WikiLeaks: Obama Rejected Hillary Clinton’s Executive Gun Control Plan, Sparked Furor

Olivier Douliery/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images/Charlie Neibergall
Olivier Douliery/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images/Charlie Neibergall

An email from WikiLeaks’ Podesta release shows Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff exasperated by President Obama’s rejection of Clinton’s executive gun control plan.

The email, dated October 7, 2015, was sent by Ann O’Leary, senior policy director of Hillary for America. In it, O’Leary forwarded an email containing a Washington Post article revolving around the Obama administration’s rejection of Clinton’s executive gun control plan.

The WaPo reported, “The Obama administration has already taken a long, internal look at the same executive-action proposal Clinton has promised to undertake, and has doubts over whether it can be made to work in practical terms, according to current and former senior administration officials.”

The heart of the matter was Clinton’s plan to use executive orders to further expand background checks, thereby closing the “private seller loophole.” Doing this would require deciding how many guns a private individual needed to sell each year before being considered “engaged in the business” of selling guns. The Obama administration investigated this approach to gun control, only to discover that instituting a threshold for such sales proved futile and created more problems than it solved.

O’Leary responded to this as “really annoying” and warned the other Clinton staffers to be ready for things to worsen on certain fronts.

She wrote:

Being really annoying.

We should all check in with our folks there about it – health care (Robert Pear article); guns; and it is going to get worse…

It is interesting to note that President Obama did find some executive gun controls for his administration to issue on January 5, but they have proven to be of little impact. The ones that did have impact, like the order requiring background checks for people named in trusts for weapons regulated under the National Firearms Act, only increased the burden on law-abiding citizens.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.

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