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10 Ways the CIA 'Russian Hacking' Story is Left-Wing 'Fake News'
The Obama administration has a history of manipulating intelligence for political gain. The most under-reported scandal of Obama’s presidency was the CENTCOM scandal, in which it emerged that “senior U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) leaders manipulated intelligence assessments in 2014 and 2015 to make it appear that President Barack Obama is winning the war against the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL).” There is even more reason to doubt the truth of a selective leak about the election.
Looks like they went beyond manipulation of intelligence.
ilsm said in reply to im1dc... March 04, 2017 at 04:00 PMObama's response states I did not authorize them.
Like he don't sell guns to jihadis.
This is very serious!
Instead of Cubans (Watergate) Hillary had the FBI.....
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Apr 06, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
ilsm -> Peter K, April 05, 2017 at 02:45 PMIn Oct 2016 Obama said "there is no serious/sensible person who believes the US election could be hacked...."While he said this Susan Rice was "unredacting" the politically motivated surveillance of republicans, calling it "counter intelligence" while none of these people had any critical sensitive information to share unlike Clinton's 30000 e-mails.
Those "unredactings" have been leaked to attempt to discredit the US elections.
Seems Obama was surrounded by no one who was "serious/sensible" but many who used his office to attack the US Bill of Rights.
Since 9 Nov 16 the DNC and its media tools have tried a coup by discrediting the US election using the security apparatus to assault privacy and they got nothing!
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Apr 06, 2017 | www.breitbart.com
Former CIA operations officer Scott Uehlinger, co-host of The Station Chief podcast, talked about the Susan Rice "unmasking" story with SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Tuesday's Breitbart News Daily."I think it's an issue which deeply concerns people like myself and other people, working-level officers in the intel community," Uehlinger said. "Even though at this point, there seems to be no evidence of breaking the law, this 'unmasking' of people was ill-advised at best. I think it really shows that abuse of power and the fact that many people in the Obama administration were willing to violate the spirit of the laws designed to protect Americans, perhaps rather than the law itself."
... ... ...
"As a working-level CIA officer, we were always told by upper authority, you're always told to – and the quote is – 'avoid the appearance of impropriety,'" he said. "Well, this does not pass that smell test, definitely."Uehlinger said another thing that concerns working-level officers in the intelligence and military communities is "the American people, average Americans like myself, are tired of seeing two sets of rules followed by the higher-ups and then the working-level people."
"This is just part of that again. A working-level officer would have gotten into big trouble doing anything remotely like this," he observed. "But now, we have a lot of people saying that she should just be given a pass."
"While I understand, you know, it's important that the Trump administration has to move forward with its domestic agenda, but these allegations demand to be further investigated," he urged.
Kassam proposed that Democrats and their media would not allow the Trump administration to move forward with any part of its agenda until this "Russia hysteria" is cleaned up. That will be a difficult task since, as Kassam noted, the hysteria has been burning at fever pitch for months without a shred of evidence to back up the wildest allegations.
Uehlinger agreed and addressed Kassam's point that media coverage alternates between "no surveillance was conducted" and "we know everything about Trump's Russia connections."
"The Obama administration relaxed the rule that allowed raw intelligence that was gathered by the NSA to be shared throughout the government," he pointed out. "First of all, to relax that, there is absolutely no operational justification for doing that. With all of the counter-intelligence problems, with espionage, with Snowden, all these things we've had, to raise by an order of magnitude the access to this very sensitive information makes no operational sense at all."
"So for someone to approve that, it's clear they had another intent, and I believe the intent was to allow for further leakage," he charged. "To give more people access, thus more leaks, which, in fact, would hurt the Trump administration. It seems very obvious when you put that together and combine it with the actions of Susan Rice and other people in unmasking people. That is the true purpose behind this."
"I say this as somebody who – you have to remember, when I was a station chief overseas, this is what I was reporting on. I was in countries like Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kosovo – countries which constantly had the offices of the prime minister or president using the intelligence services to suppress the domestic opposition. So I've been to this rodeo before, many a time. I saw the storm clouds gathering several weeks ago, and everything I've suspected has so far come to fruition," Uehlinger said.
He pronounced it "very disappointing" that such transparent abuse of government power for partisan politics would occur in the United States.
"An intelligence service has to have the trust of the people and the government in order to function effectively," he said. "With all of these scandals happening, and with the name of perhaps the CIA and other intelligence community elements in the mud, this makes the object of protecting our national security more problematic. The agencies have to have the trust of the American people, and they're losing it, because it seems as though they've been weaponized – perhaps, like I said, not breaking the law but playing very close to the line."
Kassam suggested that leaking the information might have been illegal, even if Rice was legally entitled to request information on Donald Trump's campaign and unmask the U.S. persons monitored during surveillance of foreign intelligence targets.
"That's absolutely the case," Uehlinger agreed. He went on to argue that the absence of hard evidence for any wrongdoing by the Trump campaign in all of these leaks was highly significant.
"Since basically the Obama administration has sort of loaded this with these rule changes and all to allow for leaks the fact that there is no 'smoking gun' of Trump administration collusion with Russia indicates that there isn't any. There is nothing substantial here because a juicy morsel like that would certainly have been leaked by the same people that have been leaking everything else. The fact it hasn't been leaked out means it does not exist," he reasoned.
Kassam said some of the Russia hysteria came from imputing sinister motives to conventional business dealings, arguing that Trump's organization made deals around the world, and it is exceedingly difficult to do business with any Russian entity that is not somehow connected to the Russian government.
"That's an excellent point. You're absolutely right," Uehlinger responded. "It shows these people who are doing these gambits are relying on the relative ignorance of the American public of the actual nuts and bolts of intelligence to make their point. Anyone with any background in this stuff can see it for what it is: a desperate attempt to discredit an administration because they were crushed in the past elections."
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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Apr 04, 2017 | www.cbsnews.com
A Monday report by Bloomberg's Eli Lake said that Rice requested the unmasking of Trump officials. Names of Americans swept up incidentally in the collection of intelligence are normally masked, or kept redacted, in intelligence briefings . However, the law provides for much leeway when it comes to unmasking by National Security Council officials, which suggests that Rice's request was legal.
This type of request was not a special practice related to the Trump transition team, though the former official did not dispute the reporting by Bloomberg.
As a procedural matter, an intelligence briefer would have had to clear a requested unmasking with the head of the agency providing the intelligence. It is unclear why these intelligence intercepts were considered so important that they would need to be shared with the president's national security adviser.
A former national security official told CBS News that when such information on U.S. individuals is approved and provided by the intelligence community, it is typically given directly to the senior official who made the request and is not broadly disseminated.
On some occasions, the official added, it is necessary to know the identity of U.S. persons in order to understand the context and substance of the intelligence. There is nothing improper, unusual or political about such requests.
President Donald Trump tweeted last month that Trump Tower had been wiretapped by President Obama , a claim for which there is still no evidence. Later, House Intelligence chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said he had obtained evidence showing that the names of Trump associates that were swept up incidentally by intelligence agencies had been unmasked. That evidence is believed to have been provided to Nunes by the White House.
Rice had said that she was unaware of the names of Trump officials being swept up incidentally by intelligence agencies. "I know nothing about this," she told "PBS NewsHour" last month when asked about Nunes' claim.
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Apr 04, 2017 | www.breitbart.com
Speaking at a conference two weeks before the 2016 presidential election, Evelyn Farkas, a former top Obama administration official, predicted that if Donald Trump won the presidency he would "be impeached pretty quickly or somebody else would have to take over government," Breitbart News has found.Farkas served as deputy assistant secretary of defense under the Obama administration. She has been in the spotlight since the news media last week highlighted comments she made on television that seemed to acknowledge efforts by members of the Obama administration to collect intelligence on Trump and members of his campaign.
Now it has emerged that at on October 26, 2016, Farkas made remarks as a panelist at the annual Warsaw Security Forum predicting Trump's removal from office "pretty quickly."
Asked at the event to address the priorities of a future Hillary Clinton administration, Farkas stated:
It's not a done deal, as you said. And so, to the Americans in the audience please vote. And not only vote but get everybody to vote. Because I really believe we need a landslide. We need an absolute repudiation of everything. All of the policies that Donald Trump has put out there. I am not afraid to be political. I am not hiding who I am rooting for. And I think it's very important that we continue to press forward until election day and through election day to make sure that we have the right results.
I do agree however with General Breedlove that even if we have the wrong results from my perspective America is resilient. We have a lot of presidential historians who have put forward very coherent the argument – they have given us examples of all of our horrible presidents in the past and the fact that we have endured. And we do have a strong system of checks and balances. And actually, if Donald Trump were elected I believe he would be impeached pretty quickly or somebody else would have to take over government. And I am not even joking.
Farkas was referring to General Philip Mark Breedlove, another panelist at the conference who served as Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) of NATO Allied Command Operations. The panel discussion was about what to expect following the Nov. 8 presidential election.
Farkas has also been in the news after remarks she made as a contributor on MSNBC on March 2 resurfaced last week. In the comments , she said that she told former Obama administration colleagues to collect intelligence on Trump and campaign officials.
"I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill, it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration," stated Farkas.
She continued:
Because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior [Obama] people who left, so it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy that the Trump folks – if they found out how we knew what we knew about their the Trump staff dealing with Russians – that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence.
The White House has utilized Farkas's statements to bolster the charge that Trump was being illicitly surveilled during the campaign.
White House Spokesman Sean Spicer last week stated :
[I]f you look at Obama's Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense that is out there, Evelyn Farkas, she made it clear that it was their goal to spread this information around, that they went around and did this.
They have admitted on the record that this was their goal - to leak stuff. And they literally - she said on the record "Trump's team." There are serious questions out there about what happened and why and who did it. And I think that's really where our focus is in making sure that that information gets out.
Farkas, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton's campaign, served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia until she resigned in 2015.
She told the Daily Caller last week that she had no access to any intelligence. "I had no intelligence whatsoever, I wasn't in government anymore and didn't have access to any," she said.
Speaking to the Washington Post, Farkas denied being a source of any leaks.
The Post reported:
Farkas, in an interview with The Post, said she "didn't give anybody anything except advice," was not a source for any stories and had nothing to leak. Noting that she left government in October 2015, she said, "I was just watching like anybody else, like a regular spectator" as initial reports of Russia contacts began to surface after the election.
Farkas currently serves as a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which takes a hawkish approach toward Russia and has released numerous reports and briefs about Russian aggression.
The Council is funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc., the U.S. State Department, and NATO ACT. Another Council funder is the Ploughshares Fund, which in turn has received financing from billionaire George Soros' Open Society Foundations.
Farkas serves on the Atlantic Council alongside Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of CrowdStrike, the third-party company utilized by the FBI to make its assessment about alleged Russian hacking into the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council.
Last month, FBI Director James Comey confirmed that his agency never had direct access to the DNC's servers to confirm the hacking. "Well, we never got direct access to the machines themselves," he stated. "The DNC in the spring of 2016 hired a firm that ultimately shared with us their forensics from their review of the system."
National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers also stated the NSA never asked for access to the DNC hardware: "The NSA didn't ask for access. That's not in our job."
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Apr 04, 2017 | www.breitbart.com
Here are the highlights of Mitchell's interview with Rice, which took up the first quarter-hour of Mitchell's show.Rice admitted asking for the names of U.S. citizens in intelligence reports to be "unmasked." Rice said: "There were occasions when I would receive a report in which a U.S. person was referred to. Name not provided, just U.S. person. And sometimes in that context, in order to understand the importance of the report, and assess its significance, it was necessary to find out, or request, the information as to who that U.S. official was." Rice argued it was necessary for her and other officials to request that information, on occasion, to "do our jobs" to protect national security. Rice admitted asking specifically for the names of members of Donald Trump's transition team. She argued that she had not done so for political purposes, however. Mitchell asked: "Did you seek the names of people involved in - to unmask the names of people involved in the Trump transition, the people surrounding the president-elect in order to spy on them and expose them?" Rice answered: "Absolutely not for any political purposes to spy, expose, anything." Rice denied leaking the name of former General Michael Flynn. "I leaked nothing to nobody, and never have, and never would." She added that to discuss particular targets would be to reveal classified information. She later walked back her denial. Mitchell: "The allegation is that you were leaking the fact that he spoke to the [Russian] ambassador and perhaps to others." Rice: "I can't get into any specific reports what I can say is there is an established process." Rice denied reports that she prepared a "spreadsheet" of Trump transition staff under surveillance. Mitchell asked specifically about the Daily Caller story Tuesday: "They allege there was a spreadsheet you put out of all of these names and circulated it." Rice: "Absolutely false. No spreadsheet, no nothing of the sort." She said that unmasked names "was not then typically broadly disseminated throughout the national security community or the government." Rice said that even if she did request the names of citizens to be unmasked, that did not mean she leaked them. "The notion that by asking for the identity of an American person, that is the same as leaking it, is completely false." Rice admitted that the pace of intelligence reports accelerated throughout the election. She said she could not say whether the pace of her "unmasking" requests accelerated, but she said there was increasing concern, as well as increasing information, relating to the possibility of Russian interference in the election, particularly after August 2016. Rice implied that President Obama himself ordered the compilation of intelligence reports on Trump officials. " the president requested the compliation of the intelligence, which was ultimately provided in January [2017]." Rice said that she was unaware, even while working with Flynn during the transition, that he was working for the Turkish government. Mitchell asked: "When did you learn that?" Rice answered: "In the press, as everybody else did." Mitchell, incredulously: "You didn't know that, when you were National Security Advisor?" Rice: "I did not." Rice reiterated that President Obama never tapped Trump's phone. "Absolutely false there was no such collection [or] surveillance on Trump Tower or Trump individuals directed by the White House or targeted at Trump individuals." She did not deny that there might have been some surveillance by other agencies, however. She said it was impossible for the White House to order such surveillance, but that the Department of Justice could have done so. Rice seemed aggrieved by Trump's claims. "It wasn't typical of the way presidents treat their predecessors." Rice would not say whether she would be willing to testify on Capitol Hill before Congress. "Let's see what comes. I'm not going to sit here and prejudge," she said. But she insisted that the investigations into Russian interference in the presidential election were of interest to every American citizen, and should be followed wherever the evidence leads.
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Apr 04, 2017 | www.breitbart.com
President Barack Obama's National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, allegedly ordered surveillance of Donald Trump's campaign aides during the last election, and maintained spreadsheets of their telephone calls, the Daily Caller reports.The alleged spreadsheets add a new dimension to reports on Sunday and Monday by blogger Mike Cernovich and Eli Lake of Bloomberg News that Rice had asked for Trump aides' names to be "unmasked" in intelligence reports. The alleged "unmasking" may have been legal, but may also have been part of an alleged political intelligence operation to disseminate reports on the Trump campaign widely throughout government with the aim of leaking them to the press.
At the time that radio host Mark Levin and Breitbart News compiled the evidence of surveillance, dissemination, and leaking - all based on mainstream media reports - the mainstream media dismissed the story as a " conspiracy theory ."
Now, however, Democrats are backing away from that allegation, and from broader allegations of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, as additional details of the Obama administration's alleged surveillance continue to emerge.
The Daily Caller reports :
"What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals," diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.
"The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with," diGenova said. "In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls."
The surveillance and spreadsheet operation were allegedly "ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election." According to a Fox News report on Monday, former White House aide Ben Rhodes was also involved.
Rhodes and Rice were both implicated in a disinformation campaign to describe the Benghazi terror attack in Sep. 2012 as a protest against a YouTube video. Rhodes also boasted of creating an " echo chamber " in the media to promote the Iran deal, feeding stories to contrived networks of "experts" who offered the public a steady stream of pro-agreement propaganda.
On Monday, Rhodes retweeted a CNN story quoting Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) claiming that the alleged unmasking was "nothing unusual."
To the extent they have reported the surveillance story at all, CNN and other news outlets have focused on Trump's tweets last month that alleged President Obama had "wiretapped" Trump Tower, describing the claims as unfounded.
CNN continued treating story dismissively on Monday, with The Lead host Jake Tapper insisting allegations of Russian interference in the election were more important than what he referred to as the president's effort to distract from them.
Later in the day, host Don Lemon declared he would ignore the surveillance story and urged viewers to do likewise.
The potential abuse of surveillance powers for political purposes has long troubled civil libertarians, and could affect the re-authorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act later this year.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the " most influential " people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution , is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak .
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Apr 04, 2017 | www.breitbart.com
Tuesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) called on former National Security Advisor Susan Rice to be brought in front of Congress under subpoena and asked questions about allegations she was behind the unmasking of American identities in raw surveillance.Paul also said she should be asked about former President Barack Obama's knowledge of these alleged activities.
"For years, both progressives and libertarians have been complaining about these backdoor searches," Paul said. "It's not that we're searching maybe one foreign leader and who they talk to; we search everything in the whole world. There were reports a couple of years ago that all of Italy's phone calls were absorbed in a one month period of time. We were getting Merkel's phone calls; we were getting everybody's phone calls. But by rebound we are collecting millions of Americans phone calls. If you want to look at an American's phone call or listen to it, you should have to have a warrant, the old fashioned way in a real court where both sides get represented."
"But a secret warrant by a secret court with a lower standard level because we're afraid of terrorism is one thing for foreigners but both myself and a Progressive Ron Wyden have been warning about these back door searches for years and that they could be politicized," he continued. "The facts will come out with Susan Rice. But I think she ought to be under subpoena. She should be asked did you talk to the president about it? Did President Obama know about this? So this is actually, eerily similar to what Trump accused them of which is eavesdropping on conversations for political reasons."
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Apr 04, 2017 | www.breitbart.com
Below are five facts from Susan Rice scandals every American should know.1. Susan Rice allegedly ordered surveillance of Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign aides as part of a political intelligence operation.
Rice allegedly maintained spreadsheets of Trump aides' telephone calls "one year before the 2016 presidential election," according to the Daily Caller.
The Daily Caller reports :
"What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals," diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.
"The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with," diGenova said. "In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls."
... ... ...
5. Susan Rice was the driving force behind a misinformation campaign about the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi terror attacks.
Then-UN Ambassador Rice, acting as the Obama White House's spokeswoman, appeared on five Sunday morning talk shows and repeatedly claimed that the Benghazi attacks had been caused by an anti-Islam video.
Rice appeared on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, and CNN and regurgitated talking points purporting that the protests that had erupted "spontaneously" near two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya and were a result of a "hateful video" that was offensive to Islam.
But government documents , released following a Judicial Watch lawsuit, reveal that government officials monitoring the attack in real-time did not cite an anti-Islam video as an explanation for the paramilitary attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi.
In May 2015 interview, former Obama CIA Director Mike Morell said Rice's Benghazi talking points blaming an anti-Islam YouTube video crossed "the line between national security and politics."
"I think the line in there that says one of our objectives here right on the Sunday show is to blame the video rather than a failure of policy," Morell said on Fox News' Special Report. "And as you know, I say in the book that I think that that is crossing the line between national security and politics."
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Apr 04, 2017 | www.washingtonpost.com
The pursuit of Trump may have caught the Obama White House - The Washington Post It is said that Watergate wasn't about the crime, but about the coverup. Well, at least in the Watergate scandal, there was a proper crime - specifically, the break-in and wiretapping. The media hasn't even settled on what to call its quest for a potentially nefarious Russia-Trump link. The whole pursuit is vaguely referred to as looking at President Trump's "links," "ties," "associations" or "contacts" with Russia. Since this is Washington, let's give it an acronym: L-TACs. With no end in sight, the manic pursuit of L-TACs has produced a basket of denials, lies, half-baked plots, evasions, one-off non sequiturs, side tracks, conspiracies and suspicions between the Trump administration, Democrats and the media. The frenzy has created a scandal without perpetrators or a crime. There is a sense that Washington is on the brink, but no one can say on the brink of what.When they have to be specific, some Democrats have settled on the idea that the Trump campaign may have collaborated with Russia on the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the John Podesta emails. There is no evidence of this, but it is worth remembering a few things. First, the FBI was aware of the DNC hacking when it occurred. This was confirmed again yesterday in Politico's interview with Lisa Monaco , who served as assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism in the Obama White House. She said the hacking was handled as a law enforcement matter. I assume she was referring to when the FBI called the dolts at the DNC, but the DNC took no action.
Then-national security adviser Susan Rice is seen last year on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington. (Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press)And what Earth-shattering insights were revealed as a result of the hacks? That the DNC was in the tank for Hillary Clinton and had been lying to Bernie Sanders. Everybody in Washington already knew that, and it didn't make any difference to Trump. In fact, the revelations gave the Clinton camp a pretext to get rid of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz - something it wanted to do anyway. Next, Clinton campaign chairman Podesta's emails did not reveal anything beyond Beltway gossip that was only of interest to political junkies. Nothing was revealed that drove any votes. If Russian hackers wanted to harass Podesta, what is the crime that the Trump campaign might have committed?
The cacophony of accusations, deflections and distractions has led us to the latest revelation that is causing a "holy cow" double-take, plot-thickening moment in Washington: President Obama's national security adviser, Susan Rice, sought to unmask the identities of Trump aides whose conversations had been collected through routine electronic intercepts of foreign officials' communications. To unmask, or reveal, the identities of U.S. citizens whose names and conversations were gathered through incidental collection is unusual. And there are more suspicious reasons for Obama's national security adviser to have sought to unmask the identities of Trump campaign aides than there are valid reasons. Rice has a history of a strained relationship with the truth, and for a national security adviser, she has, at times, flown close to the partisan political flame. So, what was going on? Why did she do it? And with whom, in the government and the media, did she share the information?
Multiple senators are now demanding her testimony . There could have been crimes committed and a real scandal could develop, so you can bet the full story will be slow to emerge. It appears that Rice has issued the standard denials. And her defenders on Capitol Hill and in the media will do all they can to distract and demand that there is nothing to see here. Democrats and their media allies will continue to make baseless allegations, hoping that the Russia investigations will somehow deliver for them and become this president's Watergate.
The result so far? Competing outrage. Just as Democrats are pursuing L-TACs (links, ties, associations or contacts) in search of a crime, the Obama White House's national security adviser has now landed as one of the ones who will have to answer for her actions under oath.
Washington is as scandal-primed as I've ever seen it - there is a lot of smoke right now, but no clear fire. So the noise and finger-pointing will continue. And I have no idea who is winning. The pursuit of Trump may have caught the Obama White House - The Washington Post Ed Rogers is a contributor to the PostPartisan blog, a political consultant and a veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush White Houses and several national campaigns. He is the chairman of the lobbying and communications firm BGR Group, which he founded with former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour in 1991. Follow @EdRogersDC
Bigly Fan 5:38 PM EDTHow did Ed slip this article past the Wapo /DNC/Loony Left /Bezos Puppet editors?theworm1 5:37 PM EDT"The whole pursuit [ of Trump's Russian engagement] is vaguely referred to as looking at President Trump's "links', 'ties', 'associations' or 'contacts'"Io fifty 5:37 PM EDTThese are the same nouns the media uses to describe the alleged "connections" between al Qaeda and Saddam and between ISIS and whoever we dont like today.
They carry meaning or they dont. I think most people think they do.
I just read in Breitbart, sure you have too Mr. Rogers ...... that Ms. Rice kept a 'spreadsheet' of phone calls taking place within the Trump campaign. Will that be in the next installment of this ongoing drama?
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Apr 04, 2017 | www.bloomberg.com
White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.The pattern of Rice's requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government's policy on "unmasking" the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like "U.S. Person One."
The National Security Council's senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was conducting the review, according to two U.S. officials who spoke with Bloomberg View on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. In February Cohen-Watnick discovered Rice's multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel's office, who reviewed more of Rice's requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy.
The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations -- primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.
Rice did not respond to an email seeking comment on Monday morning. Her role in requesting the identities of Trump transition officials adds an important element to the dueling investigations surrounding the Trump White House since the president's inauguration.
Both the House and Senate intelligence committees are probing any ties between Trump associates and a Russian influence operation against Hillary Clinton during the election. The chairman of the House intelligence committee, Representative Devin Nunes, is also investigating how the Obama White House kept tabs on the Trump transition after the election through unmasking the names of Trump associates incidentally collected in government eavesdropping of foreign officials.
Rice herself has not spoken directly on the issue of unmasking. Last month when she was asked on the "PBS NewsHour" about reports that Trump transition officials, including Trump himself, were swept up in incidental intelligence collection, Rice said : "I know nothing about this," adding, "I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that account today."
Rice's requests to unmask the names of Trump transition officials do not vindicate Trump's own tweets from March 4 in which he accused Obama of illegally tapping Trump Tower. There remains no evidence to support that claim.
But Rice's multiple requests to learn the identities of Trump officials discussed in intelligence reports during the transition period does highlight a longstanding concern for civil liberties advocates about U.S. surveillance programs. The standard for senior officials to learn the names of U.S. persons incidentally collected is that it must have some foreign intelligence value, a standard that can apply to almost anything. This suggests Rice's unmasking requests were likely within the law.
The news about Rice also sheds light on the strange behavior of Nunes in the last two weeks. It emerged last week that he traveled to the White House last month, the night before he made an explosive allegation about Trump transition officials caught up in incidental surveillance. At the time he said he needed to go to the White House because the reports were only on a database for the executive branch. It now appears that he needed to view computer systems within the National Security Council that would include the logs of Rice's requests to unmask U.S. persons.
The ranking Democrat on the committee Nunes chairs, Representative Adam Schiff, viewed these reports on Friday. In comments to the press over the weekend he declined to discuss the contents of these reports, but also said it was highly unusual for the reports to be shown only to Nunes and not himself and other members of the committee.
Indeed, much about this is highly unusual: if not how the surveillance was collected, then certainly how and why it was disseminated.
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Apr 04, 2017 | www.foxnews.com
As the facts about who surveilled whom during the transition get sorted out, it is useful to remember why Trump's team and his supporters have reason to be suspicious, thanks to a long documented history of Obama using shady surveillance tactics on both political opponents and international allies. Rhodes himself knows this history but that doesn't seem to matter as he once again attempts to make people believe he fell out of the sky and onto Twitter on January 21st, 2017.
... ... ...
1. Fox News reporter James RosenIn 2013 the news broke that Eric Holder's Justice Department had spied on James Rosen . Obama's DOJ collected Rosen's telephone records as well as tracked his movements to and from the State Department from where he reported. Rosen was named as a possible co-conspirator in a Justice Department affidavit. Rosen claims that his parents phone line was also swept up in the collection of his records and DOJ records seem to confirm that. Despite the targeting of Rosen, there were no brave calls to boycott the White House Correspondents Dinner.
2. Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA
CIA officers penetrated a network used to share information by Senate Intel committee members, including Sen. Diane Feinstein, the committee's Democrat chair. The bombshell New York Times report went on to disclose:
The C.I.A. officials penetrated the computer network when they came to suspect that the committee's staff had gained unauthorized access to an internal C.I.A. review of the detention program that the spy agency never intended to give to Congress. A C.I.A. lawyer then referred the agency's suspicions to the Justice Department to determine whether the committee staff broke the law when it obtained that document. The inspector general report said that there was no "factual basis" for this referral, which the Justice Department has declined to investigate, because the lawyer had been provided inaccurate information. The report said that the three information technology officers "demonstrated a lack of candor about their activities" during interviews with the inspector general.
The Obama White House defended CIA director John Brennan's actions and response. Imagine that.
3. Associated Press Phone Records
Much like James Rosen and his shady al Qaeda looking parents, Obama's Justice Department secretly obtained months of phone records belonging to AP journalists while investigating a failed terror attack. And much like the Rosen spying, this was personally approved by Attorney General Holder.
Mass surveillance and expansion of such under the Patriot Act is one of the most historically prevalent things about the Obama administration. There's even a Wikipedia page dedicated to that alone . So why do the media and former administration officials act shocked and surprised when someone points the finger in their direction and asks if targeting an incoming President is possible?
There is a long, decorated history of questionable-even unconstitutional-surveillance from the Obama administration none of which proves Trump's twitter ravings to be true. But it certainly is enough to raise suspicions among Trump's supporters and even some of this critics that he could be perfectly correct.
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Apr 04, 2017 | www.foxnews.com
Multiple sources tell Fox News that Susan Rice, former national security adviser under then-President Barack Obama, requested to unmask the names of Trump transition officials caught up in surveillance.The unmasked names, of people associated with Donald Trump, were then sent to all those at the National Security Council, some at the Defense Department, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan – essentially, the officials at the top, including former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes.
The names were part of incidental electronic surveillance of candidate and President-elect Trump and people close to him, including family members, for up to a year before he took office.
It was not clear how Rice knew to ask for the names to be unmasked, but the question was being posed by the sources late Monday.
... ... ...
This comes in the wake of Evelyn Farkas' television interview last month in which the former Obama deputy secretary of defense said in part: "I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill – it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration."
... ... ...
As the Obama administration left office, it also approved new rules that gave the NSA much broader powers by relaxing the rules about sharing intercepted personal communications and the ability to share those with 16 other intelligence agencies.... ... ...
Rice is no stranger to controversy. As the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, she appeared on several Sunday news shows to defend the adminstration's later debunked claim that the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on a U.S. consulate in Libya was triggered by an Internet video.
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Apr 04, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
If anyone expected former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, the same Susan Rice who "stretched the truth" about Benghazi, to admit in her first public appearance after news that she unmasked members of the Trump team to admit she did something wrong, will be disappointed. Instead, moments ago she told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell that she categorically denied that the Obama administration inappropriately spied on members of the Trump transition team.
"The allegation is that somehow, Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes," Rice told Mitchell. " That's absolutely false.... My job is to protect the American people and the security of our country. "
"There was no such collection or surveillance on Trump Tower or Trump individuals, it is important to understand, directed by the White House or targeted at Trump individuals," Rice said.
EXCLUSIVE: Susan Rice says the claim that intelligence was used for political purposes is "absolutely false" Watch: https://t.co/JdbgCtSgEN
- MSNBC (@MSNBC) April 4, 2017
"I don't solicit reports," Rice said Tuesday. "They're giving it to me, if I read it, and I think that in order for me to understand, is it significant or not so significant, I need to know who the 'U.S. Person' is, I can make that request." She did concede that it is "possible" the Trump team was picked up in "incidental surveillance."
"The notion, which some people are trying to suggest, that by asking for the identity of the American person is the same is leaking it - that's completely false," Rice said. "There is no equivalence between so-called unmasking and leaking."
Watch: Susan Rice tells @mitchellreports it is "possible" the Trump team was picked up in incidental surveillance https://t.co/nTHeqx8zlr
- MSNBC (@MSNBC) April 4, 2017
That said, Rice did not discuss what motive she may have had behind what Bloomberg, Fox and others have confirmed, was her unmasking of members of the Trump team.
Rice also flatly denied exposing President Trump's former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who was forced to resign in February after media reports revealed that he misled Vice President Pence about the contents of a phone call with the Russian ambassador. Asked by Mitchell if she seeked to unmask the names of people involved in the Trump campaign in order to spy on them, Rice says: "absolutely not, for any political purpose, to spy, expose, anything." And yet, that is what happened. She was then asked if she leaked if she leaked the name of Mike Flynn: "I leaked nothing to nobody."
WATCH: Susan Rice insists "I leaked nothing to nobody" https://t.co/kAsbu4VJDN
- MSNBC (@MSNBC) April 4, 2017
In a follow up question, Rice said that when it comes to Mike Flynn with whom she had "civil and cordial relations", that she learned "in the press" that he was an unregistered agent for the Turkish government.
WATCH: Susan Rice says she learned from the press that Flynn was an unregistered agent for the Turkish government https://t.co/xD41R2fbBL
- MSNBC (@MSNBC) April 4, 2017
We doubt that anyone's opinion will change after hearing the above especially considering that, in addition to Benghazi, Rice is the official who praised Bowe Bergdahl for his "honorable service" and claimed he was captured "on the battlefield", and then just two weeks ago, she told PBS that she didn't know anything about the unmasking.
It is thus hardly surprising that now that her memory has been "refreshed" about her role in the unmasking, that Rice clearly remembers doing nothing at all wrong.
On Monday night, Rand Paul and other Republicans called for Rice to testify under oath, a request she sidestepped on Tuesday. "Let's see what comes," she told Mitchell, when asked if she would testify on the matter. "I'm not going to sit here and prejudge."
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Apr 02, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored op-ed by Michael Doran via The Hill,Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Adam Schiff have both castigated Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, for his handling of the inquiry into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. They should think twice. The issue that has recently seized Nunes is of vital importance to anyone who cares about fundamental civil liberties.
The trail that Nunes is following will inevitably lead back to a particularly significant leak . On Jan. 12, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that "according to a senior U.S. government official, (General Mike) Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29."
From Nunes's statements, it's clear that he suspects that this information came from NSA intercepts of Kislyak's phone . An Obama official, probably in the White House, "unmasked" Flynn's name and passed it on to Ignatius.
Regardless of how the government collected on Flynn, the leak was a felony and a violation of his civil rights. But it was also a severe breach of the public trust. When I worked as an NSC staffer in the White House, 2005-2007, I read dozens of NSA surveillance reports every day. On the basis of my familiarity with this system, I strongly suspect that someone in the Obama White House blew a hole in the thin wall that prevents the government from using information collected from surveillance to destroy the lives of the citizens whose privacy it is pledged to protect.
The leaking of Flynn's name was part of what can only be described as a White House campaign to hype the Russian threat and, at the same time, to depict Trump as Vladimir Putin's Manchurian candidate.
On Dec. 29, Obama announced sanctions against Russia as retribution for its hacking activities. From that date until Trump's inauguration, the White House aggressively pumped into the media two streams of information: one about Russian hacking; the other about Trump's Russia connection. In the hands of sympathetic reporters, the two streams blended into one.
A report that appeared the day after Obama announced the sanctions shows how. On Dec. 30, the Washington Post reported on a Russian effort to penetrate the electricity grid by hacking into a Vermont utility, Burlington Electric Department. After noting the breach, the reporters offered a senior administration official to speculate on the Russians' motives. Did they seek to crash the system, or just to probe it?
This infrastructure hack, the story continued, was part of a broader hacking campaign that included intervention in the election. The story then moved to Trump: "He has spoken highly of Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite President Obama's suggestion that the approval for hacking came from the highest levels of the Kremlin."
The national media mimicked the Post's reporting. But there was a problem: the hack never happened . It was a false alarm - triggered, it eventually became clear, by Obama's hype.
On Dec. 29, the DHS and FBI published a report on Russian hacking, which showed the telltale signs of having been rushed to publication. "At every level this report is a failure," said cyber security expert Robert M. Lee. "It didn't do what it set out to do, and it didn't provide useful data. They're handing out bad information."
Especially damaging were the hundreds of Internet addresses, supposedly linked to Russian hacking, that the report contained. The FBI and DHS urged network administrators to load the addresses into their system defenses. Some of the addresses, however, belong to platforms that are widely used by the public, including Yahoo servers. At Burlington Electric, an unsuspecting network administrator dutifully loaded the addresses into the monitoring system of the utility's network. When an employee checked his email, it registered on the system as if Russian hackers were trying to break in.
While the White House was hyping the Russia threat, elements of the press showed a sudden interest in the infamous Steele dossier, which claimed that Russian intelligence services had caught Trump in Moscow in highly compromising situations. The dossier was opposition research paid for by Trump's political opponents, and it had circulated for months among reporters covering the election. Because it was based on anonymous sources and entirely unverifiable, however, no reputable news organization had dared to touch it.
With a little help from the Obama White House, the dossier became fair game for reporters. A government leak let it be known that the intelligence community had briefed Trump on the dossier. If the president-elect was discussing it with his intelligence briefers, so the reasoning went, perhaps there was something to it after all.
By turning the dossier into hard news, that leak weaponized malicious gossip. The same is true of the Flynn-Kislyak leak. Ignatius used the leak to deepen speculation about collusion between Putin and Trump: "What did Flynn say (to Kislyak)," Ignatius asked, "and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions?" The mere fact that Flynn's conversations were being monitored deepened his appearance of guilt. If he was innocent, why was the government monitoring him?
It should not have been. He had the right to talk to in private - even to a Russian ambassador. Regardless of what one thinks about him or Trump or Putin, this leak should concern anyone who believes that we must erect a firewall between the national security state and our domestic politics. The system that allowed it to happen must be reformed. At stake is a core principle of our democracy: that elected representatives control the government, and not vice versa.
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Apr 02, 2017 | www.dni.gov
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
WASHINGTON, DC 20511January 11, 2017
DNI Clapper Statement on Conversation with President-elect Trump
This evening, I had the opportunity to speak with President-elect Donald Trump to discuss recent media reports about our briefing last Friday. I expressed my profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press, and we both agreed that they are extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security.We also discussed the private security company document, which was widely circulated in recent months among the media, members of Congress and Congressional staff even before the IC became aware of it. I emphasized that this document is not a U.S. Intelligence Community product and that I do not believe the leaks came from within the IC. The IC has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions. However, part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security.
President-elect Trump again affirmed his appreciation for all the men and women serving in the Intelligence Community, and I assured him that the IC stands ready to serve his Administration and the American people.
James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence
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Apr 02, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
After slamming NBC's coverage of the "Fake Trump/Russia story", congratulating the NYTimes for "finally getting it" on Obamacare, Trump on Saturday commented on the previously discussed Fox News story about a "very senior, very well known" U.S. intelligence official who was allegedly involved in unmasking the names of Trump associates, and who had reprotedly surveilled Trump before the nomination."Wow, @FoxNews just reporting big news. Source: 'Official behind unmasking is high up. Known Intel official is responsible. Some unmasked not associated with Russia. Trump team spied on before he was nominated. If this is true, does not get much bigger. Would be sad for U.S.," he added.
Wow, @FoxNews just reporting big news. Source: "Official behind unmasking is high up. Known Intel official is responsible. Some unmasked....
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 1, 2017
..not associated with Russia. Trump team spied on before he was nominated." If this is true, does not get much bigger. Would be sad for U.S.
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 1, 2017
As discussed Friday night , A Fox News source (unnamed, because these days that's all there is, just ask the NYT and Wapo) said that the U.S. official behind the systematic unmasking of Trump associates and private individuals was "very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world" and was doing so for political, not nationa security reasons, intent on "hurting and embarrassing Trump and his team." In other words, another intel agency war between the old, pro-Hillary Clinton, guard and the new administration.
Additionally, the Friday Fox News report cited "a number of sources" with claims that not only were the two White House officials not the sources of the information shared with Nunes, but that Nunes knew of the information in January, and that the agencies where the information came from had blocked Nunes from gaining access to it. Further, the report cited officials within the agencies who said they were frustrated with the spreading of names for political purposes.
"Our sources, who have direct knowledge of what took place, were upset because those two individuals, they say, had nothing to do with the outing of this information," Fox reported.
"We've learned that the surveillance that led to the unmasking of what started way before President Trump was even the GOP nominee," Fox News reported Adam Housley said. "The person who did the unmasking, I'm told, is very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world and is not in the FBI."
"This led to other surveillance which led to multiple names being unmasked. Again these are private citizens in the United States," said Housley. " This had nothing to do with Russia, I'm told, or foreign intelligence of any kind."
"Fox also learned that an individual with direct knowledge that after Nunes had been approached by his source, the agencies basically would not allow him in at all," said Housley.
Understandably, the Fox News report has gotten zero media attention on any other news outlet.
For those who missed the original report from Friday night , it is reproduced below.
* * *
Intel Official Behind "Unmasking" Of Trump Associates Is "Very Senior, Very Well Known"
Day after day, various media outlets, well really mostly the NYT and WaPo, have delivered Trump-administration-incriminating, Russia-link-related tape bombs sourced via leaks (in the hope of keeping the narrative alive and "resisting."). It now turns out, according to FXN report , that the US official who "unmasked" the names of multiple private citizens affiliated with the Trump team is someone " very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world."
As Malia Zimmerman and Adam Housley report , intelligence and House sources with direct knowledge of the disclosure of classified names (yes, yet another "unnamed source") said that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, now knows who is responsible - and that person is not in the FBI (i.e. it is not James Comey)
Housley said his sources were motivated to come forward by a New York Times report yesterday which reportedly outed two people who helped Nunes access information during a meeting in the Old Executive Office Building. However, Housley's sources claim the two people who helped Nunes "navigate" to the information were not his sources. In fact, Nunes had been aware of the information since January (long before Trump's 'wiretap' tweet) but had been unable to view the documents themselves because of "stonewalling" by the agencies in question.
Our sources: This surveillance that led to the unmasking of private names of American citizens started before Trump was the GOP nominee.
- Adam Housley (@adamhousley) March 31, 2017
Our sources:The person who did the unmasking is "very well known, very high up, very senior, in the intelligence world & is not in the FBI
- Adam Housley (@adamhousley) March 31, 2017
Our sources: Unmasking the names and then spreading the names was for political purposes that have nothing to do with national security
- Adam Housley (@adamhousley) March 31, 2017
Our sources: "It had everything to do with hurting and embarrassing Trump and his team"
- Adam Housley (@adamhousley) March 31, 2017
For a private citizen to be "unmasked," or named, in an intelligence report is extremely rare. Typically, the American is a suspect in a crime, is in danger or has to be named to explain the context of the report.
"The main issue in this case, is not only the unmasking of these names of private citizens, but the spreading of these names for political purposes that have nothing to do with national security or an investigation into Russia's interference in the U.S. election," a congressional source close to the investigation told Fox News .
The White House, meanwhile, is urging Nunes and his colleagues to keep pursuing what improper surveillance and leaks may have occurred before Trump took office. They've been emboldened in the wake of March 2 comments from former Obama administration official Evelyn Farkas, who on MSNBC suggested her former colleagues tried to gather material on Trump team contacts with Russia.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Friday her comments and other reports raise "serious" concerns about whether there was an "organized and widespread effort by the Obama administration to use and leak highly sensitive intelligence information for political purposes."
"Dr. Farkas' admissions alone are devastating," he said.
Clearly this confirms what Evelyn Farakas said, accidentally implicated the Obama White House in the surveillance of Trump's campaign staff:
The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods , meaning we would not longer have access to that intelligence.
Furthermore, Farkas effectively corroborated a New York Times article from early March which cited "Former American officials" as their anonymous source regarding efforts to leak this surveillance on the Trump team to Democrats across Washington DC.
* * *
In addition, citizens affiliated with Trump's team who were unmasked were not associated with any intelligence about Russia or other foreign intelligence, sources confirmed. The initial unmasking led to other surveillance, which led to other private citizens being wrongly unmasked, sources said.
" Unmasking is not unprecedented, but unmasking for political purposes ... specifically of Trump transition team members ... is highly suspect and questionable ," according to an intelligence source. "Opposition by some in the intelligence agencies who were very connected to the Obama and Clinton teams was strong. After Trump was elected, they decided they were going to ruin his presidency by picking them off one by one."
* * *
So if the source isn't Comey, has anyone seen Jim Clapper recently? The answer should emerge soon, meanwhile the ridiculous game with very high stakes of spy vs spy, or in this case source vs source, continues.
The report summarized below in video format:
dexter_morgan -> mcl2177 , Apr 1, 2017 9:49 PMI wish Flynn would testify. He knows everything.
Chris Dakota -> mcl2177 , Apr 1, 2017 9:53 PMProbably why they don't want him testifying.
espirit -> Chris Dakota , Apr 1, 2017 9:59 PMHe knows there is nothing there.
He did what anyone would do in his position, talk to the Russian ambassador.
He was a lobbyist, they all do the revolving door.
Russia does not want to be attacked, no shit? eh?
They want their naval bases, go figure...
This is all horseshit the goal is preventing Trump from having a productive and cooperative relationship with Putin.
bardot63 , Apr 1, 2017 9:48 PM^ BINGO ^
Flynn 'might' reveal complict players. Somebody has skeletons in their closets.
Putin has the goods.
East Indian -> bardot63 , Apr 1, 2017 9:59 PMSo sorry. Journalism is shit. Very tired of 'source' stories. Cannot trust any of this crap. Breathless reporters --"We've been talking to sources...." BFD. Give me a fucking break. Fox tries a little bit of the time, but Fox is no better than NBC or CNN. Journalists today have no courage. They write these stories for each other, not for me and you.
BobEore -> East Indian , Apr 1, 2017 11:20 PMThere are no journalists; they are simply pritning whatever they are given by the "sources". They show no curiosity, no suspicion, too credulous to be a journalist and these are really end times for the MSM.
Giant Meteor -> BobEore , Apr 1, 2017 11:32 PMThere are no journalists.
You are correct. They have been exterminated ... along with the need for truth in media. Since 9-11, all over the world there has been a concerted and determined effort to target and remove all those who would stay true to the principles of that craft. And, to in their place, raise up a raft of imitators who style themselves reporters, but need have no accountability, nor take the trouble to ever leave their computer screens to go and "follow" a story.
But what most folks don't see is that this faux-journalism is a direct consequence of the so-called 'new media' - packaged as "alternative media" in order to seem a challenge and opposition to special interest groups controlling all communication channels - but actually just more special interests with even less accountability!
"There is no longer a stage, not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality-no more stage either of mental or political solidarity : Only the medium can make an event - whatever the contents, whether they are conformist or subversive. AND - There are no more media in the literal sense of the word - that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another."
The role of medias, in other words, has switched from 'mediating' between real events and the reader... to medicating the reader with concocted storylines custom made to appeal to the pre-existing information preferences of same.
Even more ominously, with the arrival of the TRUMP TWITTER medium, we reach the full blossoming of the point predicted last year - when a government staged a coup against itself, using the tools of social media to coverup their ruse! https://storify.com/SuaveBel/requiem-for-the-media
"The State has subsumed the role and space of "the media" in organizing and communicating with "the people." It has re-defined the terms "democracy" and "participation" on it's own terms, and in picking up the social media tools which had formerly belonged to "the people" as a network of communicants, relegated "the media" to the role of gelded hierophant!"
All of which has been blandly accepted and passed over by a web-entranced audience which has given over critical thinking skills to a cabal of 'communications experts' determined to put the lie to that old adage - 'you can't fool all of the people, all of the time!'
peippe , Apr 1, 2017 9:57 PMNever seen it put this well. Outstanding.
chubbar , Apr 1, 2017 9:58 PMwhy isn't obalamo apologizing for all this misfeasance?
that would wrap it up in a hurry.
he's useless even in retirement. true douche bag.
silence is getting weird.
erkme73 -> chubbar , Apr 1, 2017 10:19 PMThey got that fucker now, whom ever it was. I hope we can finally see some of the other media pick up on this blockbuster story, probably not though, they are completely out of their minds with irrationality.
I'd like to see Clapper get 10 years in buttfuck prison where leroy and shantis practice using their 10" BBCs to make him watertight. Whom ever did this is a complete piece of shit just like most of the other libtards that don't give a shit about the rule of law or basic fairness.
Either way, the cat's out of the bag and CNN, et al, won't be able to ignore this much longer. This story, unlike the Russian fairy tale, actually has some proof and they will get to the bottom of this crime.
francis_the_won... -> chubbar , Apr 1, 2017 10:23 PMI wish (and hope) you're right. But remember, the intelligence community is best at misdirection, obfuscation, deceit, and manipulation. If there was ever a group that could successfully distract or 'arrange' an alternate truth, it's them.
Seasmoke , Apr 1, 2017 10:14 PMThey put party before country, which I'm pretty sure is considered treasonous.
Reaper , Apr 1, 2017 10:16 PMPardon Snowden and do it NOW !!!!
I Write Code , Apr 1, 2017 10:17 PMPerfect scripted theater: First doubted. Then, condemned. Then, gradual exposing. Then, Trump trumps.
francis_the_won... -> I Write Code , Apr 1, 2017 10:28 PMY'all missin' the point heah, which is if Clapper or Brennan are the rat(s) - and why not both - then Obamarama was in on it too.
lordbaldric , Apr 1, 2017 10:25 PMIsn't Obama pretty much immune from any prosecution? Sure, his reputation or "legacy" can be tainted (meaning more people will realize what an a$$clown and criminal he was), but you can't do anything to him, can you?
MuffDiver69 , Apr 1, 2017 10:53 PMTime for a good old fashioned Soviet style purge of the offending agencies and their allies!
Joebloinvestor , Apr 1, 2017 10:52 PMWe have seen no evidence of Trump/Russia collusion and we all know the same people leaking and smearing Trump aren't waiting for some special moment to release it....it never works that way and he would not have been allowed by NSA or CIA to take power if they had it...
Nunes and Schiff have seen info that was compartmentalized to executive branch obviously, which is all branches appointed by president CIA,NSA,Defense(Farkas),State(Hillary) etc etc
This has been a set up by Trump from beginning. Flynn knew all his calls were being recorded and he was fired after eaks to the NYT and WAPO. He questioned why the info on ISIS he was writing up as head of Defense Intelligence Agency was being down played and ignored by the half breed...Flynn will blow the doors off this entire thing...Look up his career...He is a top level intelligence operative with an ax to grind..He is not some flunky and he has many sources all throughout the intelligence branches...Nicely played President Trump...Job is much easier dealing with simpletons
Yes We Can. But... , Apr 1, 2017 10:52 PMYou can almost bet it won't be the MSM who reveals who it is.
IMO it is a CIA rat.
MuffDiver69 -> Yes We Can. But Lets Not. , Apr 1, 2017 11:06 PMGotta believe the top intel official who did the unmasking for political reasons to hurt Trump is:
Former CIA Director John O. Brennan
Bit of trivia: Did you know that Brennan once voted for a communist for POTUS?
Yes We Can. But... -> MuffDiver69 , Apr 1, 2017 11:22 PMIt is definitely someone from the executive branch and that includes CIA head..The SCIF they are going to is in the old executive office building and only deals with executive..... state,defense,CIA,NSA etc etc
Swamidon , Apr 1, 2017 10:54 PMIf I understand correctly, the intel official behind the unmasking of folks affiliated with Trump campaign, which was taking place dating back to last summer, is a separate issue from who sheperded Nunes into the SCIF on the WH grounds (so that he could see docs he had been stonewalled from seeing), reported to be Ezra Cohen-Watnick of the NSC.
http://forward.com/news/367690/meet-ezra-cohen-watnick-the-secret-source...
iamerican4 , Apr 1, 2017 10:56 PMA lot of people have been dropping out of sight and apparently out of the country as well. I wonder if they're worried about being arrested?
MuffDiver69 , Apr 1, 2017 11:03 PMThe faction which killed JFK and MLK to send us as papal catspaw to Vietnam after the president ordered us out with 120 dead; and to restart the Vatican banker/FedScam he had ended, went on to do 9/11 and is terminally threatened by God-fearing Americans.
May God bless our president and may Satan's ruling false-elite pedo homo Fifth Column Beast of (((Gog))) and Babylon on Our Holy Land be soon cast down, praise God.
East Indian , Apr 1, 2017 11:10 PMFolls forget Trump already ran a sting on his Intel briefing during transistion. When he was briefed on piss dossier and told no one on his staff, then it was leaked to press immediately afterwards..President Trump is using tactics folks like General Flynn perfected in 33 years in the intelligence service.
Funny shit this letter by Clapper..Trump has been playing these folks BIGLY
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/224-press-releases...
VWAndy , Apr 1, 2017 11:16 PMMeanwhile, Trump declares April as the month of "National Sexual Assault Awareness"
Is he hinting at something?
#Pedogate is true.
Mr Drysdale -> VWAndy , Apr 2, 2017 12:25 AMThat would be the one that got pushed down the stairs the other day right?
Fascal rascal , Apr 2, 2017 1:18 AMhttp://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2012/07/obamas_passport_breach_u...
No, he was greased for looking into Obongo's Passport while a 'student'
Side tragedy..
Seth who?
Dead.
Democrats.
The poison seeping out...
They can't even stop it...
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Apr 01, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
fresno dan , March 31, 2017 at 3:50 pmMyLessThanPrimeBeef , March 31, 2017 at 3:55 pm"What Devin Nunes Knows" [Kimberly Strassel, Wall Street Journal]. Why Nunes left his cab:
Around the same time, Mr. Nunes's own intelligence sources informed him that documents showed further collection of information about, and unmasking of, Trump transition officials. These documents aren't easily obtainable, since they aren't the "finished" intelligence products that Congress gets to see. Nonetheless, for weeks Mr. Nunes has been demanding intelligence agencies turn over said documents-with no luck, so far.
Mr. Nunes earlier this week got his own source to show him a treasure trove of documents at a secure facility. Here are the relevant details:
First, there were dozens of documents with information about Trump officials. Second, the information these documents contained was not related to Russia. Third, while many reports did "mask" identities (referring, for instance, to "U.S. Person 1 or 2") they were written in ways that made clear which Trump officials were being discussed. Fourth, in at least one instance, a Trump official other than Mr. Flynn was outright unmasked. Finally, these documents were circulated at the highest levels of government.
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Other than right wing sites, this is the first instance of the argument I have seen of the repubs that has been put forward coherently and the issue stated cogently. That does not mean its true, but at least it is put forward.I was watching CNN last night and the blonde commentator woman (Kirsten ???) put forward the proposition that the intelligence agencies "collecting" information on Trump associates does not mean Trump associates were surveilled – now this was in the context that the discussion was about the fact that Trump individuals were supposedly illegally "unmasked" by the intelligence agencies because the information was ..collected because they were under surveillance. Parsing "collection: vs "surveilling" was disingenuous beyond reality. One can put forward the idea that Trump personnel had conversations because of "incidental collection" or that Trump personnel are lawbreakers or treasonous as a reason for the surveillance (if surveillance happened – it seems obvious that it did happen) and the surveillance was legitimate.
Unmasking could be legitimate as well – we don't know right now. But to continue to put forward the proposition that Trump associates were not surveilled (by the Obama ADMINISTRATION) is simply preposterous.
Again, I just see purposeful obtuseness. And the trust in the honor and integrity of CIA and intelligence agency officials assumed by the MSM when there are so many instances of documented lying is hard to reconcile with an objective press.I pretty much suspect there were some standard Washington scams/influence peddling going on – more so because this is Trump – and someone in the Obama administration was over anxious to leak this information, developed from classified information to hurt Trump. The only problem is that intelligence gathered information is not to be used for common criminal law. So we have the common law breaking on the Trump side and we have constitutional law breaking from the Obama side. Unfortunately, this country seems to have lost all desire to restrain the government from access to ALL communications of US citizens. And the MSM seems entirely unconcerned about unlimited government snooping.
Byron the Light Bulb , March 31, 2017 at 4:04 pmBoth orders come less than a week before Trump is set to host Chinese President Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, though both Ross and National Trade Council Director Peter Navarro insisted the move was not meant to send any sort of signal to Beijing. But China, with its nearly $350 billion trade surplus with the United States in 2016, will be at the top of the list for review."
Mar-a-Lago should be decked with as many Made-in-China products as possible maybe even laminated flooring.
"This is why we have to address that $350 billion trade surplus, Mr. Xi."
Shirts, socks, coffee cups, apple juice, etc.
It's as if GRU and Spetssvyaz had their own political action preferences based on self-interest. Destabilize and fragment Eastern Europe for bilateral relations with individual gov'ts to which warm relations are rewarded with lower natural gas prices at the risk chaos and armed conflict. Or preserve the stable central adversary for deployment of sober conventional forces that have unity of purpose with the stabilizing benefits of large conservative institutions that will just sit and rust. But what do I know? I'm just a bot. Don't know what is real, what isn't, and probably won't be be paralyzed by doubt in leadership and ability to self-rule.
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Apr 01, 2017 | www.nytimes.com
The White House on Friday revived President Trump's unproven wiretapping allegations against the Obama administration, insisting that there is new evidence that it conducted "politically motivated" surveillance of Mr. Trump's presidential campaign.
Senior government officials, including James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, and lawmakers from both parties have repeatedly and forcefully rejected the president's claim, saying they have seen no evidence of direct surveillance. A spokesman for former President Barack Obama has denied that Mr. Obama ever ordered surveillance of Mr. Trump or his associates.
But Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, asserted to reporters during his daily news briefing that members of Mr. Obama's administration had done "very, very bad things," just as Mr. Trump alleged without proof on March 4 when he posted messages on Twitter accusing Mr. Obama of "wire tapping" his phones at Trump Tower.
"The question is why? Who else did it? Was it ordered? By whom?" Mr. Spicer said. "But I think more and more the substance that continues to come out on the record by individuals continues to point to exactly what the president was talking about that day." ... ... ...
Mr. Spicer's remarks on Friday seemed designed to give new life to the allegations against Mr. Obama after weeks of trying to focus attention on the damage that Mr. Spicer said had been caused by leaks from the investigations into Russia's involvement in the 2016 presidential campaign.
TheGatewayPundit.com, a right-wing site, called it a "notorious" interview and said it proved Obama administration officials had disseminated "intel gathered on the Trump team." Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, said on the Hugh Hewitt radio show that Ms. Farkas had made "just an incredible statement." Breitbart News reported on Mr. Priebus's comments.
In fact, the reports do not back up the allegations that Mr. Trump or any officials in his campaign were ever under surveillance. In the March 2 interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program, Ms. Farkas said she had expressed concern to her former colleagues about the need to secure intelligence related to the Russian hacking of the American election.
Ms. Farkas was commenting on a New York Times article a day earlier that documented how in the days before Mr. Trump's inauguration, Obama administration officials had sought to ensure the preservation of those documents in order to leave a clear trail for government investigators after Mr. Trump took office.
In a statement she gave to the American Spectator, a conservative publication, Ms. Farkas said the furor over her remarks was "a wild misinterpretation of comments I made on the air in March." She added, "I was out of government, I didn't have any classified information, or any knowledge of 'tapping' or leaking or the N.Y.T. article before it came out." White House officials also confronted on Friday the disclosure that Mr. Flynn, who resigned in February over his contacts with Russian officials, has offered to testify before the two congressional committees investigating the Trump campaign's ties to Russia about those contacts in exchange for immunity from prosecution.
Mr. Trump said on Twitter on Friday morning that he agreed with Mr. Flynn's proposal.
"Mike Flynn should ask for immunity in that this is a witch hunt (excuse for big election loss), by media & Dems, of historic proportion!" Mr. Trump wrote.
The comments by Ms. Farkas, Mr. Spicer said, were evidence that Mr. Trump or his associates "were surveilled, had their information unmasked, made it available, was politically spread." He said that such stories were proof that Obama administration officials had "misused, mishandled and potentially did some very, very bad things with classified information."
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Mar 26, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
Korprit_Phlunkie , Mar 25, 2017 6:53 PMThere are cliques of employees in all these govt agencies who have political and religious views just like the rest of the world, except they have access to spy satellites, phone tapping, and every other spy tool just like Snowden tried to expose. Finally after watching the evil satan worshipping liberals for all these years use these tool to further the NWO thru clintons and hussein, the patriot Christian conservative side is finally leaking info they have access to to TRUMP and he is able to fight back a little. THis is good versus evil, no doubt in my mind. Choose this day whom you will serve. Especially you crossroad demon from hell.
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Mar 25, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
, Mar 25, 2017 7:13 PMRoss123 -> jamesmmu , Mar 25, 2017 7:36 PMWhistleblower Dennis Montgomery Is Living On Borrowed Time – Waiting With Data That Proves Trump Transition Team Was Monitored.
http://investmentwatchblog.com/whistleblower-dennis-montgomery-is-living...
Not Too Important -> Ross123 , Mar 25, 2017 7:41 PMJames
I read that info/ letter on another blog. I hope Dennis and Larry succeed, but there is one thing I don't quite understand. If Montgomery left the NSA a few years ago how can he have hard evidence Trump and his team were surveilled ? ( other than one of his former workmates telling him). If he has just been told that makes it hard to prove unless the workmate took a copy of the data and gave it to Montgomery.
He has the data that shows the Trump family and many others were under surveillance for a decade or more when he was still there.
600,000,000 pages of data.
We're waay beyond Trump being surveilled after the November vote.
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Mar 23, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
NSA To Provide "Smoking Gun" Proof Obama Spied On Trump InjectTheVenom -> hedgeless_horseman , Mar 23, 2017 6:56 PMChupacabra-322 -> InjectTheVenom , Mar 23, 2017 7:23 PMMr Nunes should probably stay away from Texas hunting lodges and high balconies...
just sayin' .
DRAIN THE SWAMP.
johngaltfla -> Manthong , Mar 23, 2017 7:46 PMWho ever makes "Obama For Prison 2017" T-Shrits is goi g to make a killing.
knukles -> Mano-A-Mano , Mar 23, 2017 7:57 PMExpect some variation of this story below to come from the upcomine revelations. Trump and Nunes want to not only demonstrate that Obama was scum, but put a major wedge between the DNC and Jews and Israel:
BOMBSHELL: Trump Surveillance Data Captured Due to Obama Spying on Israel, not Russia
Rubicon727 -> wee-weed up , Mar 23, 2017 7:44 PMSo many crimes, so few diversions
BarkingCat -> Rubicon727 , Mar 23, 2017 8:13 PMFirstly, there would have to be sufficient information showing Obama initiated the spying. Unless Obama has political knives out after him, these facts won't come out until 2030.
Secondly, the media, and other powers-that-be would muddy the water. We'll never know *who* and *why* of the story.
Thirdly, if the NSA comes out with genuine evidence, then we may be able to assume there IS a conflict between the FBI, the CIA vs the NSA. That, in itself, would be very relevant news.
Growing conflicts in any large government are not conducive to a smooth-operating empire.
Whoa Dammit -> InjectTheVenom , Mar 23, 2017 7:28 PMMore likely conflicts within each organization.
Or maybe you are right and the NSA are the good guys. Maybe Snowden did what he did because the NSA itself is not happy about what they are told to do. Snowden did not go rogue but is following orders from within NSA.
It could also be that the NSA dropped vault 7 onto WikiLeaks as well as the various Hillary leaks during the campaign.
McCain is alledgedly the White House leaker
http://redstatewatcher.com/article.asp?id=69677
And NYPD says Hillary knew that Wiener was sexing underage girl & did not report it to authorities. The NYPD was prevented from pursuing charges against her.
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Mar 23, 2017 | href="Was%20Obama%20behind%20it? I doubt it and I don't think it would be provable. But it seems like the intelligence agencies are spending more time monitoring repubs than Al queda.">
fresno dan March 22, 2017 at 6:56 pm So I see where Nunes in a ZeroHedge posting says that there might have been "incidental surveillance" of "Trump" (?Trump associates? ?Trump tower? ?Trump campaign?)
Now to the average NC reader, it kinda goes without saying. But I don't think Trump understands the scope of US government "surveillance" and I don't think the average citizen, certainly not the average Trump supporter, does either – the nuances and subtleties of it – the supposed "safeguards".I can understand the rationale for it .but this goes to show that when you give people an opportunity to use secret information for their own purposes .they will use secret information for their own purposes.
And at some point, the fact of the matter that the law regarding the "incidental" leaking appears to have been broken, and that this leaking IMHO was purposefully broken for political purposes .is going to come to the fore. Like bringing up "fake news" – some of these people on the anti Trump side seem not just incapable of playing 11th dimensional chess, they seem incapable of winning tic tac toe .
Was Obama behind it? I doubt it and I don't think it would be provable. But it seems like the intelligence agencies are spending more time monitoring repubs than Al queda. Now maybe repubs are worse than Al queda – I think its time we have a real debate instead of the pseudo debates and start asking how useful the CIA is REALLY. (and we can ask how useful repubs and dems are too)
Reply ↓
- craazyboy March 22, 2017 at 8:45 pm
If Obama taped the information, stuffed the tape in one of Michelle's shoeboxes, then hid the shoebox in the Whitehouse basement, he could be in trouble. Ivanka is sure to search any shoeboxes she finds.
Reply ↓- Irredeemable Deplorable March 23, 2017 at 2:57 am
Oh the Trump supporters are all over this, don't worry. There are many more levels to what is going on than what is reported in the fakenews MSM.
Adm Roger of NSA made his November visit to Trump Tower, after a SCIF was installed there, to .be interviewed for a job uh-huh yeah.
Freedom Watch lawyer Larry Klayman has a whistle-blower who has stated on the record, publicly, he has 47 hard drives with over 600,000,00 pages of secret CIA documents that detail all the domestic spying operations, and likely much much more.
The rabbit hole goes very deep here. Attorney Klayman has stated he has been trying to out this for 2 years, and was stonewalled by swamp creatures, so he threatened to go public this week. Several very interesting videos, and a public letter, are out there, detailing all this. Nunes very likely saw his own conversations transcripted from surveillance taken at Trump Tower (he was part of the transition team), and realized the jig was up. Melania has moved out of Trump Tower to stay elsewhere, I am sure after finding out that many people in Washington where watching them at home in their private residence, whichi is also why Pres Trump sent out those famous angry tweets 2 weeks ago. Democrats on the Committee (and many others) are liars, and very possibly traitors, which is probably why Nunes neglected to inform them. Nunes did follow proper procedures, notifying Ryan first etc, you can ignore the MSM bluster there ..observe Nunes body language in the 2 videos of his dual press briefings he gave today, he appears shocked, angry, disturbed etc.
You all should be happy, because although Pres Trump has been vindicated here on all counts, the more important story for you is that the old line Democratic Party looks about to sink under the wieght of thier own lies and illegalities. This all stems from Obama's Jan 16 signing of the order broadening "co-operation" between the NSA and everybody else in Washington, so that mid-level analysts at almost any agency could now look at raw NSA intercepts, that is where all the "leaks" and "unmasking" are coming from.
AG Lynch, Obama, and countless others knew, or should have known, all about this, but I am sure they will play the usual "I was too stupid too know what was going on in my own organization" card.
Reply ↓
- Lambert Strether Post author March 23, 2017 at 5:12 am
I'm not seeing any links here.
Reply ↓- Lambert Strether Post author March 23, 2017 at 4:08 am
> Was Obama behind it? I doubt it and I don't think it would be provable
I think he knew about it. After fulminating about weedy technicalities, let me just say that Obama's EO12333 expansion made sure that whatever anti-Trump information got picked up by the intelligence community could be spread widely, and would be hard to trace back to an individual source .
Reply ↓
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uncle tungsten , March 22, 2017 at 9:40 pmMar 23, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
There's also this showing evidence that Trump Tower was specifically monitored during the Obama administration, although the probe was targeting Russian mafia and not Trump and was done well before he declared his candidacy.
The FBI did wiretap Trump Tower to monitor Russian activity, but it had nothing to do with the 2016 Presidential election, it has been reported.
Between 2011 and 2013 the Bureau had a warrant to spy on a high-level criminal Russian money-laundering ring, which operated in unit 63A of the iconic skyscraper - three floors below Mr Trump's penthouse.
Not exactly a confirmation of Trump's rather wild claims, but something.
Still waiting for any evidence to appear that Russians interfered with the elections or colluded with Trump.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef , March 22, 2017 at 5:29 pmOk, so they were just after the Russian mafia, phew I feel better already. So they got the felons and they are all arrested?
What utter BS! Why is Semion Mogilevitch still at large in Hungary and no extradition process? What about Felix Sater and Steve Wynn and on and on. Why are they incapable of prosecuting mafia mobsters and instead chasing politicians?
Lambert Strether Post author , March 23, 2017 at 3:25 amThat said, it was what happening potentially to all citizens, not just Donald Trump. I dislike this intensely, but why should Trump get special dispensation over other citizens? Would like to know the reason for that.
Like Watergate, it's really about the denial or the lying.
"When did you know about the, er, collecting?"
For how many days have we ridiculed Trump for his alternative universe imagination?
fritter , March 23, 2017 at 10:38 am> He can join the other 310 million of us who can be "incidentally collected".
Didn't your mother tell you that 310 million wrongs don't make a right?
Neither party establishment cares about that quaint concept, civil liberties. If Obama's flip flip on FISA reform in July 2008, giving the telcos retroactive immunity for Bush's warrantless surveillance, didn't convince you, then his 17-city paramilitary crackdown on Occupy should have.
Code Name D , March 22, 2017 at 3:15 pmNot to mention monitoring a politician opens up a whole new can of worms. I'm convinced Trump must pretty clean relatively because the IC hasn't gotten rid of him yet and you know they have all of his communications.
I'm with Lambert on neither party caring. I knew all I needed to when Obama voted for FISA and the following years just reinforced how corrupt the Dems were. There is an import point here though. I don't think Trump would have thought that all of the surveillance would be applied to him personally. It was just about other people. It was probably a legitimate eye opener. Now Trump is at the head of the surveillance apparatus. Instead of asking wikileaks to release all of clintons emails, he should just do it himself. The Dems who were all for collecting on everyone can't (non-hypocritically) complain about Trump having all that now. I mean, we can never know how far the extremest have penetrated into our government unless we trace where all thatSaudi moneyterrorist influence goes.
Randy , March 22, 2017 at 4:13 pmNot just incedently, in concreshional hearings, Comie flat out says that Trump and his team were investigated for Rushan connections, and that none were found. The question now is was the investigations properly secured or not. Something completly in the air.
But team dem is still playing the "wire tap" canad.
allan , March 22, 2017 at 5:25 pmThe surveillance state bites the politicians that created it in the ass. I love that. They are not happy, I love that too.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef , March 22, 2017 at 5:32 pmThis is now turning into
high comedylow farce:Devin Nunes Commits "Felonious Leaking" [Emptywheel]
and @mkraju:
WYDEN, member of Senate Intel, says Nunes' statements "would appear to reveal classified information, which is a serious concern."
polecat , March 22, 2017 at 7:01 pmIt was already a farce when McCain went after Paul.
Though it was, before that, a horror film, with the 'ways the intelligence community can get you.'
wilroncanada , March 22, 2017 at 9:44 pmthey're going all Fellini on us now !
fresno dan , March 22, 2017 at 7:29 pmAnd here I thought they were only looking through a glass, darkly.
Lambert Strether Post author , March 23, 2017 at 3:31 amMyLessThanPrimeBeef
March 22, 2017 at 5:32 pmIt is a satire, wrapped in a parody, hidden in slapstick, on top of a farce, buried in a bro-mance between a man with a tower and another man riding a horse without a shirt (and the man isn't wearing a shirt either .)
allan , March 22, 2017 at 6:48 pmAnd scripted by Cersei Lannister
fresno dan , March 22, 2017 at 7:19 pmAlso, this kind of incidental collection has been known about for years.
Here's a Barton Gellman, Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani article (linked to by Emptywheel)
from the WaPo in 2014 and based on the Snowden documents:
In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are [WaPo]Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.
Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.
And what was the reaction of many Congresspersons
(including many Dems, and all of the GOP except maybe Rand Paul and Justin Amash)?
Revealing this is treason. People will die.
And Trump's CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, has called for Snowden's execution.
3.14e-9 , March 22, 2017 at 10:35 pmallan
March 22, 2017 at 6:48 pmSorry allan – I got all excited at seeing a Nunes article in ZeroHedge and posted a comment – your article is better and it makes for more coherent comment threads to keep them together – I should have looked before I leaped (posted).
Nunes: "I recently confirmed that, on numerous occasions, the Intelligence Community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.
Details about U.S. persons associated with the incoming administration-details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value-were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting.
I have confirmed that additional names of Trump transition team members were unmasked.
To be clear, none of this surveillance was related to Russia or any investigation of Russian activities or of the Trump team."==============================================
So the worm turns. The hypocrisy espoused by all sides is ..well, 11th dimensional.
fresno dan , March 22, 2017 at 11:56 pmfresno dan, this was a major topic of discussion during the committee hearing with Comey and Rogers on Monday. I listened to the whole thing – all five hours and 18 minutes' worth – because I suspected that the corporate media would omit important details or spin it beyond recognition. And so they did.
The bipartisan divide is being portrayed as Democrats wanting to get to the truth of Russian efforts to snuff out Democracy, and Republicans wanting to "plug leaks" (see Lambert's RCP except above), with some reports suggesting the Rs are advocating stifling free speech, prosecuting reporters for publishing classified information, and the like.
Republican committee members were indeed focused on the leaks, and there was talk about how to prevent them, but their concern – at least as they expressed publicly on Monday – was specifically related to whether all those current and former officials, senior officials, etc., quoted anonymously in the NYT and WaPo (the infamous "nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies") violated FISA provisions protecting information about U.S. persons collected incidentally in surveillance of foreign actors.
Sure, they're playing their own game, and it could be a ruse to divert attention from the Trump campaign's alleged Russian ties or simply to have ammo against the Ds. Even so, after listening to all their arguments, I believe they are on more solid ground than all the Dem hysteria about Russian aggression and Trump camp treason.
I don't think I'll ever get Trey Gowdy's cringe-worthy performance during the Benghazi hearings out of my head, but he made some pretty good points on Monday, one of which was that investigating Russian interference and possible ties between Trump advisers and Russia is all well and good, but there may or may not have been any laws broken; whereas leaking classified information about U.S. citizens collected incidentally under FISA is clearly a felony with up to 10 years. Comey confirmed that by saying that ALL information collected under FISA is classified.
And then he repeatedly refused to say whether he thought any classified information had been leaked or existed at all (I counted more than 100 "no comment" answers from Comey, who astonishingly managed to find 50 different ways to say it).
My beef isn't so much the leak of classified information, but the gross dereliction of duty – if not outright abuse of First Amendment powers – by reporters who collaborate with intelligence agencies and then quote them anonymously, giving everyone cover to say or write whatever they want with zero accountability.
In fact, there were some interesting comments in Monday's hearing about the possibility that some of what has been reported was fabricated. Then, you might expect Comey to say something like that. For all his talk about not tolerating leaks from his agency, blahblah, it was clear that he'll provide his own people with cover, if necessary. I think that's what Gowdy and a couple other Republicans were getting at.
It goes without saying, but I'll add that the Dems were hardly even trying to disguise their real goal, which isn't protecting the American People® from the evil Russkies, but taking down Trump.
3.14e-9 , March 23, 2017 at 3:27 am3.14e-9
March 22, 2017 at 10:35 pmThanks for watching the whole thing – the nation owes you a debt of gratitude.
"My beef isn't so much the leak of classified information, but the gross dereliction of duty – if not outright abuse of First Amendment powers – by reporters who collaborate with intelligence agencies and then quote them anonymously, giving everyone cover to say or write whatever they want with zero accountability."
First, I a squillion percent agree with you. This is a big, bit deal because essentially the military/IC/neocons is trying to wrest control of the civilian government – the idea that the CIA is some noble institution that wants the best for all Americans is preposterous, yet accepted by the media, which proves how much propaganda we are fed. The sheep like following, the mandatory use of the adjective "murderous thug" before the name of "Putin" just shows that most of the media has been bought off or has lost all their critical thinking faculties.
But I also don't want to be a hypocrite so I will explain that I don't have too much of a problem with leaks. WHAT I do have a problem with is the purposeful naivete or ignorance of the media that the CIA and/or facets of the Obama administration is trying to thwart rapprochement with Russia. Administrations BEFORE they are sworn in talk to foreign governments – the sheer HYSTERIA, the CRIME of talking to a Russian is beyond absurd. We are being indoctrinated to believe all Russia, all bad
There is a ton of information about Podesta and the Clintons dealing with Russia for money. If Flynn and whatshisname are just grifting that is pedestrian stuff and everybody in Washington does it (I thing they call it "lobbying"). If there is REAL treason something should have come out by now.
Lambert Strether Post author , March 23, 2017 at 3:46 amThanks, fd.
I began covering congressional hearings while I was still in j-school and sat though many like this during my years as a reporter in D.C. Even though I haven't worked as a full-time journalist for many years, I still prefer original sources and am willing to take the time to dig for them or, in this case, to sit through a hearing as though I were covering it as a member of the press – especially when I don't even have to wash my hair or get dressed!
I didn't mean to imply that I have a problem with leaks. I certainly encouraged enough of them in my time, and I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with publishing leaked material, even certain kinds of classified information. It depends.
There's the kind of "classified" information that is restricted expressly to keep the public from knowing something they have a right to know, and there's information that's classified to protect individual privacy. The first kind should be leaked early and often. The second kind, close to never (and off the top of my head I can't think of an instance when it would be OK).
Even though journalists aren't (and shouldn't be) held liable for publishing classified information given to them by a third party, they need to be scrupulous in their decisions to do so. Is it in the public interest? Who or what might be harmed? Would sitting on the information cause more harm than publicizing it? Does it violate someone's constitutional rights?
These questions can get tricky with someone like Flynn, who's clearly a public figure and thus mostly fair game. However, if I had been reporting that story, I think I would have sat on it until I had more information, even at the risk of getting scooped – unless, of course, I was in cahoots with the leakers and out to get him and his boss.
At that point, I am no longer an objective journalist committed to fair and accurate reporting, but a participant in a political cause. Although newspapers throughout history have taken sides, and pure "fact-based" journalism is a myth, there's a big difference between having an editorial slant and being an active participant in the story. Evidently, BezPo has decided that the latter is not only acceptable, but advantageous.
Sorry, didn't mean to ramble on when I'm likely preaching to the converted. I feel very strongly about this issue, and it's disconcerting to me, as a lifelong Democrat, that I agreed more with the Republicans in that hearing. At the same time, the D's propaganda machine is pumping out so much toxic fog that it's shaking my faith in unfettered freedom of the press.
Exactly what Putin wants, right?
Lambert Strether Post author , March 23, 2017 at 3:41 am> I began covering congressional hearings while I was still in j-school and sat though many like this during my years as a reporter in D.C. Even though I haven't worked as a full-time journalist for many years, I still prefer original sources and am willing to take the time to dig for them
Hmm. NC needs an in-house emptywheel
Lambert Strether Post author , March 23, 2017 at 3:38 amYou did this so we didn't have to. Thanks!
* * *
This:
In fact, there were some interesting comments in Monday's hearing about the possibility that some of what has been reported was fabricated.
I mean, it's not like we don't have several major players with the expertise and the institutional mandate to fake evidence. Waiting for a shoe to drop on this. Call me foily .
* * *
And this:
My beef isn't so much the leak of classified information, but the gross dereliction of duty – if not outright abuse of First Amendment powers – by reporters who collaborate with intelligence agencies and then quote them anonymously, giving everyone cover to say or write whatever they want with zero accountability.
For this, we have the First Amendment? Really?
Lambert Strether Post author , March 23, 2017 at 3:28 amI agree that everybody is surveilled all the time, especially in the Beltway, where probably there are multiple simultaneous operations run against . well, everybody.
It doesn't, er, bug me that 70-year-old Beltway neophyte Trump used sloppy language - "wiretap" - to describe this state of affairs. (I don't expect any kind of language from Trump but sloppy.) All are, therefore one is. It does bug me that the whole discussion gets dragged off into legal technicalities about what legal regimen is appropriate for which form of Fourth Amendment-destruction (emptywheel does this a lot). The rules are insanely complicated, and it's fun to figure them out, rather like taking the cover off the back of a Swiss watch and examining all the moving parts. But the assumption is that people follow the rules, and especially that high-level people (like, say, Comey, or Clapper, or Morrel, or Obama) follow the complicated rules. That assumes facts not in evidence.
Incidental collection was always a likely scenario.
We've also seen statements from people like GHCQ that clains they surveilled Trump at Obama's behest were "absurd," but those are non-denial denials. I can't recall a denial denial. Am I missing something?
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Mar 23, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
Update : House Intel Chairman Nunes spoke to reporters when he left the briefing at The White House and had some more stunning things to say:*NUNES: BRIEFED PRESIDENT ON CONCERNS OVER INCIDENTAL COLLECTION *NUNES: `PRESIDENT NEEDS TO KNOW' THESE INTEL REPORTS EXIST *NUNES: SOME OF WHAT I'VE SEEN SEEMS TO BE `INAPPROPRIATE' *NUNES: TRUMP, OTHERS IN TRANSITION PUT INTO INTELLIGENCE REPORT *NUNES: QUESTION IS IF TRUMP SHOULD BE IN THESE `NORMAL' REPORTS And the punchline: there are "multiple FISA warrants outstanding against Trump" Nunes also told reporters:
Wow - Nunes just said there are "multiple FISA warrants out there" involving Trump.
- Tom Watson (@tomwatson) March 22, 2017
* * *
As we detailed earlier, it appears Trump may have been right, again.
Two days after FBI director Comey shot down Trump's allegation that Trump was being wiretapped by president Obama before the election, it appears that president Trump may have been on to something because moments ago, the House Intelligence Chairman, Devin Nunes, told reporters that the U.S. intelligence community incidentally collected information on members of President Trump's transition team, possibly including Trump himself, and the information was "widely disseminated" in intelligence reports.
As AP adds , Nunes said that President Donald Trump's communications may have been "monitored" during the transition period as part of an "incidental collection."Nunes told a news conference Wednesday that the communications appear to be picked up through "incidental collection" and do not appear to be related to the ongoing FBI investigation into Trump associates' contacts with Russia. He says he believes the intelligence collections were done legally , although in light of the dramatic change in the plotline it may be prudent to reserve judgment on how "incidental" it was.
"I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions, the intelligence community collected information on U.S. individuals involved in the Trump transition," Nunes told reporters.
"Details about U.S. persons involved in the incoming administration with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reports."
The information was "legally brought to him by sources who thought we should know it," Nunes said, though he provided little detail on the source.
BREAKING!!! Rep Devin Nunes (Intel Cmte Chmn): There was "Incidental collection" of @realDonaldTrump thru IC surveillance <- BOMBSHELL
- Eric Bolling (@ericbolling) March 22, 2017
Nunes also said that "additional names" of Trump transition officials had been unmasked in the intelligence reports. He indicated that Trump's communications may have been swept up.
The House Intel Chair said he had viewed dozens of documents showing that the information had been incidentally collected. He said that he believes the information was legally collected. Nunes said that the intelligence has nothing to do with Russia and that the collection occurred after the presidential election.
Nunes said he briefed House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on the revelation and will inform the White House later today. Nunes' statement comes after he and other congressional leaders pushed back on Trump's claims that former President Obama had his "wires tapped" in Trump Tower ahead of the election.
Nunes said Wednesday that it was unclear whether the information incidentally collected originated in Trump Tower.
The revelation comes in the wake of the committee's explosive hearing on Monday, at which FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the bureau has been investigating Russia's election hacking since July, which includes probing possible coordination between members of Trump's presidential campaign and Moscow.
The meeting represented the panel's first open hearing on its investigation into Russia's election meddling and also featured testimony from NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers.
Nunes says the communications of Trump associates were also picked up, but he did not name those associates. He says the monitoring mostly occurred in November, December and January. He added that he learned of the collection through "sources" but did not specify those source
Politico adds that Nunes is going to the White House later Wednesday to brief the Trump administration on what he has learned, which he said came from "sources."
Nunes says he is "bothered" by this. Won't say whether or not intel community spied on Trump et. al. But says he is "concerned."
- David Corn (@DavidCornDC) March 22, 2017
While there are no further details, we look forward to how the media narrative will change as a result of today's latest dramatic development.
froze25 , Mar 22, 2017 1:38 PM
Looney -> LowerSlowerDelaware_LSD , Mar 22, 2017 1:40 PMTrump wouldn't of tweeted what he did unless he knew something. He doesn't make blind bets, he only moves on things he knows he can win. Not to mention he has shown that he can bait, watch the other side respond and deny and then present his case to show them as the liars they are.
Chupacabra-322 -> ghengis86 , Mar 22, 2017 1:44 PM
James Comey said that there were no LEGAL wiretaps.
Who would admit to ILLEGALLY wiretapping a campaign?
I am not a crook I am not a crook ;-)
Looney
Joe Davola -> froze25 , Mar 22, 2017 1:49 PMBush and Obama both illegally tapped trumps 30+ offices, residences, cell ph since 2004.
There's a New Snowden - 600M docs Leaked Including Trump Wire Taps on 30+ Phones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFJ34OAmzP8
Documents Show Obama Surveilled Entire Trump Family For 8 Years https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTT5FVyGMUU
New NSA Whistblower Goes Public About Trump Surveillance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq2SaRu9emY
NSA DOCUMENTS PROVE SURVEILLANCE OF DONALD TRUMP AND ALEX JONES https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lntc9No2vzE
Chupacabra-322 -> Joe Davola , Mar 22, 2017 1:56 PMBy "incidental monitoring" does he mean "gathering everything they can just like they do to everyone else"
Gaius Frakkin' ... -> FrozenGoodz , Mar 22, 2017 2:17 PM@ Joe,
"Incidental" is code for "Vault 7." Someone should make T-Shirts.
remain calm -> Gaius Frakkin' Baltar , Mar 22, 2017 2:29 PM"incidental surveillance"
LOL...
Something like Clapper's "not wittingly" I'm sure...
While we're at it, let's debate the meaning of "is"...
greenskeeper carl -> remain calm , Mar 22, 2017 2:50 PM"Incidental surveilance" WTF
That is like being a little gay...
j0nx -> greenskeeper carl , Mar 22, 2017 4:21 PMHow all these people still let trump bait them like this is hilarious. How many times has he said something that seemed baseless and everyone was sure would sink him, and then he is vindicated? And they still fucking fall for it.
And yes, incidental surveillance is a funny term. As in you swept all his up the same way they listen to all of us all the time? Maybe this will piss trump off enough to end this shit. I doubt it though.
wildbad -> Gaius Frakkin' Baltar , Mar 22, 2017 3:55 PMIndeed. Everyone knows Obama and hildabeast were 'tapping his lines' illegally via fake 'legal' methods...
Sam.Spade -> FrozenGoodz , Mar 22, 2017 6:16 PMwe've got to start fucking these liberals up.
the NSA , the CIA, The FBI et al. are watching all of us all the time period.
we have to beat these motherfuckers back until there is no one willing to fill those illegal and unconstitutional posts.
the terrorists are in washington and we need to dissemble their illegally constructed fortress.
Dear donald..attack them now. jail them. hang them.
Belrev -> Chupacabra-322 , Mar 22, 2017 2:22 PMHere is what Trump may have known:
The NSA 'wiretaps' EVERYONE. All of what you say on your phone, on-line, and in any other form of electronic communications is Hoovered up and dumped in their mass storage facilities in Utah and elsewhere. The system is set up to get it all AUTOMATICALLY. In fact, they would have had to go to great efforts to NOT record what Trump and his associates said electronically. Or searched for. Or visited on the web. Or even visited in person if he/she carried a cell phone with when going about.
Because it is all recorded for ALL OF US! Standard, all the time, no warrant required.
Of course, if there were FISA warrants issued, then the opposition did more than that, because no warrant is required for any of the above. So they must have also done some non-standard dirty. Like placing recording malware on the relevant cell phones to record conversations, take pictures, upload stored files, and even take video. Or sift through his financial records.
OK, so why should you care? I don't mean about Trump, although you should care there as well, but about your privacy. You may not be getting the full Monte he did, by everything you do in the first paragraph now rests with the NSA.
For an answer, consider this conversation between one of the uber-wealthy and a Federal Prosecutor:
*****
"With enough data, my lawyers can always find a crime. They'll prosecute. Bury anyone under legal motions, make his life miserable. Maybe even send him up for some felony."
"Even if he didn't do anything?"
"Of course he did something. We got 100,000 laws on the books, twice that in regs. Somewhere, sometime, by accident or intentionally, he broke one. We get a moving x-ray of his life, all we have to do is find it."
*****
It's called the power of selective prosecution. With enough data, what used to be just an annoyance becomes an unstoppable control technique. Someday, when the deep state wants you cooperation, they will drill down through their Utah stash for your name. Then they will call you in for a little chat.
Not willing to spy on your best friend or wife? You may change you mind after their little chat.
So how to avoid this trap? How do you avoid becoming a data serf?
Learn to hide your data so it can't be hovered in the first place. I suggest you start with www.privacytools.io and work your way up from there.
And do it now. Because protecting your privacy is like quitting smoking. It doesn't matter how long you have been engaged in unclean behavior, it's never too late to start living right.
The quote above, by the way, was from Thieves Emporium by Max Hernandez. It's a primer on the ways TPTB control us in the new world of fiat money and ubiquitous surveillance and what we can do to prevent it. I strongly recommend you at least investigate getting a copy.
The editors of The Daily Bell must agree as they ran it as a serial which you can still read for free at http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/max-hernandez-introducing-thieves...
Or you can buy a copy from Amazon (rated 4.6 in 118 reviews), Nook (same rating, not so many reviews), Smashwords (ditto), or iBooks.
https://www.amazon.com/Thieves-Emporium-Max-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B00CWWWRK0
CuttingEdge -> Chupacabra-322 , Mar 22, 2017 2:28 PMStatement by Devin Nunes on discovery of Trump team surveillance by Obama
Chupacabra-322 -> CuttingEdge , Mar 22, 2017 2:45 PMThere is a simple method for Trump to "drain the swamp". Fucked if I know why he hasn't, given how much butt-hurt they are dishing out to him.
An Executive Order giving immunity and witness protection (and even a fucking Presidential Medal of Freedom, if you ask me) to all whistleblowers who reveal unconstitutional malfeasance within both overt and covert .gov departments. Because these are the true patriots, and all that is stopping them shining a fucking huge spotlight on this bucket of scumfuck is persecution from the swamp dwellers who control all the levers of power.
Maybe with a (secure) hotline/email direct to the White House, just to bypass Comey and all the other cunts installed by Obama. Or probably better, directly to a morally rock solid independent Special Prosecutor who is prepared to get down and seriously dirty with the insidious morally bereft creatures infesting DC. A Trey Gowdy-type of bloke. Because , as far as relying on the FBI et al is concerned, Trump was fucked before he started.
vq1 -> Chupacabra-322 , Mar 22, 2017 3:45 PM@ Cutting,
A typewriter can get it done. Hear they're Hot sellers in Germany again.
What people don't understand is, that the Russian PsyOp / False Narrative Script by the Deep State & Pure Evil War Criminal Treasonous Psychopath Hillary Clinton Globalist was the game plan all long.
Win, stolen or lost. They were going & are going "all in" with the PsyOp, Scripted False Narrative of Russia hacking the Elections / Russia / Putin / Trump Propaganda gone full retard via the Deep States Opeatives in the Presstitute Media.
Plausible Deniability is the name of the game. If the Deep State could of pulled off the False Narrative PsyOp of Russia influencing our Elections the Deep State could & will hack into Russia's National Elections next March. Call it pay back.
The Deep State's destabilization campaign in Ukraine especially Crimea was part of the ZioNeoConFascist Agenda to destabilize Russia during their upcoming g elections.
Putin countered by expelling all Geroge Sorros NGO's from Russia. However, rest assured those destabilization cells are in place to ready to be activated come Russia's next election cycle.
The future meeting between the Two Super Powers will be Epic. The Diplomacy which will Prevail out of those meetings will be a fresh breath of air to the World.
And, final Death Blows to the Pure Evil Criminal Deep State Elite Compartmentalized Hierarchy.
forexskin -> vq1 , Mar 22, 2017 6:20 PMI assume you brought up typewriter because it is "unhackable" and allows people to leak without potentially being linked?
As we all know the wikileaks revelations show that almost no device is safe from CIA (typewriter obviously is safe).
That does not mean however that anonymity is unachievable.
Someone can feel free to point out any hole in my instructions:
1) purchase an older laptop (no camera or microphone) with cash from a "local" computer store (not a Dell or Microsoft branded business).
3) run OS from an external CD drive (NO USB). Recommend linux distro, like tails.
2) https://privacytoolsio.github.io/privacytools.io/ for software recommendations (tor, VPN, protonmail/tutanota, keepass, etc)
3) All accounts disassociated with you personally - fake names, no phone numbers, do not link to any personal accounts, make no comments, do not message your contacts.
4) never use your own wifi.
5) never use your own bank account or credit cards, use crypto currency to pay for VPN, etc.
This setup, as I understand it, would keep you completely anon with the exception of cameras at the store you purchase laptop at or cameras at the cafe you are using wifi. You can now leak without it being linked to you.
Not to say that this setup is immune from CIA. In fact the idea is that you know that the CIA is looking, its just important that they do not know WHO they are looking at (identity).
Jim in MN -> forexskin , Mar 22, 2017 7:22 PMtypewriter may be safe.
my russian compatriot Vlad told me when he was a kid, every typewriter in USSR was cataloged with samples of its output. By microscopic analysis, they could tell which typewriter was responsible for any typed document.
every computer printer made also has the same kind of ID backdoor - it will print a specific identifier (like a MAC address) somewhere on the page - except for the old dot matrix and early inkjet. Defeat that by running it thru a low res copier a few round trips.
Victory_Garden -> CuttingEdge , Mar 22, 2017 4:09 PMEast German Stasi, same deal. All typewriters registered and tracked. Such amazing depth of the deep state crap. Coming soon to a ruined Republic near you...unless......we stop it.
"An Executive Order giving immunity and witness protection (and even a fucking Presidential Medal of Freedom, if you ask me) to all whistleblowers who reveal unconstitutional malfeasance within both overt and covert .gov departments. Because these are the true patriots, and all that is stopping them shining a fucking huge spotlight on this bucket of scumfuck is persecution from the swamp dwellers who control all the levers of power.
Maybe with a (secure) hotline/email direct to the White House, just to bypass Comey and all the other cunts installed by Obama. Or probably better, directly to a morally rock solid independent Special Prosecutor who is prepared to get down and seriously dirty with the insidious morally bereft creatures infesting DC. A Trey Gowdy-type of bloke. Because , as far as relying on the FBI et al is concerned, Trump was fucked before he started."
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Mar 23, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
TeethVillage88s , Mar 23, 2017 6:54 PM
Crash Overide -> aloha_snakbar , Mar 23, 2017 7:39 PM
- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-22/bombshell-cia-whistleblower-lea...
- http://www.freedomwatchusa.org/pdf/170321-Final%20Whistleblower%20Letter...
Yes, they have your Apples too:
- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-23/nightskies-12-wikileaks-latest-...
- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-07/snowden-what-cia-revelations-sh...
- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-07/wikileaks-hold-press-conference...
- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-08/most-shocking-revelation-cia-sp...
- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-09/watch-live-wikileaks-holds-dela...
- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-13/cia-cyber-false-flag
- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-06/here-are-top-15-obamagate-wiret...
- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-16/wikileaks-exposes-cia-involveme...
- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-22/wikileaks-releases-proof-nsa-sp...
- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-16/new-snowden-leak-exposes-atts-e...
- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-16/edward-snowden-explains-histori...
- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-15/new-snowden-reveals-obamas-secr...
- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-08/edward-snowdens-new-revelations...
- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-31/whistleblowers-stunning-claim-n...
Vilfredo Pareto , Mar 23, 2017 7:01 PMMaxine Waters: 'Obama Has Put In Place' Secret Database With 'Everything On Everyone'
Chupacabra-322 , Mar 23, 2017 7:04 PMThe rank and file of the IC are not involved in this. So let's not tar everyone with the same brush, but Obama revised executive order 12333 so that communication intercepts incidentally collected dont have to be masked and may be shared freely in the IC.
Now we have "synthetic" surveillance. You don't even need a court order. Now all incidental communication intercepts can be unmasked. One can search their huge databases for all the incidental communications of someone of interest, then collect all of the unmasked incidental communications that involve that person and put them together in one handy dandy report. Viola! You can keep tabs on them every time they end up being incidentally collected.
You ever went to an embassy party? Talked to a drug dealer or mafia guy without being aware of it? Correspond overseas? Your communications have been "incidentally" collected too. There is so much surveillance out there we have probably all bounced off various targets over the last several years.
What might your "synthetic" surveillance report look like?
It's worth repeating.
There's way more going on here then first alleged. From Bloomberg, not my choice for news, but There is another component to this story as well -- as Trump himself just tweeted.
It's very rare that reporters are ever told about government-monitored communications of U.S. citizens, let alone senior U.S. officials. The last story like this to hit Washington was in 2009 when Jeff Stein, then of CQ, reported on intercepted phone calls between a senior Aipac lobbyist and Jane Harman, who at the time was a Democratic member of Congress.
Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity.
This is what police states do. In the past it was considered scandalous for senior U.S. officials to even request the identities of U.S. officials incidentally monitored by the government (normally they are redacted from intelligence reports). John Bolton's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was derailed in 2006 after the NSA confirmed he had made 10 such requests when he was Undersecretary of State for Arms Control in George W. Bush's first term. The fact that the intercepts of Flynn's conversations with Kislyak appear to have been widely distributed inside the government is a red flag.
Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told me Monday that he saw the leaks about Flynn's conversations with Kislyak as part of a pattern. "There does appear to be a well orchestrated effort to attack Flynn and others in the administration," he said. "From the leaking of phone calls between the president and foreign leaders to what appears to be high-level FISA Court information, to the leaking of American citizens being denied security clearances, it looks like a pattern."
@?realDonaldTrump?
The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc?
President Trump was roundly mocked among liberals for that tweet. But he is, in many ways, correct. These leaks are an enormous problem. And in a less polarized context, they would be recognized immediately for what they clearly are: an effort to manipulate public opinion for the sake of achieving a desired political outcome. It's weaponized spin.............
But no matter what Flynn did, it is simply not the role of the deep state to target a man working in one of the political branches of the government by dishing to reporters about information it has gathered clandestinely.
It is the role of elected members of Congress to conduct public investigations of alleged wrongdoing by public officials.. ..... But the answer isn't to counter it with equally irregular acts of sabotage - or with a disinformation campaign waged by nameless civil servants toiling away in the surveillance state.....
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Mar 22, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
Common_Cents22 , Mar 22, 2017 11:38 PMhorseman , Mar 22, 2017 11:22 PMIs this the same Dennis Montgomery who had some fraud in his past? or was that disinfo to discredit him then as well?
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/reno-casino-conman-pulled-greatest-h...
AKKadian , Mar 22, 2017 11:21 PMThis is probably why Nunes went public today. What a shame. If not for Klayman, Nunes would have gone along with the committee.
wcole225 , Mar 22, 2017 11:21 PMThey are spying on everyone. Pelosi, Schumer, Waters Judges. You name it, they are spying on everyone. No exceptions.!!!
deoxy , Mar 22, 2017 11:15 PMAnd the plot thickens. Whoever said may you live in interesting times......had no idea. Can you feel the desperation from the filthy corrupt democrats? The demonic spirits that reside in them are going berserk. The light is starting to shine on them and their evil deeds are more transparent than ever. It's only gonna get better
Not Too Important , Mar 22, 2017 11:06 PMFox better rehire Napolitano before it is too late. But it is too late for the Wall Street Journal comparing Trump to 'a drunk' clinging to 'an empty gin bottle' in scathing editorial.
JamesBond , Mar 22, 2017 11:01 PMNunes saw what he saw, got scared to death, and went directly to the President of the United States, because he can't trust anyone else, anywhere.
He is now facing ruthless fuckers that will kill and kill and kill some more to protect themselves and their masters.
He's thinking he's in waay over his head with this, and there's no way out.
This is a fight between kiddie fuckers that worship Satan, the people that work for them, and the people that don't.
Buckle up, folks, there's no putting this genie back in the bottle.
techpriest -> JamesBond , Mar 22, 2017 11:05 PMWe incidentally lied to some folks.
hustler etiquette -> techpriest , Mar 22, 2017 11:17 PMThe best thing about this presidency so far, is that everything is being laid out on the table. Soon it will be impossible to hide the swamp.
it's better than homeland X game of thrones.
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Mar 19, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
im1dc : March 18, 2017 at 01:34 PM , 2017 at 01:34 PMThe who behind Trump's Obama wire tapping claim is now knownThe why appears to be that he's an anti- Hillary Clintonista
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/trump-gchq-spying-larry-johnson-intelligence-community-236220
"How the U.K. spying claim traveled from an ex-CIA blogger to Trump's White House"
'Former intelligence analyst Larry Johnson, who has long attacked the U.S. intel community, is standing by his allegation that triggered a feud with America's closest ally'
By Matthew Nussbaum...03/18/17...02:38 PM EDT
"...Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and blogger, acknowledges he was one of the sources for Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano's claim - later repeated by the White House..."
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Mar 17, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
Fred C. Dobbs -> Fred C. Dobbs... March 17, 2017 at 07:58 PMBritain Livid on Spying Claim, but Trump Isn't Apologizinglibezkova -> Fred C. Dobbs..., March 17, 2017 at 07:59 PMWhite House aides scrambled to deal with an unusual rupture after suggesting that former President Barack Obama used a British spy agency to wiretap Donald J. Trump during the campaign.
At a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mr. Trump made clear that he felt the White House had nothing to retract.
Trump Offers No Apology for Claim on British Spying https://nyti.ms/2nzpTHO
NYT - PETER BAKER and STEVEN ERLANGER - March 17
WASHINGTON - President Trump provoked a rare public dispute with America's closest ally on Friday after his White House aired an explosive and unsubstantiated claim that Britain's spy agency had secretly eavesdropped on him at the behest of President Barack Obama during last year's campaign.
Livid British officials adamantly denied the allegation and secured promises from senior White House officials never to repeat it. But a defiant Mr. Trump refused to back down, making clear that the White House had nothing to retract or apologize for because his spokesman had simply repeated an assertion made by a Fox News commentator. Fox itself later disavowed the report. ...
Repeating myself:== quote ==
libezkova -> DeDude...
"He really is a moron."
this equally applied to those with the virulent fixation on Russia completely out of control.
== end of quote ==
Neoliberal DemoRats might pay dearly for this "poisoning of the well" trick -- McCarthyism witch hunt.
We need to remember that corruption of politician is sine qua non of neoliberalism. "Greed is good" completely replaced 10 Commandments.
But the first rule of living in a glass house that modern Internet provides (in cooperation with intelligence agencies, Google, Microsoft and Facebook) is not to throw stones.
Russia is not Serra Leon with rockets. I am afraid that Russia might have a lot of info about corruption of major Democratic politicians as most of them took bribes from Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs (whom they essentially created) and some (old Clinton "associates" like Summers) closely participated in "great economic rape of Russia" of 1991-2000. All neatly recorded and waiting their hour for release.
At some point Putin's nerves might break and he can order to release this information. Then what ?
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Mar 17, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
Following today's latest developments over Trump's allegations that the UK's GCHQ may or may not have helped Obama to wiretap the Trump Tower, an allegation which the infuriated British Spy Agency called "utterly ridiculous" and prompted it to demand an apology from the White House, a German reporter asked Trump for his current opinion on whether Obama had indeed wiretapped Trump. The president's response: he gestured to Angela Merkel and said " on wiretapping by this past administration, at least we have something in common.""At least we have something in common, perhaps": Trump addresses wiretapping claim in news conference with Merkel https://t.co/xSd5c02Crh pic.twitter.com/wrF6cJ4jEE
- CNN International (@cnni) March 17, 2017
Trump doubles down on unsubstantiated wiretapping claims, says he & Merkel 'have something in common, perhaps' https://t.co/MmUIzRWyjR pic.twitter.com/pF466XfMtC
- CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) March 17, 2017
Merkel's reaction was similarly amusing: almost as if she had heard for the first time that in 2010, and for years onward, Barack Obama had been wiretapping her and countless other heads of state.
For those unsure what the exchange was about, we suggest you read the Telegraph's " Barack Obama 'approved tapping Angela Merkel's phone 3 years ago'... President Barack Obama was told about monitoring of German Chancellor in 2010 and allowed it to continue, says German newspaper ."
And incidentally, in yet another change in the official narrative, after both Sky News and the Telegraph reported earlier today that the White House had apologized to Britain over the accusation that its spy agency had helped Obama spy on Trump, the NYT reported that the White House has said there was no apology from either Spicer or McMaster, and that instead the Administration defended Spicer's mention of the wiretapping story.
WH now sez there was no apology to Brits from @PressSec /McMaster; they fielded complaints & defended Spicer's mention of wiretapping story
- Julie Davis (@juliehdavis) March 17, 2017
Finally, as Axios adds , after Trump and Merkel left the stage reporters again asked Sean Spicer whether he apologized for repeating an anonymously sourced Fox News claim that British intelligence helped in wiretapping Trump Tower. His response: " I don't think we regret anything. "
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Mar 14, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
Jerry Brown : March 12, 2017 at 10:26 PM , 2017 at 10:26 PMNice post at Econospeak. The Safeway Amendment Scam - EconoSpeakpgl -> Jerry Brown... , March 13, 2017 at 01:48 AMEspecially agree with the conclusion- "Using disinformation to promote an agenda of shifting more costs onto workers to enhance profit margins. Isn't this what Paul Ryan means by "A Better Way"?"
Check out the latest from the disgusting Paul Ryan:Lee A. Arnold -> pgl... , March 13, 2017 at 04:41 AMhttp://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/paul-ryan-number-who-will-lose-coverage-up-to-people
He is gloating that we have more "choices" as he takes away any possible means for actually paying for our health care. This in a nutshell is the entire GOP approach. We are free to die.
"Free to die, Pay to live!"DrDick -> pgl... , March 13, 2017 at 07:33 AMIn my state, one company (BC/BS) controls 0ver 70% of the health insurance market and there are only two other even marginally significant players. Market based my ...
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www.apnews.com
"WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on President Donald Trump (all times EDT):
7:10 p.m.
The House intelligence committee says it could resort to subpoenaing the Justice Department if it fails to answer its request for any evidence that President Donald Trump was wiretapped during the election.
The committee set Monday as the deadline for getting the information, but the Justice Department says it needs more time.
The committee now says it wants the information in hand before March 20 when it holds its first public hearing on its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
A spokesman for committee chairman Devin Nunes of California, Jack Langer, says the committee might subpoena the information if the Justice Department fails to answer its questions.
___
6:30 p.m.
The Justice Department is requesting more time to respond to a congressional inquiry into President Donald Trump's unproven assertion that he was wiretapped by his predecessor.
The department had been expected to provide a response by Monday to the House Intelligence Committee, which has made Trump's wiretapping claims part of a bigger investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
But spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores says in a statement Monday that the department has asked for more time to "review the request in compliance with the governing legal authorities and to determine what if any responsive documents may exist."
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Mar 14, 2017 | freerepublic.com
From american spectatorGeorge Neumayr
Posted on 3/6/2017 4:42:04 PM by RoosterReduxTo: RoosterReduxIt is "our job," not Trump's, to "control exactly what people think," gasped MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski last month. This week's gasp from the media assumes a slightly different form and can be translated as: It is our job, not Trump's, to push stories about the government investigation of Trumpworld.
For months, the media, drawing upon criminal leaks from Obama holdovers, has been saying in effect: Trumpworld is under investigation for ties to Russia! Then Trump says essentially the same thing on Twitter and the media freaks out.
Why does the latter merit condemnation but not the former?
Notice what is happening here: The Obama holdovers are denying the import of the very stories that they planted. Where did the liberal BBC's story (building on a story first reported by Heat Street) on intelligence agencies receiving a FISA court warrant to investigate Russian-Trumpworld ties come from? It came from a "senior member of the US intelligence community":
On 15 October, the US secret intelligence court issued a warrant to investigate two Russian banks. This news was given to me by several sources and corroborated by someone I will identify only as a senior member of the US intelligence community. He would never volunteer anything – giving up classified information would be illegal – but he would confirm or deny what I had heard from other sources.Notice on the Sunday talk shows that Obama's CIA director John Brennan did not appear. Yet he served as the genesis of this investigation, according to the BBC story:(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
As the author points out, here is the key:
The Obama administration used half-baked (or, more likely, completely fabricated) information from some "foreign source" as the pretext to launch a clandestine fishing expedition against Trump during the election.
Can't wait to see the application paperwork for the requested FISA orders!!
gibsonguy 3/6/2017 5:48:56 PM
To: RoosterRedux Don't want to start a separate thread for this and it is somewhat related.Listening to Hannity show today and William Binney was on and interviewed. Binney was a US Intelligence Official with the NSA who resigned in 2001 and turned whistleblower.
I am paraphrasing but - He says phone, email, test, surveillance is routinely done on everyone with no warrant. He said they can go back for years and pull out the data.
Please listen to Hannity at the top of the 3rd hour for details.
We live in a police state folks under the warrantless eavesdropping program.
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Mar 14, 2017 | www.newsmax.com
The National Security Agency (NSA), having previously been disclosed by Edward Snowden and my whistleblower client Dennis Montgomery to have unconstitutionally and illegally spied on the telephonic metadata, internet, and social media communications of hundreds of millions of American citizens - including Supreme Court justices, hundreds of lower court judges, prominent businessmen like Trump himself, and ordinary American activists like yours truly - is at it again!This time, with the resignation of Trump White House National Security Adviser General Michael Flynn last night - based on telephone NSA intercepts he allegedly had with the Russian ambassador - it's clear that the NSA is spying on the president, his White House, and the administration in general.
This is highly dangerous, particularly since the intelligence agencies are chock full of loyalists to former President Barack Hussein Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their leftist comrades.
They are also stung by President Trump's criticism of their incompetence, partisanship, and lawlessness under the direction of former Director of National Security James Clapper, who lied to under oath to Congress about his wholesale illegal spying, yet as a card carrying member of the Washington, D.C., establishment got off scot free from prosecution. And, then there is former CIA Director John Brennan, who was literally at war with President-elect Trump as the hand-picked intelligence hack of Obama himself. Even after his resignation a day prior to the inauguration of President Trump, many of Brennan's agents remain in place at the CIA.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that the NSA and likely the CIA continue with their spying, this time on our "the president and his men." This is highly dangerous to our republic, and, as found by one of the few intellectually honest and courageous federal judges on the bench in two cases which I filed a few years ago against the NSA, this conduct is "almost Orwellian," that is, reminiscent of George Orwell's prophesy in his landmark book, "1984." Orwell's "Big Brother" has indeed come to pass, as Judge Leon held in ruling in my favor in these lawsuits. (For more information, see FreedomWatchUSA.org .)
My success in this litigation caused Congress to enact the USA Freedom Act, which requires the intelligence agencies to get warrants to obtain telephonic metadata based on a showing of probable cause that terrorism is afoot or that a crime is in the act of being committed. But it's now clear that, as has been documented time-in and time-out in court filings and from other sources, the NSA and likely the CIA continue to have no respect for the law.
Now the NSA and likely the CIA as well have predictably turned their sights on the President of the United States and his White House. This is not just an outrage, it threatens to unleash tyranny the likes of which this nation has never seen. Because if the intelligence agencies are allowed to continue, the real likelihood of coercion and blackmail will, as is also predicted, become the norm. And, when this happens, our democracy will have been destroyed, much less the hope of the new Trump administration, on behalf of all of us, to "Make America Great Again."
Of course, restoring the nation to greatness may not what the hacks at the NSA, CIA, and other intelligence agencies may have in mind. The NSA and CIA, with this spying, holds a "Sword of Damocles" over the heads of President Trump and his administration and in many ways they are control of the fate of the United States. If King George III had had this power in the days leading up to the American Revolution, our Founding Fathers would never had made to Philadelphia to debate, agree on, and ultimately sign the Declaration of Independence. They would have been picked up by the Red Coats, arrested, imprisoned, and ultimately executed.
I will be going back to Judge Leon in our ongoing cases to hold the NSA and CIA in contempt for continuing its apparently illegal spying which threatens all of us. If there is one jurist who might protect We the People, Judge Leon is the one. If not, then American patriots regrettably may ultimately decide to take matters into their own hands, as happened 1776.
Larry Klayman, founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, is known for his strong public interest advocacy in furtherance of ethics in government and individual freedoms and liberties. To read more of his reports, Go Here Now .
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Mar 05, 2017 | www.newsmax.com
The newest revelations that the Obama administration wiretapped, that is "bugged" President Trump and all of his men, in the lead up to and after the November 8, 2016, elections are not surprising. In this regard, for over 2 years the highest levels of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been secretly investigating the "harvesting" of highly confidential information including financial records of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other justices, over 156 judges, prominent businessmen like Donald Trump, and public activists like me.
In this regard, a whistleblower named Dennis Montgomery, a former NSA/CIA contractor, came forward to FBI Director Comey with 47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of largely classified information, under grants of use and derivative use immunity, which I obtained for him with the U.S Attorney for the District of Columbia. Later, Montgomery, who suffers from a potentially fatal brain aneurism, testified under oath, for over 2-and-a-half hours before FBI Special Agents Walter Giardina and William Barnett in a secure room at the FBI's field office in Washington, D.C. The testimony was under oath and videotaped and I have reminded the FBI recently to preserve this evidence.
The newest revelations that the Obama administration wiretapped, that is "bugged" President Trump and all of his men, in the lead up to and after the November 8, 2016, elections are not surprising. In this regard, for over 2 years the highest levels of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been secretly investigating the "harvesting" of highly confidential information including financial records of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other justices, over 156 judges, prominent businessmen like Donald Trump, and public activists like me.
In this regard, a whistleblower named Dennis Montgomery, a former NSA/CIA contractor, came forward to FBI Director Comey with 47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of largely classified information, under grants of use and derivative use immunity, which I obtained for him with the U.S Attorney for the District of Columbia. Later, Montgomery, who suffers from a potentially fatal brain aneurism, testified under oath, for over 2-and-a-half hours before FBI Special Agents Walter Giardina and William Barnett in a secure room at the FBI's field office in Washington, D.C. The testimony was under oath and videotaped and I have reminded the FBI recently to preserve this evidence.
I have also met on several occasions with the staff of Chairman Bob Goodlatte of the House Judiciary Committee, since judges have been illegally surveilled, and asked them to inquire of FBI Director Comey and his General Counsel James Baker why their Montgomery investigation has appeared to have been "buried" for the last few years. They have done so, but as yet have not received, to the best of my knowledge, a clear response.
In addition I have gone back to one of the few intellectually honest judges on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (nearly all of the rest, save for another great, Judge Royce C. Lamberth, are politically biased appointees of either Presidents Clinton or Obama), and asked him to move forward to trial with the cases which I filed in 2013 against Obama and his intelligence agencies over the mass spying on hundreds of millions of Americans.
Not coincidentally, before Edward Snowden revealed this unconstitutional conduct by the National Security Agency (NSA), which then was run under the direction of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, Clapper lied under oath to Congress, denying that this illegal surveillance was occurring under his watch. That he was never prosecuted for perjury at a minimum, not to mention that it is crime to wiretap innocent Americans without "probable cause," is a testament to the reality that official Washington is afraid of the intelligence agencies, knowing that they can dig up "dirt" to destroy their political and personal lives. Indeed, this may help explain Chief Justice Roberts' "inexplicable" last minute flip on the Obamacare case before SCOTUS. What, for instance, did Clapper and the NSA/CIA have on Roberts that may have "convinced" him to rubber stamp President Barack Obama's unconstitutional Affordable Care Act?
Judge Leon, in the course of my cases before him (see freedomwatchusa.org for more info), has already issued two preliminary injunction rulings ordering that the illegal mass surveillance cease and desist. He termed this unconstitutional violation of our Fourth Amendment, "almost Orwellian," a reference to George Orwell's prophetic book "1984" about "Big Brother." Judge Leon's rulings then prompted Congress to amend the Patriot Act, and call it the USA Freedom Act, which sought to leave telephonic metadata in the hands of the telephone providers, like Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T, until a warrant was obtained showing probable cause that a target or subjects communications with terrorists or a crime was being committed.
It now appears that the Obama intelligence agencies, as I predicted to Judge Leon, have again ignored and flouted the law, and at the direction of the former President Obama, and/or his men like Clapper, illegally spied on targets or subjects like Mr. Trump and his associates, including Gen. Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser. This is why I have pushed Judge Leon to move my cases along to trial, and have offered to bring Montgomery forth to be interviewed by the judge in camera in the interim, as he has a security clearance to probe Montgomery about classified information which I cannot and have not accessed.
Legally speaking, my cases against the intelligence agencies also encompass the illegal surveillance of President Trump and his men, as what apparently occurred shows a pattern of unconstitutional conduct that at trial would raise a strong evidentiary inference that this illegal behavior continues to occur. Our so called government, represented by dishonest Obama-loyal attorneys in the corrupted Federal Programs Branch of the Justice Department, continues to maintain that they cannot for national security reasons confirm or deny the mass surveillance against me or anyone else.
I have asked Judge Leon to enter a permanent injunction against Obama and his political hacks at the NSA and CIA, many of whom are still there and are bent on destroying the Trump presidency and attempting to blackmail prominent Americans, like me, who might challenge the destructive socialist/pro-Muslim agenda of the Obama-Clinton-Soros left.
... ... ...
Larry Klayman, founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, is known for his strong public interest advocacy in furtherance of ethics in government and individual freedoms and liberties. To read more of his reports, Go Here Now .
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Mar 08, 2017 | www.pressherald.com
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-California, said Tuesday that he had seen no evidence supporting President Trump's claim that his phones were tapped by the previous administration.But unlike many other members of Congress, Nunes did not demand that the administration explain the basis of Trump's accusation, saying that "we were going to look into it anyway."
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, on Capitol Hill Tuesday, wants to "verify" that the intelligence community was using its surveillance authority "ethically." Associated Press/J. Scott Applewhite"The bigger question that needs to be answered is whether or not Mr. Trump or any of his associates were in fact targeted by any of the intelligence agencies or law enforcement authorities," Nunes told reporters Tuesday. Over the weekend, he announced that his committee would look into Trump's accusation delivered via Twitter that "Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory."
"At this point we don't have any evidence of that," Nunes said. "But we also don't have any evidence of many people who have been named in multiple news stories that supposedly are under some type of investigation."
The committee's ranking Democrat, Adam Schiff of California, also told reporters Tuesday that he was happy to look into the president's allegations – but warned that if they were proven false, accusing Obama of ordering an illegal wiretap could pose much bigger problems for Trump.
"We accept – we will investigate this," Schiff said, referring to another Trump tweet in which the president likened the alleged wiretap to a "Nixon/Watergate" style scandal.
"If a sitting U.S. president alleging that his predecessor engaged in the most unscrupulous and unlawful conduct that is also a scandal, if those allegations prove to be false," Schiff said. "And we should be able to determine in fairly short order whether this accusation was true or false."
Nunes told reporters last week that he had seen no evidence of improper contacts between the Trump team and Russian officials. He repeated that assertion Tuesday, stressing that it was common practice for incoming administrations to meet with diplomats.
He added that based on his understanding of the transcripts of calls between Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, there was nothing inappropriate or suspect about the substance of the conversation.
Nunes also questioned the official explanation for why Flynn's calls were recorded. Was it actually because of "incidental collection" – as the intelligence community has argued – "or was it something else?" he asked.
"It's important for us to know whether or not the Department of Justice or any other agency tried to get a warrant on anybody related to the Trump campaign -– or any other campaign for that matter," Nunes said, explaining that the committee wanted to "verify" that the intelligence community was using its surveillance authorities "ethically, responsibly and by the law."
Nunes may have a chance to grill intelligence community members about that on March 20, when he plans to hold an open hearing as part of the House Intelligence Committee's investigation into allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.
The guest list for the hearing is formidable, but not entirely comprehensive: Nunes and Schiff agreed to invite FBI Director James Comey, National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers, former CIA director John Brennan, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, former acting attorney general Sally Yates, and two senior officers of CrowdStrike – the company that found proof that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee.
Schiff said Tuesday that he plans "on asking the director of the FBI directly whether there was any wiretap directed at Mr. Trump or his associates" at the hearing.
But no one has been subpoenaed
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Mar 14, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
Vault 7 revelations now shed some light on the possibilities of a muti-step operations to get the court order. The absurdity of the situation is evident: acting POTUS complains about wiretapping by his predecessor who supposedly used one of intelligence agencies (supposedly CIA) for this operation. Being now a Commander in Chief.
Ray McGovern who probably knows what he is talking about suggested that Obama might be scared of CIA Director Brennan ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGayl9uNW4A actually pretty interesting interview)
The following scheme looks plausible: Scapegoat Russians by hacking into DNC servers; create media hysteria about Russians; implicate Trump in connections to Russians; get court order for wiretapping on this ground
libezkova : March 13, 2017 at 06:20 PM , 2017 at 06:20 PMObama and Brennanhttp://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/17/obama-and-brennan/
Baker-Mazzetti's opener says it all: " Just hours before he publicly responded last week to the Senate Intelligence Committee report accusing the Central Intelligence Agency of torture and deceit, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A.'s director, stopped by the White House to meet with President Obama. Ostensibly, he was there for an intelligence briefing. But the messages delivered later that day by the White House and Mr. Brennan were synchronized, even down to similar wording, and the larger import of the well-timed visit was hardly a classified secret: After six years of partnership, the president was standing by the embattled spy chief even as fellow Democrats called for his resignation. " Nothing could be plainer. As one who remembers well the guilt-by-association days of McCarthyism, I'm not tarring Obama with Brennan's war crimes and that of the Agency, copiously documented in the Senate Report on Torture, and instead am suggesting an active partnership-in-war-crimes, Obama, if anything, giving CIA its head of steam under his watch , as in its role in drone assassination at facilities in Pakistan, Brennan himself installed as Director after Valiant Service as national security adviser, all despite questions of favoring waterboarding raised in confirmation hearings. From a pool of gung-ho national-security experts on which to draw, the others still making up his First Team of advisers (include generals, admirals, members of think tanks with partly disguised neocon credentials), Obama plucked Brennan to lead the intelligence charge through the interstices of government and military culminating in a permanent war economy and psychosis of vision.
Obama is not Brennan's puppet, nor the other way. Both are electrified by mutual contact and support. The reporters note friction between the White House and Langley "after the release of the scorching report," Brennan having "irritated advisers by battling Democrats on the committee over the report during the past year." They do not point out Obama did the same, stalling release, suffocating criticism of CIA hard-ball tactics against the committee, of which later; yet they make up for that with, given that this is NYT, an astonishing statement: "But in the 67 years since the C.I.A. was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Mr. Obama has forged with Mr. Brennan. It is a relationship that has shaped the policy and politics of the debate over the nation's war with terrorist organizations, as well as the agency's own struggle to balance security and liberty ."
What they don't say is that counterterrorism is part of the larger US position of counterrevolution, issuing in confrontations with Russia and China and regime change wherever American interests are challenged. Nor do they say, the Agency's struggle to balance security and liberty was lost before it had fairly begun, assassination and regime change hardly indicative of liberty, a no-contest battle.
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Jan 06, 2017 | www.pipelinenews.org
What we must presume has been a behind the scene conflict between politicized elements of America's rather vast intelligence infrastructure [at least 17 discreet agencies, which doesn't take "dark op" players into account] leading up to and now following the November 8 election, has ingloriously boiled over into a public cat fight.
If not for the subject matter the scene would be reminiscent of the now semi-ancient but nonetheless still hilarious Mad Magazine cartoon series, Spy vs. Spy it's gotten that bad.
The basic thesis, doggedly argued by the most politicized of the various intelligence agencies' nodes - John Brennan's CIA – is that Vlad Putin's operatives were responsible for the DNC/John Podesta hack which Hillary supporters believe threw the election into the Dem's nightmare scenario, victory by the Blond Barbarian from New York, Donald J. Trump.
We have touched upon this topic frequently and quite recently for example [see, A Spiteful And Psychopathic Obama Tries To Start World War III , The Anti-Trump Pushback and Obama Unchained ] so readers should be well aware of our high level of skepticism over the claims - primarily by the CIA - that the election was "hacked."
Since its inception as the Office of Strategic Services [OSS] at the start of World War II, when it was viewed a somewhat of a gentlemen's club, albeit gentlemen licensed to administer lethal force with great prejudice, to its modern day incarnation as a behemoth with an astounding 21,000 plus employees, there have been rumors of politicization and "cooked" intelligence as well as public demonstrations of same.
According to Foreign Policy Magazine the CIA has had some really serious intelligence failures which caught the agency entirely flat footed: the Yom Kippur War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Soviet Union, Ayatollah Khomeini's Iranian Revolution, India's successful nuke test, of course 9/11 and finally, the Iraqi WMD fiasco. [see, The Ten Biggest American Intelligence Failures , FP]
To some observers the very idea that a government organization with the charter of the CIA would not INHERENTLY be politicized is foolish:
"Indeed, when a government agency relies on taxpayer funding, Congressional lawmaking, and White House politics to sustain itself, it is absurd to expect that agency to somehow remain not "politicized." That is, it's a logical impossibility to think it possible to set up a government agency that relies on government policymakers to sustain it, and then think the agency in question will not attempt to influence or curry favor with those policymakers." [source, Has the CIA Been Politicized? , Mises Institute]
So much for background and generalizations, let's turn to the real matter at hand, John Brennan's performance as Obama's lap dog, parroting [highly questionable at best] the Democrat line that Putin put Trump in the Oval Office and is therefore an illegitimate president.
This line of attack is so common within the modern progressive/Marxist Democrat Party that it would normally have little effect outside the I95 corridor except for the fact that this one has a very visible [and presumed by many to be beyond reproach] and public champion, John O. Brennan and his war-toy, the Central Intelligence Agency.
We believe for a number of reasons that in his effort to discredit Mr. Trump, Brennan is acting as an intelligence operative doing [a uniquely narcissistic] president's bidding.
Exhibit one is obvious: Brennan is fearful of what the incoming administration might do to his porcine agency, one replete with desk jockeys rather than actual field agents so attacking the incoming CIC might prove advantageous in repelling the supposedly imminent attack on Brennan's turf.
An above the fold feature story in the January 5 edition of the Wall Street Journal reflects this view:
"President-elect Donald Trump, a harsh critic of U.S. intelligence agencies, is working with top advisers on a plan that would restructure and pare back the nation's top spy agency, people familiar with the planning said advisers also are working on a plan to restructure the Central Intelligence Agency, cutting back on staffing at its Virginia headquarters and pushing more people out into field posts around the world. The CIA declined to comment.
'The view from the Trump team is the intelligence world has become completely politicized,' said the individual, who is close to the Trump transition. 'They all need to be slimmed down. The focus will be on restructuring the agencies and how they interact.'" [source, Damian Paletta and Julian E. Barnes, Trump Plans Spy Agency Overhaul , Wall St. Journal, January 5, 2017]
Exhibit two might be a bit less speculative:
"In telephone conversations with Donald Trump, FBI Director James Comey assured the president-elect there was no credible evidence that Russia influenced the outcome of the recent U.S. presidential election by hacking the Democratic National Committee and the e-mails of John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign Comey told Trump that James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, agreed with this FBI assessment.
The only member of the U.S. intelligence community who was ready to assert that the Russians sanctioned the hacking was John Brennan, the director of the CIA, according to sources who were briefed on Comey's conversations with Trump.
'And Brennan takes his marching orders from President Obama,' the sources quoted Comey as saying." [source, Ed Klein, Comey to Trump: The Russians Didn't Influence the Election ]
Bolstering the image of a CIA director willing to grovel to curry favor with the administration, to the detriment of American interests, in 2010 we wrote about what was a firestorm at the time, an address by Brennan, then one of Obama's national security advisors, at an NYU event called, "A Dialogue on our National Security," which was organized by then president of the Hamas linked Islamic Society of North America, Ingrid Mattson.
During the 34 minute speech [video below] Brennan rendered his bizarre - near love affair - with Islam.
[approximately 5:40 into the speech]
"...And as part of that experience, to learn about the goodness and beauty of Islam....I came to see Islam not as it is often misrepresented, but for what it is...a faith of peace and tolerance and great diversity...[breaks into spoken Arabic]
[approximately 7:30 into the speech]
"...But I did spend time as an undergraduate at the American University in Cairo in the 1970s. And time spent with classmates from Egypt, from Jordan, from Palestine, and around the world who taught me that whatever our differences of nationality or race or religion or language, there are certain aspirations that we all share. To get an education. To provide for our families. To practice our faith freely. To live in peace and security. And during a 25-year career in government, I was privileged to serve in positions across the Middle East...as a political officer with the State Department and as a CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, I saw how our Saudi partners fulfilled their duty as custodians of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina. I marveled at the majesty of the Hajj and the devotion of those who fulfilled their duty as Muslims by making that privilege [he corrects himself] that pilgrimage. And in all my travels, the city I have come to love most is Al Quds ...Jerusalem, where three great faiths come together..." [see, William Mayer, John Brennan's "Al Quds" NYU Address - Providing Aid and Comfort to the Islamists ]
The use of the Arabic term - Al Quds - for the capital of Israel, Jerusalem by such a high ranking member of any American administration is really without precedent, leading one to view with great suspicion the allegiance of Brennan as well as raising substantial questions about his boss.
For our fourth exhibit, we turn simply to the career of Mr. Brennan. He was recruited by the CIA straight out of college, proceeded to then serve for 25 years as a field agent followed by a long list of high level intel type government jobs. It's our judgment that though the CIA director really doesn't come across as the brightest bulb in the box, that persona is a façade hiding a very skilled operator who views his current attack on the incoming president as if it were a clandestine assignment in some godforsaken part of the planet.
In short Brennan is a man on a mission, Obama's bagman.
And finally, as our fifth exhibit let's examine the logic, or lack thereof of why someone like Vlad Putin would prefer Trump over Hillary, thus providing him with motive.
Let us stipulate for the sake of argument that Putin directed a group of Russia's best programmers to hack into the DNC's Internet network knowing that internal email would make Hillary Clinton and the entire Democrat Party look so bad that voters would decide to award the election to Trump.
What on earth would motivate the wily Russian strongman to prefer Trump over Hillary, consider the facts.
1. It's common knowledge that Hillary's bathroom server network was hacked at least 5 times by foreign intelligence agencies. Thus, her trading access for money through the Clinton Foundation would be well known to a group of individuals eager to exploit such weaknesses. So it follows that if Putin was clever enough to hack into the DNC which had a more secure computer network than Hillary's, he had at the same time a literal encyclopedia of dirt on the Clintons.
This of course would make Hillary, as president an obvious target for blackmail.
Think of what a crafty ex-KGB officer could do with only 1% of the type of information which was so inelegantly stored on the Clinton email server, let alone the whole enchilada.
It would have made Hillary literally a puppet of Vlad Putin.
2. Contrast this with Trump's promise to rebuild the military as well as America's infrastructure and take an aggressive stance against America's foes.
Sorry, it just doesn't fly. The idea of Putin hacking Trump to victory is absurd and just the last in a very long list of excuses why one of the worst candidates for president in modern American history lost on November 8.
The prosecution rests
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Mar 10, 2017 | www.thecalifornian.com
So President Trump set off a firestorm over the weekend with a series of tweets alleging that Obama had tapped Trump Tower. But getting hung up on imprecise language in the president's tweets isn't the right way to look at things. What seems to be true is that the Obama administration spied on some of Trump's associates and we don't know exactly how much information was collected under what authority and who was targeted.As former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy summarizes in National Review, the Obama Justice Department considered a criminal investigation aimed at a number of Trump's associates. When they didn't find anything criminal, they converted the investigation into an intelligence probe under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act . Elements of that story have been confirmed by The New York Times, the BBC and McClatchy newspapers.
FISA surveillance has to be approved by a special court, which almost always allows the government to spy on people when asked . But when the Justice Department asked to spy on several of Trump's associates, the court refused permission, according to the BBC . As McCarthy writes, this is notable because "the FISA court is notoriously solicitous of government requests to conduct national security surveillance."
Not taking no for an answer, the Obama administration came back during the final weeks of the election with a narrower request that didn't specifically mention Trump. That narrower request was granted by the court, but reports from the Guardian and the BBC don't mention the tapping of phones.
Former Obama officials issued denials that the former president had anything to do with it, which McCarthy calls "disingenuous on several levels." Others have characterized them as a " non-denial denial ."
To the Obama camp's claim that the president didn't "order" surveillance of Trump, McCarthy writes:
"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."
And as journalist Mickey Kaus commented on Twitter, there's a reason why presidents name trusted allies as attorney general. As close as former attorney general Loretta Lynch was to Obama, and as supportive as she was of his political goals, it seems very unlikely that this was some sort of rogue operation.
It's certainly not impossible to believe that the Obama administration spied on Trump. Obama wouldn't be the first president to engage in illegal surveillance of opposition candidates, and his administration has been noted for its great enthusiasm for domestic spying. In an effort to plug embarrassing leaks, the Obama administration spied on Associated Press reporters and seized the phone records not only of a Fox News reporter but also of his parents. Obama's political allies even alleged that his CIA spied on Congress .
Nor is it unbelievable that under the Obama administration, supposedly non-partisan civil servants would go after political opponents. After all, the notorious IRS scandal was about exactly that.
Trump has called for a congressional investigation , but what this really needs is a special prosecutor, someone from outside the politically tainted Justice Department, to look into the political abuse of surveillance laws by the Obama administration. Maybe, upon investigation, it will turn out that nothing improper happened – that this is a lot of smoke, but that there's no fire. But we can't know without an investigation, and if there really were political abuses of the Justice Department and the intelligence surveillance process, those guilty should not simply be exposed but go to jail. Such abuse strikes at democracy itself.
Note that FISA surveillance is severely limited and requires information from surveillance to be kept very secret or, if not relevant, deleted. If those limits were exceeded, if Obama officials lied to the court, or if the information was – as it appears to have been – excessively shared within the government, or leaked to outsiders, those are all serious crimes, as First Amendment attorney Robert Barnes notes.
Watergate brought down a presidency, but if the worst suspicions here are borne out, we're dealing with something worse. Hopefully not, but there's no way to tell at this point. As The Washington Post has been saying lately, "Democracy dies in darkness." Let's shine some light on what the Obama administration was doing during this election.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds , a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of " The New School : How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself," is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors .
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Mar 10, 2017 | radaronline.com
Conservative Review Editor-in-Chief Mark Levin claims "the evidence is overwhelming" that the Obama administration spied on Donald Trump leading up his inauguration , RadarOnline.com has learned."I'm saying the public record is damning of the Obama administration. It was investigating the campaign of a presidential candidate of an opposing party during the course of the campaign. Its use of FISA, loosening of NSA distribution requirements, husbanding and protecting information at the behest of White House staff on the way out the door, and recent leaks of confidential and perhaps classified information is extraordinary," Levin said in the CNN Reliable Sources newsletter.
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Mar 09, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Posted on March 8, 2017 by Yves Smith Yves here. I find this Real News Network interview with Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, to be astonishing. He effectively says that Trump may not be wrong in his claims that he was spied on.At the 50,000 foot level, Trump's claim is trivial. Anyone who paid attention to the Edward Snowden revelations knows that the NSA is in a total data acquisition mode, hoovering up information from smart devices and able to use computers and tablets as monitoring devices. But Trump used the word "wiretapping," which gave his opponents a huge out, since that means a judge gave a warrant to allow for monitoring. And pinning surveillance on Obama personally was another huge stretch. In other words, Trump took what could have been an almost certain statement of fact, and by larding it up with dodgy particulars, pushed it well into crazypants terrain.
What made Trump look bad was the FBI making clear it was not snooping on Trump, when the FBI would have been involved in a wiretap. Lambert and I discussed that it wasn't hard to come up with scenarios that weren't wiretaps by which Trump could have been spied upon while keeping Obama Administration hands clean. The most obvious was to have another member of the Five Eyes do the dirty work.
What is therefore striking about this report is that Wilkerson, who is no fan of Trump, nevertheless is defending him in this matter. That is a sign that he regards the campaign against Trump as dangerous from an institutional perspective. And he states that the idea that Lambert and I had casually bandied about, that a foreign spy organization like the GCHQ, did Trump dirty work for the US government, is seen as a real possibility in the intelligence community.
PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to another edition of the Wilkerson Report.
Of course the accusations are flying in every direction in D.C.. The latest Donald Trump saying that President Obama spied on him, ordered the listening of his telephone conversations. Now joining us to talk about these allegations is Larry Wilkerson.
Larry joins us from Falls Church, Virginia. Larry was the former Chief of Staff for U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. Currently an Adjunct Professor of Goverment at the College of Willam and Mary and a regular contributor to The Real News Network.
(discussion)
PAUL JAY: So, Larry what do you make of these allegations? Most of the media seems to be saying Trump is alleging this in order to distract from the real controversy, which they say his and his administration's connections to Putin and Russia. What do you make of Trump's allegations?
LARRY WILKERSON: Well, I'm certainly not one, Paul, to defend HMS Trump and that whole entourage of people, but I will paint you a hypothetical here. There are a number of events that have occurred in the last 96 hours or so that lead me to believe that maybe even the Democratic party, whatever element of it, approached John Brennan at the CIA, maybe even the former president of the United States. And John Brennan, not wanting his fingerprints to be on anything, went to his colleague in London GCHQ, MI6 and essentially said, "Give me anything you've got." And he got something and he turned it over to the DNC or to someone like that. And what he got was GHCQ MI6's tapes of conversations of the Trump administration perhaps, even the President himself. It's really kind of strange, at least to me, they let the head of that organization go, fired him about the same time this was brewing up. So I'm not one to defend Trump, but in this case he might be right. It's just that it wasn't the FBI. Comey's right, he wasn't wire-tapping anybody, it was John Brennan, at the CIA. And you say, "What would be John Brennan's motivation?" Well, clearly he wanted to remain Director of the CIA for Hillary Clinton when she was elected President of the United States, which he had every reason to believe, as did lots of us, that she would be.
PAUL JAY: Now, Larry, do we have any evidence of this? Is this like a theory or is there some evidence?
LARRY WILKERSON: Well, it's a theory that's making its way around some in the intelligence community right now because they know about the relationship between the CIA and the same sort of capabilities, maybe not quite as vast as the NSA has, but still good capabilities that exist in London. I mean, otherwise the president just came out and said something was patently false. Generally speaking, you know, I would agree with that, with regard to this particular individual, but not in this case.
PAUL JAY: Now why would the British go along with this?
LARRY WILKERSON: Well, you have to understand this is a real problem, Paul, it's been a problem for a long time. Only certain governments have national technical means that feature $5 billion satellites orbiting the United States and the rest of the globe and providing intricate national means of looking at other people 24/7. Even streaming video and so forth. There are only so many people who can afford that. We're the biggest guy on the block so when we sidle up to France or we sidle up to Germany or Japan or anybody else, they have two choices, either cooperate with us and share in that treasure trove from time to time or they don't cooperate with us and I'll tell you what we do, we cut them off. So this is a very incestuous relationship. I saw this up close and personal when we were saying there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we had Paris and Tel Aviv and Berlin and London and everybody agreeing with us. I now know why they agreed with us, more recetively(?) (sound difficulties – 00:04:45 – 00:05:05) You still there?
PAUL JAY: Yeah.
LARRY WILKERSON: Well, they agree with us because they don't have any choice. Their choices are stark. They agree with us and hope it doesn't rebound to their discredit or hurt them or they don't agree with us and we cut them off.
PAUL JAY: Okay, now let's go back to Trump's allegations. Trump does not seem to be shy about just making stuff up from whole cloth without any basis at all. Why would one thing this isn't just another fabrication?
LARRY WILKERSON: Paul, I'm no fan of Donald Trump, but I'm not so sure you're right in that–
PAUL JAY: I'm not saying it is. I'm just asking, is there any reason to think that we know that he's not making this up?
LARRY WILKERSON: No, except that the series of events that occurred lead me to believe that John Brennan was, in fact, working with London and perhaps something came out of that, that might have assured John Brennan of a continuation of his role at the CIA with a new administration headed by Hillary Clinton. That makes every bit of sense to me when I think about it. And remember, I've been there and I've seen this stuff.
PAUL JAY: Okay. We'll have to wait over the next few days or hours and see if more hard evidence follows out. But let's go look a little further, if you're right, Brennan's helping Clinton, you have different sections of the intelligence community helping various players. Some of them seem to be turning on Trump, some are feeding Trump, some are supporting him, it's like you got little fiefdoms in the intelligence community all with their own agendas here.
LARRY WILKERSON: This is very disturbing. It's happened in the past, of course, when we politicized intelligence. It happened when Bill Casey and Ronald Reagan when Bill Casey made the case for a Soviet buildup so Reagan could justify his arms buildup in the U.S.. The Soviets were not involved in a buildup at all. That was all fabricated intelligence. It's happened with Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon from time to time. But this is a new level of 17 different heavily funded intelligence agencies and groups, headed by the DNI and the CIA all apparently playing their own little games within various segments of a political community in this country and leaking accordingly. And I don't eliminate the FBI from that either. Why else would Comey come out, for example, just prior to the elections and say he had other e-mails and imply that they might be damning of one of the candidates? It's everyone playing in this game and it's an extremely dangerous game.
PAUL JAY: Is part of what's going on here, is that all of these institutions whether it's CIA or FBI or NSA and on and on with all the alphabet, that their first priority, their deepest interest is their own agency. Their existence, their funding, their own jobs, that this is really - it's not about some supposed national interest to start with it starts with just who these guys are and they become entities unto themselves.
LARRY WILKERSON: Absolutely. Hoover, take Hoover at the FBI, during World War II, it can be proven, it can be analytically demonstrated that Hoover spent more man hours and more money trying to look at his own administration, trying to gain power over elements of that administration than he did looking at the Nazis. I mean, this is not anything new, it's just come to a depth and a profundity of action that is scary and dangerous.
When you have your entire intelligence community more interested in its own survival and its own power, and therefore, playing in politics to the degree that we have it doing so today, you've got a real problem. And I'm not talking about the people beavering away in the trenches who are trying their best to do a good job, I'm talking about these leaders, these people at the top and the second tier level, who are participating in this political game in a way that they should not be, but they've been doing for some time and now they've brought it to a crescendo.
PAUL JAY: Is part of what's happening here an overall decay, if you will, of the state itself, of the American government? Which is a reflection of what's going on in the economy. You have so much of Wall Street is about pure parasitical investment. There's more money being invested in derivative gambling and billionaires gambling against billionaires and shorting, kind of manupulating commodity markets and so on, more money in the parasitical activity than there is investment in productive activity. And these are the guys that are financing political campaigns even electing presidents, in the case of Robert Mercer, who 's the billionaire who backed Trump and Bannon. Bannon worked for Mercer. The whole state and the upper echelons in the economy they seem to be into such practically mafioso short-sightedness. Like, "What can we do today for ourselves and damn what happens later?"
LARRY WILKERSON: The decay of (sound difficulties) empire hat on and I will tell you, yes. You're right. This empire is decaying at a rapid rate. And it is not just reflected in the fact that we can't govern ourselves, the fact that we have a congress that can't even see the nation for the trees. My political party, Paul, right now thinks that it's going to achieve its full agenda or at least a good portion of it while this buffoon in the White House twiddles his thumbs. They don't see the country. They don't care about the country. All they want to do is achieve their agenda; social, economic and otherwise. This country, in all of its components, whether it's government or it's finance, economics or whatever, is falling apart.
PAUL JAY: Thanks very much for joining us, Larry.
LARRY WILKERSON: Thanks for having me, Paul.
PAUL JAY: Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
0 0 44 1 0 This entry was posted in Banana republic , Politics , Surveillance state on March 8, 2017 by Yves Smith . Subscribe to Post Comments 50 comments none , March 8, 2017 at 4:44 amsleepy , March 8, 2017 at 6:33 amThis comment (warning: it's from one of the less reputable political sections on reddit) has some interesting info and MSM links. I haven't had a chance to read it carefully yet or check the citations, but had bookmarked it to look at it later. I'm posting it here in case anyone else wants to check it out, but disclaimer: it might be total crap, I don't have an opinion on that yet.
fresno dan , March 8, 2017 at 7:57 amI took a glance at the article and read one of its links to the NYTimes article which confirms that three Trump associates were the subject of surveillance and "wiretapping" and that the information was shared with Obama.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/trump-russia-associates-investigation.html?_r=1
Even without digging into the story, the fact that Trump's claim is viewed with such disdain by the MSM has always struck me as incredulous. I have generally assumed that most communications among people in power is monitored whether legally or not.
fresno dan , March 8, 2017 at 8:15 amsleepy
March 8, 2017 at 6:33 amThe media has to acknowledge that what they report is mere rumor AND most likely incorrect, and should never ever be used for anything serious cough, cough, coughs lung out – Franken quoting CNN at Sessions hearing ..
Bill Smith , March 8, 2017 at 9:06 amnone
March 8, 2017 at 4:44 amI've read most of those. The problem is that the important thing – was a FISA warrant issued – not been confirmed by the government to my knowledge. Apparently it is secret by law so it is one of those things that the government will neither confirm nor deny – and I am SURE Trump is being advised not to tip over the apple cart and let everybody know who was RIGHT – we're all monitored all the time. And that's the rub.
The other thing about the articles is the incredible amount of contradiction (assuming the government officials aren't being misquoted there are a LOT of things that just don't square).
I think comes down to this – very simply the government/intelligence community (IC) does not really want to admit how many people's conversations it actually listens to or CAN listen to. Nobody can look at this and say that the 4th amendment is meaningful .In this case, a U.S. general, working on behalf of the president elect (or was this before Trump was elected?), was monitored by the IC and removed from office because of illegal leaks. We don't REALLY know why – but the idea that the IC has a veto over the president's appointees should give everyone pause.
fresno dan , March 8, 2017 at 10:24 amWould a warrant actually be needed?
In the New York Time article on January 12, 2017 they say:
After Congress enacted the FISA Amendments Act - which legalized warrantless surveillance on domestic soil so long as the target is a foreigner abroad, even when the target is communicating with an American - the court permitted raw sharing of emails acquired under that program, too.
So any of Trump's associates talking to a 'Russian' from the Trump Tower which was his campaign headquarters would qualify according to his tweet.
Bill Smith , March 8, 2017 at 1:13 pmBill Smith
March 8, 2017 at 9:06 amThe way I understand it (gleaned from a National Review article written by a former justice department lawyer Andrew McCarthy – I excerpted quite a bit of it, but it is now in skynet heaven )
is that Russki subjects of interest (or any nationality) are always monitored. This means that Americans will occasionally get MONITORED if in communication with such individuals as well and those communications are STORED (monitored and stored ARE NOT THE SAME AS LISTENED TO). Now, to actually listen to the Americans in these conversation is what supposedly requires the FISA warrant – it is suppose to be based on something that the person is acting as an AGENT of a foreign power.Or the FBI could have been doing just a regular financial fraud investigation between Trump companies and Russia found nothing (OR found something and IS still investigation), and than passed it over as an intelligence matter. I can't do justice to the article without being skynetted, so you will have to read the article for yourself if interested.
fresno dan , March 8, 2017 at 2:14 pmIf that is true then what was the basis for Flynn's phone calls being listened to?
So I'm not sure the point about monitored / stored / listened to is the case anymore. The NYT article I referenced is all about the old privacy rules being removed.
In addition the part of the article I quoted seems to say that isn't the case anymore.
Flynn did a lot of work during the transition from Trump Tower. We know some of his calls where intercepted and not just the one from the beach.
Evidently Paul Manafort lived in Trump Tower for a while. From the news articles his phone calls where also intercepted.
I did look up a bunch of McCarthy's articles in National Review. Thanks for the pointer.
Ptolemy Philopater , March 8, 2017 at 4:46 pmBill Smith
March 8, 2017 at 1:13 pm"If that is true then what was the basis for Flynn's phone calls being listened to?"
The way I understand it, any conversation with the Russian ambassador in it is monitored (and stored) – Flynn talks to the ambassador, he is being monitored. Supposedly, Flynn should know this.
My theory is that Flynn was talking policy – albeit SENSITIVE policy – and PERHAPS the intelligence community didn't like the change in policy and decided by leaking to make Flynn look like a dirty commie – Or Flynn is a turncoat (so why isn't he being prosecuted???)The issue from the NR article is, as I understand it, is that Flynn should not be listened to unless there was some REAL suspicion that he was an agent and there was a FISA warrant (a former US general is really suspected of being a Russian agent???). So one can know that Flynn had a conversation with the ambassador (from monitoring) but not the substance unless there was a FISA warrant – if I am understanding this correctly.
If he wasn't proven to be an agent than that conversation is suppose to go into the "vault" and never be released or acknowledged.
So there are just a lot of things that don't add up.
I'm thinking like the meme "fake news" that the people who started this whole think may regret looking into whether Trump was improperly monitored after all. BUT I DON"T KNOW – maybe Trump is guilty of somethingKukulkan , March 8, 2017 at 4:45 amDoes anybody really believe that these people feel bound by law? This is raw power politics. Getting "stuff" on people so that they can be manipulated is par for the course. Have we forgotten about J. Edgar Hoover. Does anybody really believe that the Democrats and the "deep state" don't already have enough "on Trump" to remove him from office given his mafia connections, not to mention Roy Cohn? It's not about removing anyone from office but to get them to do your bidding. Likewise it is a big distraction from the ongoing fraud and corruption consuming this nation. Men like Wilkerson are finally realizing how far along our Mafia culture has come to complete and utter collapse. Next time the music stops will there be any chairs left?
Kukulkan , March 8, 2017 at 4:52 amCould Trump's use of "Obama" just have been a metonym for the previous administration?
I mean that's how the names of presidents and other leaders are frequently used. Journalists, historians, and people in general will often say "Bush did this" or "Thatcher did that" or "Stalin did something else" when it's clear that the named individuals didn't and couldn't have personally performed the action, rather functionaries of the regimes they headed did the action.
As an example, I've seen a number news articles saying Kim Jong-un killed Kim Jong-nam, even though, as far as I can tell, Kim Jong-un has an airtight alibi, having been in a different country at the time. Most people understand such claims to mean that functionaries of the North Korean government headed by Kim Jong-un are responsible for the killing and Kim Jong-un is just used as a metonym for that government.
Same thing with "wiretap". Trump is of a generation where wiretap was a generic term used to refer to any sort of bugging.
Reading them as specific references comes across as a particularly pedantic and uncharitable interpretation.
Yves Smith Post author , March 8, 2017 at 7:01 amActually, checking the tweet, I see Trump wrote "tapp", an even more generic term for using electronic devices to listen in on other people's private conversations.
Bill Smith , March 8, 2017 at 8:56 amWow, that is an important catch! Shame on me for missing it and way bigger shame on the MSM for misrepresenting it.
jrs , March 8, 2017 at 12:10 pmActually it was "wires tapped" with Trump having put the quotes in. So yeah, very generic term. And it says Trump Tower. Doesn't he own Trump Tower? All that stuff in the Trump Tower is 'his'. So the claim is even more generic.
There were numerous reports that people associated with the campaign (headquarters in Trump Tower) had their phone conversations intercepted. I assume it was when they were talking to a 'Russian'.
The first thing I thought when I heard this was "Hey, Trump finally attended an intelligence briefing."
fresno dan , March 8, 2017 at 7:54 amIf the NSA really is listening to everything, can anyone answer why the powers that be would even bother with an actual wiretap anymore? Isn't it something anachronistic, like owning a beeper or something?
Steve H. , March 8, 2017 at 9:47 amKukulkan
March 8, 2017 at 4:45 am
&
Kukulkan
March 8, 2017 at 4:52 amAgree 1000% – I am so glad you brought it up!!!! – it sure seems to me there is ALL OF A SUDDEN all this tremendous specificity with regard to "Obama" meaning ONLY one individual, instead of it being a generic term for the Obama "administration." I sure don't remember any wailing about attributing to Bush what Cheney did .
And thanks for the catch about "tapp" – I did not know that!
thank you again!Katniss Everdeen , March 8, 2017 at 8:02 amKukulkan, I didn't know and can't find an indication. Is that an insider term, or is there an online source to point to?
fresno dan , March 8, 2017 at 8:26 amThis is exactly the way I took it–with "obama" and "wiretap" being generic terms. Funnily enough, it made all the furor over the tweet initially hard to understand. Now it makes the literal parsing look desperate and deliberately obfuscatory.
Katniss Everdeen , March 8, 2017 at 9:28 amKatniss Everdeen
March 8, 2017 at 8:02 amI find it impossible to believe that the MSM does not know that wiretap = any kind of monitoring/surveillance and that "Obama" = white house, and/or Obama administration.
There is nothing wrong about doing a story about the nuances of surveillance, but to go on and on and ON about there is no wiretapping is absurd. And the MSM professes to wonder why people find them unreliableIt is deliberate obtuseness to advance an agenda.
fresno dan , March 8, 2017 at 10:32 amI may be "mis-remembering" here, but it reminded me of a time when ben bernanke was testifying in front of some congressional committee or other. A member of the panel referenced the fed "printing" money. bernanke replied that the fed doesn't "print" money. They enter it onto a computer.
A textbook distinction without a difference.
nobody , March 8, 2017 at 9:14 amKatniss Everdeen
March 8, 2017 at 9:28 amOH EXACTLY RIGHT!!! To go off on a tangent – to not say that money is "loaned" into existence and as much as you need can be obtained from the either, just would beg the question of why Goldman Sachs, somebody who managed to lose trillions is deserving of more loans, but a borrower who was scammed into some mortgage with some skyrocketing interest rate proviso is not. And the unpalatable answer – the FED is to protect the rich and f*ck the poor .
Michael Fiorillo , March 8, 2017 at 6:23 amTrump's language was very clear (at least to my ear) in attributing personal involvement to Obama (calling him a "bad (or sick) guy"). But with "wiretap" note the use of quotation marks. When I first heard about these tweets the morning after, the first thing I did was to go to Trump's twitter feed to have a look for myself. For me the quotation marks scanned as scare quotes and I instinctively interpreted "wiretap" in its generic sense.
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
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!
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!
How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!
Colonel Smithers , March 8, 2017 at 6:32 amIn his autobiography "Memoirs of a Revolutionist," Peter Kropotkin describes being interrogated by a member of the Okhrana, the Tsar's secret police, after his arrest.
In the course of the interview, Kropotkin expresses amazement that the secret police had so deeply infiltrated his revolutionary cell. His interrogator expressed smug satisfaction, and then informed him that such surveillance was commonplace, and that in fact no one in the entire empire was more closely surveilled than the Tsar himself.
I've always operated under the assumption that the intelligence agencies devote ample resources to keeping the Executive under close observation, and that he likely has no more secrets than the rest of us.
The difference now is that the agencies are not just monitoring executive goings-on, but becoming active political players. Needless to say, clueless, hopeless Democrats are cheering them on.
p7b , March 8, 2017 at 6:42 amThank you, Michael. It's not just Democrats cheering. There are cheerleaders overseas, too, vide the UK MSM.
Yves Smith Post author , March 8, 2017 at 6:58 amWhoa. Wilkerson looks on edge, usually very cool in these pieces.
Colonel Smithers , March 8, 2017 at 6:50 amI have the impression he can't contain himself on the subject of Brennan. Is that your take?
Disturbed Voter , March 8, 2017 at 6:55 amThank you, Yves, for posting.
Your title of "Empire In Decay" reminded me of my last two years at school (late 1980s) and the emphasis on Tudors and Stuarts, Bourbons and Habsburgs in history classes. The school organised lectures from history professors like Henry Kamen and Paul Kennedy. Kennedy had just written the book on the rise and fall of empires and been on the airwaves. Kamen is an expert on imperial Spain. One rarely sees that sort of expertise in the MSM. We get the likes of McCain, Miss Lindsey, David Brooks, Bernard-Henri Levy, Simon Schama (sic) et al masquerading as experts.
Colonel Smithers , March 8, 2017 at 8:07 amPaul Kennedy knew his stuff. Read his book back in the day, cover to cover. That is the level of state-craft these people are thinking about. One dinky national election is mere detail. I am sure all the agencies have read the Club of Rome report and what came after it. It isn't just Global Warming time. Chess end games, all the way down, until checkmate.
skippy , March 8, 2017 at 7:02 amThank you, DV. Me, too. I still have the book.
It's appalling, isn't. Just the same talking heads going around studios and obsessing over trivia and sound bites.
I remember the Sunday lunchtime and evening shows in the UK thirty years ago, featuring academics and journalists who had been in a country for years and got to know the country well. The advent of 24 hour and international news seems to have destroyed what was good coverage / analysis.
FWIW, one of my friends and also son of immigrants from a former French and British colony works at the UK mission to the EU. He is a professional historian and studied at LSE and Cambridge. He hopes to return to Cambridge by the end of the decade and teach, but will also write about how Brexit panned out from a ring side seat.
It would be great if Yves could get historians of the calibre of Kamen, Kennedy, Howard, Scarisbrick and Sauvigny to contribute.
PH , March 8, 2017 at 7:14 amRational self interest meets its inevitable outcome .
PH , March 8, 2017 at 7:15 amDo we assume that Trump expected to be surveiled?
And acted cautiously as a result?
What are the motives of the various players?
who are the most important and somewhat important players?
In the fog, everyone seems to see the shapes that they expect to see
AbateMagicThinking but Not money , March 8, 2017 at 7:54 amDo we assume that Trump expected to be surveiled?
And acted cautiously as a result?
What are the motives of the various players?
who are the most important and somewhat important players?
In the fog, everyone seems to see the shapes that they expect to see
AbateMagicThinking but Not money , March 8, 2017 at 8:19 amGore Vidal was telling the world about the National Security State years ago seemingly without any impact on the wider public mindset.
Only when the legitimacy of leaders is seriously in question does this stuff pique the public interest. Isn't there something called positive vetting? But then, there are no qualifications required for becoming a politician – seemingly every other job nowadays needs a certificate but not that.
I'm just hoping that when I accidentally delete something important I can type a cry for help into Firefox and GCHQ will get it all back for me.
Eureka Springs , March 8, 2017 at 8:28 amDan Rather! It must be really serious. Ooo eee!
Campaign in fantasy, govern in paranoia. Am I paraphrasing Mario Cuomo or someone else?
dontknowitall , March 8, 2017 at 8:32 amIf these things are true then there is little reason to think we aren't far, far beyond decay.. we are the festering maggot laden puss spreading more toxic virulent dangers far and wide.
Little can explain those who circle the wagon in deference to, even in favor of the surveillance state unless they are afraid, blackmailed etc.
Chaotic unpredictable Trump (who must be clean as a whistle to survive this long) may have grabbed this Shock Doctoring chaotic beast by the tail. Will he be willing or able to bring it down? If so, he may be the greatest thing that's ever happened to this country. He's already survived more than I ever dared imagine an individual could. I mean we have long been way past stay out of any and all airplanes territory here.
The irony is just too rich a man in favor of ever increasing military, more torture, more drones just isn't enough for the intel state.
Michael Fiorillo , March 8, 2017 at 10:22 amA long while back a post Snowden revelation was that there exists a rule and mechanisms in the NSA to make sure that politicians are put on a list that specifically excludes their communications from being vacuumed with everyone else's. To bypass the list requires authorization at the highest levels in the agencies involved (and maybe even presidential authority). That is how Congress protects itself and why it so easily gives all kinds of spying authorities to the agencies. This is not czarist Russia in other words.
On whose authorities were the protections bypassed in the Trump case ? Comey has already come out to say he didn't do it. Devin Nunes, the Chairman the House Intelligence committee seems to not have been informed of any surveillance op involving Trump so the committees maybe out of the loop. This implies either CIA/NSA or GCHQ as I don't see Canada getting involved in it or NZ. Was the flimflam Russian bs crapped out by GCHQ and CIA to gain such legal authorities and dredge opposition on Trump to prevent his election or to soft coup him out ? That the Russian 'intel' came from an ex British spy seems suspicious.
Eureka Springs , March 8, 2017 at 10:45 amThe history of the FBI under Hoover makes me question your claim that members of Congress are exempt from surveillance. Are we really supposed to believe that, the technology being what it is, the intelligence agencies would show such admirable self-restraint? That's a bet I wouldn't take.
dontknowitall , March 8, 2017 at 10:55 amIf Obama would "approve" the following and intels would do it, why wouldn't he/they go after Trump?
https://shadowproof.com/2015/01/16/white-house-approved-cia-hacking-of-senate-computers/
jefemt , March 8, 2017 at 8:53 amYes I know and agree it would be foolish to rely on it. In practical terms they might do it anyway specially if safe in Obama's approval, tacit or otherwise, but the rule exists anyway, if only to be a cudgel if the congress is feeling ornery. If I remember correctly, it was discussed in Emptywheel's website in the context of the hacking of Angela Merkel.
Eureka Springs below mentions the senate hack. The hacking of the senate computers was a CIA screwup and the agencies don't like to be in the spotlight that way but CIA seems to mind it less than the others. This is another reason I think CIA may be behind the Trump tapp.
Steve , March 8, 2017 at 9:20 amWhat strikes me is that this is NOT astounding, and should really come as no surprise. Think of the subterfuge and intrigue back in the ancient empires of China, Greece, Rome. It's part of our human DNA. What cracks me up is the strength of the kool-aid the innocence and starry-eyed conviction that we are exceptional. The concept of America spun in elementary school is indeed exceptional- even exceptionally virtuous. But in fact, with our convenient lives, preoccupation with debt service and preoccupation with Dancing with the Master Chefs, misdirection has kept us from the ugly reality that we are right in there amongst the best, if not the most aggressive, in our dominant empire phase.
Think about the outrage when it was determined we were monitoring Merkle's phone. Empire in decline, indeed! Seems to me Homo sapiens is really heading out toward the end of their dead branch on the tree of life: RIP Too much head, not enough heart.jrs , March 8, 2017 at 12:18 pmA reason that I don't completely ignore Trump's claim (I do not like Trump!) is that it is beginning to look as if the entire Obama Presidency had a few real primary objectives. Firstly was to protect Wall Street from any prosecution but one of the other primary longterm goals was the TTP. Obama's desire to get the TTP through at any cost makes the act of listening in on Trump (who said he would kill it) very plausible.
DJG , March 8, 2017 at 9:36 amyour forgot one: bail out the insurance companies (ACA) – not that I even imagine the average person benefiting from the new Republican plans.
cm , March 8, 2017 at 10:14 amI believe that Cocomaan asked about a new Church committee in yesterday's comments. And the entire post above gives the reasons why not. There is no one in Congress of the caliber of Frank Church. (Even if McCain has fantasies ) No one will take on a multinational intelligence system, deliberately interlocked to avoid accountability. And when was the last congressional investigation that produced results and legal proceedings?
The "Five Eyes" always remind me of V for Vendetta. (Which is not just a great graphic novel, but an unfolding prophecy.)
White-collar America, triumphant: Love means never having to say you're sorry.
ChrisFromGeorgia , March 8, 2017 at 9:44 amI agree. Ron Wyden is perhaps the only one possible, but the fact that Clapper was never humiliated for lying to Congress shows that we don't have anyone up to the task.
McWatt , March 8, 2017 at 10:25 amA nice interview and a good example of why I keep coming back to this blog. You don't get this kind of analysis anywhere else.
While all this infighting and spy vs. spy skulduggery goes on, one thing is for certain – the neo-cons and "deep state" are too distracted by operation "take down the Donald" to pay much attention to their usual work.
The creation of failed states appears to be badly behind schedule now; Syria may actually be restored by the Russians and Iran back to a functional state, and there appears to be a gutting of the State Department in progress which will make future "color revolutions" difficult.
Is it any wonder there are so many powerful interests screaming that Russia "hacked" the election?
"methinks the lady doth protest too much."
Hamlet
RUKidding , March 8, 2017 at 10:32 amHaving just read "Sleepwalkers" and the new Rasputin biography and reading how everyone of any note
in political circles was monitored in Europe and Russia over 100 years ago these modern revelations come as no surprise. In those days they did it by opening mail, intercepting telegrams and having people followed 24 hours a day.It reminded me of when the Chaplain was arrested by the CID men because Yossarian signed the chaplain's name or Washington Irving's or Irving Washington's name as he censored soldiers letters home while staying in the hospital.
flora , March 8, 2017 at 11:29 amThanks for this very important post. Nothing that Wilkerson said is a surprise – at all – to me. In fact, it's what I've figured has been happening since well, at least since Hoover, as Wilkerson indicates.
As others have pointed out, though, this type of spying has gone on in many forms over the eons of time. None of it is new. The only sort of newsworthy aspect of it is that people in positions of some power and knowledge of behind the scenes stuff, like Wilkerson, are coming out and saying it.
I always figured, esp since the Snowden reveal, that ALL politicians of any major impact/level would be spied on – or at least the data is gathered and available to be perused on an as needed basis.
I read somewhere that Trump allegedly was steamingly angry about this. I want to say: SO? What did you expect? THIS is the way things work. Sometimes you're going like that Intel and sometimes you won't.
I'm not that convinced whether it makes a difference if there was an actual wire tap or the info was gathered by spy satellite or some other method. But I could be wrong in that regard.
So it seems to me that Trump is naive, albeit I also get it that he's hitting out at his enemies and using his tool of choice: twitter. So he makes his short tweets and expresses his anger against his enemies to shore up the defences of his supporters. I can only hope that Trump was NOT naive enough to not realize that he wouldn't be spied on. Trump can hate Obama all he wants – and I don't like Obama much either – but this kind of spying has be de rigueur for a long long time and no doubt, will continue to be so for a long long time.
Will Trump be able to "tame" the Spooks? Good luck. JFK tried that, and we all witnessed how that turned out.
Pookah Harvey , March 8, 2017 at 11:59 amThanks for this post. My guess is Wilkerson is right that intel agencies care most about their own turf and budgets. What's interesting is, judging by the Chicken Little flailing after the election, imo the CIA and other agencies never saw a Trump win coming, or really even possible. So, what are these agencies doing with all their big data? Did they simply use Google/Ada for their election probabilities intel? /s
wild west , March 8, 2017 at 1:14 pmSorry about length but I think this puts together some interesting info.
According to the BBC (from a Jan 13 report) FISA warrants were issued:
On 15 October, the US secret intelligence court issued a warrant to investigate two Russian banks. This news was given to me by several sources and corroborated by someone I will identify only as a senior member of the US intelligence community. He would never volunteer anything – giving up classified information would be illegal – but he would confirm or deny what I had heard from other sources.
"I'm going to write a story that says " I would say. "I don't have a problem with that," he would reply, if my information was accurate. He confirmed the sequence of events below.
Last April, the CIA director was shown intelligence that worried him. It was – allegedly – a tape recording of a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into the US presidential campaign.
It was passed to the US by an intelligence agency of one of the Baltic States. The CIA cannot act domestically against American citizens so a joint counter-intelligence taskforce was created.
The taskforce included six agencies or departments of government. Dealing with the domestic, US, side of the inquiry, were the FBI, the Department of the Treasury, and the Department of Justice. For the foreign and intelligence aspects of the investigation, there were another three agencies: the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Agency, responsible for electronic spying.
Lawyers from the National Security Division in the Department of Justice then drew up an application. They took it to the secret US court that deals with intelligence, the Fisa court, named after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They wanted permission to intercept the electronic records from two Russian banks.
Their first application, in June, was rejected outright by the judge. They returned with a more narrowly drawn order in July and were rejected again. Finally, before a new judge, the order was granted, on 15 October, three weeks before election day.
Neither Mr Trump nor his associates are named in the Fisa order, which would only cover foreign citizens or foreign entities – in this case the Russian banks. But ultimately, the investigation is looking for transfers of money from Russia to the United States, each one, if proved, a felony offence.
A lawyer- outside the Department of Justice but familiar with the case – told me that three of Mr Trump's associates were the subject of the inquiry. "But it's clear this is about Trump," he said.
I spoke to all three of those identified by this source. All of them emphatically denied any wrongdoing. "Hogwash," said one. "Bullshit," said another. Of the two Russian banks, one denied any wrongdoing, while the other did not respond to a request for comment.
The investigation was active going into the election. During that period, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid, wrote to the director of the FBI, accusing him of holding back "explosive information" about Mr Trump.
Mr Reid sent his letter after getting an intelligence briefing, along with other senior figures in Congress. Only eight people were present: the chairs and ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, and the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress, the "gang of eight" as they are sometimes called. Normally, senior staff attend "gang of eight" intelligence briefings, but not this time. The Congressional leaders were not even allowed to take notes.
Wilkerson's supposition was pre-dated by ex-CIA Larry Johnson in A RT interview
RT: What do you make of the accusations made by Donald Trump? How big of a deal is this?
Larry Johnson: I think it's a huge deal. The problem is Trump probably should not have done this via Twitter because to call it a "wiretap" is technically inaccurate. And the denials by the Obama people – like Bill Clinton asking what the meaning of "is" is with respect to "was oral sex a sexual act."
In this case I understand from very good friends that what happened was both Jim Clapper and John Brennan at CIA were intimately involved in trying to derail the candidacy of Donald Trump. That there was some collusion overseas with Britain's own GHCQ [Government Communications Headquarters]. That information that was gathered from GHCQ was actually passed to John Brennan and it was disseminated within the US government. This dissemination was illegal.
Donald Trump is in essence correct that the intelligence agencies, and some in the law enforcement community on the side of the FBI, were in fact illegally trying to access, monitor his communications with his aides and with other people. All of this with an end to try and destroy and discredit his presidency. I don't think there can be any doubt of that. I think it's worth noting that the head of the National Security Agency, an Admiral [Michael] Rogers, made a journey to the Trump Tower shortly after Trump had won. And in the immediate aftermath of his visit, Jim Clapper and others in the intelligence community called for him to be fired . Why did Rodgers go to Trump Tower? My understanding is that it was to cover himself, because he was aware that the NSA authorities had been misused and abused with respect to Donald Trump.
Another piece of evidence that Wikerson alludes to ( March 1, 2017 ) :
The American media is ignoring a story from London about the abrupt resignation of Robert Hannigan, the head of Britain's highly secretive Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which is the code breaking equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Hannigan's resignation on January 23 surprised everyone, with only a few hours' notice provided to his staff. He claimed in a press release that he wanted to spend more time with his family, which reportedly includes a sick wife and elderly parents. Given the abruptness of the decision, it seems likely to be a cover story.
Putting it altogether and there seems like a lot of smoke, will the MSM look for the fire?
susan the other , March 8, 2017 at 1:14 pmIf we ignore the noise that comes from all sides 24/7 we should ask ourselves what is the worst consequence of this election cycle. I think that the fact that hatred became acceptable and normal is by far the worst. Will take a long time, if ever, to heal that.
From the book The Damned Yard by Ivo AndricThe success with which the politicians were able to pursue their campaign of division and mutual antagonism depended to a very large extend on the power of language to create a reality people are ready to believe in without reference to fact. Introduction page viii
"It can happen, as you know," wrote Brother Mato, "that some of our people watching the Vizier destroy the Turks and their "prominent people" would comment on how some good would come of it for the rayah, for our fools think that another's trouble must do them good. You can tell them straight, so that they know now at least what they refused to see before: that nothing will come of it. Page 11
Such was their capacity for hatred! And when the hatred of the bazaar attaches itself to an object, it never lets go, but focuses increasingly on it, gradually altering its shape and meaning, superseding it completely and becoming an end in itself. Then the object becomes secondary, only its name remains, and the hatred crystallizes, grows out of itself, according to its own laws and needs, and becomes powerful, inventive and enthralling, like a kind of inverted love; it finds new fuel and impetus, and itself creates motives for ever greater hatred. Page 19
Well this time Wilkerson did look upset. Just last week he looked tired but not so upset in his RNN interview. The topic this time is of course Trump being tapped and Wilkerson clearly doesn't like it. But did anybody else notice that Wilkerson is wearing the exact same clothes as in the most previous interview? And the time of day is very similar by the lighting behind him on the ceiling and on his face as he speaks down into his computer. So that's odd. Because it indicates to me that they were getting ready to debunk "Trump is crazy" talk even before Trump's claim hit the news. Or at least as soon as it did; they were ready with this interview. I get the feeling they waited a few days to make it look spontaneous. Makes me think there is almost a civil war going on. But regardless of these tactics, it's annoying that the DNC pulled this clumsy crap via the UK.
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Mar 07, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
Fox News , that President Trump is "absolutely right" to claim he was wiretapped and monitored ... he was.As we noted previously, Binney is the NSA executive who created the agency's mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a "legend" within the agency and the NSA's best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened ("in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union's command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons"). Binney is the real McCoy.
Binney resigned from NSA shortly after the U.S. approach to intelligence changed following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He "became a whistleblower after discovering that elements of a data-monitoring program he had helped develop -- nicknamed ThinThread -- were being used to spy on Americans," PBS reported.
On Monday he came to the defense of the president , whose allegations on social media over the weekend that outgoing President Barack Obama tapped his phones during the 2016 campaign have rankled Washington.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/bg3BeYy5drk"I think the president is absolutely right. His phone calls, everything he did electronically, was being monitored," Bill Binney, a 36-year veteran of the National Security Agency who resigned in protest from the organization in 2001, told Fox Business on Monday.
Everyone's conversations are being monitored and stored, Binney said.
Binney also told Sean Hannity's radio show earlier Monday, "I think the FISA court's basically totally irrelevant." The judges on the FISA court are "not even concerned, nor are they involved in any way with the Executive Order 12333 collection," Binney said during the radio interview. "That's all done outside of the courts. And outside of the Congress."
Binney also told Fox the laws that fall under the FISA court's jurisdiction are " simply out there for show" and "trying to show that the government is following the law, and being looked at and overseen by the Senate and House intelligence committees and the courts."
"That's not the main collection program for NSA," Binney said.
* * *
What Binney did not delve into, however, was if Obama directed surveillance on Trump for political purposes during the campaign, a core accusation of Trump's. But Binney did say events such as publication of details of private calls between President Trump and the Australian prime minister, as well as with the Mexican president, are evidence the intelligence community is playing hardball with the White House.
"I think that's what happened here," Binney told Fox. " The evidence of the conversation of the president of the U.S., President Trump, and the [prime minister] of Australia and the president of Mexico. Releasing those conversations. Those are conversations that are picked up by the FAIRVIEW program, primarily, by NSA ."
Since Binney designed the NSA's electronic surveillance system, he would know.
stizazz -> Little Lucy , Mar 7, 2017 5:35 PM
xythras -> NidStyles , Mar 7, 2017 7:17 PMIf EVERYTHING was monitored, it wasn't about just Trump.
Now the BIG question is, will TRUMP stop EVERYTHING from being monitored?
Nope.
- Trump is the First President in Modern Era who is Adversary of DEEP STTE and not a tool of it
http://dailywesterner.com/news/2017-03-07/judge-napolitano-trump-is-the-...
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Mar 07, 2017 | www.breitbart.com
Attorney Robert Barnes appeared on Monday's Breitbart News Daily to talk about President Trump's allegation that the Obama administration wiretapped him during the 2016 presidential campaign. Barnes's latest article on the subject for LawNewz is entitled "Yes, There Could Be Serious Legal Problems if Obama Admin Involved in Illegal Surveillance.""The allegations that Trump raises are allegations that derive directly from what the newspapers have reported – the Guardian, BBC, Heat Street, the New York Times, the Washington Post , where they all talk about there being an interagency panel of people who were involved in an investigation, who purportedly requested and obtained various means of intercepting phone calls," Barnes explained.
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"So there have been competing stories, and on Sunday, they got even more complicated, as both Clapper and Comey denied any knowledge of any wiretapping presence," he continued. "Their denials went a little further than Obama's himself, where all he said was that he himself didn't personally order something – which was a rather absurd cop-out because the president doesn't directly order things of that nature. His surrogates or delegates do."
"The issue goes right to: why, at any time, was anybody's phone calls being intercepted that were on the Trump team, that are American citizens?" he said. "The various news stories that are out, including one by Andrew McCarthy, who recounts them for the National Review , there's just no legal grounds for any of that surveillance to be taking place. There's no legal grounds for any of those calls to be intercepted."
"The original pretext was that FISA warrants were obtained in October for some limited capacity of Trump surrogates," Barnes recalled. "The problem is FISA's a very limited law, especially if you are talking about U.S. citizens. If you're talking about foreigners, then the breadth of the law is very broad, and the president can, in fact, intercept and surveil foreign activities at a much wider degree because of a limited application of the Fourth Amendment – although the Ninth Circuit doesn't seem to understand the limits of the Constitution as to foreigners, but that's another story ."
"The issue he raises is critical and essential, and it's been ever since these stories started leaking out," he said of McCarthy's writing. "Aside from the criminality of the leaks, it was that this is information that never should have been gathered in the first place. What FISA requires is that if you're going to intercept a call where an American is on the line at any level, then what you have to do is you have to go through certain protocols, and you have to establish basically probable cause that the person is involved in criminal conduct of some sort. Just the fact that I, as a U.S. citizen, am talking to a foreigner does not allow magically the Fourth Amendment to disappear as to my right to privacy."
"And yet, purportedly, that's what effectively took place here because here you had Sally Yates discussing a transcript of a call that involved former NSA assistant Michael Flynn, and that's information that never should have been in her possession or custody," he observed.
"Just because one of the people on the phone call may have been not a U.S. citizen, that's no legal grounds to intercept an American's communications. Another way to think of it is, sometimes you'll see in the movies where the guy is sitting in a van, and he's listening in on a phone conversation on a wiretap, and the person he's listening to shifts to some personal conversation, maybe of an intimate nature, that has nothing to do with the criminal investigation going on. You'll see him turn off the recording device and put down his headphones," he explained.
"If it happens that the manner and method of interception was something that you couldn't physically do that, then what you're supposed to do is to scrub the information and delete it from the record. In fact, an ex-CIA officer wrote an article for American Conservative documenting that that was always the protocol and procedure, whenever they were involved in an intelligence-gathering investigation. Yet apparently here , according to published reports, what they actually did is they went and they not only kept the information, didn't scrub it or delete it, they deliberately went back and saved it, and then shared it with a bunch of other people who had no authority to ever look at it," said Barnes.
"FISA is very particular about this," he noted. "It requires protection of any innocent American's information that ever may be gathered through this process. You have to not only scrub it and delete it; you cannot disseminate it to people. You can't identify the individual that's being sourced in the investigation. And the failure to follow FISA's strict procedures is actually a crime. FISA section 1809 of Title 50 makes it a criminal penalty to either gather the information outside of FISA's procedures or to disseminate it outside of FISA's procedures."
"So President Trump is correct that it appears that's what took place here, based on published reports, headlines in the New York Times that use the words 'intercepted calls' involving Trump advisers who are American citizens. It raises very serious issues, and he's absolutely right to raise them," Barnes said.
SiriusXM host Alex Marlow noted that President Obama's denial of Trump's wiretapping accusation was "thin."
"It clearly leads to many more questions than it answers," Marlow said.
"Oh, absolutely," Barnes agreed. "There's different parts of it that are problematic. The first thing is that if he was being serious about a denial, you simply issue a two-sentence statement. You say, 'I am not aware of any wiretapping that took place on Mr. Trump or his campaign, and I would not have supported such a wiretap had it occurred.' He could have been very broad. It's interesting that Comey and Clapper were much more specific and particular than Obama was."
"The second aspect where there were some ludicrous claims included therein, such as the White House never engaging in electronic surveillance of a United States citizen," he continued. "Well, as Andrew McCarthy and other attorneys have pointed out, and other people familiar with the national security operation have pointed out, Obama drone-bombed American citizens in various foreign locations around the world while he was president, including one in Yemen quite prominently. There's no way you can actually do that without some form of surveillance on the individuals. It's not like you had a global map tattooed on the wall, and you took a dart and threw it at the map, and said, 'Oh, okay, we'll drone-bomb there.'"
"The fact that he didn't deny the existence of the wiretap, did not deny his awareness of it, did not deny his approval of it, and then made clearly materially false or misleading statements about his engagement and involvement with surveillance of American citizens – and this coming on top of Clapper committing perjury previously before Congress that led to Ed Snowden becoming Ed Snowden I mean, Ed Snowden probably never becomes Ed Snowden if Clapper doesn't commit perjury, and then, Obama's reaction to Clapper's perjury was to promote him, rather than to demote him, about spying on American citizens," said Barnes.
After playing a recording of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper flatly denying the existence of any FISA court order relating to Trump Tower, Marlow asked, "Do we care what this guy says? He's a known liar."
"I think that is problematic about Clapper in particular. He'd be the least likely guy you would want to put up as a credible source for the administration," Barnes replied. "But what he really also did at the same time was that he gutted the sort of defense that Obama could have had. Because here you have these stories that come out about intercepted calls, and Clapper goes on TV and says there's actually no legal grounds for any intercepted calls to be taking place, at least not through the FISA authority, which is exactly what was being cited as the reason it was done."
"Actually, Clapper's answer raises even more questions. Either (a) Clapper's lying, which is always possible, or (b) Clapper is being truthful, which means all these intercepted calls were done entirely illegally and off the books, or (c) it was done through the Department of Justice in some entirely different manner that would put Obama right in the middle of it," he said. "In other words, if it wasn't done as some sort of national security matter, but was simply done in some sort of disguised investigation that was a politically motivated means of monitoring your adversaries," Barnes elaborated. "So he ended up opening more Pandora's Box than he closed it."
Marlow played an excerpt from an interview given by former Bush administration Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in which he essentially said President Trump's accusation that President Obama directly ordered surveillance on Trump Tower might be "incorrect" in the details, but Trump was "right" to believe a surveillance operation could have been in progress.
Barnes said Mukasey did "accurately relay what has been reported to the press, which is this request for a FISA warrant in the summer that was rejected because it put Trump's name in the warrant request."
"To give you an idea of how rare that is, if that did occur, is that the last 35,000-plus requests for the FISA court to issue a warrant, it's only been denied 12 prior times, to public knowledge," he noted.
"According to the published reports, they went back in October and simply left Trump's name off of it, slightly limited it, and got it," he said of the FISA request in question. "Now, Clapper's statement completely denies that ever occurred in terms of October, in terms of ever getting any FISA warrant on anybody connected to, in his own words, the Trump campaign. So there's a major discrepancy present."
"Secondly, the one area where he doesn't quite correctly describe the situation: there is some misleading information out there that the government can just tap the phones of anyone involved who's working on any level on behalf of a foreign government, by any means. Well, if that had been the case, everybody at the Clinton Foundation should have been tapped permanently," Barnes said. "Putting that aside, the actual law requires that they not only be, quote, 'an agent of a foreign power,' but if they're a United States person, there has to be evidence that they're engaged in criminal activities of a particular kind."
"So they couldn't just wiretap Michael Flynn, for example, or listen in on his conversations, even if the person on the other line is not a United States person. They have to have evidence that he was engaged in criminal conduct. That is what was problematic, as soon as the Flynn story broke, was there was no grounds for them to have ever recorded him, kept the recording, or shared the recording. FISA law specifically prohibited it under those set of circumstances," he explained.
"That's the illegal aspect of what's going on. It's not just the political motivation that would be impermissible or inappropriate because it would be First Amendment punitive use, misuse of the search warrant authority. But it actually violates what warrant authority they could ever obtain in the first place, under both the First and Fourth Amendments, and under the FISA law itself," he said.
Barnes said the reported request from FBI Director James Comey for the Justice Department to refute Trump's wiretapping accusation was "an interesting set of statements."
"There were three different interpretations of Comey and Clapper combined coming out and saying that," he suggested. "One interpretation was that they were not being fully forthcoming and that it was a message to their underlings that they were not going to be the ones to take the fall if any such activity took place, and that those underlings could take Hillary-style actions in terms of whatever evidence may remain of that."
"One little-noted story last week was that Trump put out a requirement that everybody connected to the story keep all information," he noted. "He did this before he did his tweets, but his motivation may have been to actually prove and document this illicit activity took place."
"The second interpretation of what Clapper and Comey did is that they were both kept in the dark – that you had a sort of a rogue operation of people, including Sally Yates at the Department of Justice, who circumvented both Comey and Clapper in order to engage in this sort of illicit personal surveillance," he continued.
"I've been on the opposite side of Sally Yates in cases where she was at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Atlanta," Barnes revealed. "If you were going to pick an unethical, corrupt prosecutor, she'd be at the top of the list. She tried to help railroad a family there, in a case I dealt with over ten years."
"The third possibility is that this was just unlawful surveillance," he concluded. "I've had a lot of cases like that, especially under the Obama administration. It became too frequent and too regular that you had agents that were just doing illegal surveillance, without ever notifying their supervisors, without ever obtaining judicial authority, without ever doing it legally at all. And so you may have had an operation that was a true Deep State kind of operation, that was just doing unlawful surveillance."
"There's too much information, like some of the criticism of President Trump. Well, people should be critical then of the New York Times because it was their story that said there was intercepted calls of multiple members of Donald Trump's campaign. That was, I think, the story that ran on Valentine's Day, actually. It was in the very first sentence of the story. So either the New York Times was purely fake news or somebody in the government is lying about what they were up to," Barnes summarized.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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Mar 07, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
ilsm : March 06, 2017 at 01:57 PM , 2017 at 01:57 PMBarry Ritholtz' Sunday Reads:The false analogy at the end is that Johan DeWitt did not oversee the dismemberment of the US Bill of Rights or British sovereignty.
Barry Ritholtz' Monday Read:
The threat from Russia is nothing compared to the attack on the Bill of Rights by the Obama Stalinists!
Neocon hack Strobe Talbot who brought the neocon Kagans into Bill Clinton's State Dept to run Color Coupes and topple Yugoslavia. Estonia and Ukraine should be dismembered like Bill Clinton did Yugoslavia.
Filled with malarkey from PNAC humbug tank nattering nabobs' wild, unfounded, guilt by association conspiracy theory up through here:
"It is bad for Trump, since the ongoing revelations of a foreign adversary's contamination of an American election undermines the outcome's validity."
Really! They "know" Putin [anything other than Clinton and the DLC's wretchedness to many people] cost the neolibs their entitlement to run their deep state power.
That is where I stopped reading he "can", "could", "would", "assessments"
[from the deep state spooks' neolib agendas] and "NATO is not obsolete" are the very fake news themes of the past 14 months of recently ended Clinton con!How could Putin contaminate the neoliberal permanent war crowd's anointed?
Putin could NOT have as much power as the DLC crushing Bernie?
Barry insists on linking teaching points about the 10 fallacies of logic spewing forth from alt left Trump assassins.
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Mar 07, 2017 | www.salon.com
Did the surveillance state just take another gigantic Big Brotherish step forward? The New York Times and Washington Post are reporting that the Obama administration is planning to support an FBI plan for "a sweeping overhaul of surveillance laws that would make it easier to wiretap people who communicate using the Internet rather than by traditional phone services."
Facebook posts, Skype calls, Google chats, Apple's iMessage - under the new plan, every form of Internet communication would have to be accessible to law enforcement wiretapping. Civil libertarians, Internet companies and privacy activists are all understandably unenthused. A blogger at FireDogLake immediately labeled the news proof that Obama intended to support the "end of the 4th Amendment on the Internet."
That's a little overheated. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure, chiefly by requiring that search warrants be authorized by a judge and supported by probable cause. According to all descriptions of the new FBI wiretapping plan, if law enforcement wants to listen in on your Facebook chats or Apple iMessages, law enforcement will have to get a court order, just at it would if it wants to wiretap your phone. If society is going to grant government the right to listen in to our old-school phone conversations, it's hard to see how, in principle, it can deny the same right with regard to our Skype calls.
The more pertinent question is whether we can trust our government to responsibly seek those court orders, once it is armed with a massive expansion in surveillance power. The evidence there is not encouraging. On the same day that the news broke of the Obama administration's plan to support expanded wiretapping capabilities, CNET's Declan McCullagh reported that, according to documents obtained by the ACLU, the U.S. Department of Justice just doesn't believe that it needs search warrants "to review Americans' e-mails, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and other private files."
Now we're talking violation of the Fourth Amendment. And if we combine that kind of cavalier attitude toward our constitutionally mandated protections with vastly expanded technical surveillance capabilities, then we've got a real problem. Civil libertarians have a right to be nervous. Expanded power implies expanded opportunities to abuse that power.FBI Director Robert Mueller has argued for years that the new wiretapping capabilities are necessary to deal with what he calls the "going dark" problem. As we've moved our communications from voice calls to texting and chatting and tweeting, our activities have become less visible to law enforcement. But even that assumption seems highly questionable. We are now generating vastly more data about our activities than ever before, and great swaths of it are available via subpoenas that don't require a judge's approval. One could easily argue that our incredibly detailed digital trails have put more of our lives in the "light" than ever.
So here's why we should be worried about the Obama administration's purported supported for expanded wiretapping. A government that we already know to be overzealous in grabbing our data is using a bogus excuse to justify vastly increased surveillance powers. Yippee. Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21.
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Mar 07, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
ilsm -> Sandwichman ... , March 06, 2017 at 01:42 PMThe nattering nabobs' wild, unfounded, guilt by association conspiracy theory that OMG! the "Russians are coming with Trump" has beenlibezkova -> ilsm... , March 06, 2017 at 07:41 PM
okay for the past 9 month, now that the president is uncovering the deep state's assault on the Bill of Rights conspiracy theories are an issue!If Obama's Stalinist candidate had won it would be already be too late save America's liberty!
Good insight.ilsm -> pgl... , March 06, 2017 at 01:45 PMBTW Napoleon used to say the if 4 major newspapers are against you, you are really in danger:
"Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets. "
pitiable pk......no career in the country for shark jumped pk's neoliberal thought experiments
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Mar 06, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
Back in 2013, Fox News journalist, James Rosen, was named a 'criminal co-conspirator' and 'flight risk' by then AG Holder -- which led to a series of events that made Holden later regret doing it . With Holden's explicit direction, the DOJ secretly accessed all of Rosen's gmails, contacts, and surveilled of more than 20 phone lines connected to him, including his mother's phone in Staten Island, NY.The Washington Post's Dana Milbank wrote a piece on the ordeal, saying "The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush's administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of. To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job - seeking out information the government doesn't want made public - deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based."
Here is Rosen recounting his affair and opining on the plausibility of Trump being a target of the Obama administration too -- which he affirmed in the positive, 'in the age of Snowden.'
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Mar 06, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
by PoasterToaster , Mar 5, 2017 4:06 PMJLee2027 -> PoasterToaster , Mar 5, 2017 4:10 PMNo one is denying that the Russians outrageously interfered in the U.S. election.
What, exactly, did they do?
Belrev -> JLee2027 , Mar 5, 2017 4:13 PMNothing. But they keep repeating it, because they think people will eventually believe it.
J S Bach -> Belrev , Mar 5, 2017 4:16 PMPelosi loses it "Trump can't stop lying", doubles down on her lies
stizazz -> J S Bach , Mar 5, 2017 4:21 PMTrump is probably more pissed off about having to deal with such petty issues with the losers on the Left. He ran with one goal in mind... to right what he thinks is wrong with the country. That's a helluva task. He wants to get to work on that... but instead, he has to constantly tweet and twitter about this bullshit to defend his reputation.
Chris Dakota -> stizazz , Mar 5, 2017 4:51 PMNewsmax is a ZIONIST NEOCON mouthpiece.
Newsmax chumming with Trump? Zionist neocons unite.
bamawatson -> Chris Dakota , Mar 5, 2017 4:52 PMTrump supporter getting revenge on M13 gangster.
https://twitter.com/San___Frexit/status/838456709714673664/photo/1
I told you those red heads are trouble.
prime american -> bamawatson , Mar 5, 2017 4:55 PMmcStain's blue dress http://www.northcrane.com/2017/03/04/john-mccains-campaign-manager-arres...
Stainless Steel Rat -> prime american , Mar 5, 2017 5:05 PMI'm making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... http://bit.ly/2jdTzrM
weburke -> Stainless Steel Rat , Mar 5, 2017 5:20 PMI am so over the edge pissed off that I can barely hold it together. Gotta get away from the news for a few days. I hope he cleans fucking house and outs every last shit politician for every last little thing they are probably already being blackmailed on! >:-@
Troll Magnet -> weburke , Mar 5, 2017 5:24 PM"ruddy" clearly is a bullshitter. both sides of his mouth.
Secret Weapon -> Troll Magnet , Mar 5, 2017 5:28 PMwell at least trump knows now how us proles feel about the nsa.
Chris Dakota -> Stainless Steel Rat , Mar 5, 2017 5:41 PMFree Edward Snowden.
A Nanny Moose -> Stainless Steel Rat , Mar 5, 2017 7:50 PMFew days and he himself might be arrested the way this thing is going.
I can see the end and it ain't pretty.
sleigher -> Stainless Steel Rat , Mar 5, 2017 10:21 PMDon't let it get to you. Trump is playing chess, while the left is in the corner, by itself, eating checkers pieces.
Citizen in 1984 -> sleigher , Mar 5, 2017 11:36 PM"I hope he cleans fucking house and outs every last shit politician for every last little thing they are probably already being blackmailed on"
He's not going to. Trump thinks he can enact his policies and make America great again. He is completely underestimating how controlled the country is. FBI, CIA, NSA all of it.. The learning curve is way to steep and he is losing. I hate to say this but we are gonna see a sad end to this administration. Trump should be dropping any and every bomb he has but he isn't. By the time he figures out what to do it will be too late. I think it might be already. He expects the American people to stand behind and we are but that is not enough. I think it may be that time... that time we all fear would come and will show us the real America and Americans.
Trump, if you read ZH, and you read this, drop everything NOW. DROP EVERY BOMB YOU HAVE. ATTACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
fleur de lis -> sleigher , Mar 6, 2017 12:46 AMI'm all in for a whole bunch of Hellfire Missles........with facial recognition software.....
I agree.
By now Trump has enough pix and AV to crush the firebugs in public.
And if the Deep State and their psychotic friends in the CIA NSA FBI, etc., want to take it outside, Trump should unleash what good Intel forces are left and go Roman on them.
Since the pervert Dems and their psycho alphabetroid friends are hell bent on destroying this country if they can't keep it in the swamp, then they may as well take a real beat down in the process.
The one good thing about all this is that it is forcing all the DC sleaze out in the open where we can all see them for the power abusers they are.
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Mar 05, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
Peter K. : March 05, 2017 at 03:21 PM https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/05/us/politics/trump-seeks-inquiry-into-allegations-that-obama-tapped-his-phones.htmlBy MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and MICHAEL D. SHEAR
MARCH 5, 2017
WASHINGTON - The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump's assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump's phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.
Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.
A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment. Sarah Isgur Flores, the spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.
Mr. Comey's request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation's top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump's truthfulness. The confrontation between the two is the most serious consequence of Mr. Trump's weekend Twitter outburst, and it underscores the dangers of what the president and his aides have unleashed by accusing the former president of a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump's young administration.
The White House showed no indication that it would back down from Mr. Trump's claims. On Sunday, the president demanded a congressional inquiry into whether Mr. Obama had abused the power of federal law enforcement agencies before the 2016 presidential election. In a statement from his spokesman, Mr. Trump called "reports" about the wiretapping "very troubling" and said that Congress should examine them as part of its investigations into Russia's meddling in the election.
Along with concerns about potential attacks on the bureau's credibility, senior F.B.I. officials are said to be worried that the notion of a court-approved wiretap will raise the public's expectations that the federal authorities have significant evidence implicating the Trump campaign in colluding with Russia's efforts to disrupt the presidential election.
One problem Mr. Comey has faced is that there are few senior politically appointed officials at the Justice Department who can make the decision to release a statement, the officials said. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself on Thursday from all matters related to the federal investigation into connections between Mr. Trump, his associates and Russia.
Mr. Comey's behind-the-scenes maneuvering is certain to invite contrasts to his actions last year, when he spoke publicly about the Hillary Clinton email case and disregarded Justice Department entreaties not to.
It is not clear why Mr. Comey did not issue the statement himself. He is the most senior law enforcement official who was kept on the job as the Obama administration gave way to the Trump administration. And while the Justice Department applies for intelligence-gathering warrants, the F.B.I. keeps its own set of records and is in position to know whether Mr. Trump's claims are true. While intelligence officials do not normally discuss the existence or nonexistence of surveillance warrants, no law prevents Mr. Comey from issuing the statement.
In his demand for a congressional inquiry, the president, through his press secretary, Sean Spicer, issued a statement on Sunday that said, "President Donald J. Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016."
... ... ...
On Sunday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy White House press secretary, said the president was determined to find out what had really happened, calling it potentially the "greatest abuse of power" that the country has ever seen.
"Look, I think he's going off of information that he's seen that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential," Ms. Sanders said on ABC's "This Week" program. "And if it is, this is the greatest overreach and the greatest abuse of power that I think we have ever seen and a huge attack on democracy itself. And the American people have a right to know if this took place."
... ... ...
Senior law enforcement and intelligence officials who worked in the Obama administration have said there were no secret intelligence warrants regarding Mr. Trump. Asked whether such a warrant existed, James R. Clapper Jr., a former director of national intelligence, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" program, "Not to my knowledge, no."
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Mar 04, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary and Armed Services Committees, has issued the following statement after President Trump accused former President Obama of wiretapping his phones in 2016 and Obama's spokesman said that was false.Sasse raises several key points: if the wiretap was authorized by a FISA Court, Trump should demand to see the application, find out on what grounds it was granted, and then present it to the US public at best, or at least the Senate. In case there was no FISA court, it is possible that Trump was illegally tapped. Finally, there is the possibility that Trump was not wiretapped at all, although for the president to make such a public allegation one would hope that there is at least some factual basis to the charge.
my statement on wiretapping... pic.twitter.com/OzYkOCXeEh
- Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) March 4, 2017
Here is Sasse's full statement.
Sasse Statement On Wiretapping
"The President today made some very serious allegations, and the informed citizens that a republic requires deserve more information.
If there were wiretaps of then-candidate Trump's organization or campaign, then it was either with FISA Court authorization or without such authorization.
If without, the President should explain what sort of wiretap it was and how he knows this. It is possible that he was illegally tapped.
On the other hand , if it was with a legal FISA Court order, then an application for surveillance exists that the Court found credible.
The President should ask that this full application regarding surveillance of foreign operatives or operations be made available, ideally to the full public, and at a bare minimum to the U.S. Senate.
Sasses then concludes:
"We are in the midst of a civilization-warping crisis of public trust, and the President's allegations today demand the thorough and dispassionate attention of serious patriots. A quest for the full truth, rather than knee-jerk partisanship, must be our guide if we are going to rebuild civic trust and health."
It appears that the Trump admin may already be working on Sasse's recommendations: as the NYT reports , " a senior White House official said that Donald F. McGahn II, the president's chief counsel, was working on Saturday to secure access to what the official described as a document issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing surveillance of Mr. Trump and his associates. The official offered no evidence to support the notion that such a document exists; any such move by a White House counsel would be viewed at the Justice Department as a stunning case of interference ."
Alternatively, it would be viewed as a case president seeking to determine if his predecessor was actively plotting to interfere with the election via wiretapping, also a quite "stunning" case.
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Mar 04, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
Following Trump's stunning allegation that Obama wiretapped the Trump Tower in October of 2016, prior to the presidential election, which may or may not have been sourced from a Breitbart story , numerous Democrats and media pundits have come out with scathing accusations that Trump is either mentally disturbed, or simply has no idea what he is talking about.The best example of this came from Ben Rhodes, a former senior adviser to President Obama in his role as deputy National Security Advisor, who slammed Trump's accusation, insisting that " No President can order a wiretap. Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you." He also said "only a liar" could make the case, as Trump suggested, that Obama wire tapped Trump Tower ahead of the election.
No President can order a wiretap. Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you. https://t.co/lEVscjkzSw
- Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) March 4, 2017
It would appear, however, that Rhodes is wrong, especially as pertains to matters of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, and its associated FISA court, under which the alleged wiretap of Donald Trump would have been granted, as it pertained specifically to Trump's alleged illicit interactions with Russian entities.
In Chapter 36 of Title 50 of the US Code *War and National Defense", Subchapter 1, Section 1802 , we read the following:
(1) Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year if the Attorney General certifies in writing under oath that-
(A) the electronic surveillance is solely directed at- (i) the acquisition of the contents of communications transmitted by means of communications used exclusively between or among foreign powers, as defined in section 1801(a)(1), (2), or (3) of this title; or (ii) the acquisition of technical intelligence, other than the spoken communications of individuals, from property or premises under the open and exclusive control of a foreign power, as defined in section 1801(a)(1), (2), or (3) of this title;
(B) there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party; and
(C) the proposed minimization procedures with respect to such surveillance meet the definition of minimization procedures under section 1801(h) of this title; and if the Attorney General reports such minimization procedures and any changes thereto to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at least thirty days prior to their effective date, unless the Attorney General determines immediate action is required and notifies the committees immediately of such minimization procedures and the reason for their becoming effective immediately.
While (B) seems to contradict the underlying permissive nature of Section 1802 as it involves a United States person, what the Snowden affair has demonstrated all too clearly, is how frequently the NSA and FISA court would make US citizens collateral damage. To be sure, many pointed out the fact that Fox News correspondent James Rosen was notoriously wiretapped in 2013 when the DOJ was investigating government leaks. The Associated Press was also infamously wiretapped in relation to the same investigation.
As pertains to Trump, the Guardian reported as much in early January, when news of the alleged anti-Trump dossier by former UK spy Chris Steele broke in January:
The Guardian has learned that the FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The Fisa court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus. According to one report, the FBI was finally granted a warrant in October, but that has not been confirmed, and it is not clear whether any warrant led to a full investigation.
Furthermore, while most Democrats - not to mention former president Obama himself - have been harshly critical of Trump's comments, some such as former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau was quite clear in his warning to reporters that Obama did not say there was no wiretapping, effectively confirming it:
I'd be careful about reporting that Obama said there was no wiretapping. Statement just said that neither he nor the WH ordered it.
- Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) March 4, 2017
Favreau also urged his twitter followers to read a thread that explicitly suggested the prior existence of FISA-endorsed wiretaps:
Ok you definitely need to read this thread https://t.co/W7CkXjV40f
- Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) March 4, 2017
Additionally, Philip Rucker, the WaPo's White House bureau chief echoed Favreau's caveat, namely that the Obama spokesman's statement does not deny the existence of wiretaps on Trump Tower, only that Obama himself and the Obama White House did not approve them if they did exist.
The Obama statement does not say there was no federal wire tapping of Trump Tower. It only says Obama and White House didn't order it.
- Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) March 4, 2017
Further implying the existence of such a wiretap was David Axelrod, who tweeted today that that such a wiretap could exist but would have "been OK'ed only for a a reason."
If there were the wiretap @realDonaldTrump loudly alleges, such an extraordinary warrant would only have been OKed by a court for a reason.
- David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) March 4, 2017
Yet ironically, it was none other than the Trump administration which just earlier this week announced it supports the renewal of spy law which incorporates the FISA court, without reforms : "the Trump administration does not want to reform an internet surveillance law to address privacy concerns, a White House official told Reuters on Wednesday, saying it is needed to protect national security. The announcement could put President Donald Trump on a collision course with Congress, where some Republicans and Democrats have advocated curtailing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, parts of which are due to expire at the end of the year."
"We support the clean reauthorization and the administration believes it's necessary to protect the security of the nation," the official said on condition of anonymity.
The FISA law has been criticized by privacy and civil liberties advocates as allowing broad, intrusive spying. It gained renewed attention following the 2013 disclosures by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that the agency carried out widespread monitoring of emails and other electronic communications.
In any event, the bottom line here appears to be that with his tweet, Trump has opened a can of worms with two possible outcomes: either the wiretaps exist as Trump has suggested, and the president will use them to attack both the Obama administration and the media for political overreach; or, there were no wiretaps, which as Matthew Boyle writes , would suggest the previous administration had no reason to suspect Trump colluded with a foreign government.
Senator Ben Sasse said as much in his statement issued earlier today:
The President today made some very serious allegations, and the informed citizens that a republic requires deserve more information. If there were wiretaps of then-candidate Trump's organization or campaign, then it was either with FISA Court authorization or without such authorization. If without, the President should explain what sort of wiretap it was and how he knows this. It is possible that he was illegally tapped. On the other hand, if it was with a legal FISA Court order, then an application for surveillance exists that the Court found credible.
But what is perhaps most important, is that we may know soon enough. As the NYT reported on Saturday afternoon , a senior White House official said that Donald F. McGahn II, the president's chief counsel, was working on Saturday to secure access to what the official described as a document issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing surveillance of Mr. Trump and his associates.
If and when such a document is made public - assuming it exists of course - it would be Trump, once again, that gets the last laugh.
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Mar 05, 2017 | www.foxnews.com
Former President Obama on Saturday denied President Trump's accusation that Obama had Trump Tower phones tapped in the weeks before the November 2016 election."Neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false," said Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for the former president.
Trump made the claim in a series of early Saturday morning tweets that included the suggestion that the alleged wiretapping was tantamount to "McCarthyism" and "Nixon/Watergate."
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump"Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism," Trump tweeted.Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
6:35 AM - 4 Mar 2017
"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!" he said in another tweet.
Trump also tweeted that a "good lawyer could make a great case of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!"
"How low has President Obama gone to tap (sic) my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergage. Bad (or sick) guy!" the president continued.
Trump does not specify how he uncovered the Obama administration's alleged wiretapping.
However, he could be referencing a Breitbart article posted Friday that claimed the administration made two Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) requests in 2016 to monitor Trump communications and a computer server in Trump Tower, related to possible links with Russian banks.
No evidence was found.
The article was based on a segment by radio host Mark Levin.
However, the timelines for each seems to draw from a range of news reports over the last several months, including those from The New York Times and Heat Street.
Lewis also said Saturday: "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."
wouldsmash
REOPEN CLINTON EMAIL SERVER INVESTIGATION
encorezzzzzzz
GOP lawmaker calls to investigate Obama's $418 million arms deal with Kenya.
Fox News reported: A North Carolina congressman is calling for a probe into a potential $418 million contract between Kenya and a major U.S. defense contractor announced on President Obama's last day in office -- a deal the lawmaker claims reeks of cronyism. Republican Rep. Ted Budd wants the Government Accountability Office to investigate a deal between the African nation and New York-based L3 Technologies for the sale of 12 weaponized border patrol planes.
He said he wants to know why a veteran-owned small company in North Carolina – which specializes in making such planes – was not considered as the manufacturer. IOMAX USA Inc., based in Mooresville and founded by a U.S. Army veteran, offered to build Kenya the weaponized planes for roughly $281 million – far cheaper than what its competitor, L3, is selling them for.
"Something smells wrong here," Budd told Fox News. "The U.S. Air Force bypassed IOMAX, which has 50 of these planes already in service in the Middle East." "They were given a raw deal," Budd said of Kenya, which had requested from the U.S. 12 weaponized planes in its fight against terrorist group Al-Shabaab near its northern border. "We want to treat our allies like Kenya fairly," he said. "And we want to know why IOMAX was not considered."
ricochetdog
"Had my wires tapped"! Just became the new internet meme.
Andrewmag16
Why are democrats always meeting and dealing with us and then act like its bad if anyone else speaks to Russians?
evolutionmyths
Coming from an ... that never spoke any kind of truth . If he said false it means True
SheSayEh
Obama was community organizer of Chicago. Look at the mess he left behind there.
MrChainBlueLightning
The so called United States experiment should end. It was ultimately a failure. Red and Blue states should merge and form their own countries.
CLUTCHCARGO1
DON'T STOP INVESTIGATING. OBAMA NEEDS TO MEET INMATE BUBBA
wouldsmash
Trump has enough evidence to put bammy in JAIL
MickeyQBitskoIII
Soros would certainly have it done, and Obama and Hillary would be in on whatever "intel" is gathered, but there is NO WAY Soros would allow his favorite Kenyan lap dog to be directly involved in the operation.
frdm399
Tucker Carlson exposed Politifact, New York Times, and Washington Post fact checkers as liars last night. You just can't believe anything a democRAT says...
jconnelly
The US Govt was spying on Trump during the election. The Russians were spying on Clinton during the election. Which is worse?
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Mar 05, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
im1dc : March 04, 2017 at 09:46 AM Follow up on Fred C. Dobbs post above on Trump's Saturday morning accusations via Tweet on President Obama wiretapping Trump TowerAll of Trump's tweets are at this link
"Donald Trump Claims Barack Obama Ordered Wire Tap On Trump Tower Before Election"
'But he offered no evidence to back up the claims'
By Lee Moran...03/04/2017...07:16 am ET...Updated 1 hour ago
"President Donald Trump has accused former President Barack Obama of "wire tapping" Trump Tower before the 2016 presidential election.
Trump made the claims in a series of tweets that he posted early Saturday, although he offered no evidence to back his allegations up ― and a former adviser to Obama pointed out that presidents cannot order wiretaps.
"Terrible!" Trump wrote at 6.35 a.m. E.T. "Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"
Read Trump's full set of tweets below:..."
im1dc -> im1dc... , March 04, 2017 at 09:48 AM
If true it is very serious, if not then it is just as serious and action must be taken in either casePeter K. -> EMichael... , March 04, 2017 at 10:17 AMJust sayin'...the obvious
I'd have to go with PGL. You'd think if they were going to tap a Presidential candidate, they'd have to get Presidential authority.ilsm -> pgl... , March 04, 2017 at 01:28 PMWe just don't know. Probably they'd have to get a judge to sign off on it but the FISA court is pretty much rubber stamp.
When is the last time the NSA or FBI go in trouble for overstepping their bounds? Never. If they had flimsy reasons to tap Trump it's probably still legal strictly speaking.
Maybe Trump will reform the way the spies spy on private citizens?
HAHAHAHAA
The biggest complaint of the "left" is that Obama could be handing over the surveillance state to someone truly bad like Trump. That was the complaint of libertarians like Edward Snowden.
But the moderate establishment types didn't care.
They were too busy slandering Wikileaks.
There is no evidence so support any of the months of "the Russians coming" screed; there is immense evidence in that screed that the GOP was tapped!libezkova -> ilsm... , March 04, 2017 at 03:15 PMTo listen on a US citizen who is not an object of investigation is covered by the 4th Amendment etc.
If they recorded a call from a Russian diplomat to someone not in an order from that special judge the tape should be sealed.
It appears no taps were done legally and none of the illegal taps were kept from becoming innuendo in congressional hearings.
The coincidental collection is an assault on US Bill of Rights!
In many years in the pentagon bureaucracy I have NEVER seen coincidence where malice could be implied.
This fake news hysteria over "Russian contacts" might well be a smoke scree explicitly designed to cover illegal wiretapping.libezkova -> libezkova... , March 04, 2017 at 03:26 PMThey never expected Trump to be elected (neither did I ) and made some major mistakes hoping the Hillary will cover everything up.
That actually might help to explain strange behavior of James Clapper. As if he felt that he is sitting on a hot stove.
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Mar 04, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
Moments ago, Barack Obama through his spokesman Kevin Lewis denied Trump's accusation that he had ordered the Trump Tower wiretapped, saying neither he nor any member of the Obama White House, " ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false ."Follows the statement from Kevin Lewis, spokesman to former president Barack Obama
"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."
MORE: Spokesperson for former Pres. Obama responds to Trump wiretap allegation, calls it "simply false." https://t.co/cXyQHeSvNy pic.twitter.com/se2gno6wxz
- ABC News (@ABC) March 4, 2017
Yet while the carefully-worded statement, an exercise in semantics, claims Obama did not himself, or through members of his White House team, order a potential wiretapping, it does not deny an actual wiretapping of Trump (or Trump Tower), which as some have speculated in the past , did in fact take place after a FISA Court granted surveillance of Trump over accusations of Russian interference. It also does not preclude the FBI - which is the entity that would most likely have implemented such a wiretap - from having given the order.
As a reminder, here is what the Guardian reported in early January :
The Guardian has learned that the FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The Fisa court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus. According to one report, the FBI was finally granted a warrant in October, but that has not been confirmed, and it is not clear whether any warrant led to a full investigation.
For the definitive answer, we suggest Trump ask Comey whether or not his building was being tapped in the days prior to the election.
Belrev , Mar 4, 2017 1:13 PMwildbad -> Belrev , Mar 4, 2017 1:13 PMAnalyzing Obama's own statements over the years on the illegal wiritappings, one does not come to the conclusion that he can be trusted
Chris Dakota -> wildbad , Mar 4, 2017 1:15 PMend the tsa bs https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/limit-and-reduce-invasive-and-...
thesonandheir -> Chris Dakota , Mar 4, 2017 1:20 PMYeah you did you community agitator, fire starter, treasonous snake.
The_Juggernaut -> thesonandheir , Mar 4, 2017 1:23 PMJust investigate Pizzagate fully and we'll see if O'birdbath is lying or not.
auricle -> The_Juggernaut , Mar 4, 2017 1:29 PMYou have to appreciate the way he puts things out there that cause them to issue carefully worded denials that sound more like confessions than anything else.
eatthebanksters -> auricle , Mar 4, 2017 1:34 PMOf course Obama himself did not give the order It's someone in his administration that would have ordered it, which he commanded over. His wordsmithing is so tiresome.
BaBaBouy -> eatthebanksters , Mar 4, 2017 1:36 PMWe're goin to find out soon...who asked for the FISA warrant?
BaBaBouy -> BaBaBouy , Mar 4, 2017 1:43 PM"NEVER Ordered It" So that means It Was DOne, under Omaba Regime???
remain calm -> BaBaBouy , Mar 4, 2017 1:51 PMHow about that "Meeting" Between Billy and the Lorretta, on the tarmac???
The "How are the kidz, Lorretta" Meeting??? LOL...
Billy the Poet -> remain calm , Mar 4, 2017 1:54 PMObama, "The Russians did it"
Winston Churchill -> Billy the Poet , Mar 4, 2017 2:01 PMneither he nor any member of the Obama White House, "ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false."
Obama has taken credit for ordering the drone strike which killed US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. Now we are being told that no surveillance preceded that strike. Obama apparently ordered the strike and a drone was launched blindly into the heavens but it still managed to find and destroy al-Awlaki entirely by chance.
Sounds like very fake news to me.
FreddieX -> Winston Churchill , Mar 4, 2017 2:51 PMOnly a smidgeon of a lie.
Jim in MN -> FreddieX , Mar 4, 2017 4:27 PMStay sane: clear logic:
http://theduran.com/obama-replies-trumps-wiretap-charge/ " This statement is classic Obama. It appears on its face to be clear and complete, but in reality it is nothing of the sort. .. We are at a very early stage in this matter. There are multiple investigations underway, some launched by the outgoing Obama administration against the incoming Trump administration, and some launched by the current Trump administration against the preceding Obama administration. ... Obama's highly legalistic statement today – which reads very much like a defence statement – however gives a good flavour of the direction some of these inquiries are taking. " ...
" The statement hints than any order to wiretap ... was the work of officials in the Justice Department ... This too is almost certainly true. However it neglects to say that some of these officials were people whom Obama himself appointed, and who were therefore part of his administration. "
Perhaps Mr. Kadzik http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-31/doj-tells-congress-it-will-work...
monad -> Jim in MN , Mar 4, 2017 5:36 PMSimpler even then that:
If he didn't ORDER then he must have APPROVED.
If he didn't APPROVE what does that say?
And if he did?
cowdiddly -> Jim in MN , Mar 4, 2017 5:54 PMOr he found out about it when his owners told him to make a statement & provide the msm more distraction from the great things Trump is already accomplishing in this his 7th week on the job , despite the backstabbing congress, senate, spooks, crisis actors, paid protestors and moochers.
The fanatics who did this are the the same fanatics who bombed London mass transit during a drill, and conducted the 911 heist and mass execution during a drill.
fockewulf190 -> FreddieX , Mar 4, 2017 4:54 PMHe says of course:
"I am not a crook " R. Nixon
give me a break the dickhead even tapped Angela Merkel's phone and half of Europe.
eatthebanksters -> FreddieX , Mar 4, 2017 6:06 PMIf that would have been a statement straight from Obama, he would have sounded like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poz6W0znOfk
A bit old, but true nonetheless.
SWRichmond -> Winston Churchill , Mar 4, 2017 2:54 PMIs anyone naive enough to think that Loretta Lynch and Obama were unaware that the Republican candidate for POTUS was being wiretapped the month before the actual election?
This is Hillary like legal speak where Obozo is trying to keep his neck out of a legal sling. Sorry...Nixon tried that.
fleur de lis -> SWRichmond , Mar 4, 2017 3:56 PM"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
Taqqiya
xythras -> fleur de lis , Mar 4, 2017 4:24 PMWhen Obama says he did not order the wiretapping, he is probably telling the truth.
Obama had no power at all -- he took the position knowing that he was only a cat's paw.
He was content to be a facade and he knew it, and so did his wife.
He was not smart enough to be a President, but he was egotistical enough to take the position and all the bennies in exchange for taking orders from his handlers without question.
Does anyone really think he was smart enough to plan all the Middle East attacks for 8 years?
Of course not -- the logistical planning for those events were far beyond his intelligence.
For that matter, has anyone seen his Columbia and Harvard transcripts?
Of course not -- he was a dummy and a fake and the records would show that.
He was editor of the HLR but has anyone seen a sample of his writing?
Of course not -- if it exists at all it is unimpressive.
It is doubtful that the Deep State would allow Obama access to such critical wiretapping.
That sort of power is reserved for our tax funded, invisible slavemasters.
Meanwhile the hypocritical left dares to compare the two email situations
Photo of Clinton Reading about Pence's Email Scandal Goes Viral
http://dailywesterner.com/news/2017-03-04/photo-of-clinton-reading-about...
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