their own organization aimed at utilizing legal advocacy methods to target Trump’s policies.
That organization is calling itself United to Protect Democracy, drawing on the theme of Obama’s farewell speech last month.
The legal activist group is already partnered with an organization heavily financed by billionaire George Soros and is led by a former Obama lawyer who previously worked at a Soros-financed global activist outfit, this reporter documented.
Then there is also evidence of Obama-connected support for protests targeting Trump.
Last month, it was reported that Organizing for Action, the activist group that emerged from Obama’s first presidential campaign, has partnered with the newly-formed Indivisible Project for “online trainings” on how to protest Trump’s agenda. One week earlier, Breitbart News extensively reported that Indivisible leaders are openly associated with groups financed by billionaire George Soros.
Organizing for Action (OFA) is a so-called community organizing project that sprung from Obama’s 2012 campaign organization, Organizing for America, becoming a nonprofit described by the Washington Post as “advocat[ing] for the president’s policies.”
Last month, NBC News reported on OFA’s new actions and its partnership with Indivisible:
OFA has hired 14 field organizers in states home to key senators as part of its campaign to defend Obama’s signature healthcare law. To run that campaign, the group hired Saumya Narechania – the former national field director at Enroll America, which worked to sign people up for Obamacare – and a deputy campaign manager. …
OFA says more than 1,800 people have applied to its Spring Community Engagement Fellowship, a six-week training program, two-thirds of whom have not previously been involved with OFA.
And the group has teamed up with Indivisible, a buzzy newcomer to the progressive movement, to offer organizing training that began Thursday night with a video conference. A combined 25,000 people have registered to participate in those trainings, OFA said.
Writing at the New York Post, researcher and reporter Paul Sperry charged that Obama “is intimately involved in OFA operations and even tweets from the group’s account. In fact, he gave marching orders to OFA foot soldiers following Trump’s upset victory.”
Sperry was referring to comments Obama reportedly made in a November conference call with so-called grassroots supporters, telling them “Now is the time for some organizing.”
Obama hinted he will return to community organizing, stating: “I promise you that next year Michelle and I are going to be right there with you, and the clouds are going to start parting and the sun is going to come back out, and we’re going to be busy, involved in the amazing stuff that we’ve been doing all these years before.”
Perry further reported on OFA:
In what’s shaping up to be a highly unusual post-presidency, Obama isn’t just staying behind in Washington. He’s working behind the scenes to set up what will effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his threatened legacy, but to sabotage the incoming administration and its popular “America First” agenda.
He’s doing it through a network of leftist nonprofits led by Organizing for Action. Normally you’d expect an organization set up to support a politician and his agenda to close up shop after that candidate leaves office, but not Obama’s OFA. Rather, it’s gearing up for battle, with a growing war chest and more than 250 offices across the country.
Meanwhile, Politico recently profiled the OFA-affiliated Indivisible, reporting the group has been aided by MoveOn.org and the ACLU.
The associations between the OFA-affiliated Indivisible and the Soros-financed MoveOn.org and ACLU may be telling since the latter two groups have been central to recent efforts to stop Trump.
Two weeks ago, within hours of reports surfacing that Attorney General Jeff Sessions held two conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. while he was Alabama’s senator and served on the Armed Services Committee, MoveOn.org was already outside the U.S. Department of Justice building calling for Sessions’ resignation.
Sessions maintains that the conversations did not concern the 2016 presidential campaign. He served as an informal adviser to Trump during the presidential race.
MoveOn.org and Indivisible are also planning what the groups claim will be a massive anti-Trump Tax March in Washington and at least 60 other locations on April 15.
Meanwhile, lawyers from the ACLU and other groups financed by Soros were signatories to a lawsuit filed to block Trump’s original refugee order. In response to the lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly issued an emergency order that temporarily blocked U.S. authorities from deporting travelers from the nations listed in Trump’s executive order.
Obama’s newfound activism seems to bring him back to his early days in the 1980s as an Alinsky-inspired community organizer working in the South Side of Chicago.
As a reporter at WND.com, this journalist previously extensively documented Obama’s ties to Alinsky ideology.
Here are a few samples:
The executive director of an activist organization that taught Alinsky’s tactics of direct action, confrontation and intimidation was part of the team that developed volunteers for President Obama’s 2008 campaign.
Jackie Kendall, executive director of the Midwest Academy, was on the team that developed Camp Obama, a two-to-four day intensive course run in conjunction with Obama’s campaign. It trained volunteers to become activists to help Obama win the presidential election.
WND also reported the Woods Fund, a nonprofit for which Obama served as a paid board director from 1999 to December 2002, provided capital to the Midwest Academy.
Obama sat on the Woods Fund board alongside William Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist organization.
Also, in 1998, Obama participated in a panel discussion praising Alinsky alongside Midwest Academy’s founder Heather Booth, an organizer and dedicated disciple of Alinsky.
The panel discussion following the opening performance in Chicago of the play “The Love Song of Saul Alinsky,” a work described by the Chicago Sun-Times as “bringing to life one of America’s greatest community organizers.”
Obama participated in the discussion alongside other Alinskyites, including Booth, political analyst Aaron Freeman, Don Turner of the Chicago Federation of Labor and Northwestern University history professor Charles Paine.
Perhaps tellingly, Alinsky’s son, L. David Alinsky, praised Obama in August 2008 for his showing at the Democratic National Convention, which had the “elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style,” according to the son.
David Alinsky wrote:
Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well.
I am proud to see that my father’s model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008. It is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday.
David Horowitz, founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a former 1960’s radical, considers Alinsky to be the “communist/Marxist fellow-traveler who helped establish the dual political tactics of confrontation and infiltration that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States.”
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
With research by Brenda J. Elliott.
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