Former President Barack Hussein Obama and some of his top officials may be in serious trouble, analysts suggested, as it appears increasingly likely that they played a key role in illegal surveillance of Donald Trump and his team for the apparent purpose of sabotaging his presidency. But despite Democrat efforts to muddy the waters, the explosive scandal may be just getting started. Various players in the saga continuing to throw out fresh allegations, some of which, if true, could potentially land prominent current and former officials in hot water or even behind bars. And now, despite the FBI refusing to cooperate on the investigation, reports suggest there is “smoking gun” evidence proving that the Obama administration illegally spied on team Trump.
In what has become a confusing mess even to seasoned political analysts and Washington insiders, the growing scandal surrounding allegations that Obama and his minions illegally surveilled Donald Trump continues to dominate the headlines. Democrats and Obama officials are working desperately to distract from the real issues with Kremlin-Trump conspiracy theories. But this week, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said he and his committee have seen evidence that Trump team communications were at least “incidentally collected,” including those of “high-level people in the Trump transition.” From an “intelligence” perspective, the spying had “little or no apparent intelligence value.”
“What I’ve read bothers me,” Nunes told reporters. “And I think it should bother the president himself, and his team because I think some of it seems to be inappropriate.”
“I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show that the president-elect and his team were, I guess, at least monitored,” Nunes said. Basically, Nunes explained, U.S. intelligence agencies were apparently snooping on other people when they intercepted Trump team members’ communications. But then, somebody must have “unmasked” their identities, possibly for political purposes, before sharing the information around — apparently even with foreign governments. Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was one of the victims, with more than a few prominent voices suggesting a “Deep State conspiracy” may be at work to sabotage the new president. Trump said he felt “somewhat” vindicated by the revelations offered by Nunes. But that may be just the start.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is refusing to cooperate with the congressional investigation, Nunes said. “So far the FBI has not told us whether or not they’re going to respond to our March 15th letter, which is now a couple weeks old,” Nunes said in his explosive March 22 press conference, adding that the NSA was “being cooperative” in the inquiry so far. The Republican lawmaker, who is leading the probe, also emphasized that he “cannot rule out” that Obama ordered illegal surveillance on Trump. Those explosive revelations came after FBI boss James Comey told lawmakers he had no information to support Trump’s claim about Obama wiretapping him. Comey refused to comment on whether there was electronic surveillance of Trump’s campaign.
But it may be even more serious than that. Other sources say that there is actually “smoking gun” evidence proving that the Obama administration illegally spied on team Trump. It is reportedly set to be presented to lawmakers very soon, if it has not been done already. “Republican congressional investigators expect a potential smoking gun establishing that the Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team, and possibly the president-elect himself, will be produced to the House Intelligence Committee this week,” Fox News’ James Rosen reported, citing an unnamed source. Rosen himself was the victim of illegal Obama surveillance — one journalist among several who were spied on by Obama, sparking a national scandal and charges that Obama was waging war on journalism.
“The intelligence is said to leave no doubt the Obama administration, in its closing days, was using the cover of legitimate surveillance on foreign targets to spy on President-elect Trump,” Rosen continued in his explosive Fox report. “The key to that conclusion is the unmasking of selected U.S. persons whose names appeared in the intelligence, the sources said, adding that the paper trail leaves no other plausible purpose for the unmasking other than to damage the incoming Trump administration.” The report said all the details and implications might not be clear until next week. If true, multiple legal experts have said the officials involved could be facing jail time.
Other knowledgeable voices say the evidence proving illegal surveillance of Trump already exists but is being ignored by Congress and the FBI. Writing at Newsmax, Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch founder Larry Klayman said his client, former NSA and CIA contractor Dennis Montgomery, “holds the keys to disproving the false claims of those representatives and senators on the House and Senate intelligence committees, reportedly as well as FBI Director James Comey, that there is no evidence that the president and his men were wiretapped.” In fact, there is a massive amount of incontrovertible evidence, but lawmakers and the FBI are doing their best to pretend it does not exist.
According to Klayman, Montgomery, who wanted to blow the whistle on illegal activity, left the CIA and NSA with 600 million pages of information proving, among other crimes, that prominent Americans were being illegally spied upon by the Obama administration. Those included Trump, as well as the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other justices, 156 judges, and more. Apparently all of Obama’s top snoops — including James Clapper and John Brennan — were participants in the illegal “Orwellian Big Brother” intrusion on privacy, “likely for potential coercion, blackmail or other nefarious purposes,” Klayman said. The spy agencies also reportedly manipulated elections to help Obama, he said.
Speaking on Fox Business, Klayman said Obama and his officials involved in the illegal spying scandal broke the law and belong behind bars. “Comey was not truthful with that committee,” the activist and attorney explained. “He was not truthful while under oath…. These intelligence agencies during the Obama administration in particular, were surveilling all Americans and very prominent Americans like President Trump who is a businessman like me, like others, without probable cause. And that is a crime. And these people need to frankly go to jail for what they’ve done.” Indeed, it does appear that numerous criminal laws were violated, not to mention the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution that prohibits spying without a specific warrant based on probable cause.
Popular Judge Andrew Napolitano, a strong advocate of the U.S Constitution, argued that British intelligence likely helped Obama to illegally spy on Trump to help the administration avoid creating a paper trail. Already, it is well documented that the feds illegally and unconstitutionally capture and store virtually every electronic communication in America. “Thus, in 2016, when Trump says the surveillance of him took place, Obama needed only to ask the NSA for a transcript of Trump’s telephone conversations to be prepared from the digital versions that the NSA already possessed,” said Napolitano, who was suspended from Fox under suspicious circumstances after the bombshell revelation.
“But if Obama did order the NSA to prepare transcripts of Trump’s conversations last fall under the pretext of national security — to find out whether Trump was communicating with the Russians would have been a good excuse — there would exist somewhere a record of such an order,” Napolitano continued. “For that reason, if Obama did this, he no doubt used a source on which he’d leave no fingerprints. Enter James Bond.” Citing sources that spoke to Fox News, Napolitano said the lawless British spy agency “Government Communications Headquarters,” also 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,” Napolitano said. “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.” British officials strongly denied the claim, but more than a few experts and analysts have suggested it may well be accurate.
All of the brouhaha led conservative pundit Pat Buchanan to the conclusion that the illegal spying is the real scandal here, not the silly conspiracy theories alleging that Trump is a Kremlin stooge, and that proper investigations must follow. “The real scandal, which the media regard as a diversion from the primary target, Trump, is that a Deep State conspiracy to bring down his presidency seems to have been put in place by Obamaites, and perhaps approved by Obama himself,” Buchanan said in his latest column, headlined “The Obama Plot to Sabotage Trump.”
He pointed out, among other concerns, that an unnamed “senior official” had illegally leaked information on then-Trump adviser Mike Flynn to the far-left, anti-Trump Washington Post, owned by a globalist billionaire with massive contracts with the CIA. Separately, the rabidly pro-Obama New York Times reported on a scheme by the Obama administration to make as much of the “intelligence” it was collecting on Trump and his team available to as many people as possible — including foreign regimes. Presumably, the goal was to damage the incoming president and sabotage his presidency as much as possible. “Is this not disloyalty?” asked Buchanan. “Is this not sedition?”
Attorney General Loretta Lynch also issued “rules” allowing information gathered by the NSA to be shared with 16 other agencies, presumably for nefarious purposes, critics suggested. Now, somebody must be held accountable for the criminal activities. “The Obamaites seeded the U.S. and allied intel communities with IEDs to be detonated on Trump’s arrival,” Buchanan observed, noting that this was the real scandal, not the almost certainly bogus conspiracy theories purporting to link Trump and Putin. “We need to know who colluded with the Russians, if anyone did. But more critically, we need to unearth the deep state conspiracy to sabotage a presidency.”
“So far, the Russia-connection investigation has proven a dry hole,” he added. “But an investigation into who in the FBI, CIA or NSA is unmasking U.S. citizens and criminally leaking information to a Trump-hating press to destroy a president they are sworn to serve could prove to be a gusher. As for the reports of Lynch-White House involvement in this unfolding plot to damage and destroy Trump the real question is: What did Barack Obama know, and when did he know it?”
Meanwhile, congressional Democrats and their establishment-media allies are freaking out, peddling the bizarre conspiracy theories claiming Trump and everyone else who disagrees with them is somehow connected to the Kremlin. And that is despite admitting — repeatedly — to having absolutely no evidence to show that. In a likely effort to distract from the serious scandal now brewing in Washington surrounding Obama’s illegal surveillance, Democrats on the Intelligence Committee are also blasting Nunes and calling for him to be investigated. “I think the actions of today throw great doubt into the ability of both the chairman and the committee to conduct the investigation the way it ought to be conducted,” complained Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the committee, after Nunes’ press conference announcing that he had seen evidence that Trump’s team was spied on.
Beyond just the Obama administration’s apparent abuses in terms of illegally spying on Trump and his team, the whole scandal highlights once more that the federal government is out of control and continues to unconstitutionally spy on the entire American population. This is a hallmark of a police state, not a free society. It is also extremely dangerous, especially considering that Obama was illegally spying on even Supreme Court justices in what experts said may have been an effort to get material for blackmail. The implications for freedom and self-government of this sort of criminal behavior are enormous.
The whole sordid affair also illustrates yet again why America’s founders enshrined the unalienable right to not be illegally spied on in the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. Privacy is crucial to liberty. In addition to prosecuting anyone who may have broken the law with illegal spying, the Trump administration should take this opportunity to dismantle the criminal police-state “intelligence” regime imposed on Americans over the preceding decades in flagrant violation of the Constitution. As the founders are often said to have observed, trading away liberty for security will destroy both.
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU.
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