Come on Mike, what did we learn from Watergate? That an executive that attempts to interfere with a Justice Department investigation at any stage has something to hide. What would it look like if the headline read ‘Obama attempts to stop justice dept complaint’?

It is within their rights to file a complaint. What legal grounds does Obama have to prevent them? Absolutely none.

One interpretation of the known facts is Obama elected to disassociate himself from any investigation of the post 911 Bush/CIA actions and handed it off to Feinstein, herself a bullet proof supporter of the nsa/cia programs. If half of what your readers are hypothesizing is half true then if he wanted to rein them in and not have the long knives of ‘politically disastrous world events’ pulled out on his watch then he would have to, of necessity, appear to be supporting one thing, while enabling its opposite.

I am not saying this is the case, although I wish it were, I am saying that in this instance, with respect to this headline, in this article, as it corresponds to reality, it’s a deceptive failure.

You’re not without insight or industry. You should take yourself more seriously and a part of that means resisting rushing into the arms of your preferred narrative on every occasion. Another part of that is learning to generate alternative hypotheses for a given set of facts and withholding judgement until all facts are known. We don’t even know what the cia is alleging in terms of specific laws having been broken. Sure, the whole reeks of certain cia officials trying to thwart an investigation. We know with 100% certainty that Clapper lied, and that the cia has gone completely rouge before, so these agencies are prone, then and now, to conceive of themselves and their mission as above Congressional oversight.

But none of that means Obama could have legally or politically had the leeway to stop the cia from filing a complaint in this specific instance.