Up until now, President Obama has said he knew nothing about the FBI bid to destroy his political rival, Donald J.Trump, as evidenced in the newly released and mighty critical Inspector General, report.

Back in August 2016, Obama said:

 "I do not talk to the attorney general about pending investigations. I do not talk to FBI directors about pending investigations," he insisted.

"I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department or the FBI -- not just in this case, but in any case. FULL STOP. PERIOD. Guaranteed. Nobody gets treated differently when it comes to the Justice Department," he said.

Today, Obama's claim is in tatters. Julie Kelly of the Federalist, found references within the new IG report that Obama was briefed on the gamy investigation, and knew all about it all along.

Former FBI Director James Comey briefed President Barack Obama about the investigation into Donald Trump’s campaign before the 2016 election, according to a report released today by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

When we asked Comey about meetings with the White House concerning Crossfire Hurricane, he said that although he did not brief the White House about the investigation, he did mention to President Obama and others at a meeting in the Situation Room that the FBI was trying to determine whether any U.S. person had worked with the Russians in their efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. Comey said he thought it was important that the President know the nature of the FBI’s efforts without providing any specifics. Comey said although he did not recall exactly what he said, he may have said there were four individuals with ‘some association or connection to the Trump campaign.’ Comey stated that after he provided this information, no one at the meeting responded or followed up with any questions. Comey did not recall specifically when this meeting took place, but believed it may have been in August 2016.

The White House meeting also included then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and then-CIA Director John Brennan, the inspector general found.

So Obama knew, quite contrary to his claims, that this now-criticized rat-king of an investigation on his rival, was happening as he watched.

It's not a big surprise, actually. As Kelly notes, FBI officials Peter Strzok's and Lisa Page's emails suggested that that was going on:

One text causing raised eyebrows today seems to implicate the president: "potus wants to know everything we're doing," former FBI lawyer Lisa Page texted to her paramour, then-FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, on Sept. 2, 2016.  She said that she had just been in a meeting to discuss "TPs for D" (talking points for the director, i.e. FBI Director James Comey) to brief the president on their investigation.

Yet President Trump, who tried to resolve this matter by asking the Ukrainians to cooperate with investigators over the Obama-linked Biden tentacle of this octopus, is now being impeached today for taking actions "against his rivals."

Obama did it earlier, and he sure as heck wasn't impeached. Yet his string of crimes against his political rival was incredibly long, and there seems to have been a groupthink element to it, the way a group of crooks gets together and commits crimes together, except that their presence of one another seems to propel them along to do much worse than they would be capable of alone.

It wasn't just the FBI investigation he knew about - it was also the 'unmaskings' that followed from the FBI bid to pin something on Trump - the timelines show that around the time of that Coomey briefing, the "unmaskings" of Americans caught up in intelligence dragnets, looking to see if any of them were Trump officials, were stepped up, ending only when Obama administration officials packed up and left the White House.

It's apparently a whole slew of things he did to spy on and undercut his rivals. Had he used that formidable energy on America's actual enemies, he might not have been such a failure as president. For now, Obama stands exposed.