Obama’s Soviet-Level Abuse of Power for Political Purposes

Lt. Col Tony Shaffer was called upon this morning on FOX and Friends to comment on the “wire tapping” of Trump Tower controversy that came out this morning. After the above appearance Col. Shaffer returned later in the show with another expert to follow-up…

Meanwhile, ANDREW C. MCCARTHY sheds even more light on how this whole president-FISA things is supposed to work, and how since the Clinton ‘wall’ fell, how it’s been abused…

FISA and the Trump Team

The idea that FISA could be used against political enemies always seemed far-fetched. Now it might not be.

Remember the great debate over “the Wall” following the 9/11 attacks? “The Wall” was a set of internal guidelines that had been issued by the Clinton Justice Department in the mid 1990s. In a nutshell, the Wall made it legally difficult and practically impossible for agents in the FBI’s Foreign Counter-Intelligence Division (essentially, our domestic-security service, now known as the National Security Division) to share intelligence with the criminal-investigation side of the FBI’s house. Those of us who were critics of the Wall — and I was a strenuous one, beginning in my days as a terrorism prosecutor who personally experienced its suicidal applications — made several arguments against it. My favorite argument, which I have repeated countless times, centered on how preposterous were the underlying assumptions of the Wall. This was far easier for prosecutors than journalists, academics, and the public to grasp, because we dealt with the Justice Department’s different chains of command for criminal and national-security investigations.

Alas, after 20 years, I may have to revise my thinking.

The theory of the Clinton DOJ brass in imposing the Wall was the potential that a rogue criminal investigator, lacking sufficient evidence to obtain a traditional wiretap, would manufacture a national-security angle in order to get a wiretap under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). A traditional wiretap requires evidence amounting to probable cause of commission of a crime. A FISA wiretap requires no showing of a crime, just evidence amounting to probable cause that the target of the wiretap is an agent of a foreign power. (A foreign power can be another country or a foreign terrorist organization.)

The reason the Wall theory was absurd was that a rogue agent would surely manufacture evidence of a crime before he’d manufacture a national-security angle…

[…]

To summarize, it appears there were no grounds for a criminal investigation of banking violations against Trump. Presumably based on the fact that the bank or banks at issue were Russian, the Justice Department and the FBI decided to continue investigating on national-security grounds. A FISA application in which Trump was “named” was rejected by the FISA court as overbroad, notwithstanding that the FISA court usually looks kindly on government surveillance requests. A second, more narrow application, apparently not naming Trump, may have been granted five months later; the best the media can say about it, however, is that the server on which the application centers is “possibly” related to the Trump campaign’s “alleged” links to two Russian banks — under circumstances in which the FBI has previously found no “nefarious purpose” in some (undescribed) connection between Trump Tower and at least one Russian bank (whose connection to Putin’s regime is not described).

That is tissue-thin indeed…

Powerline: THE STORY SO FAR

Timeline: Mark Levin to Congress: Investigate Obama’s ‘Silent Coup’ vs. Trump

Powerline: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS SPRINGS TO OBAMA’S DEFENSE

Don Surber: Media protects Barack’s spying … Same media that saw Obama spying on the AP and FOX News journalist James Rosen (AND his family).

SPYGATE: Liberal Law Professor Jonathan Turley: Obama Spying on Trump Should be ‘Investigated’ [VIDEO]

Previous Post: Obama and Lynch Set Up Shadow Government as They Were Walking Out the Door

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Maggie

One response to “Obama’s Soviet-Level Abuse of Power for Political Purposes”

  1. The Evidence Is There: “These are Police State Tactics…” | The Universal Spectator Avatar
    The Evidence Is There: “These are Police State Tactics…” | The Universal Spectator

    […] And let’s never forget what he did to FNC’s journalist James Rosen and his family (calling Rosen a criminal), and the…. […]

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