Laughable Claim: Obama Didn't Know About NSA Spying on Foreign Leaders

Politico distills the claim, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

President Barack Obama didn’t know about the NSA spying on foreign leaders for years, and he put an end to it when the administration found out about the program, according to a new report.

The monitoring of 35 world leaders’ communications was brought to light during an internal review of NSA programs this summer, an administration official told The Wall Street Journal. Obama halted the monitoring of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and others immediately, and some remaining monitoring programs are being phased out, the official said.

I doubt that anything in the report is actually true, save the part about Obama ending something that was beneficial to the US. He does that. It’s what seems to get him out of bed in the morning.

The idea that the president didn’t know that the US routinely spies on foreign leaders, allies and enemies alike, is laughable. Of course the US does that, as does every other government that can. Other governments do it to us too, as much as they can. Anyone who doesn’t know this is naive. Claiming that POTUS didn’t know is just posturing. No one believes it.

But it would be like Obama to turn the spying off. Jimmy Carter did that too, in the 1977 Halloween Massacre. On that day, President Carter effectively blinded US intelligence by firing 800 covert CIA operatives. All that action did was make it easier for the mullahs to take over Iran two years later.