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It looks like Obama did spy on Trump, just as he apparently did to me


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2017 Sep 20, 4:36pm   2,372 views  6 comments

by Blurtman   ➕follow (2)   💰tip   ignore  

Many in the media are diving deeply into minutiae in order to discredit any notion that President Trump might have been onto something in March when he fired off a series of tweets claiming President Obama had “tapped” “wires” in Trump Tower just before the election.

According to media reports this week, the FBI did indeed “wiretap” the former head of Trump’s campaign, Paul Manafort, both before and after Trump was elected. If Trump officials — or Trump himself — communicated with Manafort during the wiretaps, they would have been recorded, too.

But we’re missing the bigger story.

If these reports are accurate, it means U.S. intelligence agencies secretly surveilled at least a half dozen Trump associates. And those are just the ones we know about.
Besides Manafort, the officials include former Trump advisers Carter Page and Michael Flynn. Last week, we discovered multiple Trump “transition officials” were “incidentally” captured during government surveillance of a foreign official. We know this because former Obama adviser Susan Rice reportedly admitted “unmasking,” or asking to know the identities of, the officials. Spying on U.S. citizens is considered so sensitive, their names are supposed to be hidden or “masked,” even inside the government, to protect their privacy.

In May, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates acknowledged they, too, reviewed communications of political figures, secretly collected under President Obama.
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Patterns

It’s difficult not to see patterns in the government’s behavior, unless you’re wearing blinders.

The intelligence community secretly expanded its authority in 2011 so it can monitor innocent U.S. citizens like you and me for doing nothing more than mentioning a target’s name a single time.
In January 2016, a top secret inspector general report found the NSA violated the very laws designed to prevent abuse.
In 2016, Obama officials searched through intelligence on U.S. citizens a record 30,000 times, up from 9,500 in 2013.
Two weeks before the election, at a secret hearing before the FISA court overseeing government surveillance, NSA officials confessed they’d violated privacy safeguards “with much greater frequency” than they’d admitted. The judge accused them of “institutional lack of candor” and said, “this is a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”
Officials involved in the surveillance and unmasking of U.S. citizens have said their actions were legal and not politically motivated. And there are certainly legitimate areas of inquiry to be made by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. But look at the patterns. It seems that government monitoring of journalists, members of Congress and political enemies — under multiple administrations — has become more common than anyone would have imagined two decades ago. So has the unmasking of sensitive and highly protected names by political officials.

Those deflecting with minutiae are missing the point. To me, they sound like the ones who aren’t thinking.

http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/351495-it-looks-like-obama-did-spy-on-trump-just-as-he-did-to-me

#Obey

Comments 1 - 6 of 6        Search these comments

1   MisdemeanorRebel   2017 Sep 20, 6:44pm  

I'm confused as to how Clapper could state in categorical terms that neither Trump nor his campaign was the subject of wiretapping in March.

The DNI is notified of all FISA warrants. Since Clapper was never disciplined for lying to Congress and the American Public, he was still DNI when the FBI got yet another FISA warrant (after at least one failed attempt) on Manafort.

Unless he just baldly lied on national television again.

Or he was deliberately kept out of the loop.
2   lostand confused   2017 Sep 20, 9:07pm  

TwoScoopsMcGee says

Unless he just baldly lied on national television again.

Or he was deliberately kept out of the loop

Interestng, I didn't consider the second possibility. Very interesting developments. From a constitutional scholar no less.
3   CBOEtrader   2017 Sep 21, 2:17am  

illegal wiretapping and abuse of power are the real story. the Russian nonsense is a cover
4   joeyjojojunior   2017 Sep 21, 5:06am  

CBOEtrader says
illegal wiretapping and abuse of power are the real story. the Russian nonsense is a cover


And you have evidence of illegal wiretapping?
5   joeyjojojunior   2017 Sep 21, 5:06am  

TwoScoopsMcGee says
I'm confused as to how Clapper could state in categorical terms that neither Trump nor his campaign was the subject of wiretapping in March.


Why don't you print/link to the quote and let's see what exactly he said.
6   joeyjojojunior   2017 Sep 21, 5:07am  

TwoScoopsMcGee says
The DNI is notified of all FISA warrants. Since Clapper was never disciplined for lying to Congress and the American Public, he was still DNI when the FBI got yet another FISA warrant (after at least one failed attempt) on Manafort


Also--can you link to the evidence of a failed warrant on Manafort? You keep referencing this.

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