During the Soviet era, “samizdat” referred to the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state. Since official news sources were little more than communist government propaganda, samizdat was often the only source of truthful reporting. In “Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of Failed Presidency,” Jack Cashill tells the story of how an American samizdat of bloggers, online journals, and citizen journalists challenged the left – and, occasionally, the more “respectable” right – for control of the Obama narrative. In this excerpt Cashill tells the story of unlikely samizdat contributor Susan Daniels and what she discovered about President Barack Obama.
Without the support of the more “respectable” right, potential scandals can die aborning. As an illustration, let me cite the work of Susan Daniels, a licensed private investigator from Ohio.
Although now in her seventies, Daniels remains sufficiently lively and attractive to get hit on in airport bars. She is no one’s fool and never has been. A movie could be made of her earlier life. In fact, one already has, but that’s a story for another day.
In 2009, Daniels was asked to run a background check on Barack Obama. Working with her law firm clients, Daniels had run checks on thousands of individuals without anxiety or incident. This was different.
In June 2009, Barack Obama had been president for six months. The House and Senate were both in Democratic hands, and the permanent bureaucracy skewed heavily left.
What Daniels planned to do was perfectly legal. That said, she had a generalized fear of retaliation from somewhere within the federal government. Had Daniels been younger, had any of her seven children still depended on her, she probably would have punted.
Daniels had access to proprietary databases denied to ordinary citizens. She entered “Barack Obama” and “Chicago” into one database without result. She tried with another and again came up empty. The third entry paid off…
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