Just out today:
Trump was under coverage for a long time before the victory. I would assume it began even before Trump himself decided to run, given his past feigns at running. What I assume happened was, as the election approached it became clear Trump wasn’t going to flame out spectacularly. The people doing the watching realized he could very well be the next President, and discover a ton of illegal surveillance directed at him.
So as the election approached, the people in charge of surveillance looked for a reason to be doing the surveillance Obama ordered. Then they sought an official FISA court order for the wiretaps, or some other official approval for being there. In-person, infiltration, and externally installed tech is more difficult to prove and less able to be prosecuted, so they may not have sought official authorization for that. These warrants were all just evidence of ass-covering, more than the full scope of the operations targeting Trump’s team, or evidence of when it began.
Here is the creepy part. Surveillance will almost never identify a threat big enough to move the machine, and then just roll out one small tool like a wiretap to target it. If a threat big enough for a wiretap is identified, the entire machine is rolled out. If Trump’s lines were being listened to and recorded, then there was other tech and people assigned to do everything from foot surveillance, to vehicle surveillance, to observation posts with views of his windows and telephoto lenses, to through-wall imagry technology, to installing tech in his vehicles, to infiltration, to a central command to coordinate it all.
My guess is there was an employee or two at Mara Lago watching and reporting in to see if The Donald was having any affairs, and there were employees in Trump Tower reporting all the scuttlebutt about the boss there too. Nobody who called for service at the Donald’s properties got just a service person – they got a TIPS program approved civilian informant, who attended a pre-service-call briefing with instructions and necessary tech supplied, and then had a post-service-call debrief. And on and on. If Donald knew about it, it would have been irritating, though I am sure his security would be a formidable countermeasure.
I don’t know if this is a sign Trump is going to take on the surveillance state. I would doubt it. But I do know it is reported that Obama intends to seek Trump’s impeachment and removal, and he has brought Valerie Jarrett on board to make it happen. Impeachment and removal is a huge goal to have. I have always suspected the Obama-team knows the full extent of the surveillance state, and intended to expose it and blame Donald for it two or three years into his Presidency. The message would immediately become, “Look America, at how this fascist control-freak has people watching all of you! We told you he was a fascist!” It would be hard to see Trump not being impeached and removed by a united team of the suddenly-aghast Cucks and leftists in Congress if they rolled that out.
Notice how with just one Tweet, Donald has mobilized the entire media to push the meme that Donald is the victim of that very system, and Obama is the one who set it up and was abusing it. If it comes out now, it will be The Donald and The People as victims, against Obama, who was a surveillance-state obsessed version of McCarthy (trigger word!) who was spying on everyone, including President Donald J Trump himself.
Talk about 3D chess. You wonder why I love this President?
[…] Donald Trump Was Wiretapped At Trump Tower […]
What makes you doubt Trump will take on the surveillance state? Or do you mean at this moment?
I think Trump knows this kind of toy is useful but with the left they’re either attacking you for using it when they’re not aggressively using it themselves. That makes it a risky toy, which is useless as far as I can tell.
Better to slowly dismantle the whole thing so the left won’t have something to use against him and his family in time. Which you can be sure is exactly what they’ll do.
No, I don’t see a way in which Trump *doesn’t* take it out root and branch over time.
Thanks for all the posts, great stuff!
The surveillance state probably has two things going for it. One, it may do useful things here and there, which it would argue make it worthwhile. I have no idea about its structure, or what it really does beyond follow various people around and clock their entire lives, while recruiting other civilians to do it. There may be multiple entities, and some may be exclusively political, or national security, or industrial, or LE, or it may all be privatized, hybridized, and homogenized (my most likely scenario). But somewhere I am sure surveillance does some good stuff.
Two, it is so big, and has been privatizing so long, and so many smart people have devoted their lives to insulating it from scrutiny by structuring it just so, and getting blackmail on those who might be a problem, that it may not be easily attackable, without fully exposing it and triggering a civil war of the watched vs the watchers. That is, there may be no way to use the civilized government legal structure to dismantle it gently.
Plus, I assume President Trump has an immense amount already on his plate, trying to keep the nation’s economic situation from collapsing, while rooting out all of the Obamaite traitors, and maintaining our world dominance.
That and Trump has come out for Civil Asset Forfeiture, which makes me think he will be very amenable to any Law Enforcement agent who comes to him and tells him surveillance is necessary for any reason. I do not like what the surveillance state has become, but I also wouldn’t want to be the guy who facilitated the next 9/11, or helped a serial killer continue taking victims by taking it all down at once.
I could be wrong. This incident might open his eyes to the fact that surveillance has entered a zone where it needs to keep control over everyone, no matter the cost, and Trump may see that as dangerous. He may be aware of leftist infiltration and corruption and control of it, and that may piss him off. He may even know other stuff we are not aware of, making him view it askance. But I tend to think it will be low on his priorities, likely because it is so difficult to get a feel for exactly what it is doing, and how bad things are, as well as the difficulty in taking it on.
I hope I am wrong and he reforms it to focus on crime and national security alone. Putting all government on the same page as civilians, and making government work with the people instead of against them would be awful nice.