MB Obama Spied on The Associated Press
May 14, 2013 By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The Obama administration, which has a chilling zeal for investigating leaks and prosecuting leakers, has failed to offer a credible justification for secretly combing through the phone records of reporters and editors at The Associated Press in what looks like a fishing expedition for sources and an effort to frighten off whistle-blowers.
On Friday, Justice Department officials revealed that they had been going through The A.P.’s records for months. The dragnet covered work, home and cellphone records used by almost 100 people at one of the oldest and most reputable news organizations. James Cole, a deputy attorney general, offered no further explanation on Tuesday, saying only that it was part of a “criminal investigation involving highly classified material” from early 2012.
Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. said he could not comment on the details of the phone records seizure, which he said was an open investigation — although he was happy to comment on the open investigation into the tax audits of conservative groups, which he said might have been criminal and were “certainly outrageous and unacceptable.”
Both Mr. Holder and Mr. Cole declared their commitment — and that of President Obama — to press freedoms. Mr. Cole said the administration does not “take lightly” such secretive trolling through media records.
We are not convinced. For more than 30 years, the news media and the government have used a well-honed system to balance the government’s need to pursue criminals or national security breaches with the media’s constitutional right to inform the public. This action against The A.P., as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press outlined in a letter to Mr. Holder, “calls into question the very integrity” of the administration’s policy toward the press.
The records covered 20 phone lines, including main office phones in New York City, Washington, Hartford, and the Congressional press gallery. The guidelines for such subpoenas, first enacted in 1972, require that requests for media information be narrow. The reporters’ committee said this action is so broad that it allowed prosecutors to “plunder two months of news-gathering materials to seek information that might interest them.”
Mr. Holder said the leak under scrutiny, believed to be about the foiling of a terrorist plot in Yemen a year ago, “put the American people at risk,” although he did not say how, and the records sweep went far beyond any one news article. Gary Pruitt, the president of The A.P., said two months’ worth of records could provide a “road map” to its whole news-gathering operation.
Under the guidelines, the administration should have sought information from other sources. Mr. Cole said it did. But the administration made the troubling and discrediting decision not to inform The A.P. in advance. The guidelines require investigators to provide notice unless it would “pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation.” That is intended to prevent destruction of evidence, an impossibility in this case.
The Obama administration has indicted six current and former officials under the Espionage Act, which had previously been used only three times since it was enacted in 1917. One, a former C.I.A. officer, pleaded guilty under another law for revealing the name of an agent who participated in the torture of a terrorist suspect. Meanwhile, President Obama decided not to investigate, much less prosecute, anyone who actually did the torturing.
The Justice Department is pursuing at least two major press investigations, including one believed to be focused on David Sanger’s reporting in a book and in The Times on an American-Israeli effort to sabotage Iranian nuclear works. These tactics will not scare us off, or The A.P., but they could reveal sources on other stories and frighten confidential contacts vital to coverage of government.
Original here
Justice Dept. Defends Seizure of Phone Records
May 14, 2013 By CHARLIE SAVAGE and SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday defended the Justice Department’s sweeping seizure of telephone records of Associated Press journalists, describing the article by The A.P. that prompted a criminal investigation as among “the top two or three most serious leaks that I’ve ever seen” in a 35-year career.
“It put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole,” he said in an apparent reference to an article on May 7, 2012, that disclosed the foiling of a terrorist plot by Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen to bomb an airliner. “And trying to determine who was responsible for that, I think, required very aggressive action.”
In a statement in response, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, Gary Pruitt, disputed that the publication of the article endangered security.
“We held that story until the government assured us that the national security concerns had passed,” he said. “Indeed, the White House was preparing to publicly announce that the bomb plot had been foiled.” Mr. Pruitt said the article was important in part because it refuted White House claims that there had been no Qaeda plots around the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.
At a news conference at the Justice Department, Mr. Holder also disclosed that he recused himself last year from overseeing the case after F.B.I. agents interviewed him as part of their investigation. His deputy, James M. Cole, approved the subpoena seeking call records for 20 office and personal phone lines of A.P. reporters and editors.
Mr. Pruitt disclosed the seizure of the phone records on Monday in a letter to Mr. Holder protesting the action as overly broad and “a serious interference with A.P.’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”
But in a letter to The A.P. on Tuesday, Mr. Cole portrayed the search as justified and disputed a detail in the wire service’s account of the Justice Department action. While the news organization had said that records from “a full two-month period” had been taken, Mr. Cole said that the seizure covered only “a portion” of two calendar months.
“We understand your position that these subpoenas should have been more narrowly drawn, but in fact, consistent with Department policy, the subpoenas were limited in both time and scope,” he wrote. He added that “there was a basis to believe the numbers were associated with A.P. personnel involved in the reporting of classified information. The subpoenas were limited to a reasonable period of time and did not seek the content of any calls.”
The dispute centered on an ambiguous description in the original notice to The A.P., which an employee of the news organization said was sent as an attachment to an e-mail on May 10 from Jonathan M. Malis, a federal prosecutor, to several A.P. employees.
The attached letter, the employee said, consisted of a single sentence citing the Justice Department regulation for obtaining journalists’ telephone records, and saying that The A.P. “is hereby notified that the United States Department of Justice has received toll records from April and May 2012 in response to subpoenas issued” for 20 phone numbers in five area codes and three states.
The regulation requires subpoenas for reporters’ tolling records — logs of calls made and received — to be narrowly focused and undertaken only after other ways of obtaining information are exhausted. Under normal circumstances, news organizations are to be notified ahead of time so they can negotiate or ask a judge to quash the subpoena, but the regulation allows exceptions, in which case journalists must be notified no later than 90 days afterward.
Mr. Cole said the department had undertaken “a comprehensive investigation” before seeking the phone records, including more than 550 interviews and a review of “tens of thousands of documents.” The calling records, he added, “have been closely held and reviewed solely for the purposes of this ongoing criminal investigation” and would not be used in any other case.
The A.P. on Tuesday was still examining whether any telephone companies had tried to challenge the subpoena on its behalf before cooperating. But at least two of the journalists’ personal cellphone records were provided to the government by Verizon Wireless without any attempt to obtain permission to tell them so the reporters could ask a court to quash the subpoena, the employee said. Debra Lewis, a Verizon Wireless spokeswoman, said the company “complies with legal processes for requests for information by law enforcement,” but would not comment on any specific case.
Lucy Dalglish, dean of the journalism school at the University of Maryland, criticized the Justice Department’s broad seizure of phone records, saying it would chill the ability of reporters to report the news. The subpoena came against the backdrop of six prosecutions of officials in leak-related cases under President Obama — twice the number prosecuted under all previous presidents combined.
“The message is loud and clear that if you work for the federal government and talk to a reporter that we will find you,” she said.
Jay Carney, a White House spokesman, on Tuesday reiterated that the White House had no involvement in the subpoena and portrayed Mr. Obama as “a strong defender of the First Amendment and a firm believer in the need for the press to be unfettered in its ability to conduct investigative reporting and facilitate a free flow of information.”
Justice Department regulations do not cover information about journalists’ e-mails. But the A.P. employee said the company operates its own internal e-mail server and had determined that the e-mails were not subpoenaed and no one at The A.P. had supplied information about them to the government.
One unanswered question is why investigators seized phone logs for The A.P.’s bureau in Hartford in addition to its New York and Washington offices. One of the reporters who worked on the bomb plot article, Matt Apuzzo, formerly worked in Hartford but moved to another bureau in 2005.
The leak investigation involving The A.P. is being run by Ronald C. Machen Jr., the United States attorney for the District of Columbia. In June, amid a Congressional uproar over disclosures in the news media of national security information, Mr. Holder assigned Mr. Machen and his counterpart in Maryland to lead two leak investigations.
The other investigation is believed to be focusing on disclosures made by David E. Sanger, a New York Times journalist, in a book and in articles in The Times about a joint American-Israeli effort to sabotage Iranian nuclear centrifuges with computer viruses. The Justice Department has declined to say whether it has issued a similar subpoena in that case, and Mr. Holder would not say on Tuesday if he is also recused from that investigation.
The May 2012 A.P. article disclosed that the Central Intelligence Agency had foiled a plot by the Qaeda branch in Yemen to destroy an airliner using an underwear bomb the government by then had in its possession. The next day, The Los Angeles Times and several other news organizations, including The New York Times, reported that the intended attacker had been a double agent.
By then, officials said, the double agent, who had reported to British, Saudi and American intelligence, had left Yemen and was not in danger. But both American and foreign intelligence officials were furious at the disclosures, which they said alerted terrorists prematurely that the plot was compromised and might discourage potential agents from working against Al Qaeda.
Christine Haughney contributed reporting from New York.
Original here
Here’s the List: More Than a Dozen Proven Victims of Obama’s Many Wiretaps
Mar 5th, 2017 by Joe Hoft
The Main Stream Media and other enemies of the current President are challenging the proposition that President Obama wire tapped President Donald Trump during the 2016 Presidential race. President Trump started this discussion with his tweets over the weekend.
In his first tweet President Trump tweeted:
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
He next tweeted:
Is it legal for a sitting President to be “wire tapping” a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!
Is it legal for a sitting President to be "wire tapping" a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
Next the President tweeted:
I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!
I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
The final for four tweets concerning the wire tapping:
How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!
How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
This is now being referred to as Obamagate!
It is not unfounded that former President Obama would wire tap President Trump during the election process. This is because he has done this before. Here is a list of individuals who were wire tapped by the Obama Administration.
WikiLeaks released the following list on February 23rd (see link here) of Obama Administration wire taps:
* The US National Security Agency bugged a private climate change strategy meeting; between UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin;
* Obama bugged Chief of Staff of UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for long term interception targetting his Swiss phone;
* Obama singled out the Director of the Rules Division of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Johann Human, and targetted his Swiss phone for long term interception;
* Obama stole sensitive Italian diplomatic cables detailing how Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to help patch up his relationship with US President Barack Obama, who was refusing to talk to Netanyahu;
* Obama intercepted top EU and Japanese trade ministers discussing their secret strategy and red lines to stop the US “extort[ing]” them at the WTO Doha arounds (the talks subsequently collapsed);
* Obama explicitly targeted five other top EU economic officials for long term interception, including their French, Austrian and Belgium phone numbers;
* Obama explicitly targetted the phones of Italy’s ambassador to NATO and other top Italian officials for long term interception; and
* Obama intercepted details of a critical private meeting between then French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Merkel and Berluscon, where the latter was told the Italian banking system was ready to “pop like a cork”.
In addition to the above list we also know now that Obama wire tapped various individuals in the US media that were reporting information not flattering to the Obama Administration. It is widely known that Obama’s Justice Department targeted journalists with wiretaps in 2013:
* In 2013 the liberal Washington Post expressed outrage after the revelation that the Justice Department had investigated the newsgathering activities of a Fox News reporter as a potential crime in a probe of classified leaks. The reporter, Fox News’ James Rosen and his family, were part of an investigation into government officials anonymously leaking information to journalists. Rosen was not charged but his movements and actions were tracked.
* Also in 2013, members of the Associated Press were also a target of the surveillance. The ultra liberal New Yorker even noted that “In moderate and liberal circles, at least, the phone-records scandal, partly because it involves the dear old A.P. and partly because it raises anew the specter of Big Brother, may well present the most serious threat to Obama’s reputation.”
* Reporter Sharyl Attkisson said in 2014 that her personal computer and CBS laptop were hacked after she began filing stories about Benghazi that were unflattering to the Obama administration. A source who checked her laptop said the hacker used spyware “proprietary to a government agency,” according to an article in the New York Post.
Update – WikiLeaks tweeted overnight that the Obama Administration spied on their journalists as well:
Did Obama spy on @realDonaldTrump's campaign? Here is proof the Obama administration spied on our journalists https://t.co/R1wSTtahJL pic.twitter.com/wo9vEGzSZB
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 6, 2017
Obama is no stranger to wire tapping. His administration tapped phones and computers of friends and foe alike.
TGP image by Brett R. Smith
https://hocuspocus13.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/obamagate-file-list-of-obamas-wiretap-victims/
https://70news.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/obamagate-file-list-of-obamas-wiretap-victims/
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/03/draft-heres-the-complete-list-of-victims-from-obamas-many-wiretaps/
The Strata-Sphere » Obama Administration Looks To Be In Very Serious Legal Trouble
MARCH 5, 2017
Source: The Strata-Sphere » Obama Administration Looks To Be In Very Serious Legal Trouble
There is a lot of breaking news this weekend as the nation learns that a sitting President (Obama) looks to have used the nation’s national security apparatus – which is empowered to protect this nation from foreign enemies and threats – for crass political gain (read “personal gain”). If this is even partially true, this would be Watergate on steroids and irreparably tarnish the Obama administration for all history.
These high stakes may also explain the irrational fear and hate by the democrat leadership we have seen in their scorched-Earth actions since the election. Events may be unraveling on them big time, events that started last summer in a very different world.
Let’s begin by setting down a hard and fast rule to blunt the coming weasel words from team Obama. The President runs his administration. The President’s cabinet has some individual authority, but they confirm with the Commander-in-Chief anything that could erupt back on them either legally or politically. No cabinet member – especially the Attorney General – would run near or across legal or ethical lines without concurrence (i.e., cover from) the top person.
To say Obama did not “order” the “wire tap” against the Trump campaign is as ridiculous as it sounds. Note: Trump used figurative parentheses when he tweeted “wire tap”, so read that as meaning “surveillance” legally.
It is not like the Captain of a ship actually “weigh’s the anchor” themselves! Captains order it be done. Or more accurately, it is one step of a process that has been established by the command chain so that when the Captain orders the ship to prepare to “get under way” this action is taken. However executed, the Captain is legally responsible for the people under him, and any mistakes they make. This would include any issues or damage done “weighing” the anchors.
So when someone tries to split hairs about who ordered the surveillance on Team Trump, remember this:
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.
The fact is no one would be dumb enough to run afoul of the laws protecting the American People from our intelligence apparatus without top cover – because these represent very, very serious crimes. So let’s stop pretending AG Lynch did this on her own. If this happened, it was all coordinated.
We also need to start with specifying which laws were broken, and then get to the all critical timeline – because that is where we will discover how thin the ice is under Team Obama.
The best overview of the laws broken is here, and the following excerpts summarize the issues our nation faces. To understand the issues one must understand the very narrow and special role the FISA Court and our Intelligence Apparatus plays in our nation. Because of its special powers, it is very restricted on what it can do.
Rather shockingly, no law currently forbids misusing the power of the presidency to spy on one’s adversaries. What the law does forbid is lying to any judicial officer to obtain any means of surveillance. What the law does forbid, under criminal penalty, is the misuse of FISA. Both derive from the protections of the Fourth Amendment itself. Under section 1809, FISA makes it a crime for anyone to either “engage in” electronic surveillance under “color of law” under FISA without following the law’s restrictions, or “disclose” or “use” information gathered from it in contravention of the statute’s sharp constrictions.
Emphasis mine. As we deal with this explosive situation, remember the core issue. It is not run-of-the-mill political skulduggery (is there any other kind?). It is the criminal misuse of a critical national defensive capability. Liken it to using a military weapon against your political opponent, because that is the nearest and best analogy. If Obama ordered the military to intervene with Team Trump during the election, that would not be much different from using the intelligence powers to intervene. This is not on the same level as using the IRS to target political opponents – not by a long shot.
Why is this the case? Because the FISA court operates outside the US Constitution, and therefore any misuse is much more serious:
FISA, 50 USC 1801, et seq., is a very limited method of obtaining surveillance authority. The reason for its strict limits is that FISA evades the regular federal court process, by not allowing regularly, Constitutionally appointed federal judges and their magistrates to authorize surveillance the Fourth Amendment would otherwise forbid. Instead, the Chief Justice handpicks the FISA court members, who have shown an exceptional deference to the executive branch. This is because FISA court members trust the government is only bringing them surveillance about pending terror attacks or “grave hostile” war-like attacks, as the FISA statute limits itself to. Thus, a FISA application can only be used in very limited circumstances.
Again, emphasis mine. The capability to use our intelligence resources against any entity is restricted to critical national security. These resources are NOT to be applied for other legal matters, such as questionable business interests, hacking computers, etc. This is important because the evidence seems to show Team Obama tried to abuse these resources – and were rebuffed!
FISA can only be used for “foreign intelligence information.” … The only “foreign intelligence information” allowed as a basis for surveillance is information necessary to protect the United States against actual or potential “grave” “hostile” attack, war-like sabotage or international terror. Second, it can only be used to eavesdrop on conversations where the parties to the conversation are a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power. An agent of a foreign power cannot be a United States person unless they are knowingly involved in criminal espionage. No warrant is allowed on that person unless a FISA court finds probable cause the United States person is knowingly engaged in criminal espionage. Even then, if it involves a United States person, special steps must be taken to “minimize the acquisition and retention, and prohibit the dissemination, of non publicly available information concerning un-consenting United States persons.”
This is the crux of Obama’s legal trouble. In order to legally capture information about members of the Trump Campaign (one of which was a sitting Senator), then retain it and distribute it, the reason would have to border on high crimes and treason – not “discussions” or “hacking” or “business transactions”. Even coordinating national policies and treaties with foreign leaders would not rise to the level of urgency required to invoke these intelligence resources.
To summarize, it is Team Obama’s collection, retention and distribution of information protected by the US Constitution that constitute the high crimes here, specifically when it pertains to members of Trump’s campaign, emphasized here:
This includes procedures that require they never identify the person, or the conversation, being surveilled, to the public where that information is not evidence of a particular crime.
Since the Fake News media has been reporting these very same details to the public, and citing current and former Obama administration sources, it is not debatable on whether laws were broken. They were.
Bottom line: this should never have happened:
At the outset, the NSA should have never been involved in a domestic US election. Investigating the election, or any hacking of the DNC or the phishing of Podesta’s emails, would not be a FISA matter. It does not fit the definition of war sabotage or a “grave” “hostile” war-like attack on the United States, as constrictively covered by FISA. It is your run-of-the-mill hacking case covered by existing United States laws that require use of the regular departments of the FBI, Department of Justice, and Constitutionally Senate-appointed federal district court judges, and their appointed magistrates, not secretive, deferential FISA courts.
So how did this happen? How did our extensive intelligence apparatus come to be misused against members of the Trump campaign?
Well, the simplest answer seems to be Team Obama misled the courts:
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. A fact is “material” if it could have the possible impact of impacting the judicial officer deciding whether to authorize the warrant. Such affidavits are the most carefully drawn up, reviewed, and approved affidavits of law enforcement in our system precisely because they must be fully-disclosing, forthcoming, and include any information a judge must know to decide whether to allow our government to spy on its own. My assumption would be that intelligence officials were trying to investigate hacking of DNC which is not even a FISA covered crime, so therefore serious questions arise about what Obama administration attorneys said to the FISA court to even consider the application. If the claim was “financial ties” to Russia, then Obama knew he had no basis to use FISA at all.
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.
President Trump now owns the records of the United States of America. One thing he and his Attorney General (former Senator Sessions) can get their hands on are these affidavits to the FISA Court. If they are as damning as some believe they must be, then Team Obama is going to be in serious trouble.
Remember, back when this all started no one believed Trump would win and be given the keys to all the evidence lockers. Which is why one has to ask why did Team Obama double down in January and push the laws even further?
Team Obama has a responsibility to the FISA Court to not disclose any information on US Citizens accidentally caught up in a surveillance activity, but this is what they began doing in January 2017. This may be the second smoking gun – diligently reported by the Fake News media.
That raises the third problem: it seems the FISA-compelled protocols for precluding the dissemination of the information were violated, and that Obama’s team issued orders to achieve precisely what the law forbids, if published reports are true about the administration sharing the surveilled information far-and-wide to promote unlawful leaks to the press.This, too, would be its own crime, as it brings back the ghost of Hillary’s emails — 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. The problem for Obama is simple — if it could fit a lower level of classification, then it had to be deleted and destroyed, not disseminated and distributed, under crystal clear FISA law.
There is much more in the article, so please take the time to read the whole thing.
This is about as open-and-shut as you can get in my humble opinion. All this has been faithfully reported (i.e., corroborated) by the Fake News media – citing sources. Along with the internal trail of documents the government is required to keep, it would seem Team Obama has a real problem on their hands.
So let’s visit the timeline of events (best one can be found here), and recall that when all this started Hillary was a shoe-in as the next POTUS. Therefore she would be able to keep a lid on all the critical internal government documents Team Trump now has unfettered access to.
June 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration files a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is denied.
Note that the article above identifies a prior attempt to gain surveillance through the normal criminal courts process, before this event. This is one month prior to the RNC and DNC conventions. At this time Trump as POTUS seems to be pure fantasy.
This prior attempt is confirmed (supposedly independently) by Andrew McCarthy:
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).
….
In June, the Obama Justice Department submitted an application that apparently “named” Trump in addition to some of his associates. … In any event, the FISA court reportedly turned down the Obama Justice Department’s request.
Both the normal courts and the FISA court reject the administrations requests. These requests should be made public ASAP.
Very few people expected Hillary to lose the election at this stage. Bernie was clearly on his way to being vanquished from the Democrat ticket. The effort in June 2016 is clumsy and quickly abandoned. Hillary has her email problems, but she also looks invincible.
I would note one other event on this timeline, when former President Bill Clinton tried to secretly meet with Obama’s AG, Loretta Lynch:
Attorney General Loretta Lynch said she regrets her controversial meeting over the summer with former President Bill Clinton, saying she should have recognized ahead of time how it would be perceived by the public.
Mrs. Lynch had met with Mr. Clinton privately after the two wound up on the same airport tarmac in Phoenix on June 27, just days before FBI Director James Comey would announce that he would not press charges against Hillary Clinton over her private email server.
AG Lynch is the only person authorized to make FISA court requests. Coincidence?
Anyway, nothing happens for months, until …
3. October: Podesta emails. In October, Wikileaks releases the emails of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, rolling out batches every day until the election, creating new mini-scandals. The Clinton campaign blames Trump and the Russians.
4. October: FISA request. The Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at National Review later notes. The Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.
By October 2016 things are looking really serious for Hillary, but not desperate yet. The Democrats are trying to find a way to neutralize the Podesta emails, which expose serious collusion with the Fake New media. They also remind everyone of Hillary’s own email issues.
But more importantly, the Clinton Foundation was being exposed as a pay-for-power enrichment scheme (rivaling anything thrown at Team Trump in the last few weeks). Did all these events panic the White House and the Democrat power structure? Did they attempt a Hail Mary and try and resurrect their plan to use our nation’s Intelligence Apparatus against Trump?
Not an unreasonable assumption to be honest. And somehow Team Obama actually get the authority for surveillance (maybe by withholding key information about Trump?). Anyway, no one is challenging the fact surveillance began.
But after losing the election to the GOP, team Obama does something stupendously stupid: they issue a memo that attempts to overturn very clear laws about dissemination so they can try and “leak” damning innuendo about Trump through their surrogates in the Fake New media:
6. January: Obama expands NSA sharing. As Michael Walsh later notes, and as the New York Times reports, the outgoing Obama administration “expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.” The new powers, and reduced protections, could make it easier for intelligence on private citizens to be circulated improperly or leaked.
The new rules, which were issued in an unclassified document, entitled Procedures for the Availability or Dissemination of Raw Signals Intelligence Information by the National Security Agency (NSA), significantly relaxed longstanding limits on what the NSA may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations.
…
Jan 3rd 2017 – Loretta Lynch signs off on rule changes for phone taps.
Jan 12th 2017 – WaPo reports On Phone Calls Anonymous Intel Sources
Obama’s administration had become so addicted to circumventing laws by executive orders, procedures, rules, etc they apparently went to that well one time too many.
There is no legal cover behind an illegal rule. This is not going to protect these people from legal jeopardy (may reduce their sentences somewhat). And the more players involved (Lynch, her successor Yates, etc) the more this runs into the RICO statutes.
Team Trump looks to have a great case here. Plus they have access to the government “smoking gun” documents spread throughout. I do not understand why Obama’s administration would dig their legal hole deeper in disseminating the classified information the law required them to delete and not leak. But they did.
So what does that indicate about team Obama? Either colossal stupidity, uncontrolled panic, or a combination of both. Maybe by they time they realized Trump would find the FISA court records their only avenues was to try and turn public opinion using their robots in the Fake News media.
All Trump has to do is let out the smoking gun documents one at a time. Let the left deny and parse words, then drop his counterveiling bombshells.
Rinse and repeat.
If this is as bad as some say, Trump will milk this all the way – as he should.
https://hocuspocus13.wordpress.com/2017/03/05/the-strata-sphere-obama-administration-looks-to-be-in-very-serious-legal-trouble/
https://gds44.wordpress.com/2017/03/05/the-strata-sphere-obama-administration-looks-to-be-in-very-serious-legal-trouble/
What happens if Obama was involved in illegal surveillance?
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Related
https://brittius.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/jarrett-from-within-white-house-may-have-launched-a-watergate-style-attack-on-trump-during-election/
https://brittius.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/all-roads-lead-back-to-brennan-wiretapping-of-trump/
https://brittius.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/obama-audited-billy-graham-so-wiretapping-trump-tower-is-not-a-stretch/
https://brittius.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/blackmail-did-comey-let-hillary-off-the-hook-because-she-knew-about-fbi-wiretapping/
https://brittius.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/grassley-probes-fbis-ties-to-british-spy-who-investigated-trump/
https://brittius.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/uk-helped-obama-wiretap-trump-insider-explains-fbi-nsa-coup-obamagate-sedition/
Related previous posts on this blog
https://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/03/07/video-more-proof-mb-obama-green-lighted-trump-wiretap-hacking-politics-of-moral-outrage-conway-challenges-comey/
https://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/video-wiretapping-trump-the-evidence-is-overwhelming-judge-jeanne-corey-est-dems-mccarthyism/
https://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/03/05/video-mr-president-your-predecessor-actually-wire-tapped-all-of-our-phones-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it/
https://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/02/08/surprised-soros-fingerprints-all-anti-trump-lawsuits-attacking-with-187-organizations/
https://reclaimourrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/video-trump-under-attack-by-187-organizations-directly-funded-by-george-soros/
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