Obama’s Wiretaps? - Matthew Vadum

by Matthew Vadum

Details of a Watergate-style conspiracy against Trump emerge.

President Donald Trump caused a media firestorm by claiming over the weekend that then-President Obama wire-tapped telephones at Trump Tower in Manhattan during the final leg of last year's election campaign.

Seeing the writing on the wall, tainted FBI Director James Comey promptly and publicly urged the Department of Justice to reject Trump’s claims. Although it is an attempt at a cover-up, it is an admirably transparent one.

Now the outlines of a Watergate-like conspiracy are emerging in which a sitting Democrat president apparently used the apparatus of the state to spy on a Republican presidential candidate. Watergate differed in that President Nixon didn’t get involved in the plot against the Democratic National Committee until later as an accomplice after the fact. Here Obama likely masterminded, or oversaw someone like the diabolical Benghazi cover-up artist Ben Rhodes, masterminding the whole thing.

Throughout his agonizingly long presidency, Obama serially abused his powers as the nation’s Chief Executive to undermine his political opponents. It might be said that every day of his presidency he committed at least one impeachable offense.

Obama used the IRS to target conservative and Tea Party nonprofits, along with Catholic, Jewish, and pro-Israel organizations. He brazenly lied about it, too. His Justice Department surreptitiously obtained telephone records for more than 100 reporters. He did nothing while Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius repeatedly violated the Hatch Act, an anti-corruption statute.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of Obama’s misdeeds in office. Books have been written about his corruption and many more such volumes will follow.

First thing Saturday morning, Trump tweeted, “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

He followed that with “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!”

That was followed by, “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!” and “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

A spokesman for Obama, who now lives in former Bill Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart’s walled mansion with Valerie Jarrett on Washington’s Embassy Row so he can pursue his unprecedented, taxpayer-subsidized post-presidential war against Trump, denied Obama ordered that Trump Tower be wiretapped.

“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,” according to a carefully-worded statement. “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.”

Of course, as others quickly pointed out, the denial is misdirection.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy wrote yesterday that the denial “seems disingenuous on several levels.” When a warrant is obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), “it is technically the FISA court that ‘orders’ surveillance.” Moreover, under the law, “it is the Justice Department, not the White House, that represents the government in proceedings before the FISA court.”

McCarthy wrote presciently on Jan. 11 that “[t]he idea that FISA could be used against political enemies always seemed far-fetched. Now it might not be.”

Besides, Obama and his gang have generally been smart enough to hide their tracks when carrying out political dirty tricks. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, and NSA, aren’t headquartered in the White House. Obama could wage war against Trump by creating multiple layers of plausible deniability. That’s what a community organizer from Chicago does.

Predictably, former Obama speechwriter Rhodes went on Twitter to lie. Replying to a Trump tweet, the Iranian mullahs’ best friend wrote, cheekily, that, “No President can order a wiretap. Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you.”

In fact, as Zero Hedge notes, Chapter 36 of Title 50 of the US Code, War and National Defense, Subchapter 1, Section 1802, states that under certain specific conditions:

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 …

To no one’s surprise, the mainstream media was quick to slap down the president’s claim without even investigating, claiming Trump was recklessly microblogging without evidence. Perhaps the loudest media figure was the Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens, who was effectively a Hillary Clinton surrogate during the campaign. He said he wanted Trump to be “so decisively rebuked that the Republican Party, the Republican voters will forever learn their lesson that they cannot nominate a man so manifestly unqualified to be president in any way, shape or form.”

In response to Trump’s claim, the increasingly wacky Stephens tweeted Saturday, “When will Republicans acknowledge that the President of the United States is mentally ill?”

Most mainstream journalists were loath over the past eight years to call the exhaustively documented and at times bald-faced lies and misdeeds of President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and HHS Secretary Sebelius. It would seem uncovering government corruption is only a journalist’s duty when a Democrat resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

While it may be true that Trump offered little supporting evidence on Twitter – he provided some evidence by tweeting that an earlier request for surveillance was turned down by a court – it does not follow, nor is it true, that there is no evidence of his claim.

In reality the evidence does exist that Obama spied on Trump and it is "overwhelming," according to talk show host and Landmark Legal Foundation president Mark Levin. He explained on "Fox and Friends" Sunday that evidence of secret court-approved eavesdropping of Trump Tower had already been reported months ago by the New York Times, McClatchy media outlets, Heat Street, and the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper.

Levin said:

Donald Trump is the victim. His campaign is the victim. His transition team is the victim. His surrogates are the victim. These are police state tactics. I am telling you this as a former chief of staff to an attorney general. If this had been done to Barack Obama all hell would break loose, and it should.

Let’s recount what former British Member of Parliament Louise Mensch reported at Heat Street on Nov. 7, the day before the U.S. election.

Two separate sources with links to the counter-intelligence community have confirmed to Heat Street that the FBI sought, and was granted, a FISA court warrant in October, giving counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia.
Contrary to earlier reporting in the New York Times, which cited FBI sources as saying that the agency did not believe that the private server in Donald Trump’s Trump Tower which was connected to a Russian bank had any nefarious purpose, the FBI’s counter-intelligence arm, sources say, re-drew an earlier FISA court request around possible financial and banking offenses related to the server. The first request, which, sources say, named Trump, was denied back in June, but the second was drawn more narrowly and was granted in October after evidence was presented of a server, possibly related to the Trump campaign, and its alleged links to two banks; SVB Bank and Russia’s Alfa Bank. While the Times story speaks of metadata, sources suggest that a FISA warrant was granted to look at the full content of emails and other related documents that may concern US persons.
The FBI agents who talked to the New York Times, and rubbished the ground-breaking stories of Slate (Franklin Foer) and Mother Jones (David Corn) may not have known about the FISA warrant, sources say, because the counter-intelligence and criminal sides of the FBI often work independently of each other employing the principle of ‘compartmentalization’.

Both of the FISA court applications should be made public and Congress should be given the daily intelligence briefings over the last year or so, Levin said.

We already knew that days before Trump’s inauguration, it was reported that Obama green-lighted a disturbing relaxation of the rules regulating the National Security Agency’s ability to circulate globally intercepted personal communications among the other 16 intelligence agencies, some of which are more politicized than the NSA, before applying important longstanding privacy-protection protocols. Before the policy was altered, the NSA screened out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information before passing intercepted communications along to other agencies like the CIA or the FBI’s intelligence units.

Put another way, 17 days before President Trump was sworn in, NSA was unleashed against his embryonic administration, newly empowered to share raw intelligence gathered from telephone calls and emails that go through network switches outside the country, as well as messages between people outside the U.S. that go through domestic network switches.

WikiLeaks offered a refresher course in Obama’s treachery on Twitter Sunday, noting that “Obama has a history of tapping & hacking his friends and rivals[,]” and providing plenty of examples.

The newly discovered Trump Tower scandal further undermines the Left’s false narrative painting Trump as fascistic. After all, Obama, not Trump, was the great, power-mad centralizer using heavy-handed tactics and the vast resources of the federal Leviathan against his enemies, including Trump.

As hardcore Never Trumper David French has been forced to admit, Trump is “less authoritarian than Obama.”

Trump’s administration, “through policy or personnel, appears to be signaling that the executive branch intends to become less intrusive in American life and more accountable to internal and external critique.”

And despite the growing mass media hysteria, there is still no publicly available evidence the Trump campaign somehow colluded with the Russian government last year. Sources in newspaper articles are never identified. There is not a scintilla of proof of improper conduct. All we have is the alleged say-so of faceless CIA spooks whose motives are questionable, to put it charitably.

As more evidence surfaces of Obama’s under-handed surveillance of Trump, it should become crystal clear who the real authoritarian is.

Matthew Vadum, senior vice president at the investigative think tank Capital Research Center, is an award-winning investigative reporter and author of the book, "Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers."

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266016/obamas-wiretaps-matthew-vadum

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