Sheryl Atkisson: Looks Like Obama Spied on Trump Just Like He Spied on Me

A pattern of using pretexts to spy on problematic American citizens.

Many in the media are diving deeply into minutiae in order to discredit any notion that President Trump might have been onto something in March when he fired off a series of tweets claiming President Obama had "tapped" "wires" in Trump Tower just before the election.

According to media reports this week, the FBI did indeed "wiretap" the former head of Trump's campaign, Paul Manafort, both before and after Trump was elected. If Trump officials -- or Trump himself -- communicated with Manafort during the wiretaps, they would have been recorded, too.

But we’re missing the bigger story.

If these reports are accurate, it means U.S. intelligence agencies secretly surveilled at least a half dozen Trump associates. And those are just the ones we know about.

Besides Manafort, the officials include former Trump advisers Carter Page and Michael Flynn. Last week, we discovered multiple Trump "transition officials" were "incidentally" captured during government surveillance of a foreign official. We know this because former Obama adviser Susan Rice reportedly admitted "unmasking," or asking to know the identities of, the officials. Spying on U.S. citizens is considered so sensitive, their names are supposed to be hidden or "masked," even inside the government, to protect their privacy.

In May, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates acknowledged they, too, reviewed communications of political figures, secretly collected under President Obama.

Nobody wants our intel agencies to be used like the Stasi in East Germany; the secret police spying on its own citizens for political purposes. The prospect of our own NSA, CIA and FBI becoming politically weaponized has been shrouded by untruths, accusations and justifications.

You’ll recall DNI Clapper falsely assured Congress in 2013 that the NSA was not collecting "any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans."

Intel agencies secretly monitored conversations of members of Congress while the Obama administration negotiated the Iran nuclear deal.

In 2014, the CIA got caught spying on Senate Intelligence Committee staffers, though CIA Director John Brennan had explicitly denied that.

...

Journalists have been targeted, too. This internal email, exposed by WikiLeaks, should give everyone chills. It did me.

Dated Sept. 21, 2010, the “global intelligence” firm Stratfor wrote:

[John] Brennan [then an Obama Homeland Security adviser] is behind the witch hunts of investigative journalists learning information from inside the beltway sources....

The government subsequently got caught monitoring journalists at Fox News, The Associated Press, and, as I allege in a federal lawsuit, my computers while I worked as an investigative correspondent at CBS News....

She then recounts her own fight against hacking, and her lawsuit against the government, with our government fighting against her. She says the keylogger software used to hack her is federal government proprietary software.

It recalls what Daniel Greenfield wrote at Townhall: Once you start spying illegally, you have to keep spying illegally, because now you have to keep yourself out of jail.

Meanwhile, Don Surber tries to figure out why the We Bugged Trump story was leaked to CNN -- was it planted by an anti-Mueller hand trying to get Mueller in trouble, or a pro-Mueller hand trying to help him?

He thinks it's the latter.

Ben Domenech has some questions of his own. Remember, the wiretap was removed when the evidence it produced was "not conclusive," then it was re-applied for.

5. When was the wiretap renewed? On whose orders was the request made, and what new justification was involved?

6. If the evidence contained within the conversations the government wiretapped were indeed "not conclusive" about acts of collusion, as two sources tell CNN, why was the wiretap renewed (presuming that was the case) after Manafort left the campaign? Was it investigating the same activity, or new ones?

7. This was a 2014-based investigation given Manafort’s activity on behalf of a Vladimir Putin-friendly political party in Ukraine at the time. Back in April the Podesta Group revised their FARA reporting on their involvement in that Ukraine election, when their activity was directed by Manafort. Was the Podesta Group or any of its officials included in any wiretaps in 2016?

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10. Was any of the justification contained within the application for the wiretap’s renewal dependent on the Steele Memo, whose many claims cannot be substantiated or have been significantly debunked? We know according to prior CNN reporting it was used for approval from a FISA court regarding Carter Page.

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12. Why did Attorney General Jeff Sessions say there was no basis for Trump’s tweet when it seems clear that in fact someone as senior as Manafort, working and operating within Trump Tower, was indeed wiretapped?

By the way, for those on the SubRight determined to defend CNN and their hero Jake Tapper at every turn, even Clapper is now confessing that sure, maybe Trump was intercepted -- incidentally, of course.

The SubRight defenders of the media and Obama's spy ring are cutting the baloney thinner and thinner to claim that Trump wasn't really surveilled.

posted by Ace at 04:54 PM

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