When Donald Trump tweeted his accusation in March that former President Obama’s administration had wiretapped his communications and those of his close associates, the liberal establishment attacked Trump, claiming he was making wild accusations without any basis in truth. It is now clear that Trump was on the right track, and the liberal establishment was — as usual — out in left field. Because now, even CNN is reporting that the Obama administration “wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman” Paul Manafort (shown).
While the liberal establishment — and its media outlets (including CNN) — appear determined to pretend that reports of government wiretapping of Trump and associates is a revelation, the fact remains that the only thing new about this story is that the establishment is admitting it happened. Or at least sort of admitting it happened. Because on the same day that CNN ran the headline, “Exclusive: US government wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman,” the almost completely discredited liberal news network also ran another article under the headline, “Donald Trump still has no evidence that his wiretapping claim was right.” This appears to be a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.
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Of course, if the Obama administration was conducting wiretapping of Manafort while he was the chairman of the Trump campaign (which even fake-news-prone CNN is forced to admit), then it is a foregone conclusion that conversations with candidate Trump (and later President-elect Trump) were vacuumed up in that surveillance. As for Trump’s specific claim that “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower,” given the level of surveillance conducted against the Trump campaign by the Obama administration, it is easy to see that Trump’s claim is credible; where there is smoke, there is fire.
Furthermore, it is difficult to believe the denials of the former administration and intelligence officials when one considers that they have been caught lying to protect Hillary Clinton and were shown to have manufactured the “Trump/Russia connection” to bolster Clinton’s claims that Trump is “Putin’s puppet.”
But perhaps the biggest reason to doubt the veracity of the former administration’s denials concerning wiretapping Trump Tower is that the administration lied directly about that very subject. When President Trump took to Twitter in March to accuse Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower, Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis categorically denied the claim, stating:
A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”
Now that even the liberal establishment media are admitting that Obama’s administration had Manafort under surveillance, it is a obvious that Lewis was lying when he said that no “White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen” — unless he expects the American people to believe that Manafort is not a “U.S. citizen.”
And Lewis was not alone in telling that lie. Because former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the same lie in an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press in March. Responding to Trump’s tweets, Clapper told host Chuck Todd, “I can deny it.” He was even more explicit in that same interview, saying, “I will say that the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw — the DNI — there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, the president-elect at that time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign.” So, while Lewis expects the American People to ignore the simple fact that Manafort is an American citizen, Clapper expects them to ignore the simple fact that Manafort — the campaign chairman — was part of the campaign.
This degree of bare-faced lying is not new to Clapper. Considering that he lied to Congress — under oath and on camera — not once, but twice, lying to the media likely did not even cause the former top spy to even break a sweat. It is noteworthy that Clapper’s two famous lies to Congress were both related to surveillance. The first, in March 2013, was when he lied to Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) by saying that the NSA does not collect any data at all on American citizens. Since it is now known that the NSA does indeed do exactly what Clapper said it does not do, it is a self-evident fact that he perjured himself. The second example of Clapper practicing his tradecraft before Congress was in January of this year when Clapper was testifying about Russian hacking of the DNC and Clinton campaign. He was asked by Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) about WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. Clapper said Assange had no credibility and that he was “holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London because he’s under indictment — I believe by the Swedish government — for a sexual crime.” In reality, Assange was never indicted in connection with the allegations of sexual crimes. Clapper simply lied to defame Assange who had claimed that he knew that the leaked DNC and Clinton e-mails were not the product of hacking — Russian or otherwise.
So considering the track record for lying by those claiming that Trump’s accusations are off base — and taking into account the evidence supporting his claims — it seems reasonable in light of these new reports to believe that Trump Tower was under surveillance leading up to and following the election.
CNN reported:
US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election, sources tell CNN, an extraordinary step involving a high-ranking campaign official now at the center of the Russia meddling probe.
The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump.
The surveillance — which, if either Lewis or Clapper were telling the truth, could never have happened — was initially authorized in 2014 via a secret warrant issued by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. “It centered on work done by a group of Washington consulting firms for Ukraine’s former ruling party,” according to the report by CNN. That surveillance was halted sometime last year “for a lack of evidence,” according to CNN’s sources. Then, as part of investigating the Trump campaign’s alleged connections to Russia, the surveillance was reinstated with a new FISA warrant.
Since capturing the communications of Manafort at a time when he was in communication with Trump necessarily means that communications with Trump would have been swept up in the surveillance, it is no stretch at all to say that the intelligence community — beginning with authorization from the Obama administration — conducted surveillance on Trump during and after the election.
This much is for certain: Obama’s administration conducted surveillance — including wiretapping — on the Trump campaign and lied about it. Trump’s claims that Obama ordered Trump Tower wiretapped are much more credible than the denials of those who have been proven liars. But don’t expect the liberal establishment media to report that.
Image of Paul Manafort: Screenshot of Face the Nation interview on YouTube
