Is this President Donald Trump's rabbit hole, to drain the swamp?
Suppose the commander-in-chief declared a massive political scandal — and nobody cared?
What Can Be Gleaned From Trump’s Allegations of Wiretapping
The stories currently are three-fold:
First story: That Obama’s team tried to get a warrant from a regular, Article III federal court on Donald Trump, and was told no by someone along the way (maybe the FBI) the evidence was weak or non-existent...
Second Story: Obama’s team then tried to circumvent the federal judiciary’s independent role by trying to mislabel the issue one of “foreign agents” and tried to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, and were again turned down when the court saw Donald Trump was named. This is an extremely rare act of FISA court refusal of the government. Suggesting the evidence was truly non-existent against Donald Trump.
Third Story: Obama's team circumvented both the regular command of the FBI and the regularly appointe⍭d federal courts, by placing the entire case as a FISA case as a “foreign” case, and then omitted Donald Trump’s name from a surveillance warrant submitted to the FISA court, which the FISA court unwittingly granted.
Which Obama's alphabet soup then misused to spy on Donald Trump and many connected to Donald Trump.
When Meet the Press asked Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, whether he could confirm or deny if a FISA order for this existed, James Clapper declared, "I can deny it."
Asked again whether there was a FISA Court order to monitor Trump Tower, James Clapper said, "Not to my knowledge.". James Clapper added "I can't speak for other authorized entities in the government or a state or local entity,".
James Comey, the director of the FBI, has reportedly asked the US justice department to publicly reject claims made by Donald Trump that Barack Obama ordered his phones to be tapped during the 2016 election campaign.
James Comey made the request because of his concern that the allegation was false and suggested the FBI had broken the law, according to the New York Times.
The most famous recent instance is when President George W. Bush, on October 4, 2001, ordered the National Security Agency to secretly conduct wiretapping, in violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (October 25, 1978). Bush’s action was exposed by The New York Times on December 16, 2005.
BTW - I will be tracking these stories in the comments
James Comey made the request because of his concern that the allegation was false and suggested the FBI had broken the law, according to the New York Times.
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| Fake News |
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| Hat Tip |
President Franklin Roosevelt, on this day, told Attorney General Robert Jackson to ignore a recent Supreme Court ruling on wiretapping, claiming it did not apply to national security. The Court, in Nardone v. United States (December 11, 1939), ruled that wiretapping was illegal under the 1934 Communications Act.
President Roosevelt’s instructions to the attorney general on this day represented just one of several examples in modern American history when presidents claimed a “national security exception” to existing laws. On August 24, 1936 FDR authorized J. Edgar Hoover to resume political spying by the FBI, and then to investigate “subversive activities” on September 6, 1939. On May 20, 1954, for example, President Eisenhower’s Attorney General Herbert Brownell advised the FBI on how to evade a recent Supreme Court decision on eavesdropping.
In short, while many of the FBI’s actions under J. Edgar Hoover were secret and unknown to his superiors, many others were directly authorized or passively approved by the attorney general or the president. The notorious COINTELPRO program, for example, which arguably involved the most abusive FBI actions, was approved by the National Security Council on March 8, 1956, with both the president and the attorney general giving their silent assent.
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| Watergate Timeline |
BTW - I will be tracking these stories in the comments