Obama: "No More Illegal Wiretapping of Amerian Citizens"

Jerry Shugart

Well-known member
"The outrage from the media and the Democrats appears to be standard hatred of Trump. The president forced a set of facts into the news cycle that was already previously public but framed in a way that puts his political opponents and the establishment media on the defensive. This appears to be the calculus: either the wiretaps exist, as Trump suggests, and the president will use them to bludgeon the Obama administration and the media for impropriety and overreach; or, there were no wiretaps, which suggests the previous administration had no reason to suspect Trump colluded with a foreign government."

http://dailywesterner.com/news/2017...to-trump-wiretap-claim-raises-more-questions/
 

pondsbb

New member
Copy and paste from a comment section for information purposes, so I don't know who to credit. It is not my own timeline or conclusion.

1. June 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration files a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is denied.

2. July 2016: The Russia joke. Wikileaks releases emails from the Democratic National Committee that show an effort to prevent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) from winning the presidential nomination. In a press conference, Donald Trump refers to Hillary Clinton’s own missing emails, joking: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing.” That remark becomes the basis for accusations by Clinton and the media that Trump invited further hacking.

3. October 2016: Podesta emails. In October, Wikileaks releases the emails of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, rolling out batches every day until the election, creating new mini-scandals. The Clinton campaign blames Trump and the Russians.

4. October 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at National Review later notes. The Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.

5. January 2017: Buzzfeed/CNN dossier. Buzzfeed releases, and CNN reports, a supposed intelligence “dossier” compiled by a foreign former spy. It purports to show continuous contact between Russia and the Trump campaign, and says that the Russians have compromising information about Trump. None of the allegations can be verified and some are proven false. Several media outlets claim that they had been aware of the dossier for months and that it had been circulating in Washington.

6. January 2017: Obama expands NSA sharing. As Michael Walsh later notes, and as the New York Times reports, the outgoing Obama administration “expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.” The new powers, and reduced protections, could make it easier for intelligence on private citizens to be circulated improperly or leaked.

7. January 2017: Times report. The New York Times reports, on the eve of Inauguration Day, that several agencies — the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Treasury Department are monitoring several associates of the Trump campaign suspected of Russian ties. Other news outlets also report the exisentence of “a multiagency working group to coordinate investigations across the government,” though it is unclear how they found out, since the investigations would have been secret and involved classified information.

8. February 2017: Mike Flynn scandal. Reports emerge that the FBI intercepted a conversation in 2016 between future National Security Adviser Michael Flynn — then a private citizen — and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The intercept supposedly was part of routine spying on the ambassador, not monitoring of the Trump campaign. The FBI transcripts reportedly show the two discussing Obama’s newly-imposed sanctions on Russia, though Flynn earlier denied discussing them. Sally Yates, whom Trump would later fire as acting Attorney General for insubordination, is involved in the investigation. In the end, Flynn resigns over having misled Vice President Mike Pence (perhaps inadvertently) about the content of the conversation.

9. February 2017: Times claims extensive Russian contacts. The New York Times cites “four current and former American officials” in reporting that the Trump campaign had “repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials. The Trump campaign denies the claims — and the Times admits that there is “no evidence” of coordination between the campaign and the Russians. The White House and some congressional Republicans begin to raise questions about illegal intelligence leaks.

10. March 2017: the Washington Post targets Jeff Sessions. The Washington Post reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had contact twice with the Russian ambassador during the campaign — once at a Heritage Foundation event and once at a meeting in Sessions’s Senate office. The Post suggests that the two meetings contradict Sessions’s testimony at his confirmation hearings that he had no contacts with the Russians, though in context (not presented by the Post) it was clear he meant in his capacity as a campaign surrogate, and that he was responding to claims in the “dossier” of ongoing contacts. The New York Times, in covering the story, adds that the Obama White House “rushed to preserve” intelligence related to alleged Russian links with the Trump campaign. By “preserve” it really means “disseminate”: officials spread evidence throughout other government agencies “to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators” and perhaps the media as well.

In summary: the Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media.
All in a bid to stop or overthrow a Trump administration.

Sent from my RCT6303W87DK using Tapatalk
 

jgarden

BANNED
Banned
Obama is trying to set up a shadow government - very sneaky and dangerous - SAD
This is the same crowd that supported the "birther" movement for the past 8 years and we all have come to understand the credibility of that assertion!

Now that the Republicans have control of the White House,the House and the Senate, they are still searching for conspiracies and excuses, instead of governing, to divert attention away from their inability to "get-their-act-together!"
 

Jerry Shugart

Well-known member
Now that the Republicans have control of the White House,the House and the Senate, they are still searching for conspiracies and excuses, instead of governing, to divert attention away from their inability to "get-their-act-together!"

Are you denying that those within the Obama administration eavesdropped on the Trump campaign?
 

aCultureWarrior

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Banned
LIFETIME MEMBER
Are you denying that those within the Obama administration eavesdropped on the Trump campaign?


As pondscum posted above, there were numerous requests by the Obama administration, but none were authorized.

The question is: Does Donald the Degenerate have evidence, or is this just a smokescreen that he's using to cover up his (and numerous people within his cabinet) close ties to Putin and Russia?


Trump, Offering No Evidence, Says Obama Tapped His Phones
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/us/politics/trump-obama-tap-phones.html?_r=0
 

Jerry Shugart

Well-known member
The question is: Does Donald the Degenerate have evidence, or is this just a smokescreen that he's using to cover up his (and numerous people within his cabinet) close ties to Putin and Russia?

That's funny!

Where is the evidence that there was ever any discussion between those within the Trump campaign and officals from Russia about rigging the election?

There is not even one piece of evidence but the Demos and mainstream press have already declared Trump guilty!

Now the shoe is on the other foot and you are squealing like a pig!
 

Jerry Shugart

Well-known member
"Interestingly, however, a number of other former Obama administration officials do not deny that such a wiretap existed. They just deny that the White House or Obama himself would have approved it or ordered it, and say that the Department of Justice would have sought it in consultation with a foreign intelligence surveillance, or FISA, court.

Obama’s former speechwriter Jon Favreau tweeted that he would warn reporters against saying there was no wiretap."


I'd be careful about reporting that Obama said there was no wiretapping. Statement just said that neither he nor the WH ordered it.

http://dailywesterner.com/news/2017...to-trump-wiretap-claim-raises-more-questions/

Of course I am sure that the Department of Justice would have sought the approval for wiretapping Trump without Obama's knowledge.
 

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
If the Feds Did Wiretap Trump Tower, It’s Not Obama Who Should Worry

It started, like so many eruptions these days, with a tweet.

Early Saturday morning, President Trump fired off a series of tweets accusing, without evidence, former President Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower in the month before the election. Trump compared the alleged snooping to “Nixon/Watergate,” and intimated legal action.

Anatomy of an Allegation

Baffling as it may be, it appears Trump’s accusation stems from a recent article published on Breitbart, the conservative news outlet formerly run by White House senior adviser Stephen Bannon.

“This is a somewhat stunning, in so far as the president of the United States doesn’t need to get his information about classified activity from Breitbart,” says Cato Institute fellow Julian Sanchez.
. . . .

Look past the president’s conspiracy theories, though, and one fact stands out: However strongly Trump feels that he’s right, he’d better hope he’s wrong.

Tower of FISA

If nothing else, Trump’s tweets show he doesn’t understand how the FISA system works. If he did, he may have limited himself to tweeting about Arnold Schwartzenegger quitting The Apprentice this morning.

“While the order would have been requested by some part of the executive branch, Obama can’t order anything. Nor can Trump,” says former NSA lawyer April Doss, who stresses that her comments are based only on public information. “The order has to come from the court, and the court operates independently.”

FISA court judges serve seven-year appointments, so the court’s composition doesn’t ebb and flow with the political tides. What’s more, specific laws adopted in the wake of Watergate prevent the very activity Trump accuses Obama of.

“You can’t tap the phones of a political candidate for political purposes,” says Doss.

What you could tap them for? Acting as a foreign power, or as an agent of a foreign power. In other words, spying against US interests with both knowledge and intent.

Clearing that bar is difficult, by design. FISA warrants don’t allow for broad wiretaps of, say, every call going in and out of a specific office in a 58-story Manhattan skyscraper. Federal authorities must demonstrate not just probable cause, but that a given phone line serves primarily to undermine US interests. It’s difficult, for instance, to obtain a warrant to wiretap a shared office, for fear of picking up innocent third-party conversations.

“I have high confidence that a FISA court judge would not have authorized any warrant unless it met all the requirements under the statute,” says Doss.

Trump’s wiretap claims, then, carry presumably inadvertent implications. First, based on previous reporting and the nature of FISA courts, any wiretaps within Trump Tower would be legal. And they would stem from overwhelming evidence that the Trump campaign, or someone within it, has unsavory ties to Russia or another foreign power. Otherwise, it’s unlikely those wiretaps would exist at all.

If federal authorities did have cause to listen in on Trump Tower, though, and they provided enough evidence for a FISA court to approve the snooping, Obama is not the one who ought to worry.


 

ok doser

lifeguard at the cement pond
they should call bammy before a grand jury, swear him in and catch him lying :banana:
 
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