Nail BO, H Clinton and other guilty democrats! I remember the
Comey press conference on Clinton and I was excited as Comey was talking and
leaning towards getting Clinton, then all of a sudden he dropped the call. It
is now apparent Comey was a puppet for BO and many heads should roll. Clinton
and others are corrupt and have a problem with the facts and the truth.
Conservative Wisdom United.
++++++++++++++++
Lisa Page: Obama DOJ Ordered FBI Not to Prosecute Hillary
Clinton
Former FBI legal counsel Lisa Page testified to Congress
that the Justice Department ordered the FBI not to charge former Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton with “gross negligence” by mishandling classified
information.
Transcripts of Page’s closed-doortestimony in
July 2018 were released Tuesday by Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) on Tuesday, which
included the following exchange with Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX):
RATCLIFFE: So let me if I can, I
know I’m testing your memory. But when you say advice you got from the
Department, you’re making it sound like it was the Department that told you:
You’re not going to charge gross negligence because we’re the prosecutors and
we’re telling you we’re not going to …
PAGE: That is correct.
RATFLIFFE: …bring a case based on
that.
Ratcliffe highlighted the exchange on Twitter.
Lisa Page confirmed to me under oath that the FBI was
ordered by the Obama DOJ not to consider charging Hillary Clinton for gross
negligence in the handling of classified information. pic.twitter.com/KPQKINBtrB
Page confirmed that
the Department of Justice led by Attorney General Loretta Lynch had “multiple
conversations” about charging Clinton with gross negligence but noted that it
would be a rare decision.
“[T]hey did not feel they could sustain a charge,” she said,
referring to the Department of Justice.
President Donald Trump reacted to the reports on Wednesday.
“The just revealed FBI Agent Lisa Page transcripts make the
Obama Justice Department look exactly like it was, a broken and corrupt
machine,” he wrote. “Hopefully, justice will finally be served. Much more to
come!”
The just revealed FBI Agent Lisa Page transcripts make
the Obama Justice Department look exactly like it was, a broken and corrupt
machine. Hopefully, justice will finally be served. Much more to
come!
The
Muslim Brotherhood’s Global Threat: The House Committee on Oversight
and Government Reform, Subcommittee on National Security [in relation
to Islamic Relief begins on page
12]; Submitted by Dr. M. ZUHDI JASSER; Oversight.House.gov;
27 pgs.; 7/11/18
Clarion Project’s
National Security Analyst and Director of the Clarion Intelligence Network Ryan
Mauro personally worked on a case that would have been the largest
terror-funding case in the U.S. The case involved Islamic Relief, one of the
world’s largest Islamic “charities.”
After his briefing,
three government agencies were prepared to go ahead with prosecution, but the
Obama administration declined. Find out why in this interview with Mauro below
and see if the Trump administration has picked up the ball.
Ryan Mauro, Director of the Clarion Intelligence Network and Shillman
Fellow for the Clarion Project, talks to The Daily Caller about how his
research into Islamic Relief triggered an investigation by three agencies,
resulting in a joint criminal case that was dropped in 2016.
The Clarion Project (formerly
Clarion Fund) is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to educating
both policy makers and the public about the growing phenomenon of Islamic
extremism. The Clarion Project is committed to working towards safeguarding
human rights for all peoples.
About Clarion Project
Clarion Project is a
non-profit organization that educates the public about the dangers of radical
Islam.
Clarion’s award-winning
films, seen by more than 125-million people, expose how radical Islamists use
terrorism, murder, subjugation of women, indoctrination of children, religious
persecution, genocide of minorities, widespread human rights abuses, nuclear
proliferation and cultural jihad— to threaten the West.
The ClarionProject.org web
site delivers news, expert analysis, videos, and unique perspectives about
radical Islam, while giving a platform to moderate Muslims and human rights
activists to speak out against extremism.
Clarion Project engages in
grassroots activism to achieve its goals.
Even as the Leftist Mainstream Media and Obama Deep State operatives
spin an alternative story, only a fool or a lying spin doctor would not admit
Obama inserted his political desires into the 2016 election cycle.
Who is the FBI spy that was trying to glean information on
the Trump campaign? Well, reportedly, it’s longtime CIA operative Stefan
Halper. And no, it wasn’t leaked. If this is true, and most likely it is,
there’s enough public information on him, along with the news media leaving a
trail of breadcrumbs that confirmed his identity. They were as subtle as a
sledgehammer.
Last week, it was reported that the FBI had spied on the
Trump campaign during the 2016 election. It was later revealed by Axios that
Halper had tried to
get a top-level job in the administration after the campaign.
Yet, before we get into what The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald and others have
noted about the timeline of the FBI’s Russia probe, let’s look real quick at
the linguistic martial arts the news media is playing here. All of this deep
state/Trump was spied on stuff was written off by the news media as
conspiratorial garbage. Well, it turns out they were wrong. They’re wrong about
everything it seems, especially reports covering this White House. This is
how The New York Times covered this development. They also
said that this spy is
someone well known within D.C. circles.
President Trump accused the F.B.I.
on Friday, without evidence, of sending a spy to secretly infiltrate his 2016
campaign “for political purposes” even before the bureau had any inkling of the
“phony Russia hoax.”
In fact, F.B.I. agents sent an
informant to talk to two campaign advisers only after they received evidence
that the pair had suspicious contacts linked to Russia during the campaign. The
informant, an American academic who teaches in Britain, made contact late that
summer with one campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, according to people
familiar with the matter. He also met repeatedly in the ensuing months with the
other aide, Carter Page, who was also under F.B.I. scrutiny for his ties to
Russia.
[…]
F.B.I. agents were seeking more
details about what Mr. Papadopoulos knew about the hacked Democratic emails,
and one month after their Russia investigation began, Mr. Papadopoulos received
a curious message. The academic inquired about his interest in writing a
research paper on a disputed gas field in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, a
subject of Mr. Papadopoulos’s expertise.
The informant offered a $3,000
honorarium for the paper and a paid trip to London, where the two could meet
and discuss the research project.
“I understand that this is rather
sudden but thought that given your expertise it might be of interest to you,”
the informant wrote in a message to Mr. Papadopoulos, sent on Sept. 2, 2016.
Mr. Papadopoulos accepted the offer
and arrived in London two weeks later, where he met for several days with the
academic and one of his assistants, a young woman.
Over drinks and dinner one evening
at a high-end London hotel, the F.B.I. informant raised the subject of the
hacked Democratic National Committee emails that had spilled into public view
earlier that summer, according to a person familiar with the conversation. The
source noted how helpful they had been to the Trump campaign, and asked Mr.
Papadopoulos whether he knew anything about Russian attempts to influence the
2016 presidential election.
Yeah, how is that not spying? It is. And this is the problem
with liberalism as of late; they’ve wantonly decided to ignore the definition
of what words mean. Spying is now informing. Invasions are now called “uncontested
arrivals,” but back to Mr. Halper and the timeline. It seems that
his alleged information gathering operation started way before his rendezvous
with Papadopoulos. Carter Page and Sam Clovis, two others affiliated with the
Trump team, were also approached by Halper as well.
Greenwald noted that Halper has history with this sort of
operation; he reportedly did something similar to Carter’s 1980 re-election
campaign. Halper with some other former intelligence operatives allegedly
funneled information on then-President Carter’s foreign policy to Republican
candidate, and future president, Ronald Reagan. This was all revealed in 1983.
Puh-lease. Facts:
DOJ/FBI blew their source,
by leaking every detail to friendly media to spin. NYT and WaPo stories cite
"gov" sources--not Congress. And Daily Caller had that name
out months ago, before news of spying. https://t.co/amtIzZpgVc
Greenwald also noted that while the news media knew who the
FBI spy was, they refused to reveal his name, though they left so many clues
that they might as well have disclosed the source. He also adds that the FBI
and members of Congress are being more or less absurd that revealing the source
would be damaging to national security; we pretty much already know who it is.
And his work was already been reported. The Intercept then details how the
Daily Caller was able to discern whom the source was using entirely
public information, which brings us to FBI timeline. When did this
investigation begin because it seems there were other times that Halper reached
out to Trump team members prior to the Papadopoulos meeting that supposedly led
to the FBI opening up a counterintelligence investigation in July of 2016. By
the way, this
theory was published by the Times in December of
2017, and it was ripped apart.
…the New York Times reported in
December of last year that the FBI investigation into possible ties between the
Trump campaign and Russia began when George Papadopoulos drunkenly boasted to
an Australian diplomat about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was the
disclosure of this episode by the Australians that “led the F.B.I. to open an
investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and
whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired,” the NYT claimed.
But it now seems clear that
Halper’s attempts to gather information for the FBI began before that. “The
professor’s interactions with Trump advisers began a few weeks before the
opening of the investigation, when Page met the professor at the British
symposium,” the Post reported. While it’s not rare for the FBI to gather
information before formally opening an investigation, Halper’s earlier snooping
does call into question the accuracy of the NYT’s claim that it was the drunken
Papadopoulos ramblings that first prompted the FBI’s interest in these possible
connections. And it suggests that CIA operatives, apparently working with at
least some factions within the FBI, were trying to gather information about the
Trump campaign earlier than had been previously reported.
Then there are questions about what
appear to be some fairly substantial government payments to Halper throughout
2016. Halper continues to be listed as a “vendor” by websites that track
payments by the federal government to private contractors.
[…]
Equally strange are the semantic
games which journalists are playing in order to claim that this revelation
disproves, rather than proves, Trump’s allegation that the FBI “spied” on his
campaign.
So, there’s the new line of inquiry. The FBI spy was
investigating something prior to the official start of the counterintelligence
probe. Byron York’s column in The Washington Examiner noted that Trump March
meeting with The Washington Post editorial board is where the FBI
and DOJ probably got the first batch of names to peruse; Trump has
announced that Papadopoulos and Carter Page would be lending a hand:
Trump's announcement did not go
unnoticed at the FBI and Justice Department. The bureau knew Page from a
previous episode in which Russian agents had tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit
him. It's not clear what the FBI knew about the others. But then-Director James
Comey and number-two Andrew McCabe personally briefed Attorney General Loretta
Lynch on the list of newly-named Trump foreign policy advisers, including Page,
according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
Lynch told the House Intelligence Committee
that she, Comey, and McCabe discussed whether to provide a "defensive
briefing" to the Trump campaign. That would entail having an FBI official
meet with a senior campaign official "to alert them to the fact that …
there may be efforts to compromise someone with their campaign," Lynch
said.
It didn't happen, even though it
was discussed again when Comey briefed the National Security Council principals
committee about Page in the "late spring" of 2016, according to
Lynch's testimony. (The principals committee includes some of the
highest-ranking officials in the government, including the secretaries of
State, Treasury, Defense, and Homeland Security, the attorney general, the head
of the CIA, the White House chief of staff, U.N. ambassador, and more.)
So the nation's top political
appointees, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies were watching Trump
campaign figures in the spring and early summer of 2016.
And all of this brings us to a figure that has remained
under the radar in all of this: President Barack Obama. What did he know and
when did he know it because the intelligence apparatus of the U.S. was under
his administration, along with the FBI/DOJ. It’s relevant to bring the former
president and his team under the microscope again. Until then, what we
know via
Larry O’Connor is that a) the Trump campaign was spied on; and
b) the motive was political pending new developments:
First, let’s hope that all
Americans, Left, Right and Never Trump, can agree that this operation was
unprecedented and extraordinary. The FBI has never, as far as we know,
conducted a clandestine investigation on a presidential campaign complete with
electronic surveillance and a spy. The bar to initiate such an investigation
would have to be pretty high. The FBI would not, under normal circumstances,
authorize this kind of operation unless there was extreme and justifiable
reasons to do so.
So, whatever the reason to initiate
this operation, one expects that reason to be pretty concrete and conclusive.
Now, let’s examine the underlying
political atmosphere surrounding the decision to launch this extraordinary,
unprecedented investigation.
Donald Trump was President Obama’s
political enemy. He was running, specifically, to undo Obama’s legacy and
everything he had instituted through executive actions. He was also running
against Obama’s chosen successor.
[…]
We know that the atmosphere
surrounding the decision to launch the investigation was highly political. It
was political in the most personal sense for President Obama, who held the
reigns [sic] of power over the FBI and the DOJ at the time of the
investigation.
We know that the political document
known as the “Steele dossier” was used, at least in part, to justify many
elements of the spying operation against the Trump campaign.
We know that George Popadopoulos’
statement in a bar with an Austrailian [sic] diplomat triggered some element of
the investigation as well.
A guy making a statement in a bar
and a pile of unverified opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign
doesn’t even come close to the very high bar needed to be cleared to initiate a
clandestine investigation on any American citizen, let alone a member of a
presidential campaign just weeks before election day.
But, it appears, that’s all we have
[…]
Given the politically charged
backdrop of the Obama versus Trump death match, coupled with the use of the
Steele dossier (by definition a political document paid for by Trump’s
political opponent) the only reasonable conclusion to reach is that the FBI
spying operation was launched for political purposes.
And now the wait begins—and it could take years.
++++++++++++++++++
Ex-Trump Aide Comes Forward… Says There’s Second Spy,
Second Intel Agency
Michael Cavuto on Fox News
- Screen Capture of CT Video
One of President Donald Trump’s most explosive claims about
the 2016 election — one that was dismissed out of hand until recently — was
that his campaign was the subject of extensive surveillance.
Now, a former Trump aide is saying something even more explosive:
There wasn’t just a mole inside the Trump campaign, there was a second spy and
intelligence agency.
Michael Caputo is pretty much the definition of a political
lifer. A media strategist, he worked with Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and
various other Republicans. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he began doing
work with the Russians.
This didn’t get the attention of too many people until he
started working for Trump. Much like Carter Page, the low-level Trump campaign
staffer whose ties to Russia became the subject of a million conspiracy
theories, Caputo’s ties to the Russians became of intense interest to the
overzealous FBI people charged with finding some sort of evidence that Trump
was the Siberian Candidate.
Caputo appeared on Fox News just hours after Axios reported “President Trump’s top trade adviser,
Peter Navarro, recommended appointing Stefan Halper, an academic and suspected
FBI informant on the Trump campaign, to a senior role in the Trump
administration.”
That’s bad. According to Caputo, things were even worse.
“Let me tell you something that I know for a fact, this
informant, this person that they planted, that they tried to plant into the
campaign and even into the administration, if you believe Axios — he’s not the
only person that came into the campaign!” Caputo said.
“And the FBI is not the only Obama agency who came into the
campaign,” he added.
“I know because they came at me. And I’m looking for
clearance from my attorney to reveal this to the public. This is just the
beginning and I’ll tell you, when we finally find out the truth about this,
Director Clapper and the rest of them are gonna be wearing some orange suits.”
Orange suits are an unlikely outcome, but
Caputo’s statement indicates that Obama-era surveillance of the Trump campaign
— once dismissed as tinfoil-hattery — might actually be very real.
Of course, Caputo may have a reason to prevaricate about
such things. Kimberley Strassel doesn’t. She’s the Wall Street Journal
writer whose reporting has indicated that she
believes there was an FBI mole inside the campaign.
“The Bureau already has some explaining to do. Thanks to the
Washington Post’s unnamed law-enforcement leakers, we know Mr. Nunes’s request
deals with a ‘top secret intelligence source’ of the FBI and CIA, who is a U.S.
citizen and who was involved in the Russia collusion probe,” she wrote in an
article earlier this month.
“When government agencies refer to sources, they mean people
who appear to be average citizens but use their profession or contacts to spy
for the agency. Ergo, we might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a
person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in
some capacity with the Trump campaign.
“This would amount to spying, and it is hugely disconcerting,”
she added. “It would also be a major escalation from the electronic
surveillance we already knew about, which was bad enough.”
During and after the campaign, Trump’s claims that he was
surveilled (and that the surveillance was politically-motivated) were dismissed
as baseless fantasies, yet another sign this was an unbalanced person who
shouldn’t be normalized or believed.
And yet, here we are, weeks away from the inspector general’s report on the Clinton
investigation, which doesn’t sound like it’s going to simply be the pro forma
postmortem it normally would be, considering it involved a losing campaign. The
report is expected to detail a whole host of tactics by the “deep state” that
could easily be construed as being in service of the Clinton campaign and to
the detriment of the Trump campaign.
If Caputo is telling the truth, this means there’s a whole
host of issues here. Who was involved? The DOJ and FBI, obviously, but the CIA
too? Other agencies under the aegis of the ODNI?
I can predict just one thing: Things are about to get very
interesting for everyone who called Trump crazy when he talked about
surveillance.
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Hold On, The FBI Was
Spying On The Trump Campaign *Before* The Counterintelligence Probe Officially
Started?
Townhall.comis the leading source for conservative news and
political commentary and analysis.
The Dems have tried to frame President Trump with getting
the Russians to fix the November elections to Trump’s favor. Indeed, traitor
former President Obama has been exposed with his own self trying to sway the
election with the Russian Fake News story combined with some Watergate style
campaign spying in the name of National Security.
FINALLY! President Trump is pushing back! Our President is
letting the cat out of the bag and the Dems are trying to obfuscate the push
back with typical denials in their defense of treasonous Obama.
Here is some more Obama/Dem Deep State documentation of the
travesty of pulling a legal coup against President Trump. I have to wonder.
WHEN the legal coup fails, will the Obama/Dems begin a violent coup as
evidenced in the streets with violence against Pro-Trumpers? Can you say Loretta Lynch?
As to the push back against
Obama, Mark Levin outlines the very same thing Trump refers to on Fox &
Friends yesterday. The irony! The sources cited by Levin are Left oriented rags
(Levin uses the term “another Right Wing” in a tongue-in-cheek fashion to
get his point across).
Mark
Levin interview on Fox News Fox & Friends on March 5, 2017 3/5/17 and
provides proof of Obama Administration Wiretapping Spying by FBI and NSA. Mark
Levin proves wiretap trump tower
If you are foolish enough to
watch other news outlets castigate President Trump for his tweets against
treasonous Obama, YOU have to see the hypocrisy that Levin sources the Left for
Obama meddling in the 2016 election cycle!
Mark Levinis on a tearand it is a wonder to behold. I just watched him
provide solid proof on Fox News on how all these police tactics against
President Trump did indeed occur. The media provided most of the proof
themselves that the two FISA requests were sought by Obama… the first one in June of last year, which mentioned
Trump directly and was denied, and a second that occurred in October last year
and was narrowed in scope, then was approved. It looks like it may have been
targeting a server in the White House that was emailing Russian banks
supposedly. No wrongdoing was found, unless of course you count what Obama did.
Levin has laid out exactly
how this should be investigated and he has the full attention of the White
House. His findings and recommendations have been circulated to
several White House staffers, according to Washington Post reporter Robert
Costa. The FISA orders and transcripts should now be made public and hearings
should begin over all this. The media is still insisting there is no proof,
when they provided said proof. This is insane.
From Conservative Review:
Mark
Levin, Conservative Review’s editor-in-chief, recommends the Trump
administration open an investigation into Barack Obama. Levin states the former
president’s team used police-state tactics against then-candidate Trump during
the 2016 election.
“The
gravity of this is unparalleled. It appears that during the course of a
presidential election, the Obama administration used both intelligence and law
enforcement agencies to investigate the Republican nominee’s campaign and
certain surrogates,” Levin tells Conservative Review.
Levin
– who served as chief of staff for President Reagan’s Attorney General Ed Meese
– explained the potential
scandal on his Thursday evening radio show:
“We
have a prior administration – Barack Obama and his surrogates – who are
supporting Hillary Clinton and her party, the Democratic Party. Who were using
the … intelligence activities to surveil members of the
Trump campaign, and to put that information out in the public.”
“The
question is: Was Obama surveilling top Trump campaign officials during the
election?” Levin asked on “The Mark Levin Show.”
Mark Levin is calling this a silent coup.
And he is correct. I’ve looked right at this evidence for months and I never
connected the dots. I’m so glad Levin did. It is obvious to me that
Barack Obama did know about all this and had Lynch at the DOJ once again do his
dirty work. There was and is an orchestrated plan to sabotage the Trump
presidency and not only stop him from getting his appointees approved, but stop
him from accomplishing anything of merit or that would hurt the Obama legacy.
A myriad of things now look
very connected. The protests and riots, Valerie Jarrett moving into Obama’s
mansion, Jarrett’s daughter being hired by CNN to cover the DOJ and Jeff
Sessions when she’s not even a journalist, the attack on Jeff Sessions himself,
and on and on and on. When do we wake up and realize we are at war within? And
that Obama and his activists must be stopped and held accountable. You’ve got Loretta Lynch literally
calling for blood and death in our streets: “…They’ve
marched, they’ve bled and yes, some
of them died. This is hard. Every good thing is. We have done this before. We
can do this again…”– Loretta Lynch, February 28 2017 This is who we are fighting and we must now see
this through and show the left that we will not stand for police state tactics
against Americans like this and especially against an elected President.
After Donald Trump blew the
whistle on the eavesdropping of his 2016 campaign headquarters by Barack
Obama’s administration, few in the media or elsewhere seem to be asking the
obvious questions:
Was it legal?
Was it ethical – in the
American way?
One thing is for certain: If
the roles were reversed and the Trump administration bugged Democrats, you can
imagine the media would take a much different view.
Let’s first take a look at
how the media reported this travesty of justice, political decorum, the
Constitution and American legal tradition:
oWashington Post: President
Trump on Saturday angrily accused former President Barack Obama of
orchestrating a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap the phones at his Trump Tower
headquarters in the run-up to last fall’s election, providing no evidence to
support his explosive claim and drawing a flat denial from Obama’s office.
oCNN: Trump’s baseless
wiretap claim
oAtlantic: Trump’s Unfounded
Claims of a “Nixon/Watergate” Wiretapping Scheme
oHuffington Post: Obama
Refutes Allegation that He Wiretapped Trump Tower During Campaign
oNew York Daily News:
Trump’s poor understanding of national security investigations may prove
dangerous
oNew York Times: President
Trump on Saturday accused former President Barack Obama of tapping his phones at
Trump Tower the month before the election, leveling the explosive allegation
without offering any evidence.
The accusation is indeed bigger than Watergate, which began
with an attempt not to eavesdrop directly on Richard Nixon’s opponent in the
1972 presidential election, but on Larry O’Brian, the head of the DNC, whose
offices were in the Watergate Hotel. He was the Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of his
day, but she and Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta didn’t bother
securing their email communications, and you could read them all on WikiLeaks.
And that brings us to the excuse for Trump’s campaign being
undoubtedly bugged – the elusive evidence for Russian hacking and interference
in the 2016 U.S. election.
If you doubt there is no evidence, just carefully read every
New York Times story on the fake scandal. Way down near the bottom of every
story, the paper that has trumpeted this story the most admits there’s no
evidence.
So, here’s the way this thing obviously went down.
Obama’s team first tried to get a broad FISA warrant to
investigate the Russian fantasy. The judge turned it down.
It tried again with a narrower FISA warrant request. The
judge turned it down.
Then it tried a third time, and the judge approved it in
October. Coincidentally, that is the exact time Trump says the wiretapping
began.
Not one of these big news organizations will tell you that.
It’s the attorney general who would request such wiretap
authorizations for heavy-duty, politically charged requests such as this – not
that any have ever been requested or authorized in the history of the republic.
Do news organizations really want to be covering up stuff
like this? Don’t they understand the same tactics can be used against them?
Obama, or (wink-wink) Lynch, just set the precedent.
Nixon never did anything remotely like this – and he was
forced from office as a result. Obama or Lynch could well be prosecuted by the
Trump administration. And one or both probably should be.
Misuse of FISA statutes is a clear violation of the law.
FISA can only be used for “foreign intelligence information”
as the basis for surveillance to protect the U.S. against a “grave” or
“hostile” attack, war-like sabotage or international terror.
Does anyone suggest such a thing with regard to Russian
hacks?
That’s what makes this scandal, pardon the expression,
“bigger than Watergate.”
Out of more than 35,000 FISA court requests, only 12 have
ever been rejected. But two out of three requested by the Obama administration
to investigate the Russia deal were. What does that tell you?
It tells me this was a political fishing expedition to build
a case against Trump if or when he beat Hillary.
Since the election, the hysteria over Russia’s role in the
election has only increased exponentially.
And that’s why:
1)I believe Trump.
2)I don’t believe Obama.
3)I don’t believe the “fake
news cartel,” which is all in for finding the elusive Trump-Russia link.
What we’ve got here at first glance is a prima facie case for
“bigger and worse than Watergate.”
But the Washington Post and New York Times have already
signaled they won’t be investigating. They are already publishing front-page
editorials that stake out a rather shrill “see-no-evil, hear-no-evil,
speak-no-evil” approach.
Was it legal? No.
Was it ethical in the American political tradition? No.
Is it one of the most dangerous developments in American
political history? Yes.
+++
The Obama Camp’s
Disingenuous Denials on FISA Surveillance of Trump
President Trump’s early Saturday morning tweeting has
exploded to the forefront an uncovered scandal I’ve been talking about since
early January (including in this weekend’s column): The fact that the Obama
Justice Department and the FBI investigated associates of Donald Trump, and
likely Trump himself, in the heat of the presidential campaign.
To summarize, reporting indicates that, prior to June 2016,
the Obama Justice Department and FBI considered a criminal investigation of
Trump associates, and perhaps Trump himself, based on concerns about
connections to Russian financial institutions. Preliminary poking around
indicated that there was nothing criminal involved. Rather than shut the case
down, though, the Obama Justice Department converted it into a
national-security investigation under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA). FISA allows the government, if it gets court permission, to conduct electronic
surveillance (which could include wiretapping, monitoring of e-mail, and the
like) against those it alleges are “agents of a foreign power.”
FISA applications and the evidence garnered from them are
classified – i.e., we would not know about any of this unless someone had
leaked classified information to the media, a felony. In June, the Obama
Justice Department submitted an application that apparently “named” Trump in
addition to some of his associates.
As I have stressed, it is unclear whether “named” in this
context indicates that Trump himself was cited as a person the Justice
Department was alleging was a Russian agent whom it wanted to surveil. It could
instead mean that Trump’s name was merely mentioned in an application that
sought to conduct surveillance on other alleged Russian agents. President
Trump’s tweets on Saturday claimed that “President
Obama . . . tapp[ed] my phones[,]” which makes it more
likely that Trump was targeted for surveillance, rather than merely mentioned
in the application.
In any event, the FISA court reportedly turned down the
Obama Justice Department’s request, which is notable: The FISA court is
notoriously solicitous of government requests to conduct national-security
surveillance (although, as I’ve noted over the years, the claim by many that it
is a rubber-stamp is overblown).
Not taking no for an answer, the Obama Justice Department
evidently returned to the FISA court in October 2016, the critical final weeks
of the presidential campaign. This time, the Justice Department submitted a
narrowly tailored application that did not mention Trump. The court apparently
granted it, authorizing surveillance of some Trump associates.
It is unknown whether that surveillance is still underway,
but the New York Times has identified – again, based on illegal leaks of
classified information – at least three of its targets: Paul Manafort (the
former Trump campaign chairman who was ousted in August), and two others whose
connection to the Trump campaign was loose at best, Manafort’s former
political-consulting business partner Roger Stone, and investor Carter Page.
The Times report (from mid-January) includes a lot of heavy
breathing about potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia; but it
ultimately concedes that the government’s FISA investigation may have nothing
to do with Trump, the campaign, or alleged Russian efforts to interfere in the
U.S. election by hacking e-mail accounts. Trump’s tweets on Saturday prompted
some interesting “denials” from the Obama camp. These can be summarized in the
statement put out by Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis:
A cardinal rule of the Obama
Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any
independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that
practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance
on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.
This seems disingenuous on several levels. First, as Obama
officials well know, under the FISA process, it is technically the FISA court
that “orders” surveillance. And by statute, it is the Justice Department, not
the White House, that represents the government in proceedings before the FISA
court. So, the issue is not whether Obama or some member of his White House
staff “ordered” surveillance of Trump and his associates.
The issues are (a) whether the Obama Justice Department
sought such surveillance authorization from the FISA court, and (b)
whether, if the Justice Department did that, the White House was aware of or
complicit in the decision to do so. Personally, given the explosive and
controversial nature of the surveillance request we are talking about – an
application to wiretap the presidential candidate of the opposition party, and
some of his associates, during the heat of the presidential campaign, based on
the allegation that the candidate and his associates were acting as Russian
agents – it seems to me that there is less than zero chance that could
have happened without consultation between the Justice Department and the White
House. [Blog Editor’s bold text]
Second, the business about never ordering surveillance
against American citizens is nonsense. Obama had American citizens killed in
drone operations. Obviously, that was not done in the U.S. or through the FISA
process; it was done overseas, under the president’s commander-in-chief and statutory
authority during wartime.
But the notion that Obama would never have an American
subject to surveillance is absurd. Third, that brings us to a related point: FISA
national-security investigations are not like criminal investigations. They are
more like covert intelligence operations – which presidents personally
sign off on. [Blog Editor’s bold text]
The intention is not to build a criminal case; it is to
gather information about what foreign powers are up, particularly on U.S. soil.
One of the points in FISA proceedings’ being classified is that they remain
secret – the idea is not to prejudice an American citizen with publication
of the fact that he has been subjected to surveillance even though he is not
alleged to have engaged in criminal wrongdoing. Consequently, there is nothing
wrong, in principle, with a president’s ordering national-security surveillance
of a potential foreign agent who may be helping a foreign power threaten
American security and interests.
That is one of the president’s main jobs – there would
be something wrong if a president, who truly believed the nation was threatened
by a foreign power, failed to take action. Prior to FISA’s enactment in 1978,
courts had no formal role in the surveillance of foreign agents for
national-security purposes – it was a unilateral executive-branch
function. Beginning with the Carter administration during FISA’s enactment, it
has been the position of presidential administrations of both parties that,
despite the enactment of the FISA process, the president maintains inherent
authority under Article II of the Constitution to order surveillance even in
the absence of court authorization. [Blog Editor’s bold text]
Of course, doing so is controversial, as President Bush
learned after he directed the NSA to conduct warrantless wiretapping of
suspected terrorists following the 9/11 attacks. Nevertheless, we should not
allow the statements of Obama spokesmen to confuse us here. The Justice
Department and FBI have two missions: (a) criminal law-enforcement and (b)
national security. It would be scandalous (though probably not constitutional
unconstitutional) for a president to interfere in the law-enforcement mission
by ordering the Justice Department to prosecute someone outside its normal
procedures.
But it would not be inappropriate e–ven though civil
libertarians would raise holy hell — for the president to direct warrantless
surveillance against a target, even an American citizen, if the president truly
believed that target was functioning as an agent of a foreign power threatening
U.S. interests. To be clear, there does not seem to be any evidence, at least
that I know of, to suggest that any surveillance or requests to conduct
surveillance against then-candidate Donald Trump was done outside the FISA
process.
Nevertheless, whether done inside or outside the FISA
process, it would be a scandal of Watergate dimension if a presidential
administration sought to conduct, or did conduct, national-security
surveillance against the presidential candidate of the opposition party. Unless
there was some powerful evidence that the candidate was actually acting as an
agent of a foreign power, such activity would amount to a pretextual use of
national-security power for political purposes. That is the kind of abuse that
led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in lieu of impeachment. [Blog Editor’s bold
text]
Moreover, it cannot be glossed over that, at the very time
it appears the Obama Justice Department was seeking to surveil Trump and/or his
associates on the pretext that they were Russian agents, the Obama Justice
Department was also actively undermining and ultimately closing without charges
the criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton despite significant evidence of
felony misconduct that threatened national security. This appears to be
extraordinary, politically motivated abuse of presidential power. [I
have updated the post, as indicated, to reflect that I meant “not
unconstitutional” in a passage in which I erroneously said “not
constitutional.] -[Blog Editor’s bold text]
