"Obama wiretapped Trump Tower - well, just kidding, dunno really"

[Aeson]

... but momma ... Hillary did it first!

[-Jrabbit]

BTW, how much money did Hillary and the Clinton Foundation receive from Saudi Arabia compared to how much Trump received from Russia?

Another weak deflection, Kid. Try to stay on topic.

BTW, the answer is simple: we need the investigations completed so we can answer such questions.

[rah]

Kid doesn't need facts, they just get in the way.

[Kidlicious]

JR's conspiracy theory is too fascinating so I have to deflect.

[-Jrabbit]

What is this conspiracy theory that you think I subscribe to? Be specific.

[rah]

Good luck with that.

That's kidspeak for "he doesn't understand"

[Broken_Erika]

Can't we just throw all the Republicans and Democrats in jail? It's like trying to figure out which is worse, Heroin or Crack.

[Kidlicious]

What is this conspiracy theory that you think I subscribe to? Be specific.

Depends. Do you hope for impeachment or just to justify spying on republicans?

[rah]

So you admit that you don't even know what conspiracy theory. You are pathetic. Is there anything you won't just make up?

[ZEE]

I have nevar seen Kidicious PWN so much ass as I have seen in this thrade.

My goal is to eventually poast and think exactly the way Kidicious does, so I can PWN soem asses one day as well!

[Kidlicious]

Obama Political Spying Scandal: Trump Associates Were Not the First Targets


by Andrew C. McCarthyApril 18, 2017 12:27 PM

@AndrewCMcCarthy This list includes Dennis Kucinich and investigative journalists.

In 2011, Dennis Kucinich was still a Democratic congressman from Ohio. But he was not walking in lockstep with President Obama — at least not on Libya. True to his anti-war leanings, Kucinich was a staunch opponent of Obama’s unauthorized war against the Qaddafi regime.

Kucinich’s very public efforts included trying to broker negotiations between the administration and the Qaddafi regime, to whom the White House was turning a deaf ear. It was in that context that he took a call in his Washington office from Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, the ruler’s son and confidant. Four years later, as he recalled in a recent opinion piece, Kucinich learned that the call had been recorded and leaked to the Washington Times.

The former lawmaker believes the monitoring of his communication and the subsequent leak are the work of American intelligence agents.

To be sure, it is not a solid case. Kucinich is now a commentator at Fox News, on whose website he explains his side of the story, and on whose programming ardently pro-Trump contributors are a staple — including contributors who have been sympathetic to the new president’s claim that he was monitored by his predecessor. The gist of Kucinich’s piece is to “vouch for the fact that extracurricular surveillance does occur.” The express point is to counter the ridicule heaped on Trump’s claim that he personally was wiretapped at Trump Tower.

–– ADVERTISEMENT ––


As we’ve repeatedly noted (see, e.g.,here, here, and here), there is no known support for Trump’s narrow claim (made in a series of March 4 tweets). Yet, there is now overwhelming evidence that the Obama administration monitored Trump associates and campaign and transition officials. There were, moreover, leaks of classified information to the media — particularly in the case of Trump’s original national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, whose telephone communications with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. were unlawfully disclosed to theWashington Post.

There is a question closely related to that of whether the Obama administration was guilty of a gross abuse of power — exploiting its foreign-intelligence-collection authority to keep tabs on its political opponents, thwarting and punishing their resistance. The question is: Did it start with Donald Trump?

The answer is no.

In an important analysis published byTablet magazine, Lee Smith considers the likely abuse of foreign-intelligence-collection authority by the Obama administration in connection with negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. The White House knew there would be vigorous Israeli opposition to the Iran deal — just as there was ardent American opposition to the highly objectionable pact. Notwithstanding that Israel is an important ally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., became surveillance targets — agents of a foreign power, treated no differently under the law than such operatives of hostile foreign powers. Fair enough — it is simply a fact that allies occasionally spy on each other. Obviously, their interests sometimes diverge.

But there was something different about this monitoring initiative. It was not targeted merely at Israeli officials plotting their opposition strategy. TheWall Street Journal, Smith notes, reported in late December 2015 that the targeting “also swept up the contents of some of [the Israeli officials’] private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”

Smith continues:

“At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents,” says a pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the day-to-day fight over the Iran Deal. “The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans engaged in perfectly legitimate political activism — activism, due to the nature of the issue, that naturally involved conversations with foreigners. We began to notice the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our own paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.

This is what systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection for domestic political purposes looks like: Intelligence collected on Americans, lawmakers, and figures in the pro-Israel community was fed back to the Obama White House as part of its political operations. The administration got the drop on its opponents by using classified information, which it then used to draw up its own game plan to block and freeze those on the other side. And — with the help of certain journalists whose stories (and thus careers) depend on high-level access — terrorize them.

Once you understand how this may have worked, it becomes easier to comprehend why and how we keep being fed daily treats of Trump’s nefarious Russia ties. The issue this time isn’t Israel, but Russia, yet the basic contours may very well be the same.

That, of course, is the Russia issue. Kremlin subterfuge is incontestably a legitimate basis for intelligence collection — indeed, a compelling one. But even a compelling rationale can be used pretextually. Was Russia, and specifically the overwrought “Russia hacked the election” narrative, used as camouflage for what was actually a political spying operation? MORE ARTICLESHOME

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Do you really think the Obama administration, which turned the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department into process cudgels for beating Obama detractors, would be above that sort of thing?

At her website, Sharyl Attkisson providesa very useful “Obama-era Surveillance Timeline” — with “surveillance” broadly construed to encompass many varieties of government power to collect and coerce the production of information. Attkisson notes, for example:

The IRS’s targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, a politicized initiative that stymied the groups’ ability to contest Obama’s reelection in 2012.

The administration’s targeting of journalists, including (a) attorney general Eric Holder’s approval of the seizure of personal and business phone records of Associated Press reporters en masse (i.e., not a particularized search targeting a specific journalist suspected of wrongdoing); and (b) Holder’s approval of a warrant targeting the e-mails of Fox News reporter James Rosen in a leak investigation — based on an application in which the government represented to a federal court that the journalist could be guilty of a felony violation of the Espionage Act in connection with a leak of classified information (in addition to purportedly being a “flight risk”).

The administration’s 2011 loosening of minimization procedures to enable more-liberal scrutiny of communications of American citizens incidentally swept up in foreign-intelligence gathering

The administration’s leaks to the media of sensitive government information in apparent retaliation against whistleblowers in the “Fast and Furious” scandal (a scandal in connection with which Holder, after misleading Congress about the “gun-walking” scheme, was ultimately held in contempt of Congress for stonewalling committee subpoenas).

The CIA’s accessing of Senate Intelligence Committee computers and staff e-mails — which CIA director John Brennan initially denied, then apologized for after it was confirmed by an inspector-general report.

The investigation of Trump associate Carter Page, including a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant based on the claim that Page was a Russian agent, which would have authorized monitoring of Page’s communications — including any with Trump, then the Republican nominee for president.

The criminal leaking to the media of former Trump national-security adviser Michael Flynn’s communications with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.

The “unmasking” of identities of Americans (connected to Trump) at the behest of Obama national-security adviser Susan Rice, a White House staffer and Obama confidant.

The promulgation in the last days of Obama’s presidency of new rules enabling the spreading of raw intelligence, including “unmasked” American identities, across the 17-agency U.S. “intelligence community” — which significantly increased the likelihood of leaks. At the same time, according to former Obama Defense Department official Evelyn Farkas, current and former Obama officials were encouraging the transmission of information regarding Trump and his associates to Capitol Hill, further magnifying the potential for leaking.

Ms. Attkisson also has her own story to tell. Formerly at CBS News, she was one of the few journalists at mainstream outlets who aggressively reported on the Fast and Furious scandal and the Benghazi massacre. In the latter, we recall, Rice and other Obama officials falsely told the public that the attack, which resulted in the killing of four Americans including the U.S. ambassador, grew out of spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim video (rather than being a coordinated jihadist strike). The Obama administration later used its criminal-prosecution authority to trump up a case against its chosen scapegoat: the video producer.

Attkisson’s reporting prompted internal administration complaints that she was “out of control.”

As a tale of political spying intrigue, Dennis Kucinich’s story would not be worth telling. But can it so easily be dismissed after the spying on American critics of the Iran deal?

Based on examinations by two forensic experts, Attkisson and CBS eventually reported that her personal and work computers were “accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions.” Was this “unknown party” the government? The experts say it was a highly advanced intruder, which “used sophisticated methods to remove all possible indications of unauthorized activity.” Moreover, one computer was infiltrated remotely by the use of “new spy software proprietary to a federal agency.”

One of Attkisson’s sources — an unidentified “intelligence-connected” source who suggests that she has been under government surveillance — told her, as she puts it, that “the government has pushed the envelope like never before and that the public would be shocked to ‘learn the extent that the government is conducting surveillance of private citizens.’” According to Attkisson, the FBI opened an investigation of intrusions of her computer. Although the bureau contacted CBS, agents never contacted her, Attkisson reports. In addition, despite her numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the FBI is said to be withholding investigative information about her.

Is Kucinich another case in point? For now, it is impossible to say.

It is a good bet that the National Security Agency was monitoring the communications of Qaddafi’s son and other regime figures in 2011. If so, it is likely that then-congressman Kucinich was lawfully intercepted “incidentally.” It is also entirely possible, however, that the Libyans themselves were recording their conversations with prominent Americans and that the Kucinich–Qaddafi call was found after the regime fell.

The Washington Times reporters did not reveal to Kucinich how they had gotten the tape, but the paper’s related stories had referred to “secret audio recordings recovered from Tripoli.” Moreover, if the Obama administration had been behind a vindictive leak against Kucinich, one might have expected the leak to have happened in 2011, during Kucinich’s prominent opposition to the Libya war, rather than four years later, when the regime had long been toppled and Kucinich had retired from Congress.

On the other hand, Kucinich recounts that the recording is very clear on both ends (one might expect a Libyan recording would be distinctly clearer on the Libyan end). The Washington Times also does not seem the most natural destination for a secret disclosure from Libya. Furthermore, Kucinich explains, he made routine FOIA requests regarding information pertinent to him before leaving Congress in 2012. Although he did not learn of the recording until 2015, these FOIA requests would have covered his communication with Qaddafi, he adds. Kucinich says that some of the intelligence agencies have failed to respond.

On its own, Dennis Kucinich’s story would not be worth telling — not as a tale of political spying intrigue. But can it so easily be dismissed after the spying on American critics of the Iran deal? The measures taken to make “incidental” monitoring of Americans easier, its fruits far more widely disseminated and, inevitably, criminally leaked? The shocking abuse of IRS processes to collect information on, and procedurally persecute, Barack Obama’s political adversaries? Fast and Furious — the use of government police powers to create a political anti-gun narrative, then the contemptuous cover-up when it went horribly wrong, resulting in a Border Patrol officer’s death? The scandalous Benghazi cover-up — including a bogus prosecution of a pathetic video producer to help prop up the fraud? The monitoring of Trump associates and members of his campaign and transition staffs — the unmasking, the intentional wide dissemination of raw intelligence, the willful felony publication of classified information?



There is considerably more evidence that the Obama administration grossly abused its awesome intelligence-gathering and law-enforcement powers than that Russian meddling had a meaningful impact on the 2016 election. And these abuses of power certainly did not start with the targeting of Donald Trump’s campaign.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

Editor’s Note: This piece has been emended since its initial posting.



Comments

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0
6' North Korean troops on parade in Pyongyang (Reuters photo: Damir Sagolj)Is America Really Ready for a Second Korean War?


by David FrenchApril 18, 2017 2:58 PM

@DavidAFrench The costs of a 21st-century conflict on the Korean peninsula would be devastatingly high.

The first and only time I’ve been jolted awake by air-raid sirens came in Seoul, South Korea, in 2010. I had of course heard tornado-warning sirens before; I grew up in the South, after all. But I’d never heard anything like this. I was sleeping in a tent in the middle of the Yongsan Garrison, taking a break from my night shift during a military exercise called Operation Key Resolve, which was designed to simulate the resumption of hostilities on the Korean peninsula. For the last several nights, I’d been thinking about nothing but the next Korean War as I watched the simulated advance of North Korean infantry divisions toward Seoul.

So when the air-raid sirens went off in mid-afternoon, for a half-second before I got my bearings and realized it was a routine drill, I thought the nightmare scenario I had seen on the computer screen had become real, and I had seconds to find cover before North Korean artillery flattened part of Seoul.

03:44PM

• NEXT ARTICLE

[Kidlicious]

Some people said before this scandal that Obama was spying on them.

“At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents,” says a pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the day-to-day fight over the Iran Deal. “The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans engaged in perfectly legitimate political activism — activism, due to the nature of the issue, that naturally involved conversations with foreigners. We began to notice the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our own paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.

This is what systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection for domestic political purposes looks like: Intelligence collected on Americans, lawmakers, and figures in the pro-Israel community was fed back to the Obama White House as part of its political operations. The administration got the drop on its opponents by using classified information, which it then used to draw up its own game plan to block and freeze those on the other side. And — with the help of certain journalists whose stories (and thus careers) depend on high-level access — terrorize them.

Once you understand how this may have worked, it becomes easier to comprehend why and how we keep being fed daily treats of Trump’s nefarious Russia ties. The issue this time isn’t Israel, but Russia, yet the basic contours may very well be the same.

Obama may have spied on Kucinich and opponents of Iran who spoke to Israeli officials.

Not my conspiracy theory. Just reporting.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446843/barack-obama-spying-journalists-dennis-kucinich-sharyl-attkisson-donald-trump-campaign-transition

[Kidlicious]

The discredited dossier was used to get a FISA warrant for Carter Page. There doesn't seem to be any warrant for spying on any other Trump associate.

FBI used dossier allegations to bolster Trump-Russia investigation


By Evan Perez, Shimon Prokupecz and Manu Raju, CNN



Updated 8:07 PM ET, Tue April 18, 2017


Sources: FBI used dossier allegations to bolster Trump-Russia investigation 03:39Washington (CNN)The FBI last year used a dossier of allegations of Russian ties to Donald Trump's campaign as part of the justification to win approval to secretly monitor a Trump associate, according to US officials briefed on the investigation.

The dossier has also been cited by FBI Director James Comey in some of his briefings to members of Congress in recent weeks, as one of the sources of information the bureau has used to bolster its investigation, according to US officials briefed on the probe.
This includes approval from the secret court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to monitor the communications of Carter Page, two of the officials said. Last year, Page was identified by the Trump campaign as an adviser on national security.
Officials familiar with the process say even if the application to monitor Page included information from the dossier, it would only be after the FBI had corroborated the information through its own investigation. The officials would not say what or how much was corroborated.The dossier first came to light when CNN reported that a summary of it had been presented to President Obama and President-elect Trump back in December by top US Intelligence officials.
Comey's briefings to lawmakers stand in contrast to efforts in recent months by the bureau and US intelligence agencies to try to distance themselves from the dossier.
US law enforcement and intelligence officials have said US investigators did their own work, separate from the dossier, to support their findings that Russia tried to meddle in the 2016 presidential election in favor of Trump.
The dossier alleges that Page met senior Russian officials as an emissary of the Trump campaign, and discussed quid-pro-quo deals relating to sanctions, business opportunities and Russia's interference in the election. Page has denied meeting the officials named in the dossier and says he never cut any political deals with the Kremlin.
During the campaign, he traveled to Russia in July, where he gave a lecture critical of US policy toward Russia. That trip drew the attention of the FBI and raised concerns about Page's contacts with suspected Russian operatives, according to US officials briefed on the matter. Page has said he made the trip independent of the Trump campaign and his speech reflected his own views.
Page has also disputed any wrongdoing and says there was nothing illegal in his interactions with Russian officials. He blames former Obama administration officials for pushing the Russia allegations.
"I look forward to the Privacy Act of 1974 lawsuit that I plan to file in response to the civil rights violations by Obama administration appointees last year," Page said in a statement to CNN. "The discovery process will be of great value to the United States, as our nation hears testimony from them under oath, and we receive disclosure of the documents which show what exactly was done in 2016."
The dossier is a collection of memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative working for political opponents of Trump. The memos purport to describe efforts by Russian intelligence to gather compromising information on Trump. CNN reported earlier this year that both President Obama and then-President Elect Trump were briefed on the dossier's existence in part to ensure that Trump understood what was being circulating among intelligence agencies investigating the dossier, and also to emphasize that Russia sought to compile information damaging to Republicans and Democrats. US investigators say they have corroborated some aspects of the allegations, particularly the conversations between foreign nationals that took place as described in the reports.
Comey hasn't mentioned the dossier in all his briefings to lawmakers, according to people familiar with the briefings. To some of them, he has emphasized that the FBI gathered evidence as part of its investigation to support seeking FISA court approval and to take other steps as part of the probe that began last July, according to the officials briefed of the probe.
The Washington Post was first to report the FISA court warrant targeting Page.
To obtain court permission to target Page, the FBI and Justice Department would have to present probable cause that he was acting as an agent of a foreign power, including possibly engaging in clandestine intelligence gathering for a foreign government. Comey and other top Justice Department officials would have to sign off on the application, which government officials say involves a rigorous review process.
Then-candidate Trump cited Page last year in an interview as one of his advisers on national security matters. He was officially on the campaign foreign policy team from March 2016 to September 2016. Page calls himself a 'junior member of the team" and Trump officials have said he had no influential role with the campaign.
The FBI became interested in Page, the officials say, in part because of concerns about his interactions with suspected Russian intelligence operatives last year. The Justice Department and FBI haven't accused Page of wrongdoing and it's unclear whether any charges could be brought in the investigation.
The FBI already knew about Page because of his role as a witness in the 2013 federal prosecution of an undercover Russian spy. Prosecutors alleged that the spy had tried to cultivate Page as a source. Page denies he knew he was interacting with a Russian spy.
Page was also among those who met with Russia's ambassador, Sergey Kislyak during the Republican National Convention in 2016.

[Kidlicious]

He was a conduit for political espionage against Trump.


Last October, Harry Reid, the ruthlessly partisan former senator from Nevada, wrote a nasty and bumptious letter to FBI director James Comey. The letter remains a significant piece of evidence in Obamagate, as it confirms his role as conduit for Obama administration’s political espionage against Trump.

“In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government,” he wrote. “The public has a right to know this information. I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public. There is no danger to American interests from releasing it. And yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information.”

Who were those “top officials” whispering the fable of Trump-Russia collusion in Reid’s ear? One was John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director. Last August, Brennan shared his political espionage with Reid, knowing that Reid would then disseminate it to his friends in the liberal media.

“In an Aug. 25 briefing for Harry Reid, then the top Democrat in the Senate, Mr. Brennan indicated that Russia’s hackings appeared aimed at helping Mr. Trump win the November election, according to two former officials with knowledge of the briefing,” reported the New York Times earlier this month. “The officials said Mr. Brennan also indicated that unnamed advisers to Mr. Trump might be working with the Russians to interfere in the election. The F.B.I. and two congressional committees are now investigating that claim, focusing on possible communications and financial dealings between Russian affiliates and a handful of former advisers to Mr. Trump. So far, no proof of collusion has emerged publicly.”

Was Brennan also using Reid to put additional pressure on Comey to accelerate his investigation into Trumpworld? Notice this extraordinary paragraph in the Times report:

In the August briefing for Mr. Reid, the two former officials said, Mr. Brennan indicated that the C.I.A., focused on foreign intelligence, was limited in its legal ability to investigate possible connections to Mr. Trump. The officials said Mr. Brennan told Mr. Reid that the F.B.I., in charge of domestic intelligence, would have to lead the way. Days later, Mr. Reid wrote to James B. Comey, director of the F.B.I. Without mentioning the C.I.A. briefing, Mr. Reid told Mr. Comey that he had “recently become concerned” that Russia’s interference was “more extensive than widely known.”

It was reported this week that the discredited dossier of the former British spy Christopher Steele — which he slapped together at the direction of Trump’s political opponents — served, astonishingly, as one of the justifications for spying on campaign volunteer Carter Page.

This is the same dossier that John Brennan denies even reading. In January, after Trump wondered if he had leaked it, Brennan played the innocent, saying, “First of all, this is not intelligence community information” and that he had “no interest in trying to give that dossier any additional airtime.”

But Harry Reid says that he saw Steele’s dossier before firing off his letters to Comey. As BuzzFeed reported in January, “Harry Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson tweeted Tuesday that the former Senate Democratic leader had seen the documents before writing a public letter to FBI Director James Comey about Trump’s ties to Russia.” In other words, Reid must have discussed Steele’s dossier during his briefing with Brennan.

Brennan’s claim that he never read the Steele dossier is also contradicted by the British press, which has reported that Steele took it to the CIA. Reported the Independent: “Mr Steele also decided to pass on information to both British and American intelligence officials after concluding that such material should not just be in the hands of political opponents of Mr Trump, who had hired his services, but was a matter of national security for both countries.”

What emerges from these fragments is a picture of far-flung and stunningly flaky political espionage — a game of Russian whispers played by partisans desperate to interpret the shoddiest “intelligence” in the most sinister light in order to help Hillary and hurt Trump.

https://spectator.org/dirty-harry-reids-role-in-obamagate/

Former CIA Director John Brennan must have lied when he said that he had not seen the dossier.

[grumbler]

A, the good ol' American Spectator: creating Fake News before that was even cool.