President Trump is
accusing the New York Times of treason because the Leftist rag told the world about
a classified U.S. mission to mess with Russia undoubtedly due Russian cyber warfare
being conducted against the United States. The most public of which is cyber
meddling in U.S. election cycles.
I would not be
surprised to find out some day the USA and Russia have been exchanging cyber
barbs for quite some time. Is it ethical or even legal for the NYT to expose clandestine
and probably Classified cyber missions intended as bloodless reprisals to Russian
cyber-crimes? It’s definitely not ethical! If exposing Classified actions
against a foreign enemy isn’t illegal, IT SHOULD BE!
Justin Smith pointed
this post on my Facebook Group Social
Media Jail Conversations for Conservatives & Counterjihadists(yeah I know, lengthy title. I had just
emerged from Facebook jail and was quite annoyed at the time. So I created the
group. Feel free to join the still relatively small group). The group URL
to Justin’s share is HERE.
Justin did not
include the URL from whence he found the post. Justin’s reason: The “URL is
being banned by Facebook”. The banned website is The Patriot Brief.
Interestingly The Patriot Brief
picked up the article from The National Sentinel.
It is from the original source I am cross posting below. In case you are
curious The Patriot Brief link to the
article is HERE.
(NationalSentinel) We have made
the observation before that in the age of
Donald Trump, the establishment media has become a national security liability
due to the fact that major outlets will publish just about anything in order to
undermine him.
But in doing so, these same outlets also undermine our country —
and some 312 million American citizens — making them as big a threat to our
security as any foreign power.
The New York Times did it again Sunday with a
story claiming that the Trump
administration has escalated attacks on Russia’s power grid:
The United States is stepping up
digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President
Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using
new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former
government officials said.
In interviews over the past
three months, the officials described the previously unreported deployment of
American computer code inside Russia’s grid and other targets as a classified
companion to more publicly discussed action directed at Moscow’s disinformation
and hacking units around the 2018 midterm elections.
Advocates of the more aggressive
strategy said it was long overdue, after years of public warnings from the
Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. that Russia has
inserted malware that could sabotage American power plants, oil and gas
pipelines, or water supplies in any future conflict with the United States.
But it also carries significant risk
of escalating the daily digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.
“It has gotten far, far more aggressive over the past year,”
one senior intelligence official told the Times. “We are doing things at a
scale that we never contemplated a few years ago.”
You know what else carries “significant risk?” Reporting
classified information that provides valuable insight and intelligence for a
nuclear-armed adversary.
So much for “Russia collusion,” right?
The revelations infuriated POTUS Trump, and rightfully so.
He said on Twitter the paper committed “a virtual act of Treason” over its
report, The Hillnoted.
“Do you believe that the Failing New York Times just did a
story stating that the United States is substantially increasing Cyber Attacks
on Russia,” Trump tweeted. “This is a virtual act of Treason by a once great
paper so desperate for a story, any story, even if bad for our Country.”
“Anything goes with our Corrupt News Media today,” he added.
“They will do, or say, whatever it takes, with not even the slightest thought
of consequence! These are true cowards and without doubt, THE ENEMY OF THE
PEOPLE!”
He also claimed the Times report was “NOT TRUE.”
Do
you believe that the Failing New York Times just did a story stating that the
United States is substantially increasing Cyber Attacks on Russia. This is a
virtual act of Treason by a once great paper so desperate for a story, any
story, even if bad for our Country.....
The fact is the Times report most likely is true.
Rational people understand that in light of report after report regarding
Russia/China/Iran/North Korea targeting U.S. infrastructure, it makes sense for
America — which is a cyber superpower — to respond in kind.
But these kinds of operations are not meant to be revealed.
Doing so not only compromises said operations, but foreign intelligence
agencies gleaning details from published open source information very often
learn things that help them counter our moves.
Which, again, puts our country at risk.
The Times editors know this. They understand full well what
revealing this kind of highly classified information can mean to an adversary.
And yet, they published it anyway. Just to ‘get Donald
Trump.’
What does that say about them? It says — again —
that the president has been right about our own press since he took
office: They are more of an enemy than some of our
adversaries. Or at least the equivalent.
Even though we have speech protections written into our
Constitution via the First Amendment, you still can’t slander someone, libel
them, yell ‘fire’ in a theater, or engage in various forms of “hate” speech.
Publishing highly classified information that provides ‘aid
and comfort’ to an adversary should be legally actionable as well. Doing
so harms our country by weakening our national security.
Think about it: Does anyone believe that FDR would not have
punished the NYTimes or the Washington Post if either paper had published plans
for the D-Day invasion, just because their editors believed Americans ‘had a
right to know’?
Granted, we were in an actual war then, and we’re not
fighting Russia — now. Though you could argue that in places like Syria, where
Russian-sponsored mercenaries from the Wagner Group attacked U.S. forces and
their allies early last year, amounts to a real conflict. Or Russia putting
forces into Venezuela, in our hemisphere. Or encroaching on NATO’s eastern
flank.
We have argued before that
reporting the details about these highly classified operations are harming our
national security at a time when the world is more dangerous
than ever, not less, and for no good reason. The Times is just as guilty, in
our view, as the U.S. officials who leaked the information. If they can
be charged under the Espionage Act, then the ‘paper of record’ that published
the information should be equally culpable.
The National Sentinel is a fiercely independent,
non-corporate-owned news site dedicated to bringing our readers fresh,
informative content and the news of the day, without the bias and
political chicanery of the so-called “mainstream” media.
Updated daily and throughout the day, rely on us to
provide you with unfiltered news and information you won’t find anywhere else
that helps you to make informed decisions. Like the media is supposed to do.
The National Journal is part of the USA
Features Medianetwork of sites.
Follow USA Features on Facebook (click here).
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our site earns a commission off of items we advertise and sell, as an
affiliate. Think of it like a tip for bringing you awesome content! In any
event, we have an advertising relationship with the stores we link to. Now
you know.
There's a coward in the White House. A spy in the Trump
administration wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times yesterday that's not only
entirely gutless, but also proves everyone that has ever believed in the Deep
State correct.
The spy wants everyone to know that:
It may be cold comfort in this
chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room.
The anonymous senior member of the Trump administration goes
on to describe how bad the president is, and that he or she and a group of
others from within the White House are trying to subvert him.
That is why many Trump
appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions
while thwarting Mr. Trump's more misguided impulses until he is out of office.
How dare this person talk about preserving democratic
institutions while, at the same time, actually admitting to undermining an
elected official. I don't care how virtuous their intentions are, these people
were never elected! President Trump was. They and a good portion of the country
may not like it, but that's how the system works. This person has brazenly
admitted to being part of an unelected guerilla movement within the government
that's secretly pursuing their own ideology, their own path for the country,
and WE - the voters - never gave them our mandate. They operate with zero
accountability.
I wonder if it ever occurred to this coward that they aren't
just subverting the president, they're also subverting the 63 million Americans
that voted for him. They may not like Trump and his policies, but is he really
doing anything contrary to what he campaigned for? Everything that Trump has
been saying and doing since he was elected is exactly why his supporters voted
for him. It's what they want. No one has the right to go behind his back and
steer the country in a different direction.
This person, this anonymous senior official, probably feels
pretty brave - and maybe even a little famous - this morning. But they're a
coward. If they've witnessed the President doing something unbecoming of the
office or counter to what his voters would agree with, it is their
responsibility to come forward the proper way. Show your face, make a public
accusation and provide evidence. This is a disgrace.
It is looking more and more Dem conspirators in the FBI and
DOJ tried to fix the November 2016 election to Crooked Hillary’s favor. AND
barring the failure of a Crooked Hillary election, then the conspiracy appeared
intending to take out President Trump with fake evidence.
George Papadopoulos was the
“improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the
Trump administration.” Like the Trump campaign itself, advisor Papadopoulos
“proved to be a tantalizing target for a Russian influence operation.”
Thus opens a 2500-plus-word
December 30 New York Times piece headlined “How
the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt,”by
Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazetti and Matt Apuzzo, with reporting by Adam
Goldman, Eileen Sullivan and Matthew Rosenberg. The multiple authorship
betokens serious investigation but this piece shapes up as dezinformatsiya and
the Times gives it away in the early going.
“It was not, as Mr. Trump and
other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy
hired by a rival campaign,” that started the investigation, and there is some
truth to that. The dossier, one of thedirtiest
tricks political tricks in US history, was only part of a plan
revealed by FBI counterintelligence boss Peter Strzok in the office of FBI
deputy director Andrew McCabe. As a Strzok email explained: “I want to believe
the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office that there’s no way
he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an
insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40. . .”
Like FBI boss James Comey,
Strzok was a partisan of Hillary Clinton, the likely reason he got the job of
spearheading the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. It was Strzok who
changed “gross negligence” to “extremely careless,” freeing the Democrat from
the prospect of criminal charges. As David Horowitz said, it was thegreatest
political fix in American history.
TheClintons
are not exactly short on cashand FBI deputy director “Andy”
McCabe got some $500,000 from the Clintons for his wife’s political campaign.
The establishment media are not curious whether Peter Strzok got a piece of the
action, and if so how much. The Clinton’s faithful Odd Job would not be the
first FBI man to grab the gold from under the table.
Strzok works
counterintelligence but on his watch Pakistani-born Imran Awan enjoyed
access to the computers of the House Intelligence Committeeand
the Democrats’ favorite IT man performed his IT work from Pakistan for several
months a year. If Peter Strzok knew about Awan’s illicit data-mining operation
it seems clear he did nothing to stop it. On the other hand, POTUS 44 had
commanded the FBI to look the other way when Muslims were involved, and the
Bureau, which wields
a budget approaching $9 billion, duly followed orders.
In the office of Andy McCabe,
Peter Strzok discussed the “insurance policy” with his consensual flame Lisa
Page, an FBI lawyer and Clinton devotee. When that emerged, new FBI boss
Christopher Wray did not fire Strzok and take his gun and badge. Instead Wray
stashed Strzok in human resources, where he will still command access to FBI
records.
After all this, and a lot
more, the New York Times opts to point the finger at George
Papadopoulos. The establishment media prefer to claim that the FBI’s Clinton
fan club and the bogus dossier had nothing to do with the Russia investigation.
Did the FBI perchance deploy
the dossier to secure a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign?Russophile
Nellie Ohr, wife of demoted DOJ official Bruce Ohr, duly hired on
at Fusion GPS. What was Nellie’s role in the dossier? Who paid for the
dossier? Congress has been trying to get answers but the FBI has been stonewalling.
What are they trying to hide?
Devin Nunes, chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee, wants the DOJ and FBI to hand overall
documents related to the dossier on Wednesday, January 3, 2018. The
committee also seeks to interview Ohr, Strzok, FBI attorneys James Baker, Lisa
Page, and Sally Moyer and FBI assistant congressional affairs boss Greg Brower.
If the FBI and DOJ fail to
comply in full, that will certify their partisan corruption, the larger back
story of the Russia investigation. All testimony should be public so the people
can watch on C-SPAN and avoid the deep-state disinformation of the old-line
establishment media.
+++++++
TABLES TURN: NOW FBI
PROBED FOR ELECTION INTERFERENCE
House Intel Committee
investigates plot to stop Trump
WASHINGTON – What began as an
investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election has now become a
probe into how federal law enforcement conspired to stop Donald Trump from becoming
president.
The House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence has expanded its investigation that began with claims
of Russian collusion and a fraudulent memo paid for by Trump opponents to one
that focuses on members of federal law enforcement – both in the U.S. Justice
Department and the FBI – and how they actively worked against the Trump
campaign and the eventual Trump presidency.
In a startling turnabout,
committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., is accusing the Justice Department
and the FBI of misleading him in “a pattern of behavior that can no longer be
tolerated.” He charges that Justice claimed it possesses no documents related
to the infamous Trump dossier, then, under pressure, produced “numerous” such
papers.
U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff,
D-Calif., is already opposing the move, even though he and other Democrats have
conceded recently that finding a Russia-Trump conspiracy has produced no real
evidence.
Nunes has put in place what
amounts to a separate investigation of the FBI and the Justice Department
hierarchy.
According to reports, the
major components are:
§Fusion GPS, the opposition
research company that prepared the bogus Trump-Russia dossier with money from
Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
§How the FBI allowed that
dossier to fuel investigations since July 2016.
§Investigative bias that has
been discovered regarding several key investigators.
A key subpoenaed witness is
David Kramer, an associate of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Kramer is one of the
few people known to have possessed a hard copy of the dossier. McCain asked
Kramer to represent him at a Nov. 28, 2016, meeting with Christopher Steele in
Surrey, England. Steele compiled the 35 pages of memos making up the dossier
based on his paid Kremlin sources.
Kramer then obtained a copy
of the dossier from Fusion GPS and McCain hand-delivered a copy to then-FBI
director James B. Comey in December 2016.
Thank President Trump
for all his accomplishments during his first year in office. Send him a FREE
card of your choice. Go to ThankTrump.us
According to an interview in
Mother Jones magazine, Steele said he supplied his memos accusing Trump of a
Russia conspiracy to the FBI in “early July” 2016. Comey has testified he began
the counterintelligence investigation in “late July.” The memos accused the
Trump team of a conspiracy with the Kremlin to damage Hillary Clinton’s
campaign.
Nunes wants more information
on how the bureau used the document to investigate Trump people. He has been
unsuccessfully trying to gain access to FBI documents.
In a Dec. 28 letter to Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Nunes said the Department of Justice at first
said dossier-related FBI interview summaries, known as 302s, “did not exist.”
Weeks later, under an Aug. 24 subpoena, DOJ suddenly located “numerous FD-302s
pertaining to the Steele dossier, thereby rendering the initial response
disingenuous at best,” the House intel committee chief wrote.
Based on the record of
stonewalling, Nunes said the committee no longer can accept Justice’s position
that it cannot turn over other official investigative forms, called 1032s. They
document meetings between the FBI and confidential human sources.
He gave the Justice
Department until Wednesday to comply with his requests.
“Unfortunately, DOJ/FBI’s
intransigence with respect to the August 24 subpoenas is part of a broader
pattern of behavior that can no longer be tolerated,” Nunes wrote. “At this
point, it seems the DOJ and FBI need to be investigating themselves.”
FRONTPAGE MAG IS A PROUD PROJECT OF THE DAVID HOROWITZ FREEDOM
CENTER
The DHFC is dedicated to the defense of free societies whose moral,
cultural and economic foundations are under attack by enemies both secular and
religious, at home and abroad.
…
FrontPage Magazine, the Center’s
online journal of news and political commentary has 1.5 million visitors and
over 870,000 unique visitors a month (65 million hits) and is linked to over
2000 other websites. The magazine’s coverage of and commentary about
events has been greatly augmented over the last two years by the presence of
four Shillman Fellows in Journalism underwritten by board member Dr.
Robert Shillman. FrontPage has recently added a blog called “The Point,” run by
Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield, which has tripled web traffic.
WND, formerly WorldNetDaily, can best be explained by its mission
statement: “WND is an independent news company dedicated to uncompromising
journalism, seeking truth and justice and revitalizing the role of the free
press as a guardian of liberty. We remain faithful to the traditional and
central role of a free press in a free society – as a light exposing
wrongdoing, corruption and abuse of power.
“We also seek to stimulate a free-and-open debate about the great
moral and political ideas facing the world and to promote freedom and
self-government by encouraging personal virtue and good character.”
Indeed, WND is a fiercely independent news site committed to
hard-hitting investigative reporting of government waste, fraud and abuse.
Founded by Joseph and Elizabeth Farah in May 1997, it is now a
leading Internet news site in both traffic and influence.
WND has broken some of the biggest, most significant and most
notable investigative and enterprising stories in recent years. …READ THE REST
Judge Andrew Napolitano has caused quite a stir amongst the
Media, the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ), and officials in the U.S. government when the Judge stipulated that
GCHQ surveilled the Trump campaign for the treasonous President Barack Hussein
Obama. Here is the segment on Fox & Friends Tuesday March 14
morning:
[Blog Editor 4/27/18: I just discovered the HX Video was not only removed by Youtube but apparently the entire Youtube Account was removed which I chalk up censoring Conservatives. The video that was above was Judge Nap's appearance on Fox & Friends making the GCHQ connection. Here is Youtube's fake reasoning that I discovered by click the above HX Video Youtube Channel link: "This account has been terminated due to multiple or
severe violations of YouTube's policy against spam, deceptive practices, and
misleading content or other Terms of Service violations."]
Very shortly after the Judge
said he had three sources, the Judge mysteriously - without comment – was
removed from Fox News air time. Incidentally, if you listened to the
segment, the Judge remarked that the GCHQ person who complied with Obama
resigned after Trump was inaugurated. Fox’s censorship means Napolitano
can neither name the three intelligence sources nor the name of the person who
resigned from GCHQ. ALSO, Fox News used later-in-the-day news anchors to
walk back Napolitano’s GCHQ/Obama assertion.
Fox censorship, Napolitano
silence on suspension, GCHQ public denial and an U.S. apology is a set-up the
typically credible Napolitano to look like a tinfoil conspiracist.
AND YET, is Judge Andrew Napolitano a discredited source on
Obama surveillance of President Trump’s campaign? Since I have contended that
Barack Hussein Obama was a crooked President from day one of his
Administration, I am not prepared to throw the Judge under the bus as all
others have seeming done.
Below are two articles that
should give you pause before you consider throwing Napolitano under the bus.
The first article is from today (3/22/17) from Bob Unruh and the second is from
Cliff Kinkaid of AIM posted on 3/21/17.
The first is close to
breaking news corroborated by Fox News. The second article pretty much
elaborates the details that Judge Andrew Napolitano alluded to in his 2-minute
50-second Fox & Friends segment. In fact, there is so much detail in
the second article it is a bit lengthy. You may want to come back a few times
to complete and digest the information that demonstrates a Crooked Obama and a
nefarious Intel community, not to mention an extremely untrustworthy Director
James Comey of the FBI.
The lawyer who founded
Judicial Watch and later Freedom Watch, Larry
Klayman, has sent a letter to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, asking him to look at a
whistleblower’s evidence of “systematic illegal surveillance on prominent
Americans, again including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other
justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen such as Donald Trump, and even
yours truly.”
That spying was done,
Klayman’s letter contends, by the FBI.
It’s become a major issue
following President Trump’s assertion that he and Trump Tower were spied upon
by the federal government, and the subsequent denials by intelligence and
law-enforcement officials, including FBI Director James Comey, who famously
cleared Hillary Clinton on accusations she mishandled classified information as
secretary of state.
Klayman has been working with
Dennis Montgomery, a former NSA and Central Intelligence Agency contractor who
“left the NSA and CIA with 47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of
information, much of which is classified.”
Montgomery then “sought to
come forward legally as a whistleblower to appropriate government entities,
including congressional intelligence committees, to expose that the spy
agencies were engaged for years in systematic illegal surveillance on prominent
Americans.”
Explained Klayman: “Working
side by side with former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper,
who lied in congressional testimony, and former Obama Director of the CIA, the
equally ethically challenged John Brennan, Montgomery witnessed ‘up close and
personal’ this “Orwellian Big Brother’ intrusion on privacy, likely for
potential coercion, blackmail or other nefarious purposes.”
But he said the testimony has
been essentially ignored.
Now, however, with the issue
pending before Congress, there even are media reports that appear to
substantiate the general claims that the government has been spying. The New
York Times in January referenced wiretapping at Trump Tower, and just this
week ABC News documented that
the FBI monitored Trump Tower.
The report claimed, “But it
was not placed at the behest of Barack Obama, and the target was not the Trump
campaign of 2016. For two years ending in 2013, the FBI had a court-approved
warrant to eavesdrop on a sophisticated Russian organized crime
money-laundering network that operated out of unit 63A in Trump Tower in New
York.”
It resulted in the
indictments of more than 30 people, ABC said.
Explained the report: “The
FBI investigation did not implicate Trump. But Trump Tower was under close
watch. Some of the Russian mafia figures worked out of unit 63A in the iconic
skyscraper – just three floors below Trump’s penthouse residence – running what
prosecutors called an ‘international money-laundering, sports gambling and
extortion ring.'”
Klayman, a Washington
watchdog who repeatedly took on the Clinton political machine to investigate
suspicion of wrongdoing, explained in his letter to Nunes, which was copied to
other members of Congress, that he previously won a judgment from U.S. District
Judge Richard Leon preliminarily halting the “illegal, warrantless, and
massive surveillance of U.S. citiznes [sic] and lawful residents” in 2015.
As part of Nunes’ hearing on
claims of government spying, he invited “anyone who has information about these
topics to come forward.”
Klayman said that is exactly
what Montgomery has done.
“There is a myriad of
evidence, direct and circumstantial, of the illegal and unconstitutional
surveillance disclosed to the FBI by Montgomery,” said Klayman, describing
how his client made an on-camera interview with the agency about the misdeeds
some time ago.
He said Montgomery “holds
much of the roadmap to ‘draining the swamp’ of this corruption of our
democracy.”
Montgomery, Klayman said, has
information “that the spy agencies were engaged for years in systematic illegal
surveillance on prominent Americans.”
During Montgomery’s interview
with FBI General Counsel James Baker, under grants of immunity, he “laid out
how persons like then businessman Donald Trump were illegally spied upon by
Clapper, Brennan, and the spy agencies of the Obama administration.”
“He even claimed that these
spy agencies had manipulated voting in Florida during the 2008 presidential
election, where illegal tampering resulted in helping Obama to win the White
House.”
But that interview,
“conducted and videotaped by Special FBI Agents Walter Giardina and William
Barnett, occurred almost two years ago, and nothing that I know of has happened
since.”
Klayman wrote that it appears
to have been “buried” by Comey, possibly because “the FBI itself
collaborates with the spy agencies to conduct illegal surveillance.”
He said he previously
visited with a staff lawyer, Allen Souza, to inform Nunes of questions that
needed to be put to Comey while under oath.
“My expressed purpose: to
have Chairman Nunes of the House Intelligence Committee ask Comey, under oath,
why he and his FBI have seemingly not moved forward with the Montgomery
investigation while, on the other hand, the FBI director recently claimed
publicly, I believe falsely, that there is ‘no evidence’ of surveillance on
President Trump and those around him by the Obama administration.
“Indeed, there is,” he wrote.
He tells members of Congress
that Comey needs to be grilled during a subsequent hearing, now set for March
28. He asks Nunes to respond by March 24 to let “the American people, and Mr.
Montgomery … know where you and the other members of your
committee stand.”
“Do you intend to get at and
investigate the full truth, or as has regrettably been the case for many years
in government, sweep the truth under the carpet?”
Other recipients of the
letter were Reps. Adam Schiff, Mike Conaway, Peter King, Frank LoBiondo, Tom
Rooney, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Michael Turner, Brad Wenstrup, Chris Stewart, Rich
Crawford, Trey Gowdy, Elise Stefanik, Will Hurd, Jim Hines, Terri Sewell, Andre
Carson, Jackie Speier, Mike Quigley, Eric Swalwell, Joaquin Castro and Denny
Heck.
A special report from
the Accuracy in Media Center for Investigative Journalism; Cliff Kincaid,
Director.
[AIM CIJ Director's Note:
UPDATE: Former NSA/CIA contractor Dennis Montgomery has told
Accuracy in Media through his attorney Larry Klayman that it is entirely
possible that the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was
used as a back channel to collect and pass information-based on electronic
surveillance of Trump associates and Donald J. Trump personally-to officials in
the Obama administration. Montgomery said the procedure known as shell-game
eavesdropping, in which the NSA can deny they are wiretapping, and the GCHQ can
also deny that they are wiretapping, could have been used in this case. In
other words, the NSA, CIA or FBI would ask the British to conduct the
surveillance on behalf of the U.S. government so that U.S. officials could deny
their own involvement.
Montgomery said that he has
provided extensive evidence of illegal wiretapping by U.S. intelligence
agencies to the FBI, but that the Bureau has failed to act on the evidence
since he provided it almost two years ago.
Judge Andrew Napolitano of
Fox News had said, "The NSA has given GCHQ full 24/7 access to its
computers, so GCHQ - a foreign intelligence agency that, like the NSA, operates
outside our constitutional norms - has the digital versions of all electronic
communications made in America in 2016, including Trump's." [Bold Text
Editor JRH] However, it may be
difficult to find Obama's personal "fingerprints" on what happened,
Napolitano warned. Under these circumstances, the House Intelligence Committee
should ask FBI Director James Comey about Montgomery's evidence of illegal
wiretapping and then call in Montgomery for his own personal testimony. Klayman
says Montgomery can shed important light on how Trump and many other innocent
people can be targeted.
ØPlease call the office of
Rep. Devin Nunes at 202-225-4121 and urge that Congress question FBI Director
Comey about the Dennis Montgomery case.]
(Editor's Note: Public
hearings on this controversy are scheduled for March 20 and 28 by the House
Intelligence Committee.)
Senate Intelligence Committee
leaders from both parties, Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA),
have issued a disingenuous statement[1] that
"no element of the United States government" surveilled "Trump
Tower." They dishonestly evade the fact that media reporting[2] two
days earlier had said that British intelligence operating at U.S. behest had
likely been implicated in wiretapping Trump and Trump associates, all at the
instigation of the U.S. government.
White House Press Secretary
Sean Spicer said on March 16 that Fox News[2] sources
have reported[3] through
retired Judge Andrew Napolitano that then-President Obama had used two
officials to arrange with the British NSA, called GCHQ or Government
Communications Headquarters, to carry out the wiretapping of both Trump and
Trump associates. (See this AIM[4]guest
column.) The British now dispute this claim.
This evasive use of British
spying is done in order to leave no American "fingerprints[5]"
on the highly illegal operation, as the White House quoted Judge Napolitano. It
is a long-standing practice under treaty-like intelligence agreements that
British intelligence can use NSA facilities, and vice versa, for
shell-game eavesdropping.
The trick is for the two
agencies to swap places so that the NSA can deny they are wiretapping, and the
GCHQ can deny that they are wiretapping. The Brits are trying to escape in
between these moves of what a key expert has called the US-UK "wiretapping
shell game."
This is the first time
that news sources[2] have
explicitly stated that Obama personally ordered the wiretapping of Trump
himself, through Obama officials going to the British, though it has been
implied in the past by the suspicious lack of any circumspect denials, even
when The New York Times said on January 19 and 20 that "wiretapped
communications" went to the Obama White House. No one in the article said
"Obama White House-but not Obama personally."
Consider how one important
person-President Trump-got the clear media message that he was indeed the
target of the spying: President Trump told Fox News's Tucker Carlson that he
read this New York Times story of January 20 before he tweeted about Obama
"wiretapping" him. White House spokesman Spicer quoted from this
article.
President Trump told Carlson
on Fox[6] on
March 15 why he tweeted what he did: "Well, I've been reading...I think it
was January 20...New York Times article where they were talking about
wiretapping....I think they used that exact term."
NEW
YORK TIMES (print edition) Jan. 20, 2017, Headline:
"Wiretapped Data
Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides"
"found no
conclusive evidence of wrongdoing ... [but]
"... Wiretapped communications had
been provided to the [Obama] White House." [Emphasis added;
bracketed [ ] text added.]
Remember, this is the same
New York Times, along with other hostile media, that is attacking President
Trump for making what it calls "baseless" and
"unsubstantiated" claims of Obama administration wiretapping of
Trump. It is its own reporting that President Trump was referring to.
The Times hypocritically
suppresses its own front-page headline stories about "Wiretapped Data Used
in Inquiry of Trump Aides" which claimed that these "wiretapped
communications" reports went to the Obama White House (New York Times[7],
Jan. 20, 2017).
White House spokesman Spicer
forcefully made this point to the press, which viciously dodged his points to
continue insisting[8] that
"there's no evidence of this" at all, repeatedly and rudely
interrupting Spicer in an acrimonious confrontation.
Again, the question is: What
did Obama know and when did he know it?
How the "Wiretap
Shell Game" Works
Some reports claim that the
Obama administration sought and/or obtained FISA Court warrants to tap phone
calls and hack emails in Trump Tower.
But FISA warrants are
routinely avoided by a little-known intelligence trick of using U.S.-British
intelligence "reciprocity agreements" to dodge U.S. laws and vice
versa. There are now direct reports[5] of
this Obama-orchestrated British wiretapping of Trump, cited by the White House
to back up President Trump's statements and tweets.
The British are issuing denials[9].
But it is well-known that U.S. intelligence agencies can routinely arrange
for British intelligence officers to use NSA facilities to spy on Americans, so
that the U.S. agencies can claim that "they" (the U.S.) did no
wiretapping or surveillance of Americans. It is a type of "plausible
denial" government lie (see more on this in the appendix to this
article). [Bold Text Editor JRH]
The strange involvement of an
"ex" British MI6 agent, Christopher Steele, in conducting
"opposition research" during a U.S. election has raised no questions
in the left-wing media. It bears consideration, as it could represent in
reality a British "reciprocity" covert operation on behalf of Obama's
CIA, one to fabricate discrediting disinformation about Trump, not a mere intelligence-gathering
or wiretapping operation.
The exact means and exact
agency by which this wiretapping, or much of it, has been done had been left
unclear until now, when the claimed British connection surfaced. These types of
British surveillance wiretaps are known as operations under "UKUSA"
and "BRUSA" intelligence "reciprocity" agreements, which
are the functional equivalent of formal treaties in the spy world.
Such
"reciprocity" operations are designed to evade the laws of each
country, the U.S. and the UK, by having the British spy on Americans who the
Americans want spied on, and having the Americans spy on the British who the
Brits want spied on. [Bold Text
Editor JRH] Each side then exchanges the wiretap and other data the other
side wants, thus without directly incriminating themselves. UKUSA reciprocity
treaty "requests" have the force of direct orders to the other
country's intelligence agencies.
The wiretap data is exchanged
under bogus traditional claims of the "extreme sensitivity" of
"foreign liaison" intelligence, in order to obstruct outside
oversight and thus in reality conceal surveillance of questionable legality.
The UKUSA arrangements go beyond mere data searches and exchanges, by having,
for example, British agents use NSA equipment and facilities on a rental lease
basis to spy on the Americans that U.S. agencies want surveilled (and vice
versa) so that the best equipment in the best position of access is used.
Former Justice Department
Nazi-hunter John Loftus has documented how this British-U.S. "wiretap
shell game" works, and pointed out how it is used to spy on political
candidates in elections, and is covered up from Congress. Loftus reported:
"Over
the years the British back-channel inside the NSA was used for a variety of
political dirty tricks. A large number of American candidates for public office
have been placed under electronic surveillance by British intelligence officers
sitting at their ‘temporary listening post' at [NSA] Fort Meade." [Loftus[10], Secret War Against the Jews[11], 1997,
p. 195]
The media have been saying
that their government sources report that the CIA-NSA-FBI intercept targeting
of Russians shifted to the targeting of the Trump team by September,
2016-possibly as early as June, 2016. There are reports of rejected FISA court
applications in June[12] and July[13] of 2016 which would indicate
that change of focus. (Incidentally, rejections by the FISA court are normally
almost unheard-of.)
The BBC's twist on the third
alleged try at a FISA warrant, allegedly granted on October 15, was that it was
narrowly drawn against only two Russian banks. But the BBC was at pains to
assure us that they had an unnamed source who said that "three of Mr. Trump's
associates were the subject of the inquiry."
"But it's clear this is
about Trump," the source told the BBC[13].
New York Times Lies About
Its Own Reporting
Meanwhile The New York Times[14] is
doubling down on its lies, pretending it never reported that Trump or his aides
had been wiretapped[7],
and with supreme chutzpah claims, "It is not clear why Mr. Trump thought
he was wiretapped or what led him to make the claim." Again, look at the
front-page New York Times headline.
The New York Times has been
forced by confused readers to grudgingly admit[15] that
President Trump's tweets on Obama's wiretapping actually do "echo certain
aspects of The New York Times's reporting from recent weeks." But they try
to offer up sorry excuses to explain away the glaring contradiction in their
own reporting of Obama administration wiretapping of Trump and/or Trump people-and
then their denials of it. The New York Times claims[16] that
what they originally said was that Obama officials merely investigated past
wiretap data in archives of "routine" surveillance already done, but
did not wiretap into future data.
But the New York Times stated
in January[7] that
after past recordings of phone calls of Trump people had been checked, that the
FBI "asked" the NSA to continue to "collect as much information
as possible"-evidently without restraint or limitations-in what were
clearly all future wiretapped calls between Russians and Trump people. It's
known as an intelligence "collection requirement." (New York Times
on January 20[7] and February 14[17];
see also the BBC[13] on
January 12.)
White House spokesman Spicer,
days before the Times' excuse-making, clearly explained[16] that
President Trump's tweets on March 4 were based on open-source news media
reporting of the wiretaps-thus including The New York Times-over the last few
months.
In fact, the news media have
been reporting[18] since
at least September 23, 2016, that U.S. intelligence has been "actively
monitoring" the "talks" (conversations), "wiretapping"
the phone "calls," and intercepting other communications of Trump
aides or Trump himself-communications allegedly made with the Russians.
"Active monitoring"
means wiretapping and surveillance of future phone calls, emails, texts, and
other communications on an ongoing basis.
Not a shred of any New York
Times or other reporting since September, 2016 on the "wiretapping"
of Trump and/or his aides has demonstrated any concern whatsoever for Trump's
civil rights or the sanctity of the election process. No concern was expressed
by the CIA, FBI, NSA or other agencies, or by the Obama White House-or by the
media doing the reporting. In fact, they have been quite excited and eager
about the prospect of illegal snooping on Trump.
As White House spokesman
Spicer pointed out, efforts were made by Obama officials during their last days
in office to lessen the protections of wiretap data in order to spread more widely
any highly-sensitive wiretap data on Trump. The New York Times reported[19] on
March 1 that the Obama administration's lowering of "classification
levels" of NSA data was done to "spread" the Trump wiretaps
around various agencies and even foreign governments (see Obama DNI James
Clapper's orders lowering security protections of raw NSA intercept data,
December. 15, 2016).
The New York Times had originally reported[20] on
January 12 that this massive lowering of NSA wiretap data security was in
contrast to Obama's previous tightening of regulations in 2014, after the
Snowden mass leak, to give "privacy protections to foreigners," like
they were Americans. But not for Trump.
The New York Times
headline story[19] on
March 1 that said Obama officials had "Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of
Russian Election Hacking" also admitted that officials say that alleged
Trump collusion with Russia "has not been confirmed" in any of that
intelligence wiretap data.
So what were they
"rushing" to "preserve?" It is the purported Trump
"conspiracy" with Russia that is utterly unsubstantiated and
baseless. Wiretapping one's political opponents in an election, as Obama or his
minions have done, is a classic Watergate-style threat to the democratic
process.
The Fake "Trump
Dossier"
"As part of the
inquiry," wrote The New York Times, this "wiretapping" was done
by the CIA, FBI and/or NSA to try to "investigate" the alleged
Trump-Russian connections claimed in what is known as the (fake) "Trump
dossier"-within a broader investigation of alleged Russian hacking and
other supposed election interference (NY Times, January 20[7], February 14[17],
2017).
This "Trump
dossier" is the controversial document composed by ex-British agent Christopher
Steele, who had been paid by Hillary Clinton's still unidentified backers to do
election "opposition research" against then-candidate Trump. It is
riddled with absurd self-contradictions and vile allegations against President
Trump.
The "dossier[21]"
cannot even make up its mind, so to speak, as to whether the Russians did spend
"years" passing political dirt on Hillary Clinton to Trump to help
"cultivate" relationship with him-or did not in fact ever pass such
info to Trump (Steele report[21],
June 20, 2016). There are at least eight different origins of the hacked or
leaked DNC emails claimed in the "dossier," including that Trump
hacked them, not the Russians, or that they were all just "created"
or "made up."
The one-party opposition
media have managed to ignore the ridiculous contents of the bogus "Trump
dossier" with its raving lunatic absurdities.
For example, thousands of
Russian retirement "pensioners," according to the
"dossier," did the hacking of the DNC emails and passed them on to
Russian officials, apparently in secret meetings at (we infer) park benches and
shuffleboard affairs in Miami and elsewhere (Steele reports 095 and 111[21] and Newsweek[22], November
4, 2016).
These Russian retirement
pensioners living in the U.S. are "hacking...cyberoperatives"
according to Newsweek, in its pre-election article[22] heavily
based on Steele's "Trump dossier," oblivious to the patent absurdity
of the claim.
You will not hear about that
from the anti-Trump media, which so desperately wants the "Trump
dossier" to be believed, regardless of whether any of it is true.
Appendix:
Former Justice Department
Nazi-hunter, John Loftus, has explained how this US-British reciprocity
scheme-or "wiretap shell game," as he calls it-works. Loftus'
evidence of the top secret trick of US-British, NSA-GCHQ wiretapping of
Americans is based on numerous NSA sources and others from many agencies
stretching back decades, including censorship of this information from his and
another expert's early book manuscripts because of "classification" (Loftus[10], Secret War Against the Jews[11], 1997,
pp. 188-195, 548-9).
According to Loftus this is
how the illegal wiretapping "game" is played:
"...
the NSA headquarters [at Fort Meade, Md.] is also the chief British espionage
base in the United States. The presence of British wiretappers at the keyboards
of American eavesdropping computers is a closely guarded secret...."
"The
NSA is a giant vacuum cleaner. It sucks in every form of electronic
information, from telephone calls to telegrams, across the United States. The
presence of British personnel is essential for the American wiretappers to
claim plausible deniability.
"Here's
how the game is played. The British liaison officer at [NSA Hq] Fort Meade
types the [NSA-supplied] target list of ‘suspects' into the American computer.
The NSA computer sorts through its wiretaps and gives the British officer the
recording of any American citizen he wants.
"Since
it is technically a British target of surveillance, no American search
warrant is necessary. [Loftus' italics] The British officer then simply hands
the results over to his American liaison officer. Of course, the Americans
provide the same service to the British in return...."
"According
to our sources, this duplicitous, reciprocal arrangement disguises the most
massive, and illegal, domestic espionage apparatus in the world....
"Through
this charade, the intelligence services of each country can claim that they are
not targeting their own citizens. The targeting is done by an
authorized foreign agent, the intelligence liaison resident in Britain or the
United States" [Loftus, pp. 189-190; endnotes omitted].
Loftus describes how the
courts tried to shut down some of the domestic wiretapping abuses, and how the
FBI succeeded in evading the judiciary. Then the Bureau got its dream come true
with the FISA law, which only applied to U.S. agencies, not the British:
"In
1978 Congress finally passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FIS) Act
[or FISA], a feeble attempt to stamp out some of the worst excesses of domestic
espionage.... [But FISA] was restricted only to targeting by American agencies,
leaving the British liaison officer with a major loophole. The restrictive
language added to the FIS Act [FISA] left unchanged the arrangement under which
the British wiretapped American suspects and then passed on the information to
the NSA."
"To
this day Congress does not realize that the British liaison officers at the NSA
are still free to use American equipment to spy on American citizens. And, in
fact, they are doing just that. Congress has been kept in the dark
deliberately" [Loftus, pp. 191-2].
Naturally, such dirty-trick
U.S.-British spying schemes have led to political abuses. In a comment of eerie
timeliness today, with the claims of Obama directing the wiretapping of candidate
Trump through British intelligence, Loftus states that:
"Over
the years the British back-channel inside the NSA was used for a variety of
political dirty tricks. A large number of American candidates for public office
have been placed under electronic surveillance by British intelligence officers
sitting at their ‘temporary listening post' at [NSA] Fort Meade." [Loftus,
p. 195]
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