Surveillance Within Trump Tower

For John, BLUF:  Of course there was, but who cares now?  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Here is the short form version of the story.

Tucker Carlson: "Patronizing Assurances That No One Was Spying On Political Campaigns Were False, Probably Intentionally So"

This is from Real Clear Politics and Reporter Tim Hains, posted 20 September 2017.  It includes a video.

Here is the lede plus three:

According to a new report from CNN, Paul Manafort, who for a time last year was the Trump campaign chairman, was indeed wiretapped by the federal government, both before and after the election.

Manafort, it ought to be noted, had an apartment inside Trump Tower at that time, so it is virtually certain that surveillance of him would have included other members of the Trump campaign staff, maybe even Trump himself.  In other words, it looks like Trump's tweet may have been right.  So why did three top members of Congress from both parties, and the country's top law enforcement officers all assure us that the surveillance didn't happen?  That there wasn't a shred of evidence to suggest it had happened? Were they lying or did tey simply not know?

Neither answer is comforting.

Either the intelligence agency has gone rogue, pursuing its own goals without meaningful oversight from elected officials, or, our elected officials are colluding with each other to lie to the public, apparently for political reasons.

Don't you wish Richard Nixon was still in the White House?  If he was this would are a major scandal.

Here is the long form version of the story.

WHY OBAMA REALLY SPIED ON TRUMP

The sub-headline is:

Obama had to spy on Trump to protect himself.

From Front Page Magazine and Writer Daniel Greenfield, it has a dateline of 20 September 2017.

The lede and a few:

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

Last week, CNN revealed (and excused) one phase of the Obama spying operation on Trump.  After lying about it on MSNBC, Susan Rice admitted unmasking the identities of Trump officials to Congress.

Rice was unmasking the names of Trump officials a month before leaving office.  The targets may have included her own successor, General Flynn, who was forced out of office using leaked surveillance.

While Rice’s targets weren’t named, the CNN story listed a meeting with Flynn, Bannon and Kushner.

Bannon was Trump’s former campaign chief executive and a senior adviser.  Kushner is a senior adviser.  Those are exactly the people you spy on to get an insight into what your political opponents plan to do.

Now the latest CNN spin piece informs us that secret FISA orders were used to spy on the conversations of Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.  The surveillance was discontinued for lack of evidence and then renewed under a new warrant.  This is part of a pattern of FISA abuses by Obama Inc. which never allowed minor matters like lack of evidence to dissuade them from new FISA requests.

Desperate Obama cronies had figured out that they could bypass many of the limitations on the conventional investigations of their political opponents by ‘laundering’ them through national security.

I am hoping the current Ken Burns series on Viet-nam will talk about the Domestic Spying that went on in the 1960s and early 1970s.  Things covered by the Church Committee.  Then there was the veneer of national security.  Today it is just politics.♠

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  I wonder if Mrs Clinton thinks back to her time on the Senate Watergate Committee as a staffer and thinks about how wrong President Nixon was, or if she thinks that he was just wrong to get caught.