From: townhall.com, by Pat Buchanan, on Mar 24, 2017
Devin Nunes just set the cat down among the pigeons.
Two days after FBI Director James Comey assured us there was no truth to President Trump’s tweet about being wiretapped by Barack Obama, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Trump may have had more than just a small point.
The U.S. intelligence community, says Nunes, during surveillance of legitimate targets, picked up the names of Trump transition officials during surveillance of targets, “unmasked” their identity, and spread their names around, virtually assuring they would be leaked.
If true, this has the look and smell of a conspiracy to sabotage the Trump presidency, before it began.
Comey readily confirmed there was no evidence to back up the Trump tweet. But when it came to electronic surveillance of Trump and his campaign, Comey, somehow, could not comment on that.
Which raises the question: What is the real scandal here?
Is it that Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta’s emails and handed them off to WikiLeaks? We have heard that since June.
Is it that Trump officials may have colluded with the Russians?
But former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and ex-CIA Director Mike Morrell have both said they saw no evidence of this.
This March, Sen. Chris Coons walked back his stunning declaration about transcripts showing a Russia-Trump collusion, confessing, “I have no hard evidence of collusion.”
But if Clapper and Morrell saw no Russia-Trump collusion, what were they looking at during all those months to make them so conclude?
Was it “FBI transcripts,” as Sen. Coons blurted out?
If so, who intercepted and transcribed the conversations? If it was intel agencies engaged in surveillance, who authorized that? How extensive was it? Against whom? Is it still going on?
And if today, after eight months, the intel agencies cannot tell us whether or not any member of the Trump team colluded with the Russians, what does that say of their competence?
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.
Consider. On Jan. 12, David Ignatius of the Washington Post wrote,
“According to a senior U.S. government official, (Gen. Michael) Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials … What did Flynn say?”
Now, on Dec. 29, Flynn, national security adviser-designate, was not only doing his job calling the ambassador, he was a private citizen.
Why was he unmasked by U.S. intelligence?
Who is this “senior official” who dropped the dime on him? Could this official have known how many times Flynn spoke to Kislyak, yet not known what was said on the calls?
That is hard to believe. This looks like a contract hit by an anti-Trump agent in the intel community, using Ignatius to do the wet work.
Flynn was taken down. Did Comey turn his FBI loose to ferret out the felon who had unmasked Flynn and done him in? If not, why not?
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Dan Henninger points anew to a story in The New York Times of March 1 that began: “In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Trump and Russians — across the government.”
“This is what they did,” wrote Henninger, quoting the Times:
“At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low classification level to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government — and, in some cases, among European allies.”
For what benign purpose would U.S. intelligence agents spread secrets damaging to their own president — to foreign regimes? Is this not disloyalty? Is this not sedition?
On Jan. 12, writes Henninger, the Times “reported that Attorney General Loretta Lynch signed rules that let the National Security Agency disseminate ‘raw signals intelligence information’ to 16 other intelligence agencies.”
Astounding. The Obamaites seeded the U.S. and allied intel communities with IEDs to be detonated on Trump’s arrival. This is the scandal, not Trump telling Vlad to go find Hillary’s 30,000 missing emails.
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. 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?
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To some degree, I can understand that some in government (like security agency operatives, for example) didn’t want Donald Trump to be president. I didn’t want him either. But, he was legally elected by the people and now Donald Trump is the President of the United States – period. It no longer matters who we might have preferred, no one else won, Trump did.
As I said, Trump was not my preference and there were a lot of things about him that I felt would be troublesome, but now, he is our president and any patriot should put any animosity against Trump on the back burner and concentrate on the well-being of the country as a whole. As long as he remains true to his campaign promises and doesn’t relapse into a liberal, I pray that Trump is successful because I want the country to be successful. If Trump-haters continue to bury land mines in and around each and every task that he attempts, not only will he suffer, but so will the country. What concerns me is that we’re seeing evidence of collusion against Trump almost daily and it defies credulity to believe that it’s not a coordinated effort to create an insurrection against his presidency in order to bring him down.
At the moment, we don’t (yet) have a “smoking gun” to indict any particular individual(s) as being behind these seditious plots, but the more recent reports of surveillance of Trump and his top advisors do point to ex-president Barack Obama. It’s particularly difficult to believe that the FISA warrants that resulted in capturing communications between any Trump advisers or operatives and foreign entities were issued without the knowledge of Barack Obama. Once captured, the names of U.S. citizens were illegally “unmasked” to allow them to be identified, after which they were then leaked to unknown persons and/or governments. And it is impossible to believe that the distribution expansion of the raw NSA data to sixteen additional intelligence agencies (done days before Obama’s exit) wasn’t intended to assure the most extensive “leakage” of the now-unmasked individuals to whatever entity might best inflict damage on the new Trump administration.
For my money, Obama’s stinking fingerprints are all over this seditious activity. I believe the actions against Trump to be an intentional series of attacks on his administration’s validity in hopes that the American populace will become disenchanted with President Trump in the hopes that he will be forced to resign from office or that he’ll be impeached. In any event, his troubles would make a 2nd term nearly impossible.
I want the TRUTH. I want to see whoever had a hand in these un-American actions to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the laws covering sedition, after all, that is what it is.
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An addendum: if you’ve wondered – as I did – who these 16 intelligence agencies were (since they’re never identified in any of the articles), I did finally find a list. The only puzzling thing is that the list consists of 16 agencies in total, one of which is the NSA itself, so it seems like the reference should have been “15 other intelligence agencies.” Nevertheless, here they are:
Members of the Intelligence Community
Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, Coast Guard Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, Department of Treasury, Drug Enforcement Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Marine Corps Intelligence, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, National Security Agency, and Navy Intelligence.
Kinda makes you wonder how many thousands of potential leakers now have access to the previously closely-held surveillance information gathered by the NSA, doesn’t it?
Garnet92.
Categories: Political
Pesky Truth 
Don’t worry, Garnet. I’m sure Obama only read about all this Trump surveillance stuff in the newspaper just like you and me.
Of course Obama has been at work trying to undermine Trump. He’s an A**hole extraordinaire, remember? Sedition is what A**holes do. Obama ridiculed Romney in front of the nation when Romney named Russia as our greatest geo-political threat, then he whispered to Putin’s underlings that he would have more flexibility after he was securely re-elected (wink, wink) and then he did nothing to deter the Russians when he posed as our president for 8 long years. It was only when the Russians seemed to be inflicting harm on the candidacy of Obama’s torch bearer – Hillary Clinton – that Obama suddenly took an interest in the Russians (did I mention that A**holes only care about what’s good for THEM?), and now we’re supposed to believe that Obama, Democrats and the leftist media are worried about threats posed by Russia? Give me a break.
The great irony of this whole story is that Obama’s plot to undermine Trump is bona fide proof of his innocence as far as any collusion with Russia, because if the Left really had anything they would surely have dropped that bomb by now. Obama & Co. are betting that the sheep will be too stupid to figure that out and/or too corrupt to admit it. They’ll probably win that bet. Trump should call their bluff and tell them to put up or shut up. Then he should throw some A**holes in jail.
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I’m sure you’re right about when Obama learned of this (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). I also agree that if anything dubious had been found in the NSA surveillance concerning Trump and/or his people consorting with Russians, it would have been plastered all over the NYT, WaPo, and all of the other democrat-aligned media. In case anyone missed it – it ain’t there – there was none – only the attempt to fool those who aren’t engaged into believing that the Russians helped Trump win the presidency.
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By spreading this across 16 agencies, they’ve made it impossible to trace back – there have been far too many people that had access to the information. I would hope that by now Trump has reversed O’s order to share intelligence with other agencies and put a stop to this.
It’s doubtful we’ll ever know the truth – even investigations don’t produce the truth – Hillary’s server issue and the Benghazi nightmare are poof of that. It seems their desire to create chaos and their hatred of Trump is much stronger than their patriotism. Trump’s cabinet members to get busy helping him drain the swamp.
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Exactly the point! Before Obama’s strategically-timed order, releasing the NSA intel required a sign-off, in other words, it was an exception – Obama’s order made it automatically available to hundreds/thousands of additional people. Ask yourself WHY? The only conclusion I can come to is the one already express by the author, in my commentary, and by Kathy – Obama wanted as many opportunities for leakage as possible of whatever was captured by the NSA relating to Trump’s team.
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This stinks more than catfish bait. At some point there will need to be Watergate style hearings regarding national intelligence during the Obama years, to include Hillary’s emails and server, and why it was allowed.
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As someone who has baited crawfish traps with my dad, I can attest to the stink Craw mentions and how it pales in comparison to the stink of this Obama-induced insurrection against Trump’s presidency.
I don’t care about this holier-than-thou, we’re better than that, crap – it’s time that we fight back with every weapon at our disposal. The left/dems will stop at nothing to tar and feather Trump into resigning or being impeached – anything to tarnish and demean him and, by association, all who voted for him.
They don’t fight fair, rules and laws mean nothing to them if they stand in the way of winning. It’s time that we gave them some of their own medicine. After we’ve beat them down, we can return to “playing nice.”
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