The Trump Team Was Spied on by the Obama Administration -- Who Authorized It??

THE TRUMP TEAM WAS "BUGGED." • On Friday, WND and other media outlets reported that Representative Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committe, has confirmed that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort will testify before the Committee on Monday. Nunes has also asked FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Admiral Mike Rogers to testify in a closed session on Tuesday. • Both Comey and Rogers will apparently be presented with information that contradicts their public testimony before the committee last Monday, when they said they had "no information to support President Trump’s claims" that President Obama spied on him. While the NSA has agreed to turn over more reports on the apparent spying by the Obama administration, the FBI is reportedly stalling or stonewalling. Nunes said the FBI still has not agreed to his request to provide its intelligence reports on the Trump transition team. These are the latest developments in a rapidly exploding story that could confirm President Trump’s accusation that the Obama administration spied on him and his inner circle during the presidential campaign and afterward. • Fox News says a source told it that the NSA will provide the House Intelligence Committee with potential “smoking gun” documentation proving the Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team, and maybe even on President-Elect Trump himself. Multiple sources told Fox the intelligence information will prove the Obama administration misused information gained from legitimate surveillance of foreign targets to spy on the President-Elect, including the “unmasking” -- revealing the identity -- of those spied upon and sharing those identities in the intelligence community without asking for FISA approval for the unmasking, which would be a criminal offense if proven. Sources also told Fox : “[T]he paper trail leaves no other plausible purpose for the unmasking other than to damage the incoming Trump administration.” • Nunes said he expects the full extent of the spying to be disclosed, and he also expects the NSA documentation to provide more intelligence than he has already seen. It isn't clear if any of that information will be made public, or whether it was delivered as promised on Friday so that congressional investigators have time to examine the documents and determine their significance before this week's hearings. Nunes said on CNN that after reading reports he was confident the Obama administration “had a pretty good idea of what President-Elect Trump was up to and what his transition team was up to and who they were meeting with.” Nunes would not rule out the possibility that Obama was personally involved in the surveillance. • • • THE "UNINTENDED INTERCEPTION" EXPLANATION SEEMS TO BE SHATTERED. Nunes revealed last Wednesday, as reported by WND, that he had learned from intelligence sources that “on numerous occasions, the intelligence community incidentally collected information about US citizens involved in the Trump transition,” and that details about those people “were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting” even though they had “little or no apparent foreign intelligence value.” Nunes also confirmed that names of Trump transition team members were unmasked, quite possibly in violation of the law, which the congressman said he found “alarming.” The NSA documentation will also perhaps reveal who saw the classified information, why the reports were not reported to Congress, and who requested and authorized the unmasking of those who were surveilled. • Of the greatest significance to former President Obama and his administration officials is that the committee will also try to learn whether the intelligence community was ordered to spy on President-Elect Trump, either by Obama or others in his senior intelligence leadership. • • • PAUL MANAFORT IN SPOTLIGHT. Last Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was questioned by reporters about an AP report published Wednesday that claimed Manafort 'secretly worked for a Russian billionaire' with a plan to ‘greatly benefit the Putin Government,’” during the administration of President George W. Bush. Taking repeated reporter questions as to whether that proved some kind of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, Spicer repeatedly noted that the business dealings examined in the report were from "the last decade," and that Manafort was only involved with the Trump campaign for five months, ending in August. Spicer also noted : “Nothing in this morning’s report referenced any actions by the President, the White House or any Trump administration official.” Spicer went on to turn the tables on the media's questioning about Russia meddling in the election. He observed that, just recently, “John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair, sat on the board of a Russian-based energy company. This was something tied to Hillary Clinton, who was the face of the failed Russia reset policy.” Spicer also noted : “As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, along with the Obama administration, approved a deal that gave Russia 20% of America’s uranium reserves. Hillary’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, received over half-a-million dollars for a paid speech by a bank connected to the uranium deal. And Vladimir Putin personally called the former President and thanked him for giving the speech.” Press Secretary Spicer charged that the Clintons had far more extensive ties to Russia than did Manafort, and, “while Secretary of State, Hillary was crafting a policy she said was designed to ‘strengthen Russia.’” Spicer told the White House press corps : “Numerous individuals, including former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and acting CIA Director Mike Morrell and members of the intelligence community from both parties who have been briefed, have said across the board that they have seen zero evidence of any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. And, that’s not going to be changed by former business dealings of a campaign staffer from a decade ago.” • • • DEMOCRATS CROWED, BUT THEY ARE NOW SILENT. Fox News journalist James Rosen reported last Thursday that 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. The classified intelligence showing "incidental collection" of Trump team communications, seen by committee Chairman Nunes, came from multiple sources, Capitol Hill sources told Fox News. The intelligence corroborated information about surveillance of the Trump team that was known to Nunes, sources said, even before President Trump accused Obama of having wiretapped him in a series of now-famous tweets posted on March 4. • 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, according to multiple sources. That conclusion was reached because of the unmasking of selected US persons whose names appeared in the intelligence, the sources told Fox, adding that the paper trail leaves no "plausible purpose" for the unmasking except to "damage" the incoming Trump administration. • The FBI under Director Comey has not been responsive to the House Intelligence Committee’s request for documents, but the National Security Agency was expected to produce documents to the committee by last Friday, producing more intelligence than Nunes has so far seen or described -- including what one source described as a potential “smoking gun” establishing the Obama administration spying. • Fox's Reston says that : "Because Nunes’s intelligence came from multiple sources during a span of several weeks, and he has not shared the actual materials with his committee colleagues, he will be the only member of the panel in a position to know whether the NSA has turned over some or all of the intelligence he is citing. However, Fox News was told that Intelligence Committee ranking Democrat member Representative Adam Schiff had been briefed on the basic contents of the intelligence described by Nunes. CIA Director Mike Pompeo is also sympathetic to the effort to determine, with documentary evidence, the extent of any alleged Obama administration spying on the Trump team, sources said." • At the dramatic Wednesday news conference when Nunes said he had seen evidence that members of the Trump transition team, possibly including the President-Elect, were subjected to “incidental surveillance” collection, Nunes characterized the revelation as legal but troubling -- but this may prove to be a hasty, wrong conclusion if there actually was criminal activity involved. Nunes said last Wednesday : “What I've read bothers me, and I think it should bother the President himself, and his team because I think some of it seems to be inappropriate.” Schiff blasted Nunes for not coming first to the Intelligence Committee with the information : "If accurate, this information should have been shared with members of the committee, but it has not been." • But, Schiff and his Democrat congressional colleagues have been muted the last few days as the full import of the information disclosed by Chairman Nunes sinks in -- that Trump was right in accusing President Obama and his intelligence hierarchy of spying on Trump and his team. The Democrat response to Russian hacking into Podesta's and Hillary's email accounts is to call it a "form of war," in the Progressive Democrat attempt to fit the hacking into a larger narrative pushed by Democrats that casts President Trump as weak on Russia and plays up the damage done by Moscow through the electoral interference. But, Michael Schmitt, an international law professor at the University of Exeter in Britain, told TheHill that public officials need to choose their words carefully to “control escalation.” Schmitt, who led the team of legal experts that formulated the Tallinn Manual 2.0, a comprehensive analysis of how international law applies to cyberspace, said : “I find that sort of talk dangerous.” Schmitt's assessment is that the hacking campaign was not an act of war but rather a violation of two prohibitions : one on violating another state’s sovereignty and another on intervention into another state’s affairs. Schmitt added : “Without a scintilla of a doubt, it is not an act of war.” • • • GOWDY SAYS NUNES ACTED PROPERLY. Representative Trey Gowdy, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Nunes "briefed the Commander-in- Chief on matters unrelated to the Russian investigation. So if that's a big deal in Washington, then we've sunk to a new low." When pressed, Gowdy reiterated that Nunes briefed the President on "something that has nothing to do with the Russia investigation. So if the Commander-in-Chief cannot be briefed by the chairperson of the House Intel Committee on a matter that has nothing to do with the FBI investigation, then I don't know what they can talk about." Gowdy, a former US prosecutor, on Sunday also dismissed the idea of establishing an independent commission to investigate the Russian interference : "Thank goodness we have one. It's called the FBI. The FBI has counterintelligence jurisdiction and they have criminal jurisdiction." More cynically, Gowdy added : "And what we learned on Monday, and it's about the only thing we learned on Monday, was that the FBI is investigating both." He added that he knows incidental collection in the country happens, but he hopes people will focus on the unmasking : "The felonious dissemination of classified information is the only thing we know for sure is a crime, and it would be nice if we showed the same level of interest in that." • • • DEAR READERS, Nunes' revelation is not just troubling news, it is the tip of a new, but not unexpected, iceberg that may show how far President Obama and his insider advisors went in violating the constitutional right of every individual to be free of government spying, and also how far these violations went in criminally breaking federal law put in place to protect individual Americans from government spying. It would fit into the Obama White House pattern of disregard for the law we already know about -- IRS harassment of conservatives, selling guns to Mexican drug cartels, covering up the Benghazi attack, refusing to comply with congressional requests and subpoenas for information and documents, lying to Congress, making laws without going through the required constitutional process of asking Congress to adopt them -- the list is long and has been troubling for years. Are we now at the point of seeing real evidence collected by Obama's own intelligence community Deep State puppets that proves our longtime suspicions. We must wait for Representative Nunes' House Intelligence Committee and its Senate counterpart to do their investigative jobs. And, perhaps FBI Director Comey will finally see that stonewalling in the name of protecting "ongoing investigations" will not help him escape liability for his role under Obama, if it was nefarious. • But, one thing is certain. In the American constitutional system, individuals are the building blocks of society, choosing the representatives who govern on their behalf. Those representatives adopt laws that carry out the electorate's desires, while being faithful to the Constitution. The "electorate" is none other than those many individuals exercising their God-given right to create a society based on laws and individual liberty -- including the right to personal privacy protected by the US Constitution. There is no room in the United States for a Democrat President or any arm of government to illegally spy on any individual -- and certainly not the duly-elected Republican President-Elect.