Obama could face serious consequences if he wiretapped President Trump:
One important reminder about electronic surveillance. Occasionally, a law enforcement officer will hear or see or record information not allowed by the warrant, but incidental or accidental to otherwise lawful surveillance. Their job is to immediately stop listening, stop recording, and to delete such information…
This bring us to Watergate-on-Steroids, or #ObamaGate. Here are the problematic aspects of the Obama surveillance on Trump’s team, and on Trump himself. First, it is not apparent FISA could ever be invoked. Second, it is possible Obama’s team may have perjured themselves before the FISA court by withholding material information essential to the FISA court’s willingness to permit the government surveillance. Third, it could be that Obama’s team illegally disseminated and disclosed FISA information in direct violation of the statute precisely prohibiting such dissemination and disclosure. FISA prohibits, under criminal penalty, Obama’s team from doing any of the three.
At the outset, the NSA should have never been involved in a domestic US election…
Out of 35,000+ requests for surveillance, the FISA court has only ever rejected a whopping 12. Apparently, according to published reports, you can add one more to that — even the FISA court first rejected Obama’s request to spy on Trump’s team under the guise of an investigation into foreign agents of a pending war attack…
This raises the second problem: Obama’s team submission of an affidavit to to the FISA court. An application for a warrant of any kind requires an affidavit, and that affidavit may not omit material factors…
Since Trump was the obvious target, the alleged failure to disclose his name in the second application could be a serious and severe violation of the obligation to disclose all material facts. Lastly, given the later behavior, it is evident any promise in the affidavit to protect the surveilled information from ever being sourced or disseminated was a false promise, intended to induce the illicit surveillance. This is criminalized both by federal perjury statutes, conspiracy statutes, and the FISA criminal laws themselves…
Do liberals understand what Pandora’s Box Obama opened up by Obama using the powers of the NSA, CIA and FBI to spy on his political opponents? Even Nixon never did that…
… by definition, FISA information is strictly confidential or it’s information that never should have been gathered. FISA strictly segregates its surveilled information into two categories: highly confidential information of the most serious of crimes involving foreign acts of war; or, if not that, then information that should never have been gathered, should be immediately deleted, and never sourced nor disseminated. It cannot be both.
Recognizing this information did not fit FISA meant having to delete it and destroy it. According to published reports, Obama’s team did the opposite: order it preserved, ordered the NSA to search it, keep it, and share it; and then Obama’s Attorney General issued an order to allow broader sharing of information and, according to the New York Times, Obama aides acted to label the Trump information at a lower level of classification for massive-level sharing of the information…
Democrats may regret Sessions’ recusal, as his replacement is a mini-Sessions: a long-respected, a-political, highly ethical prosecutor, Dana Boente, whose reputation is well-warranted from his service at the Tax Division, and who won’t be limited by any perceived ties to Trump, given his prior appointment by Obama. Obama himself appeared scared of Boente, as he removed Boente from the successor-to-Sessions position during the lame-duck part of Obama’s presidency, but Trump restored Boente to that role earlier this month. Democrats may get the investigation they wanted, but it may be their own that end up named in the indictment.
It almost seems as if Trump engineered Session’s recusal, specifically to further weaponize this investigation. Now there will be no claiming it is partisan, if it moves forward.
It is interesting, looking back, to see what a good idea FISA would have seemed like, especially after 9/11. I have to admit, I would have been 100% for it back then, sadly. A special court, that could fast-track surveillance in the event of an imminent attack. All sorts of safeguards, so it couldn’t just be used willy nilly, and would just be a tool of last resort.
And like clockwork it was turned into a tool for the leftist administration spy on the conservative candidate for President to try and take him down.
Interestingly, now it comes out that Sessions was bugged, even when he was just a Republican Senator:
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said in an interview on “Justice with Judge Jeanine” Saturday that the Obama administration listened in on conversations between then-Sen. Jeff Sessions and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
“What we have seen from the previous administration is they did spend time listening to conversations between then Senator Jeff Sessions and the ambassador to Russia while he was in his U.S. Senate office,” Lewandowski told Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro. “If that were to take place – which supposedly did take place – what other conversations are they listening in on.”
Note that this site has been saying this type of activity was going on widely for some time now. And these are the relatively establishment conservatives who are being bugged and wiretapped. If you are alt-right, or three precenter, or Redditor, or on Voat, or online and have an opinion, or even just have a Pepe background on your computer, it is entirely possible there is a transcript of your life for the last eight years in a file somewhere. Keep in mind that somebody may always be watching.
But to me, the investigation into the wiretapping of Trump and his team, and even the broader right, will be a lesser issue based on practicalities of the media terrain and how publicity drives the narrative.
The media would actually not care about Trump, or sessions, or us being wiretapped. The them, Trump is a dangerous conservative, and should have had the full force of the government opposing him. Trump can obviously move this issue himself, as he has moved his entire campaign, but how much faster it would move with the media’s assistance.
Now, even without the media, this investigative train is beginning to leave the station and pick up steam. I have no idea where it goes, but things like this can quickly get out of control, and begin to choose their own path. We have no idea who in Congress has a bone to pick with any of the involved agencies, or what may come up unexpectedly in the course of investigations. A small investigation of a minor land deal by the Clintons decades back morphed into Monica Lewinsky and Impeachment – and it would have produced a removal had Clinton not effectively stalled it for so long. Where does an investigation bigger than Watergate, involving the President of the United States wiretapping political opposition using the intelligence infrastructure go?
You know that the Trump administration, being as brilliant as it is, has to have foreseen this possibility, and they do appear to be letting things move in the direction of investigation regardless. So where might it go that could be even worse for Obama?
That is what nobody is talking about, and it is what might become the most important facet of this investigation. What if it wasn’t just Trump’s people under coverage? We know that the Obama administration had at least two high-profile documented cases of what appear to have been illegal spying on reporters in the media. In one, Fox’s James Rosen had the national security and Law Enforcement apparatus turned on him:
The Justice Department spied extensively on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, tracking his movements in and out of the State Department and seizing two days of Rosen’s personal emails, the Washington Post reported on Monday.
In a chilling move sure to rile defenders of civil liberties, an FBI agent also accused Rosen of breaking anti-espionage law with behavior that—as described in the agent’s own affidavit—falls well inside the bounds of traditional news reporting.
And then there was the case of Sharyll Atkisson, who appears to have not only have been spied upon, but who had classified documents planted on her computer, so she could be imprisoned for her reporting. Her case is presently the subject of a lawsuit against the government:
Former CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson has sued the Justice Department over the hacking of her computers, officially accusing the Obama administration of illegal surveillance while she was reporting on administration scandals.
In a series of legal filings that seek $35 million in damages, Attkisson alleges that three separate computer forensic exams showed that hackers used sophisticated methods to surreptitiously monitor her work between 2011 and 2013.
“I just think it’s important to send a message that people shouldn’t be victimized and throw up their hands and think there’s nothing they can do and they’re powerless,” Attkisson said in an interview.
The media may not care about Trump, but as the investigation progresses, it is difficult to see how it will navigate away from these cases. And as it moves through those cases, other cases may come to light, exposing a much broader spying operation targeting the political enemies of the Obama administration, as well as the more general media infrastructure. That could pull the mainstream media on board with Trump. And when the further cases we have not heard of, but which could be even worse come to light, then things could really pick up.
For example, was Michael Hastings under some form of surveillance? If so, and it was denied by the government at the time, suddenly his death begins to look incredibly interesting. Did his surveillance team document an approach of other individuals into his bubble? Did it identify someone who tampered with his car? Did it receive an order to back off people around him and let them slip away? Who issued the orders? What video of his coverage, around the time he was killed, exists?
You see how this could spiral out of control, and quickly. Either the Trump administration has just procured the mother of all blackmail chips to cash in later, or his administration will let this play out freely and possibly see an epic rollback of the security state.
And I am not even sure anybody, President Trump included, can control which this turns into at this point.
One thing K-shifts are not, is boring.
Spread r/K Theory, because the Apocalypse will look a lot like this
Snowden, Stellar Wind and systemic corruption.
Michael Hastings had to have been killed. There was also a firebomb of some sort. Look at this picture. See the gas tank on the right laying on the ground? It’s not burnt. If the gas tank is on the ground then where did all the incendiary stuff come from to burn up the car? Cars are fuel injected and only have fuel lines going to the engine and a return going back to the tank.
I agree. I assumed it when they put out the story that Mercedes engineered the car to “eject” the engine for safety in the event of a crash. Nothing says safety and lack of legal liability, like creating a car that ejects a 900lb cannonball a few hundred yards in a random direction every time the car is in a crash.
Hastings must have been onto something interesting.