With the walls closing in on Obama, Ben Rhodes weaves a sticky narrative web

Now that the Mueller report is out, effectively exonerating President Trump of colluding with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton, the Trump administration has begun investigations as to the origins of the phony Steele dossier and the illegal surveillance of his campaign. It's a trail that's unlikely to lead anywhere but to the office of embittered President Obama, and independent reporter Nicholas Ballasy got a chance to ask the Obama administration's former deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, whether he thought this investigation would eventually lead. His response was about what you might expect — nowhere Obama might be, along with a string of "narratives," so fake that if you weren't suspicious Obama knew anything about the abuses of power going on, you would be after hearing Rhodes.

There he is, in all his twerpy glory, situated between two bottles of screwtop wine, using the teenage girl's favorite word "like" as a particle, and perhaps most significantly, blinking his eyes every time he insists that the Obama administration knew nothing about the Steele dossier or the effort to spy on the Trump campaign, even as Ballasy shows admirable restraint in not belting the guy across the table. It's interesting that he starts the interview confidently dismissive, but then, seemingly getting into his cups, gets more emphatic and detailed, repeating all sorts of defensive denials, even as the reporter was quite gentle on him. Here's one of Rhodes's clearest whoppers — he actually seems to contradict himself with this sequence — from Ballasy's report on PJ Media: "We had nothing to do with that, nothing. I saw it – I heard about it at the very end when, you know, in January of 2017, like, we weren't involved in commissioning the dossier like that's crazy, you know. We learned about it when it was in the report that was appended to the report that went to Congress at the end of the administration," Rhodes said. "I have been investigated by these committees and I'm telling you they didn't find it. No, we had nothing to do with the dossier. I mean, like literally, nothing to do with this dossier." He heard of the Steele dossier only after President Trump became president? Even though it was all over the news in late 2016? File under 'disingenuous.' Suddenly, the man who suggests he gets all his information from the Washington Post...forgot to read the paper. Now, in Rhodes's defense, it's possible he was kept out of the loop by the Obama administration due to his sheer twerpiness, his lightweight intellectual heft. Someone like Obama, or perhaps his more powerful minions, might have known he wasn't a guy to be trusted with a secret. And, as President Obama's public relations guy, he might not have had a need to know, although that is contradicted by the fact that he was first and foremost President Obama's chief propagandist, and very much a political operative. But Obama officials were intimately involved in the strategy of attempting to undercut candidate Trump and oust President Trump once he got into office. Sundance over at Conservative Treehouse has good documentation showing just how false that Sergeant Schultzy claim to know nothing is. The writer there has a strong timeline. Rhodes annoyingly repeats all sorts of now discredited "narratives" — one that stands out is the now discredited canard that the FBI investigation of Trump was all the result of poor hapless George Papadopoulos's bar talk with the Australian ambassador, not the Steele dossier. "To what end is this? We're going to attack law enforcement for — I mean, we know from the Mueller report that the initiation of the investigations came from, not the dossier, but from the contacts that George Papadopoulos had in London, right, so the whole origin of this stupid conspiracy theory has been disproven by exhaustive work. So, to me, the whole thing is a waste of time," Rhodes said. That fell apart long ago in this Byron York report. And the Mueller report itself cites a WikiLeaks dump as the origin of the investigation, not Papadopoulos. There are plenty of others. It all suggests that Rhodes has returned to fiction-writing as his means of projecting reality. To the rest of us, it looks like he's on his back foot and is trying to lie his way out of his self-created morass. Team Obama has got a sticky web to extricate itself from. Image credit: Nicolas Ballasy via shareable YouTube, screen shot.