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The question of whether former President Barack Obama actually spied on President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and transition has been tantalizing Washington since President Trump first made the allegation nearly two weeks ago. Since then, three investigations have been launched — one by the FBI, one by the House of Representatives and one by the Senate. Are the investigators chasing a phantom, or did this actually happen?
Here is the back story.
Obama would not have needed a warrant to authorize surveillance on Trump. Obama was the president and as such enjoyed authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to order surveillance on any person in America, without suspicion, probable cause or a warrant.
FISA contemplates that the surveillance it authorizes will be for national security purposes, but this is an amorphous phrase and an ambiguous standard that has been the favorite excuse of most modern presidents for extraconstitutional behavior. In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon used national security as a pretext to deploying the FBI and CIA to spy on students and even to break in to the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, one of his tormentors.
FISA was enacted in the late 1970s to force the federal government to focus its surveillance activities — its domestic national security-based spying — on only those people who were more likely than not agents of a foreign government. Because FISA authorizes judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to make rules and establish procedures for surveillance — essentially lawmaking — in secret, the public and the media have been largely kept in the dark about the nature and extent of the statute and the legal and moral rationale for the federal government’s spying on everyone in the U.S.
The mass spying that these judges have ruled FISA authorizes is directly counter to the wording, meaning and purpose of FISA itself, which was enacted to prevent just what it has in fact now unleashed.
We now know indisputably that this secret FISA court — whose judges cannot keep records of their own work and have their pockets and briefcases checked by guards as they enter and leave the courthouse — has permitted all spying on everyone all the time.
The FISA court only hears lawyers for the government, and they have convinced it that it is more efficient to capture the digital versions of everyone’s phone calls, texts, emails and other digital traffic than it is to force the government — as the Constitution requires — to focus on only those who there is reason to believe are more likely than not engaging in unlawful acts.
When FISA was written, telephone surveillance was a matter of wiretapping — installing a wire onto the target’s telephone line, either inside or outside the home or business, and listening to or recording in real time the conversations that were audible on the tapped line.
Today the National Security Agency has 24/7 access to the mainframe computers of all telecom providers and all computer service providers and to all digital traffic carried by fiber optics in the U.S. The NSA has had this access pursuant to FISA court orders issued in 2005 and renewed every 90 days. The FISA court has based its rulings on its own essentially secret convoluted logic, never subjected to public scrutiny. That has resulted in the universal surveillance state in which we in America now live. The NSA has never denied this.
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. Because the NSA has the digital version of every telephone call made to, from and within the U.S. since 2005, if President Obama last year wanted transcripts of Trump’s calls made at any time, the NSA would have been duty-bound to provide them, just as it would be required to provide transcripts of Obama’s calls today if President Trump wanted them.
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. For that reason, if Obama did this, he no doubt used a source on which he’d leave no fingerprints.
Enter James Bond.
Sources have told Fox News that the British foreign surveillance service, the Government Communications Headquarters, 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. 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. Adding to this ominous scenario is the fact that three days after Trump’s inauguration, the head of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, abruptly resigned, stating that he wished to spend more time with his family.
I hope the investigations of Trump’s allegation discover and reveal the truth — whatever it is. But the lesson here is terribly serious. We face the gravest threat to personal liberty since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 proscribed criticism of the government. We have an unelected, unnamed, unaccountable elite group in the intelligence community manipulating the president at will and possessing intimate, detailed knowledge about all of us that it can reveal. We have statutes that have given the president unconstitutional powers that have apparently been used. And we have judges on secret courts facilitating all this as if the Constitution didn’t exist.
For how much longer will we have freedom?
Copyright 2017 Andrew P. Napolitano. Distributed by Creators.com.
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Trump has been around the block and obviously KNEW that his team’s communications would be comprehensively bugged by Barry and the Chicagoes.
It is less obvious what Trump can do to shake off an openly seditious Deep State apparatus. Playing nice will clearly not work.
Great Post Judge. Sometimes you get lost in all the fireworks here, but I always read your posts and nine times out of ten, agree. This is the first time I’ve heard that Obama would not have needed a warrant. On TV I always hear defenders stating “he would have needed a warrant”.
Recording all of us is certainly unwarranted.
Interesting. Might be worth noting that one Christopher Steele, the ‘author’ of the ‘Trump dossier’, is also a limey, working for the limey ‘intelligence’.
I’m so far from informed on this that I probably shouldn’t even be allowed an opinion. But of course I guess anyway. All the details, intrigue, conspiracies, and all are endlessly interesting, but in the end I keep returning to this:
I have seen wikileaks. I find it not just unlikely, but implausible, that they spied on everyone *except* Trump.
So, you think Trump should go all-out Erdogan on the Deep State?
Might be interesting.
LF
Actually, it’s more obvious: fire everyone he isn’t sure about, i.e., fire pretty much everyone. It’s well within his power to do so.
Zero hour is already here, judge, and I’m shocked you still consider the USA a free nation. What few freedoms we do have are slipping away and chipped away at constantly. When the U.S. government has the power to destroy any of our lives at any time under any pretext or using their tangle of laws then we are not free.
Before long, I expect EU style speech codes which could shut sites like this down and mandatory minimum sentencing for thought criminals (i.e., white people who oppose the conversion of their historic nation into a third world cesspool and totalitarian hellhole).
Leftists are so unbelievably smart and historically literate that they tell us that the second amendment only confers a right to own a muzzle loading musket and flintock pistol. But even then it must be locked up in an armory guarded by political commissar from the DNC. Further, the 2nd amendment doesn’t apply to the technological advances in the firearms industry after the 18th century so the founding fathers would have banned the private ownership of every type of firearm other than the aforementioned.
The second amendment really only applies to government officials, the national guard and state and federal police officials.
Your comment about the left and 2A is great. Nice post. I’m stealing it.
I tend to agree with Buck Sexton (lolbuh), or whoever it was I heard on the radio last night; it seems unlikely that the Brits would be willing to help an outgoing president against a potentially incoming president this way. At least officially – of course one cannot rule out a rogue actor, although that seems rather unlikely, too. And in still descending order of unlikeliness, it may be that Trump was inadvertently caught up in a GCHQ information exchange.
On the other hand, I can see how some people would argue that this election would be the one where they could see the Brits making an exception. I would respond that the Brits are smart, well-educated people: “If it’s so unlikely that Mr. Trump will win, Mr. President, then you don’t need our help anyway.”
This is a truly important article and the best argument that I have read to shut down the whole existing NSA and deep state intelligence network, since technology has enabled these out of control agencies to break the Constitution.
A fresh start would involve real judicial oversight of very specific FOREIGN operations carried out by much smaller organizations with every member sworn to defend and uphold the Constitution with regard to US citizens.
As Napolitano says, this is a difficult but critically important issue for the new administration to get right, or will Trump be tempted by the vast power at his disposal, or will the Deep State and Friends simply take him down piece by piece along with his government (Flynn style)?
A secure contact line for Deep State employees + immunity from prosecution, with an invitation to report anti-US activities within these organizations to a military (?) Tribunal would no doubt come up with some interesting and actionable information and start on the road to finishing them off.
I admit, that is an interesting tidbit. I could see a scenario like this: “Mr. President, we will privately give you the dirt on Hussein and his cronies, if you agree that we will publicly deny your accusations, and you will publicly withdraw them and apologize.”
In other words, I think Trump administration’s retraction and apology need explaining, too.
Whoops, forgot one bit:
The corollary seems to be that the First Amendment only applies to printing presses, and not any advances in communications technology that came after the 18th century. Stupid ignorant leftists will of course reply that these things don’t cause harm, to which I’d reply (after “so what?”) that guns are used to kill a few people, while the media is used to destroy entire civilizations.
IOW the NSA is spying on everybody and only occasionally on Trump, but maybe not even then.
IOW methinks we can’t see the forest for all the bugs on the bark.
We’ve all been wiretapped. It just remains to be seen if the powers that be/the deep state want to let somebody else in on it.
For a price, if not their own nefarious outside the constitution purposes.
Sounds like a sweet gig/totalitarian in principle.
Where do we sign up?
In the early 20th Century, most of the world’s communications were routed through Britain on account of British control over the world’s telegraph network. During WWI, the British and Americans set up a cell in London to monitor telegraphic traffic. Since it was considered bad form for the British to spy on British citizens … and for Americans to spy on American citizens, the Americans and British came to a long-term arrangement. The Americans would spy on the British, and the British would spy on the Americans. They would share anything noteworthy with the other team. This charade allowed them to “truthfully” maintain that the Americans and British did not spy on their own citizens.
This arrangement lasted through WWII. Post-WWII, it evolved into the “Five Eyes” in which Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand shared intelligence on similar terms. The Five Eyes intelligence consortium is still in operation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
Hence, the likelihood of Britain spying on Donald Trump for the Americans is very, very high. It’s credible. Claims that spying on Trump would require a FISA warrant and, therefore, no such spying took place because no such warrant exists reflects bad faith and an ignorance of how the Five Eyes arrangement works. Indeed, it would have been unnecessary and high risk for Obama to ask the NSA or CIA to spy on Trump when the clandestine Five Eyes consortium was available to do it for him.
All of this is a thinly veiled intelligence conspiracy that has been ongoing among Anglo-Saxon countries for at least 100 years.
Every time when attacks on Trump are finally dying, MSM comes out with some new trick.
But it is impossible to distinguish if MSM is trying to increase ratings, or want to destroy Trump.
The essential theorem is that the constitution began as a fraudulent imposition and faith in it is foolish since it, like any other tool, can be used or ignored at will, interpreted in any manner imaginable, and perverted beyond reason.
All the rest is mere commentary.
11 Svigor > I would respond that the Brits are smart, well-educated people
but not so smart as to clean up their own government-circle closet full of pedophiles who are subject to blackmail by the Americans, should the need arise.
Or maybe you prefer to believe that there is honor amongst thieves?
12 Miro23 > with every member sworn to defend and uphold the Constitution with regard to US citizens.
My dear fellow, if you take a job as a (eg) file clerk with the US Dept of Agriculture, you will recite that oath on your first day of employment.
Mar 9, 2017 BADA BING! NSA Whistleblower Confirms Trump Was Tapped!
They’re wire tapping President Trump, and Kim Kardashian, and Hulk Hogan, and you… and EVERYBODY!
Video Link
Dude, that ship done sailed a long time ago.
Awesome points!
Your comment reminds me ( I hope I’m remembering correctly) that around the beginning of WW1 the cable to Germany from the West went into Euorpe via France and was cut by the Brits so that all German cable communications had to go through London. Don’t quote me on the details of that just yet, but you can imagine what effect that would have on the eventual outcome of the war.
The old “cui bono” question leads us to the true instigators of that war, but to this day most Americans seem to believe it was Germany’s fault. It simply wasn’t, and the fact is relevant to what’s going on in hte world vis a vis aggression today.
Sorry for not googling this before my previous comment.
Makes me wonder if the Zimmerman cable was tampered with or even an outright forgery.
In any case an important effect of cutting the cable was that Americans were much more likely to come under the influence of Brit propaganda than the German stuff.
Do you see how Clapper strokes his pate [at about 40 seconds] while testifying that the NSA never ‘wittingly’ collected data on Americans? Is that a tell? Does he always touch his head when he’s lying?
Video Link
NSA Whistle blower WILLIAM BINNEY ON LOU DOBBS
Well then it’s just some sort of meaningless formality for the CIA/NSA people?
I can view you are informed well done RobinG. Jun 7, 2013 William Binney – The Government is Profiling You (The NSA is Spying on You)
Video Link
January 10, 2014 *500* Years of History Shows that Mass Spying Is Always Aimed at Crushing Dissent *It’s Never to Protect Us From Bad Guys*
No matter which government conducts mass surveillance, they also do it to crush dissent, and then give a false rationale for why they’re doing it.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/500-years-of-history-shows-that-mass-spying-is-always-aimed-at-crushing-dissent/5364462
This wiretap is just another distraction. I wonder if someone is keeping tab of trump’s tweets and ramblings. and then compare it to the executive order timings 🙂
“Today the National Security Agency has 24/7 access to the mainframe computers of all telecom providers and all computer service providers and to all digital traffic carried by fiber optics in the U.S. The NSA has had this access pursuant to FISA court orders issued in 2005 and renewed every 90 days. The FISA court has based its rulings on its own essentially secret convoluted logic, never subjected to public scrutiny. That has resulted in the universal surveillance state in which we in America now live. The NSA has never denied this.”
So whats the big deal? Donald is only tating the obvious, deliberately misleading his sycophants into believing that surveillance of him was unusaul, when it happpens to everybody all of the time.
One strong indication is that when queried, the bugging wasn’t directly denied, agencies just say no warrant was requested or issued.
Since when is spying, “official”?
Your point is?
And, examples please.
Same with the bogus & impossible ‘German gas chambers’ propaganda of WWII.
You probably know that not a single British Bletchley Park intercept of secret German messages to and from Auschwitz and the so called ‘death camps’ mention gas chambers, killing Jews, or anything holocaust-like. There are many which do mention transporting Jews out of these labor camps.
Also note that the outbound train records which were kept have disappeared while the inbound records have not.
The ‘6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’ are scientifically impossible frauds.
see the ‘holocaust’ scam debunked here:
http://codoh.com
No name calling, level playing field debate here:
http://forum.codoh.com
Dems like Obama and Pelosi have been throwing out baseless accusations for years. This forces Republicans into denial and disproving mode which is destructive and energy sapping.
Trump is no dope. He is probably doing this to Obama/Dems now.
Knowing this passive aggressive sleaze Obama….of course it is possible he was wiretapping/surveilling Donald Trump and his campaign. Or getting a Trump intel/wiretap feed from the British GCHQ as has been alleged. The particulars are irrelevant and so is if Obama/Dems actually did anything to surveil Trump.
So now The Donald has Obama/Dems dancing around, having to prove he/they were not wiretapping Trump, Trump Tower and so on. They are sputtering with outrage and demand Trump show proof.
No!
The Dems have to prove they were not wiretapping. lol lol lulz Which is impossible plus no one will believe them anyhow. Shoe is on the other foot now. Winning! By DJT!
Such 2A argument certainly complicates/contradicts the prog-left’s argument for a living constitution–making any technological advance since the 18th century outside the scope of the constitution.
Why not both?
Wally, thanks!
My, my, my…
Much as that might be entertaining, it’s not likely. Sadly, this take by Mike Lofgren seems more realistic.
http://lobelog.com/yes-there-is-a-deep-state-but-not-the-right-wings-caricature/#comment-660882
Yes, There Is a Deep State—But Not the Right Wing’s Caricature
That’s about the size of it.
It’s only a living document until they decide otherwise. It’s static for things like the second amendment(i.e., it only protects firearms in service during the 18th century). Or when they decide that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed” really means that only the DHS, 82nd airborne or Navy Seals have this right.
The founding fathers would be horrified that racists, sexists, nativists, homophobes and anti-semites are exercising this hallowed right.
You must accept that only leftists are qualified to interpret the Constitution and tell us what it really means. Only they can unlock its mysteries and riddles.
My favorite is when they tell us that there’s an “evolving standard,” which means that it no longer means what everyone previously thought it means, it now has this completely new meaning that no sensible person would have previously imagined.
But when you suggest amending the Constitution through the proper means you are accused of “tampering.”
examples of what?
Mar 20, 2017 What Is The Deep State? James Corbett on Financial Survival
James Corbett joins Alfred Adask for his bi-monthly appearance on Financial Survival. This time they discuss the #Vault7 documents, the surveillance state and the deep state. What is the deep state? Who are its members? How does it operate? Find out in this in-depth conversation.
Video Link
Quite the stupid distraction on The Hill today:
Intel Committee “Political Theater” as Trump Escalates Wars
http://www.accuracy.org/release/intel-committee-political-theater-as-trump-escalates-wars/
Great column! Completely laying the countries super net out there in such a concise manner means you cannot reference freedom when referring to the same monster. Unless referring to it in some future pipe dream.
One thing I am curious about though. I could see deep states nonacceptance of the Trump who ran for president, what is the fear of President Trump? Hes threatening, bombing. killing, increasing war spending, giving money to Israel, etc… If you squint you can see amnesty in our future.
Hes the supposed anti establishment President but is following ClintonBushObama play book they left in the desk.
Sad
US uses GCHQ to spy on US citizens to get around legal hurdles. Standard practice.
Trump’s team probably includes people who don’t want this admitted in public even if it would prove the allegation.
Using GCHQ to spy on US citizens is standard practice. There’ll be people on Trump’s team who think it’s vital to keep that secret even if proves the bugging allegation because GCHQ is probably bugging thousands of US citizen jihadists inside the US.
Like the US, the UK elite are fully signed up to the banking mafia’s version of globalism and Trump is a threat to that. The globalist conspiracy is trans national.
The security dudes would do what they were told.
Don’t let the bastards get ya down…Larry the cable Guy and Jeff Foxworthy will
be on this Friday night the 24th. On RFD channel……..the title of their theme is
“We’ve been thinkin”, hell, those two thinking together is a scary thought….LoL…..and
I bet they will have alot to say about this……..we all
need to have some humor right about now. Cuz ya know what…….I’m over it…..
To the guys on Friday night……..Let’s all watch…..and gee did you notice… the mandela
effect did not seperate the word ALOT……….wow…….just F–king amazing…..there’s yer
sign……..it’s gonna be ok folks………….
So what’s with Fox News putting the kibosh you, Judge? You reported that 3 separate sources had advised FOXNEWS (not just you personally) about the GCHQ spying.
You’re generally pretty reliable. I’m sure you did not pull this out of your hat. The denials coming from Britain are hardly convincing.
Just what the hell is going on, and why are you being silenced?
Could be. certainly lying when mouth opens.
Truth brings out the silencers
Trump has no proof he has been spied by Obama, or so is what the talking heads and the spinmeisters are saying …
But when it comes to Trump as a Russian agent, no proof needed or shown …
People are fed up with this Orwellian doublethink newspeak.
The judge spoke truthfully
And in the zionized west
truth sets you free
usually from employment
Trump, Devin Nunes, Five Eyes, Deep State, Obama?
Yesterday’s Very Odd, Fast Paced Events: Question – Was Judge Nap Right? Are the 5 Eyes Now Spying on Devin?
https://willyloman.wordpress.com
Where in the world is Judge Nap Nap Nap? He has been cut out of photos and disappeared Soviet/Argentinean style. …Dropped from a helicopter over the oceans
What seems very strange is that Trump, WH or even Breitbart are not playing Devin Nunes revelation strong enough. Trump team was spied on. No question about it. So why are they so timid?
All governments are weaponized human extinction machines.