By Matthew Vadum ——Bio and Archives--March 6, 2017
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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 Republican 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.
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Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.