White House officials are insisting that the president didn't know that his National Security Agency was bugging German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone.  However, according to a report in German-language newspaper Bild am Sonntag, President Obama "personally authorized the monitoring of Angela Merkel's phone three years ago."

So here we go again.  What did Obama know, and when did he know it?  The Merkel-Obama scandal is now supplanting the ObamaCare IT fiasco.  Before the health care website flop, there were Benghazi, Syria, and Fast and Furious.  What about the IRS targeting conservative groups and the Tea Party?  No one bothered to tell Obama about that little powder keg, either.  "I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the [inspector general's] report beforehand," said Obama. 

Over the last five years Americans have heard the president and his various agency heads deny his involvement in any high-level programs.

But Obama's hands-off approach contradicts what mainstream journalists from the New York Times and the Washington Post have observed about the ruling cabal in D.C.  Obama's media friends complained about the administration's obsessive need to micromanage and survey everything going on around them, calling the group hypersensitive and "control freaks."  So how can Obama and company claim ignorance while acting like autocratic overlords?

From National Review, October 10:

"This is the most closed, control freak administration I've ever covered," said David  E. Sanger, veteran chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times. ...

Washington Post national security reporter Dana Priest ... : "... I'm even afraid to tell officials what I want to talk about because it's all going into one giant computer." ...

"Sometimes their levels of sensitivity amaze me-about something on Twitter or a headline on our website," said Washington Post Managing Editor Kevin Merida.

If the Obama administration fits the definition of control freaks, as Sanger contends,  there is a slim-to-none chance Obama didn't know exactly what was going on at the NSA, the IRS, the ATF, the CIA, and the FBI, to name a few.