Obama may claim a scandal-free administration, but after Fast and Furious, the targeting of the Tea Party by the IRS, the Benghazi cover-up, Hillary's emails, to name a few, Spygate is just the latest. I use the plural "occupants" because while Barack Hussein Obama may have been nominally the president of the United States, at the heart of every one of these scandals and virtually every administration move was Valerie Jarrett, who arguably could be considered our first female president .

Unless we assume the FBI went completely rogue, it is inconceivable that the deployments of personnel to spy on the Trump campaign and make provocative contact with its lesser members could have occurred without the full knowledge and control of the occupants of the Oval Office.

Jarrett, born in Iran to American parents, has been with the Obamas since her days as deputy chief of staff in the office of Chicago mayor Richard Daley, the younger. She hired Michelle Obama, then Michelle Robinson, to fill an opening in the mayor's office. As WikiLeaks describes the beginning of a long relationship (citations omitted):

In 1991, as deputy chief of staff to Mayor Richard Daley, Jarrett interviewed Michelle Robinson for an opening in the mayor's office, after which she immediately offered Robinson the job. Michelle Robinson asked for time to think and also asked Jarrett to meet Robinson's fiancé, Barack Obama. The three ended up meeting for dinner. After the dinner, Michelle took the job with the mayor's office, and Valerie Jarrett reportedly took the couple under her wing and "introduced them to a wealthier and better-connected Chicago than their own." Jarrett later took Michelle with her when Jarrett left the mayor's office to head Chicago's Department of Planning and Development.

The rest, as they say, is history. Not only did Valerie Jarrett become a mentor to the young Barack Obama, but she soon became what some have called Obama's Rasputin, someone who had more security than our personnel did in Benghazi.

She receives more protection than our Libyan ambassador, calls the president by his first name, dines and vacations with the First Family and had the power to call off three strikes against Osama bin Laden. Ambassador Chris Stevens did not have a Marine detail in Benghazi, Libya. But White House senior adviser and Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett reportedly had a full Secret Service detail on vacation in Martha's Vineyard. "Jarrett seems to have a 24-hour, around-the-clock detail, with five or six agents full time," Democratic pollster Pat Caddell said in an interview recently with Breitbart news. If Stevens had a similar escort, he'd probably be alive today. Such protection isn't usually available to senior advisers, but Jarrett is no ordinary adviser[.]

Indeed, she is not. She arguably has had more influence over Obama than anyone with the possible exception of Michelle Obama herself:

Her influence is shown by an account in Richard Miniter's book "Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him." It relates that at the urging of Jarrett, Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden on three occasions before finally approving the May 2, 2011, Navy SEAL mission. Seems she was concerned about the possible political harm to Obama if the mission failed[.] ... Edward Klein, author of the best-selling book about Obama, "The Amateur," once asked Obama if he ran every decision by Jarrett, and the president responded, "Absolutely." A former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor of the New York Times Magazine, Klein describes Jarrett as "ground zero in the Obama operation, the first couple's friend and consigliere."

If Obama ran every decision past Jarrett, the decision to plant spies in the Trump campaign certainly was among the most important. Obama's legacy was important to Jarrett, perhaps even more important than to Obama himself. She had to preserve it and ensure that the fundamental transformation of America continued. If Hillary could not win, Trump must be destroyed.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich also finds it inconceivable that the spying operation was launched without Jarrett signing off on it:

In a Tuesday appearance on Fox News, Newt Gingrich said that he believed former President Barack Obama and some of his top officials – including Valerie Jarrett – were involved in spying on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign[.] ... "Presently, someone will figure out to ask what did Valerie Jarrett know and when did she know it?" Gingrich said. "What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it? Because what you're seeing happen is, on every single level – and this is what happens with really big scandals – they keep on folding and they keep on folding and they keep on folding."

Former press secretary Ari Fleischer agrees that such an operation could have been authorized only with the full knowledge of Jarrett and Obama:

Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said Thursday he believes it's highly unlikely that President Obama did not know an FBI informant was in the Trump campaign. "We need to know why did it begin, who authorized it and what role did Barack Obama have. Did he know the FBI had informants there? I'll guarantee you the answer is yes. No FBI would put informants in another presidential campaign without permission from the White House, including the president," he said on "Outnumbered."

Can it be believed that, as key players in the Obama administration like Strzok and Page, as well as FBI director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, number four at Justice Bruce Ohr, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and many others were linked in a vast criminal conspiracy to keep Hillary Clinton out of prison and Donald Trump out of the White House, Barack Obama was blissfully unaware of all this? Rather, it can be plausibly argued that he was orchestrating it – perhaps not directly or by explicit orders, but rather by discussing the threat to his legacy Trump represented with his progressive minions and then simply saying, as crime bosses throughout history have done, "You know what needs to be done. Do it."

This scandal did not occur in a vacuum any more than did the weaponizing of the IRS to target the Tea Party and other conservative groups before Obama's 2012 re-election campaign occurred in a vacuum. The agencies under Obama's control have been politicized before and used to intimidate and destroy his political opponents

This fish is also rotting from the head. Back in April 2016, President Obama gave an interview in which he seemed to have foreknowledge that Hillary Clinton would be exonerated for her "carelessness" and did not "intentionally" mishandle classified emails, words that Comey would use just a few months later:

President Obama said Sunday that Hillary Clinton showed "carelessness" by using a private email server, but he also strongly defended his former secretary of state, saying she did not endanger national security, while also vowing that an ongoing FBI investigation into the matter will not be tainted by politics. In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," Mr. Obama seemed to prejudge the outcome of the ongoing inquiry into Mrs. Clinton's email scandal, and he disputed the notion that any of the emails contained classified information of true importance. "She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy," he said. "What I also know is that there's classified and then there's classified. There's stuff that is really top secret top secret, and then there's stuff that is being presented to the president, the secretary of state, you may not want going out over the wire."

National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy has long argued that Obama was the ringleader in obstructing justice in the Hillary email investigation:

From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton-emails caper was President Barack Obama's call – not the FBI's, and not the Justice Department's[.] ... The decision was inevitable. Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.

Why would Obama use a fake email account to communicate with Hillary Clinton? Granted, classified communications between a president and a secretary of state are normal, but not via a fake email account. Were they discussing the fix that was in during her email investigation? McCarthy suggests just such a reason:

If Clinton had been charged, Obama's culpable involvement would have been patent. In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton-Obama emails would have been in the spotlight. For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence. More significantly, for Clinton's defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton's conduct yet faced no criminal charges.

After Trump's victory, Jarrett moved in with Obama and Michelle in their new Washington-area home with the express purpose of organizing the "resistance." Obama's D.C. home was to serve as the nerve center to the resistance to the presidency of Donald Trump. As the Daily Mail reported:

Barack Obama is turning his new home in the posh Kalorama section of the nation's capital – just two miles away from the White House – into the nerve center of the mounting insurgency against his successor, President Donald J. 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. And Obama is being aided in his political crusade by his longtime consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, who has moved into the 8,200-square-foot, $5.3-million Kaloroma mansion with the former president and Michelle Obama, long time best friends.

Her power and influence extended from staffing the White House to virtual veto power over foreign policy decisions. Valerie Jarrett undoubtedly had significant input into President Obama's Munich-like deal with Iran, which kicked the nuclear can down the road to assured detonation over Israel, which Iran continues to threaten to wipe off the map when it is not wishing "death to America." Her influence over President Obama is legendary:

The Iranian-born Jarrett (her parents were American-born expatriates) is the only staff member who regularly follows the president home from the West Wing to the residence and one of the few people allowed to call the president by his first name.

Noam Scheiber, writing in the November 9, 2014 New Republic, called Jarrett "The Obama Whisperer," noting her power and influence and the fear she instilled in other staffers:

Even at this late date in the Obama presidency, there is no surer way to elicit paranoid whispers or armchair psychoanalysis from Democrats than to mention the name Valerie Jarrett. Party operatives, administration officials – they are shocked by her sheer longevity and marvel at her influence. When I asked a longtime source who left the Obama White House years ago for his impressions of Jarrett, he confessed that he was too fearful to speak with me, even off the record. This is not as irrational as it sounds. Obama has said he consults Jarrett on every major decision, something current and former aides corroborate. "Her role since she has been at the White House is one of the broadest and most expansive roles that I think has ever existed in the West Wing," says Anita Dunn, Obama's former communications director. Broader, even, than the role of running the West Wing. This summer, the call to send Attorney General Eric Holder on a risky visit to Ferguson, Missouri, was made by exactly three people: Holder himself, the president, and Jarrett, who were vacationing together on Martha's Vineyard[.] ... Jarrett holds a key vote on Cabinet picks (she opposed Larry Summers at Treasury and was among the first Obama aides to come around on Hillary Clinton at State) and has an outsize [sic] say on ambassadorships and judgeships[.] ... And Jarrett has been known to enjoy the perks of high office herself. When administration aides plan "bilats," the term of art for meetings of two countries' top officials, they realize that whatever size meeting they negotiate – nine by nine, eight by eight, etc. – our side will typically include one less foreign policy hand, because Jarrett has a standing seat at any table that includes the president.

Valerie Jarrett's hold over President Obama is as mysterious as it has proven dangerous. She is Obama's Rasputin and will have great influence as the former community organizer wages guerrilla warfare from his Washington, D.C. bunker, an operation that includes Spygate.

Correction: Valerie Jarret worked for Chicago Mayor Daley the younger

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.