How credible is it that Obama was unaware that the NSA was tapping the phones of 35 world leaders? I don’t know. But the evidence is mounting that it is not credible. Ed Morrissey, for one, doesn’t buy it:
[W]ho exactly would be the customer of this data, once collected? Here’s a hint: It’s not going to be the undersecretary of agricultural development at the USDA. The only reason to surveil Angela Merkel is to provide real-time intelligence to the highest level of government about the intentions of the German Chancellor. Furthermore, that intelligence would have to be specified as to its source for the policymaker to validate it for its consideration. If that policymaker is not Barack Obama, then perhaps we should be asking who exactly is making decisions at the top level of government.
The idea that Obama didn’t know about this program is absurd on its face. That doesn’t mean it started with Obama, and it’s almost assured that it didn’t. However, more than four years after taking office, Obama can’t seriously think that anyone will believe that he just found out about this NSA effort from the funny papers.
Jack Goldsmith is also highly skeptical:
I have a hard time believing that the President in his many hundreds of intelligence briefings – scores of which surely involved intelligence about allied leaders in run-ups to various diplomatic and political meetings – did not know that some of the information was gleaned through collection against the leaders themselves. (I am not saying that the White House is lying about what the President knew – only that its statement about the President’s ignorance is extraordinary, and that I suspect that someone in the White House knew.)
A new LA Times story backs him up:
The White House and State Department signed off on surveillance targeting phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said Monday, pushing back against assertions that President Obama and his aides were unaware of the high-level eavesdropping.
Ambers thinks is possible that Obama wasn’t told about the NSA’s activities:
If no one at NSA ever presumed that the flap potential from an operation like this was huge enough to notify the new president, then those who accuse the NSA of buying into its own hubris are in good standing. The NSA has not thought strategically about the geopolitical and real-world ramifications of the enormous post-9/11 expansion of its power and capabilities, and the agency is going through hell right now because one of its own employees, for whatever reason, decided to call its bluff. …
Bugging the phones of foreign leaders is not illegal, and there may have been a time when the risk of doing it was worth the reward to the policy-makers who ordered it. But the NSA, for whatever reason, never reassessed this risk calculation, perhaps assuming that the secret would never get out, and so there really wasn’t any need to tinker with a communications channel that might be important in the future.
And then it leaked.
And now, President Obama, the policy-maker, is screwed.
Shafer expects the story to blow over:
It may be that Merkel’s public carpet-calling of Obama is just for domestic show, as she tries to figure out what the country’s next government will look like. Or maybe in a weak moment, she said something in a text message that she forgot could be monitored. Who among us hasn’t? And if we haven’t, it’s only a matter of time before we do. But as scandals go, this seems like a Snapchat moment: it’s designed to disappear.
The Dish 