Why Should We Believe Anything the Leaking, Many-Version Intel Community Says About Trump or Russia?

Consider a mother who confronts her six- and eight-year-old children after just-baked brownies go missing and she sees brownie crumbs on their little faces. When she asks them if they took the brownies, they say plaintively, "Oh No Mother, we wouldn't do that!!" Common sense and the brownie crumbs tell Mother her kiddies ate the brownies. • Now, consider Trump's allegations about the wiretapping, surveilling, sweeping in and unlocking data -- whatever you want to call it -- by Obama's intel apparatus on Trump Tower, Trump the presidential candidate, and President-Elect Trump. Obama and his intel leaders-of-the-pack shout loudly to Congress; "Oh No Congress, we wouldn't do that!!" • Now, tell me -- Why, oh why, would we expect the CIA or FBI or DOJ or NSA -- or even the British GCHQ -- to give any information or documents to Congress that would indicate that they illegally surveilled Trump or Trump Tower?? -- We are not total idiots. The intel community has brownie crumbs all over its face, but, unlike the kiddies' Mother, Congress says, "They didn't do it." • • • CONGRESS REFUSES TO SEE THE brownie CRUMBS. Last Friday, Representative Devin Nunes said of the House Intelligence Committee : "The committee is satisfied that the Department of Justice has fully complied with our request for information from our March 8 letter on possible surveillance related to Donald Trump or his associates. The committee still has not received information requested from the CIA and FBI in our March 15 letter that is necessary to determine whether information collected on US persons was mishandled and leaked. However, the NSA has partially met our request and has committed to fully meet our request by the end of next week." • The House and Senate intelligence committees had given the Justice Department until Monday regarding President Trump's claims that the Obama administration tapped his New York City telephones during the election. Nunes' statement did not disclose the nature of the information, but CNN reporter Manu Raju tweeted that he said he did not believe that it would support Trump's wiretapping accusation, quoting, of course, Democrat Intelligence Committee member Adam Schiff : "SCHIFF tells me DOJ letter won't prove Trump was wiretapped." -- Since many congressional leaders have brownie crumbs all over their faces, too, of course they don't see any evidence of intel surveillance of Trump and his team. • • • THE DOJ INFORMATION. CNN is hot on the story that the classified information the Justice Department provided to congressional investigators on Friday does not confirm President Trump's claims that he was wiretapped by former President Barack Obama during the campaign last year, quoting Schiff and two of its notorious "unnamed sources." CNN says "The sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, spoke with knowledge of the classified report's contents." Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, told CNN : "There's really no question about this. The President's statements before, and his tweets since leading right up to today, have no basis in fact." • The Justice Department declined to comment on the contents of the classified information, saying only that it had been delivered to Congress. • FBI Director James Comey, whose agency reports to the DOJ, will testify on Monday before the House Intelligence Committee about any Russian activity during the presidential campaign. -- Don't expect Comey to say 'we're guilty' of surveilling Trump -- he's working fulltime to wipe the brownie crumbs off the FBI's face. • • • BRITAIN ROARS "WE DIDN'T EAT THE BROWNIES." Britain's top intelligence agency says the US has agreed to drop its claim that the United Kingdom helped President Obama wiretap Donald Trump -- a Fox News allegation repeated by White House press secretary Sean Spicer. The apology news was reported by the BBC, the Times of London and the Guardian on Friday. And London's Telegraph says the US has "made a formal apology to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and told British Prime Minister Theresa May the allegation will never be repeated." A spokesman for May wouldn't confirm that a formal apology had been made, but the NYT reported that Spicer has talked to British ambassador Kim Derroch "to smooth things over." Intelligence "sources" told the Telegraph that Spicer and National Security Advisor McMaster, both apologized for the "gaffe." The British connection to the war of words started Thursday when Spicer repeated Fox News claims that Obama used GCHQ to spy on Trump so there would be "no American fingerprints on this." Spicer cited Andrew Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court Judge and Fox judicial analyst, who stated earlier last week that Obama "didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn't use the FBI and he didn't use the Department of Justice -- he used GCHQ." Napolitano also said that two people went to the GCHQ on Obama's behalf : "President Obama needs transcripts of conversations involving candidate Trump, conversations involving President-Elect Trump, he's able to get it." Napolitano's claim caused the GCHQ to release a statement : "Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct 'wiretapping' against the then President-Elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored." On Thursday, a UK government spokesman told Newsmax "no part of this story is true." -- But, British and US intel share a lot of information routinely, so why should we believe that GCHQ did not help Obama to surveil Trump? It would have been pretty much a routine favor for the GHCQ that already had brownie crumbs on its face over an earlier fake report on Trump and Russia. • • • THE MERKEL-TRUMP PRESS CONFERENCE. Germany got into the war of words when German reporters challenged Trump to address his wiretapping accusation and media attacks at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House last Friday. When a German reporter asked Trump whether he regrets claiming that former President Obama bugged Trump Tower during the presidential campaign, Trump's reply made even the leftist press laugh at his joke about reports that the NSA under Obama had once monitored Merkel’s phone : "As far as wiretapping, I guess by this past administration, at least we have something in common, perhaps." • Trump turned back onto the press its questions about why the White House had accused Britain’s intelligence agency of having helped Obama surveil Trump Tower, saying press secretary Sean Spicer had merely read aloud a report from a Fox News legal analyst : “We said nothing. All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind [Napolitano] who was the one responsible for saying that on television. I did not make an opinion on it. That was a statement made by a very talented lawyer on Fox. So you should not be talking to me. You should be talking to Fox.” A more aggressive German reporter asked Trump why he is "so scared of diversity in the news and the media that you speak so often of a ‘fake news’ and that things that in the end cannot be proven, like for the fact that you were wiretapped by Mr. Obama." Trump's answer to that? "Nice, friendly reporter.” • President Trump used Twitter Saturday morning to hit the unfavorable press coverage of the Merkel visit. Trump also pressed Germany to pay more money to NATO : "Despite what you have heard from the FAKE NEWS, I had a GREAT meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Nevertheless, Germany owes...vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!" -- But, remember that Chancellor Merkel represents the EU, which is terribly frightened by the enormous popularity of President Trump with growing populist European parties and their supporters, so why would Merkel or the German press go to Washington to make Trump look good? The answer is 'no reason at all to do that.' Merkel's press corps tried to trap Trump but ended up wiping the brownie crumbs off their own chins. • • • TRUMP STANDS BY HIS VERSION OF EVENTS. President Trump doubled down Friday on the wiretap claim, even after the British government denied the Fox News report saying Obama had enlisted its intelligence agency GCHQ in the effort. This was after the White House on Thursday stood by Trump's accusation that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, despite growing bipartisan clamor that there's no evidence to back up the claim and mounting pressure on Trump to retract the statement. White House press secretary Sean Spicer defended the President's statement, telling reporters Trump "stands by" the four tweets that sparked the firestorm between Trump and Congress. Spicer criticized reporters for taking the President's words too literally and suggested lawmakers were basing their assessments on incomplete information. Spicer responded to the Senate Intelligence Committee's statement on Thursday -- that there is no indication that Trump Tower was "the subject of surveillance" by the US government before or after the 2016 election -- by suggesting the statement from GOP Senator Richard Burr and Democrat Senator Mark Warner was made without a full review of the evidence or a briefing from the Justice Department. Spicer said : "They are not findings." Burr and Warner were among eight senior congressional leaders briefed by FBI Director Comey, not DOJ, on March 10, but an "unnamed" Senate aide insisted Spicer was incorrect in claiming Burr and Warner had not been briefed on the matter : "Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016," Burr and Warner said in a one-sentence joint statement Thursday afternoon." • The Senators' statement leaves unanswered questions about just what information was made available to them, whether someone unrelated to Trump or his team was being monitored, and whether the US government or President Obama was using information provided by foreign or non-government surveillance. • President Trump told Fox News last Wednesday that there would be "some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks." GOP Representative Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he had seen no information to support the claim and then suggested the President's assertion should not be taken at face value : "Are you going to take the tweets literally? If so, clearly the President was wrong." -- Do the Senators and Representative Nunes have brownie crumbs on their faces? Could be. Were they offered intel-baked brownies? • • • THE BROWNIE CRUMBS EVIDENCE. There are many reasons not to believe anything that anyone in the Washington establishment says. • The FBI is not transparent about the political connections of its senior leaders. Fox News reported last week that records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe left the box blank for wife Dr. Jill McCabe's salary, as a doctor with [Virginia] Commonwealth Emergency Physicians. And there is no documentation of the hundreds of thousands of campaign fund dollars she received in her unsuccessful 2015 Virginia state Senate race. As first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Clinton confidante Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe urged McCabe’s wife to run for statewide office shortly after news reports were published that Hillary Clinton used a private email server and address for all her government business while Secretary of State. For the reporting period of October through November 2015, McCabe's campaign filings show she received $467,500 from Common Good VA, a political action committee controlled by McAuliffe, as well as an additional $292,500 from a second Democrat PAC. Why did the FBI deputy director not list his wife's salary or the campaign contributions on the "Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure Report" for 2015? An FBI spokesman said the forms were certified as "in compliance with applicable laws and regulations," adding that Office of Government Ethics regulations do not require that a spouse's salary or contributions received by a spouse's political campaign must be declared. The Disclosure Report was filed by Andrew McCabe on July 8, 2016, three days after FBI Director James Comey's public statement in which he recommended against criminal charges in the Clinton case. Andrew McCabe was at the center of the FBI's investigation into Clinton's use of a private, unsecured email server as Secretary of State -- despite his wife having run for office supported financially by a close Clinton ally. GOP Senator Chuck Grassley, in a November 2016 letter to the DOJ inspector general, noted that in July 2015, around the time the Clinton investigation began, Andrew McCabe was promoted to FBI associate deputy director -- the No. 3 position. Yet, Grassley wrote, "the FBI asserts that Mr. McCabe did not have an ‘oversight role’ in the Clinton investigation until he became the number two in command in 2016. However, the FBI's statement does not foreclose the possibility that Mr. McCabe had a non-oversight role while associate deputy director. Thus, even during the time period in which his wife's political campaign received approximately half a million dollars from Governor McAuliffe's political action committee, and over $200,000 from the Virginia Democrat Party, he may have had a role in the investigation and did not recuse himself." Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz is now conducting a broad investigation of events leading up to the November election, including potential conflicts at the FBI, Comey's public recommendation against prosecution, and related matters -- which are expected to include then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch's tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton at Sky Harbor airport in Arizona one week before Hillary Clinton's FBI interview. In his letter, Grassley noted the Wall Street Journal statement that : “98% of the Governor McAuliffe related donations to his wife came after the FBI launched the investigation.” Given this, Grassley wrote : “the FBI must provide a more detailed explanation as to why it determined that it was appropriate for Mr. McCabe to participate in that investigation in any way." -- The FBI has political brownie crumbs all over its face. So, why should we believe that it had no knowledge of, and played no part in, a Trump surveillance scheme??? • Breitbart reported on March 3 "another leak from DHS" gave MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow a scoop that she called "another leaked report.” It was a document dated March 1, apparently written by DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis. Maddow pointed to a graphic of the document, highlighting the words “for official use only.” She added : "It was coordinated with Customs and Border Protection, State Department, Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- ICE, National Counterterrorism Center, and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services." Maddow said : "I’m not going to tell you how we got it, but the Department of Homeland Security has tonight confirmed to us that this is authentic, that this is real." Breitbart asks in its report : "Did anyone think about saying to MSNBC, 'No comment'? Or even, 'The possession of a such a document, by anyone outside of the Department, is a violation. So you’ll soon be hearing from law enforcement wondering how you got it'?" Breitbart says that the leak on the document was the work of "Deep Statists" -- career staffers, and not Trump appointees. The document titled “Most Foreign-Born US-Based Violent Extremists Radicalized After Entering Homeland” -- led Breitbart to rip into Maddow for her use of the report's key finding : “We assess that most foreign-born, US-based violent extremists likely radicalized several years after their entry into the United States, limiting the ability of screening and vetting officials to prevent their entry because of national security concerns.” Since the radicalization of foreign-born newcomers couldn’t be judged or predicted, there was no point in even trying -- just let ‘em all in, as Maddow put it. Of course, Maddow is wrong. Look at recent cases of young Moslems, mostly male, acting violently in America : the Tsarnaev brothers set off two bombs, killing three and injuring hundreds of others, including 16 who lost limbs, at the Boston Marathon in 2013; Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez used an AK-47, a shotgun, and a pistol to kill five military recruiters in Chattanooga in 2015; Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, a recent immigrant who got into the US as Farook's new wife, shot and killed 14, wounding 22 more, in San Bernardino, CA, in 2015; Omar Mateen killed 49 people and injured another 53 when he machine-gunned a gay nightclub in Orlando in 2016. -- The federal government has Deep State anti-Trump 'leakers' brownie crumbs all over its face, so why should we believe anything their bosses say concerning whether leaks about surveillance of Trump Tower or Donald Trump and his team were true or false, real or non-existent?? • • • WAS THERE SURVEILLANCE? We go back to Andrew C. McCarthy's excellent set of discussions about the Trump accusations. McCarthy wrote on March 13 : "...let’s be clear. This is not speculation. We know an investigation happened (and may still be ongoing). The only real questions concern the scope and the investigative tactics that have been used : Was there FISA wiretapping or, significantly, its functional equivalent in other forms of monitoring?....We know that this happened because the FBI, CIA, and NSA jointly issued a (not very edifying) report about it....After Trump won, the Obama administration made efforts to spread investigative information across the intelligence community, outside the tight web of investigators handling the Russia probe. This has encouraged leaking and distorted the public’s understanding of what the investigators were doing -- which was properly focused on Russia, not politically focused on Trump....Yes, there was an investigation. No, Russia did not ‘Hack the Election.’ " McCarthy then states : "From the Democrats’ standpoint, Trump is a grotesque solipsist, dangerously unfit for the presidency. So don’t tell them that Hillary Clinton ran foreign policy for an administration that serially appeased Putin. Don’t remind them that it was Mrs. Clinton’s scandalous e-mails, not John Podesta’s comparatively benign e-mails, that had a real impact on the election. And don’t bother pointing out that, whatever business interests Trump associates may have with Russians, they never managed to rake in piles of cash while paving the way for Russia to acquire 20% of US uranium reserves, as did Clinton and her Foundation....On the other hand, it is perfectly obvious now that Russia did not “hack the election,”....and there is no evidence that Trump people were complicit in it." • McCarthy draws his conclusions carefully : "The election process suddenly became potentially illegitimate...when, and only because, Clinton lost....That leaves us with the final question of what investigative tactics were used -- a question that might have been relegated to insignificance had President Trump not claimed that President Obama had him wiretapped....The media and Democrats, after hyping for four months the notion of an aggressive investigation against Trump and his associates that included 'wiretapping' and examining 'intercepted conversations,' is now downplaying that very possibility. The political winds have shifted, so there’s now a perception that the investigation of a presidential campaign is a bigger scandal than 'Russian-hacking' proved to be. Consequently, the Left is now beating back reports that the Obama Justice Department 1) marched into the secret FISA court with surveillance applications targeting Trump associates, perhaps even Trump himself, on the ground that they were Russian agents; and 2) that the DOJ was eventually permitted to wiretap at least some Trump associates....It may well be that all the focus on FISA has been something of a head fake. It is now effectively possible to target people for FISA surveillance without having to ask the FISA court for permission. There are expansive FISA orders that authorize the NSA to gather and store millions of communications that target, or merely relate to, 193 different countries. The content is accessible if it is pertinent to one of thousands of 'foreign intelligence requirements' established by the President and the intelligence community, based on American security needs and national interests. This is as it should be. It’s a dangerous world out there....If the NSA decides that the identity of the American who has been incidentally intercepted must be known in order to fully understand the intelligence value of the communication...if the attorney general concludes that an American may be acting as an agent of a foreign power, the intelligence community may use that American’s identity as a 'selection term' when it searches through its trove of captured communications. Consequently, if the intelligence agencies know that X American person is meeting with certain Russians, it can target those Russians for surveillance and 'incidentally' monitor X’s communications. And if the attorney general concludes that X is an agent of a foreign power, the NSA’s database can be searched to find any of X’s intercepted communications -- of which there are apt to be many. It is not necessary to get a FISA warrant naming X in order to examine X’s communications that have been swept up in foreign surveillance coverage that does not particularize targets. It is entirely possible to conduct a ‘counterintelligence’ investigation that quite intentionally accesses intercepted communications of an American without obtaining a FISA warrant...that singles out that American for wiretapping. Consequently, the question is not merely whether Trump or his associates (or both) were the targets of FISA applications or warrants. It is whether the intelligence agencies took active steps to access and analyze their intercepted communications -- whether through targeted FISA warrants, non-particularized FISA authorizations, or other foreign-intelligence-gathering streams. Assuming that there are such intercepted conversations, as the New York Times has reported, the question is whether people in the Trump camp just happened to be incidentally monitored because they were dealing with some Russians of interest to the intelligence community, or whether they were targeted to have their communications monitored or at least analyzed after the fact. It is a fascinating question. And as with the other fascinating questions, we will probably never get a definitive answer. What you’ll get is this: The Russians tried to meddle in the election, but the Russians did not 'hack the election' or affect its outcome. As for the rest of it, nothing to see here, move along." -- Read that conclusion carefully several times to grasp its full meaning -- that any American could be surveilled simply by innocently talking to an intel "target." What Andrew McCarthy is saying is that it is entirely possible that Trump and his team were "surveilled" in some ways without the need for warrants or a paper trail in the CIA, FBI, DOJ or NSA. -- That is the entire intel face covered with brownie crumbs. • • • DEAR READERS, with the FBI hiding its leaders' political connections, the British distorting their role in alleged Obama surveillance of Trump; the German press accusing Trump of ''fake news" about the surveillance; the federal government unable to control the rampant 'leaking' of real and/or fake classified information from its career Deep State employees; and the CIA, FBI, DOJ and NSA having at their fingertips many unverifiable means of "surveilling" anyone, including President Trump, let's ask the opening question again -- Why, oh why, would we expect the CIA or FBI or DOJ or NSA -- or even the British GCHQ -- to give any information or documents to Congress that would indicate that they illegally surveilled Trump or Trump Tower. We know the answer to that question, don't we.