© AP Photo/Saul Loeb/Pool
The swirling battle in Washington over President Trump's desire for a detente with Russia has just taken a dramatic twist with President Trump's disclosure in an extraordinary series of tweets that back in October - just before the election - US President Obama had Trump's office in Trump Tower tapped.
The President has also disclosed that a court initially refused Obama's request for a warrant to have Trump Tower tapped, though a renewed request was later granted.
This means that the wiretap was legal, and that the Obama administration presented some evidence to the court, which the court accepted, that there were legitimate grounds for the wiretap. In the event the wiretap found nothing.
Details of what happened have been provided by conservative radio host Mark Levin in comments which were almost certainly sourced from the White House (probably from Steve Bannon) and which have been expanded in an article in Breitbart News. Mark Levin's timeline is as follows
1. June 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration files a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is denied.Confirmation that the Obama administration did indeed circulate claims about the Trump campaign's alleged contacts with Russia as widely as possible throughout the bureaucracy and to foreign governments was provided by an article by The New York Times. The Moon of Alabama blog has thoroughly discussed the implications of the revelations in this article. I would merely add to that discussion the following:
2. July: Russia joke. Wikileaks releases emails from the Democratic National Committee that show an effort to prevent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) from winning the presidential nomination. In a press conference, Donald Trump refers to Hillary Clinton's own missing emails, joking: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing." That remark becomes the basis for accusations by Clinton and the media that Trump invited further hacking.
3. October: Podesta emails. In October, Wikileaks releases the emails of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, rolling out batches every day until the election, creating new mini-scandals. The Clinton campaign blames Trump and the Russians.
4. October: FISA request. The Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at National Review later notes. The Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.
5. January 2017: Buzzfeed/CNN dossier. Buzzfeed releases, and CNN reports, a supposed intelligence "dossier" compiled by a foreign former spy. It purports to show continuous contact between Russia and the Trump campaign, and says that the Russians have compromising information about Trump. None of the allegations can be verified and some are proven false. Several media outlets claim that they had been aware of the dossier for months and that it had been circulating in Washington.
6. January: Obama expands NSA sharing. As Michael Walsh later notes, and as the New York Times reports, the outgoing Obama administration "expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government's 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections." The new powers, and reduced protections, could make it easier for intelligence on private citizens to be circulated improperly or leaked.
7. January: Times report. The New York Times reports, on the eve of Inauguration Day, that several agencies — the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Treasury Department are monitoring several associates of the Trump campaign suspected of Russian ties. Other news outlets also report the existence of "a multiagency working group to coordinate investigations across the government," though it is unclear how they found out, since the investigations would have been secret and involved classified information.
8. February: Mike Flynn scandal. Reports emerge that the FBI intercepted a conversation in 2016 between future National Security Adviser Michael Flynn — then a private citizen — and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The intercept supposedly was part of routine spying on the ambassador, not monitoring of the Trump campaign. The FBI transcripts reportedly show the two discussing Obama's newly-imposed sanctions on Russia, though Flynn earlier denied discussing them. Sally Yates, whom Trump would later fire as acting Attorney General for insubordination, is involved in the investigation. In the end, Flynn resigns over having misled Vice President Mike Pence (perhaps inadvertently) about the content of the conversation.
9. February: Times claims extensive Russian contacts. The New York Times cites "four current and former American officials" in reporting that the Trump campaign had "repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials. The Trump campaign denies the claims — and the Times admits that there is "no evidence" of coordination between the campaign and the Russians. The White House and some congressional Republicans begin to raise questions about illegal intelligence leaks.
10. March: the Washington Post targets Jeff Sessions. The Washington Post reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had contact twice with the Russian ambassador during the campaign — once at a Heritage Foundation event and once at a meeting in Sessions's Senate office. The Post suggests that the two meetings contradict Sessions's testimony at his confirmation hearings that he had no contacts with the Russians, though in context (not presented by the Post) it was clear he meant in his capacity as a campaign surrogate, and that he was responding to claims in the "dossier" of ongoing contacts. The New York Times, in covering the story, adds that the Obama White House "rushed to preserve" intelligence related to alleged Russian links with the Trump campaign. By "preserve" it really means "disseminate": officials spread evidence throughout other government agencies "to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators" and perhaps the media as well.
In summary: the Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media.
(1) The New York Times article provided further confirmation to my previous claim that there is a British connection to this affair, with some of the warnings about supposed contacts between people associated with the Trump campaign and various Russians coming from British and Dutch intelligence (I should say that Dutch intelligence has a very long history of close collaboration with British intelligence extending back before the setting up of NATO); and
(2) that The New York Times article essentially admits that there is no evidence that many of the Russians these persons had contacts with were actually Russian intelligence officials as was previously claimed in an earlier article. It turns out that the definition of who is a 'Russian intelligence official' is so flexible that it could be stretched to cover almost any Russian believed to be in good stead with the Russian government. The precise words used in The New York Times article are as follows
The label "intelligence official" is not always cleanly applied in Russia, where ex-spies, oligarchs and government officials often report back to the intelligence services and elsewhere in the Kremlin. Steven L. Hall, the former head of Russia operations at the C.I.A., said that Mr. Putin was surrounded by a cast of characters, and that it was "fair to say that a good number of them come from an intelligence or security background. Once an intel guy, always an intel guy in Russia."That makes it look even more likely that most of these contacts were simply business contacts. Several people associated with Donald Trump eg. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, have long had perfectly legal and public business relationships with Russian businessmen, though contrary to some claims no evidence has ever come to light that Donald Trump ever did on any significant scale. Businessmen meet often to talk business and it is likely that most of the contacts which are being talked about were of this nature.
The New York Times article incidentally confirms that the FBI investigation into these contacts has so far revealed nothing inappropriate about them, and judging from some irritated comments by some Democrats it seems that FBI Director Comey reported as much to Congress yesterday.
The President's tweets on the revelation about the wiretaps follow
Is it legal for a sitting President to be "wire tapping" a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!I would finish by saying that the information that the previous administration was tapping his phone whilst he was still a candidate was almost certainly provided to the President as a first result of the leaks investigation he has ordered.
I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!
How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!
Trump wiretap is the real scandal of the US election, bogus Russia story is the real cover-up
The claim Russia interfered in the election was the cover story to conceal the Obama House/Deep State surveillance of the Trump campaign
Back on 10th October 2016, shortly after the US intelligence community published its first claim that Russia was trying to interfere in the US election, I wrote an article for The Duran in which I pointed out that the true story was that for the first time in its history the US intelligence community was interfering in a US election in order to swing the election behind its favoured candidate - Hillary Clinton - and that the practices the US intelligence community had honed to interfere in elections in other countries were now being imported to the US.
In an article for The Duran on 31st October 2016 - just a week before the election - I said that Hillary Clinton and her supporters had a planted a bomb under US democracy by orchestrating a campaign claiming that her opponent Donald Trump was the favoured candidate of Russia, and that the result would be that if Donald Trump were elected his legitimacy as President would be challenged.
In a further article for The Duran on 10th December 2016, in the fraught run up to the inauguration and whilst the Democrats and the Hillary Clinton campaign were actively lobbying electors on the Electoral College to disregard the results of the election and to vote against Donald Trump, I said that the CIA and the US intelligence community by playing up the paranoia against Russia were engaging in what amounted to a coup against the country's constitutionally elected President. The word 'coup' is now also being used by people like Mark Levin to describe what has been happening.
What we now learn is that the Obama administration, of which Hillary Clinton was once a part, used the US's federal security and intelligence agencies during the election to spy on Hillary Clinton's opponent, Donald Trump, and on his campaign. They did so despite the fact that no evidence existed or has ever come to light of any wrongdoing by Donald Trump or by anyone else working on his behalf or for his campaign such as would normally justify surveillance.
This is the true scandal of the US Presidential election of 2016. By contrast the various claims of Russian interference in the election are unproven and threadbare and almost certainly wrong, whilst the claims of illicit contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia are undoubtedly false and wrong.
Donald Trump is comparing this scandal to Watergate. On any objective assessment it is far worse than Watergate. The reason Richard Nixon had to set up his own amateur intelligence agency within the White House to carry out his 'dirty tricks' - the so-called "White House plumbers" - was because the federal security and intelligence agencies - the CIA and FBI - refused to do his bidding by acting against his political opponents. By contrast on this occasion these same federal security and intelligence agencies have actively colluded in taking action against Donald Trump - the Obama administration's and Hillary Clinton's electoral opponent - by carrying out surveillance upon him and his associates though there has never been any evidence that either he or they did anything wrong. That is something which ought to cause serious concern to people, though so far with the exception of a small number of people it does not appear to be doing so.
Nor did Nixon try to provide legal and political cover for his various activities by orchestrating a bogus campaign that his opponents were somehow allied to Russia or to some other foreign power (eg. China or North Vietnam). By contrast not only did the Obama White House, the Hillary Clinton campaign and certain officials within the US intelligence community do precisely that, but the smoke they have created around this bogus issue in order to conceal and justify their activities continues to confuse many people, and will no doubt go on doing so.
To be clear, just as the wiretapping of Donald Trump's phone and of the Trump campaign are the real scandal of the US election of 2016, so the bogus Russia story is the real cover-up.
To say all this does not unfortunately mean that this scandal is going to play out the way it should, or that people will see it for what it really is.
Many powerful people in the US political system, including in the US's Deep State, in the media and in Congress, are deeply implicated in this scandal, and they will fight tooth and nail any attempt to hold them to account, continuing to use the bogus Russia cover story to justify and protect themselves, as they have been doing successfully up to now.
Beyond that there are a great many people who have bought into the Russia story - bogus though it is - falling for the entirely wrong and repeatedly discredited psuedo-principle that there cannot be smoke without fire (there not only can be; there usually is).
Lastly, the paranoia about Russia in the US and in western Europe is now so great that it is easy to dupe many people by conjuring it.
Nonetheless, though it is far from sure that many people will be able to see the true scandal through all the smoke, the proof of the real scandal of the Presidential election of 2016 is now finally out there. It remains to be seen whether the highly corrupt and deeply compromised US political system retains sufficient vitality and integrity to investigate it.
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