By Matthew Vadum —— Bio and Archives April 8, 2017
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American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.A note at the bottom of the web page states, “A version of this article appears in print on January 20, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides.” (Note the Old Gray Lady’s use of the word “Wiretapped.”) So there is evidence out there in media outlets that left-wingers accept as credible that supports Trump’s wiretapping allegation against Obama. Whether that evidence is trustworthy or relevant will be decided at some point in the future – but it does exist regardless of the increasingly strident posturing of Fox News Channel’s worst anchor, Shepard Smith. Some hairsplitting left-wingers pillory Trump for tweeting that President Obama, as opposed to the FBI, wiretapped him. This is semantic goalpost-shifting. Although the FBI enjoys great independence from the White House, it remains part of the Department of Justice in the administration of the sitting president. And in colloquial American speech, that is, expression outside of legal documents and formal writing, people commonly attribute actions by federal employees to their ultimate overseer, the president of the United States of America. George H.W. Bush is commonly said to have raised Americans’ taxes in 1990, even though all he did in the legislative process – apart from being a RINO coward and betraying his political base – was minimal as he signed into law a bill that the people’s representatives in the House and Senate had sent him. So according to this longstanding linguistic convention, because Barack Obama was president when the FBI sought the warrants against the Trump people, Barack Obama sought the wiretapping warrants, just as Donald Trump tweeted. Some of the other intellectuals on the Left even attack Trump for supposedly using the verb “wiretap” incorrectly. David Jackson of USA Today accuses Trump in a March 16 piece of “trying to alter the meaning of the term ‘wiretap.’” He adds, “[f]or days, Trump aides have tried to shift the term ‘wiretapping’ to ‘surveillance.’” If true, Trump aides under pressure from the media have been wasting their time. Their boss got it right the first time, using the verb correctly on Twitter. This is confirmed by the authoritative textbook, Introduction to Computer Security, by Matt Bishop, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis. “Wiretapping, or passive wiretapping, is a form of snooping in which a network is monitored. (It is called ‘wiretapping’ because of the ‘wires’ that compose the network, although the term is used even if no physical wiring is involved.)” There is the apparent admission of the existence of an Obama-era IC conspiracy by Dr. Evelyn N. Farkas to MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski on March 27. Farkas left her post as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia in 2015 and went on to serve as a foreign policy advisor to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Then there’s the March 16 allegation by Fox News contributor Andrew Napolitano who, citing unnamed sources, claimed President Obama may have used British intelligence to spy on Trump.
Sources have told me that the British foreign surveillance service, the Government Communications Headquarters, known as GCHQ, most likely provided Obama with transcripts of Trump’s calls. The NSA has given GCHQ full 24/7 access to its computers, so GCHQ — a foreign intelligence agency that, like the NSA, operates outside our constitutional norms — has the digital versions of all electronic communications made in America in 2016, including Trump’s. So by bypassing all American intelligence services, Obama would have had access to what he wanted with no Obama administration fingerprints. Thus, when senior American intelligence officials denied that their agencies knew about this, they were probably being truthful. Adding to this ominous scenario is the fact that three days after Trump’s inauguration, the head of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, abruptly resigned, stating that he wished to spend more time with his family.Although Napolitano, who was briefly suspended by Fox News management for this statement, has been ridiculed for this claim, it isn’t as far-fetched as it may initially seem. As my intrepid Capital Research Center colleague, Dr. Steven J. Allen, informed me, the United States and United Kingdom are parties to a multilateral intelligence cooperation pact. This five-way intelligence alliance among the U.S., United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada is called Five Eyes (FVEY). It obligates the countries to work together in the area of signals intelligence (SIGINT). SIGINT is the gathering of intelligence related to communications between individuals (COMINT) and or from electronic signals not directly used in communication (ELINT). Her Majesty’s Government has allowed the U.S. to spy on Britons. The Independent reported in 2013 that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government “gave America permission to store and analyse the email, mobile phone and internet records of potentially millions of innocent Britons” and that there “is no evidence that the practice has been discontinued.” The report added, “US intelligence uses a practice called ‘contact chaining’ – gathering data not just on surveillance target, but that of their friends and their friends, too.” So if Napolitano’s sources are correct, British spymasters may very well have had no good reason to turn down a request from Obama or his subordinates to spy on Trump’s people This is not an exhaustive compilation of evidence that bolsters Trump’s claim. But it is enough to show that the president isn’t making a “baseless” accusation against his predecessor.
Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
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