Trump's "Evidence" for Obama wiretap claims relies on sketchy anonymously sourced reports

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Trump’s ‘evidence’ for Obama wiretap claims relies on sketchy, anonymously sourced reports
By Glenn Kessler

March 5, 2017 at 11:24 AM

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President Trump accused former president Barack Obama of wiretapping his calls in Trump Tower. Here's a timeline of their relationship since inauguration. (The Washington Post)
“How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
— President Trump, tweet, March 4, 2017

“Reports concerning potentially politically motivated investigations ahead of the 2016 election are very troubling.”
— White House press secretary Sean Spicer, statement, March 5

President Trump’s explosive allegation that former president Barack Obama wiretapped him is based on — what?

That has been the question ever since Trump sent provocative early-morning tweets over the weekend, because he and his staff have provided no evidence.

At The Fact Checker, we require the accuser to provide the evidence for a dramatic claim. We asked Saturday and received no answer.


However, in calling for a congressional investigation of apparent Russian meddling in the election to also look into Trump’s allegation, White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Sunday referred to “reports concerning potentially politically motivated investigations.” That suggests that the tweets were based on media reports, not information that the president might have received from inside the government.

Our colleague Robert Costa has reported that White House aides have internally circulated an article on Breitbart titled “Mark Levin to Congress: Investigate Obama’s ‘Silent Coup’ vs. Trump.” Breitbart is a right-leaning news organization that is a rather unreliable source of information. Often the material that is published is derivative and twisted in misleading ways.

However, a White House spokesman told The Fact Checker that the White House instead is relying on reports “from BBC, Heat Street, New York Times, Fox News, among others.” He provided a list of five articles.

Let’s explore the sources of the president’s claim.

The Facts
We are going to start with the Breitbart article, which lists two key data points that appear to relate to the president’s claim:

June 2016: FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] request. The Obama administration files a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is denied.October: FISA request. The Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at National Review later notes. The Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.
But these data points are not based on reporting by Breitbart. Instead, Breitbart links to a report that appeared in Heat Street, another right-leaning news organization: “EXCLUSIVE: FBI ‘Granted FISA Warrant’ Covering Trump Camp’s Ties To Russia.” It was written by Louise Mensch, a former Tory member of the British Parliament and an independent journalist. This is one of the news reports identified by the White House, and it’s the most important one.


This article claimed: “Two separate sources with links to the counter-intelligence community have confirmed to Heat Street that the FBI sought, and was granted, a FISA court warrant in October, giving counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia.”

Mensch claimed that the warrant was related to an FBI investigation of a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to two Russian banks — an investigation that, as far as anyone knows, went nowhere.

“The FISA warrant was granted in connection with the investigation of suspected activity between the server [in Trump Tower] and two banks, SVB Bank and Alfa Bank. However, it is thought in the intelligence community that the warrant covers any ‘US person’ connected to this investigation, and thus covers Donald Trump and at least three further men who have either formed part of his campaign or acted as his media surrogates,” Mensch wrote.

(Note: While Heat Street says the server in question is in Trump Tower, other reports have suggested the server actually was located in Philadelphia. That’s because the Trump domain was controlled by a company that outsourced emails to another company called Listrak, which actually owns/operates the physical server in a data center in Philadelphia.)

The Washington Post for months has sought to confirm this report of a FISA warrant related to the Trump campaign but has been unable to do so. Presumably, other U.S. news organizations have tried to do so as well. So one has to take this claim with a huge dose of skepticism. Indeed, the New York Times reported before the election that the FBI “ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts” with the Russian banks.


Interestingly, as far as we can tell, only two other reports have touched on this FISA claim, and they also have British connections. One is a report in the BBC from January, which the White House cited as a source. The BBC reported:

Lawyers from the National Security Division in the Department of Justice then drew up an application. They took it to the secret US court that deals with intelligence, the FISA court, named after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They wanted permission to intercept the electronic records from two Russian banks.Their first application, in June, was rejected outright by the judge. They returned with a more narrowly drawn order in July and were rejected again. Finally, before a new judge, the order was granted, on 15 October, three weeks before election day.Neither Mr Trump nor his associates are named in the FISA order, which would only cover foreign citizens or foreign entities — in this case the Russian banks. But ultimately, the investigation is looking for transfers of money from Russia to the United States, each one, if proved, a felony offense.A lawyer — outside the Department of Justice but familiar with the case — told me that three of Mr Trump’s associates were the subject of the inquiry. “But it’s clear this is about Trump,” he said.
Finally, there was a report in the Guardian, which reported on the supposed June FISA request but could not confirm the October one. (The White House did not cite the Guardian.)

The Guardian has learned that the FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (FISA) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The FISA court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus. According to one report, the FBI was finally granted a warrant in October, but that has not been confirmed, and it is not clear whether any warrant led to a full investigation.
Separately, McClatchy, in a January article that mostly focused on whether money from the Kremlin covertly aided Trump’s campaign, reported that one source had confirmed that “the FBI had obtained a warrant on Oct. 15 from the highly secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing investigators access to bank records and other documents about potential payments and money transfers related to Russia.” This echoed the BBC report, but is much different than the Heat Street account. (The White House did not mention this report as a source for Trump’s claim.)

The White House provided three other sources. Two, a National Review article and a Fox News interview, are simply derivative of the Heat Street article, with no independent confirmation. The third is a New York Times report that intelligence agencies “are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions” as part of a probe of possible links between Russian officials and Trump campaign aides. (We recall that the president has previously deemed Times reporting on this matter as “fake news.”)

So what do we have here?


Only two articles, both with British roots, have reported that a FISA court order was granted in October to examine possible activity between two Russian banks and a computer server in the Trump Tower. This claim has not been confirmed by U.S. news organizations. Moreover, neither article says that Obama requested the order or that it resulted in the tapping of Trump’s phone lines. The server, in fact, may not have even been in Trump Tower.

(Our colleague Ellen Nakashima reported how difficult it is to obtain a wiretap of a U.S. citizen as part of a foreign intelligence investigation.)

Moreover, the articles do not support the White House’s claim that these were “potentially politically motivated investigations” led by Obama. The articles all suggest that the FISA requests — if they happened — were done by the intelligence agencies and the FBI. The BBC says the investigation was prompted by a tip from a Baltic country about possible criminal activity:

Last April, the CIA director was shown intelligence that worried him. It was — allegedly — a tape recording of a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into the US presidential campaign.It was passed to the US by an intelligence agency of one of the Baltic States. The CIA cannot act domestically against American citizens so a joint counter-intelligence task force was created.
We should also note that a spokesman for Obama has denied the allegation that the former president ordered a wiretap on Trump.

Moreover, James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence under Obama, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that in the national intelligence activity he oversaw, “there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, the president-elect at the time, as a candidate or against his campaign.” Clapper said as intelligence director he would have known about a “FISA court order on something like this. Absolutely, I can deny it.”

Asked again whether there was a FISA court order to monitor Trump Tower, Clapper replied: “Not to my knowledge.”

The Pinocchio Test
While the Trump White House cited five news reports to justify its request for a congressional investigation, only two actually are relevant.

It’s certainly ironic that the Trump White House — which has heavily criticized articles relying on anonymous sources — now relies on articles based on anonymous sources that cite information that has not been confirmed by any U.S. news organization. It would be amusing if it were not so sad.

After all, Clapper, who presumably would be aware of a FISA court order, has issued an on-the-record denial.

Even if these media reports are accepted as accurate, neither back up Trump’s claims that Obama ordered the tapping of his phone calls. Moreover, they also do not back up the administration’s revised claim of politically motivated investigations.

We’re still waiting for the evidence. In the meantime, Trump earns Four Pinocchios.

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The Snowden effect, if he had not come out these request would have been rubber stamped by the FISA court.
 

QueEx

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This former British lawmaker
is at the heart of the Trump wiretap allegations


upload_2017-3-6_18-55-0.png

Stefan Wermuth /AFP via Getty Images - Louise Mensch in 2012.



LONDON — A former British legislator is at the heart of the Trump administration’s explosive allegation that President Barack Obama was spying on him during the 2016 campaign.

But who exactly is Louise Mensch?

For starters, the politician-turned-journalist is the writer behind an article published on the eve of the election titled:
“EXCLUSIVE: FBI ‘Granted FISA Warrant’ Covering Trump Camp’s Ties To Russia.”


The article, published on the right-leaning, libertarian website Heat Street, did not create much of a stir at the time. But it has come under the spotlight after Trump, in a tweetstorm over the weekend, accused Obama of wiretapping his offices during the election campaign. Trump compared the alleged bugging to the Watergate scandal, but he has not offered any evidence to back up his claims.

In tweets on Monday, Mensch emphasized that her reporting does not back up Trump’s wiretapping claim, -- even though the White House cited her article to justify the allegation. She stressed that her reporting refers to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court warrant and does not mention anything about wiretapping.

Over the weekend, the White House cited reports “from BBC, Heat Street, New York Times, Fox News, among others” to justify the claims. Former Obama administration officials and aides have denied the accusation.

After combing through these news reports, The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler concluded that the piece by Mensch in Heat Street was “the most important” of the lot:

In her report, published Nov. 7, Mensch said the FBI was granted a FISA court warrant in October “giving counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia.”

She cited “two separate sources with links to the counter-intelligence community” as evidence for those claims.

Mensch, who is based in New York, said her sources contacted her because of her outspoken backing for the intelligence community. She has, for instance, called Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified documents, “a loathsome traitor.”​

“They gave me one of the most closely guarded secrets in intelligence,” she said, referring to her sources. Speaking to the Guardian, a left-leaning British newspaper, she added: “People are speculating why someone trusted me with that. Nobody met me in a darkened alley in a fedora, but they saw me as someone who has political experience and is their friend. I am a pro-national security partisan. I don’t have divided loyalties.”​

Mensch, 45, is a force on social media and describes herself on Twitter as a “Conservative. Feminist. Optimist. Patriot.”

Anyone who follows her on Twitter — and more than 170,000 people do — knows that she is not a Trump supporter and has been probing Trump-Russia links for some time.

Her name also appeared in the hacked emails of John Podesta, the former chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In an email she sent to the Creative Artists Agency that was forwarded to Podesta, Mensch described herself as a “committed Republican” who was concerned about a Trump presidency and offered a suggestion for a campaign ad for Clinton.

In Britain, Mensch is best known for her stint as a Conservative lawmaker and for her work as a successful chick-lit novelist under her maiden name, Louise Bagshawe.

She resigned as a lawmaker in 2012, saying it “proved impossible to balance the needs of my family.” The mother of three moved to New York to live with her husband, Peter Mensch, manager of the bands Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.


*** Although she served as a member of Parliament for only two years, she quickly became a high-profile figure, partly because of her leading role in a parliamentary committee investigating phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid.

Mensch was one of four Conservative lawmakers on the committee who refused to endorse the panel’s conclusions. The committee’s description of Murdoch as “not a fit person” to run a major international company, Mensch said, was “partisan” and unjustified. She also apologized to the broadcaster Piers Morgan after falsely accusing him of admitting to phone hacking.


Mensch was regularly featured in the news when she was a politician. She was once contacted by an investigative journalist who claimed to have pictures proving that Mensch had taken drugs in a nightclub in the 1990s with the violinist Nigel Kennedy.

Mensch responded in a statement by saying it was “highly probable” and apologized for her dancing.

“Since I was in my twenties, I’m sure it was not the only incident of the kind; we all do idiotic things when young. I am not a very good dancer and must apologise to any and all journalists who were forced to watch me dance that night at Ronnie Scott’s,” she said.

She works as an executive for News Corp., a media company owned by Murdoch. She helped to launch Heat Street last year but left that role in December and is focusing on creating digital media projects for the company.

This story has been updated.


SOURCE: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...gations/ar-AAnU2xB?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp


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QueEx

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Politics

A Conspiracy Theory’s Journey
From Talk Radio to Trump’s Twitter



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The lobby of Trump Tower in New York. President Trump alleged, without evidence, that the Obama
administration ordered a wiretap of the building. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times



WASHINGTON —

It began at 6 p.m. Thursday as a conspiratorial rant on conservative talk radio:

President Barack Obama had used the “instrumentalities of the federal government” to wiretap the Republican seeking to succeed him. This “is the big scandal,” Mark Levin, the host, told his listeners.

By Friday morning, the unsubstantiated allegation had been picked up by Breitbart News, the site once headed by President Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon.

Less than 24 hours later, . . . [Trump] embraced the conspiracy in a series of Twitter posts accusing his predecessor of spying on him, setting in motion the latest head-spinning, did-he-really-say-that furor of Mr. Trump’s six-week-old presidency.​


Previous presidents usually measured their words to avoid a media feeding frenzy, but Mr. Trump showed again over the weekend that he feeds off the frenzy. Uninhibited by the traditional protocols of his office, he makes the most incendiary assertions based on shreds of suspicion. He does so without consulting some of his most senior aides, or even agencies of his own government that might have contrary information. After setting off a public firestorm with no proof, he then calls for an investigation to find the missing evidence.

To his adversaries, Mr. Trump’s bomb-throwing seems like a calculated strategy to distract from another story he wants to avoid. In this case, they said Sunday, he clearly wanted to turn the conversation away from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recused himself last week from any federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s links with Russia in response to reports that he had met with Russia’s ambassador during the presidential race. Instead of what Mr. Sessions did or did not do, the Sunday talk shows were dominated by discussion about what Mr. Obama did or did not do.

But in shifting the story, Mr. Trump also kept the Russia investigation front and center, rather than his initiatives on health care, taxes or jobs. His first address to Congress, which won him plaudits for being presidential, was last week but now feels ages ago. Even some Republicans pointed out that if an eavesdropping warrant had been approved, it would mean that a judge was convinced that someone in Mr. Trump’s circle might have committed a crime or acted as a foreign agent.

“I’m very worried that our president is suggesting that the former president has done something illegally,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told the audience at a town hall-style meeting in his home state over the weekend. At the same time, he said, “I would be very worried if, in fact, the Obama administration was able to obtain a warrant lawfully
about Trump campaign activity with a foreign government.”

This was hardly the first time Mr. Trump made a shocking accusation without evidence.

He claimed that more than three million people voted against him illegally in November, giving Hillary Clinton a victory in the popular vote.

Republican and Democratic officials alike said there was no indication of any such thing, and

Mr. Trump’s promised investigation has so far led nowhere.

Nor was it the first time Mr. Trump leveled astonishing allegations against Mr. Obama.

He spent years promoting the false claim that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States, promising an investigation to uncover the truth and backing down only last year, during his campaign.

And last summer, he asserted that Mr. Obama was “the founder of ISIS.”


Photo
06tictoc-02-master675.jpg

Attorney General Jeff Sessions at a news conference on Thursday. Critics said Mr. Trump’s allegation was
an effort to distract from damaging reports about Mr. Sessions. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

The White House remained firm on Sunday even after Mr. Obama’s office denied ordering a wiretap and James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that there had been no wiretapping of Mr. Trump or his campaign. James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, privately asked the Justice Department to issue a statement that Mr. Trump’s claim was false, senior officials said, but the department
had not done so as of Sunday evening.

“Everybody acts like President Trump is the one that came up with this idea and just threw it out there,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House spokeswoman, said on “This Week” on ABC News. “There are multiple news outlets that have reported this. And all we’re asking is that we get the same level of look into the Obama administration and the potential that they had for a complete abuse of power that they’ve been claiming that we have done over the last six months.”

Ms. Sanders pointed to reports in “multiple outlets,” including The New York Times, as the foundation for the allegation. Mr. Levin, the radio host, likewise read from a series of mainstream news reports during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” on Sunday.

“The evidence is overwhelming,” he said. “This is not about President Trump’s tweeting. This is about the Obama administration’s spying, and the question isn’t whether it spied.” He added, “The question is who they did spy on, the extent of the spying — that is, the Trump campaign, the Trump
transition, Trump surrogates.”


But the news organizations he and Ms. Sanders cited have not reported that Mr. Obama tapped Mr. Trump’s phones, as the president claimed on Twitter. The Times has reported that several of Mr. Trump’s associates are being investigated for their connections with Russians and that law enforcement agencies have examined intercepted communications. It has not reported that those associates themselves have necessarily been wiretapped, but it has reported surveillance of Russians, which is commonplace.


News outlets have noted that a phone call between Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, and Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey I. Kislyak, was monitored, leading to Mr. Flynn’s resignation because his account of the conversation did not match the intercept. It is common for the United States to monitor the communications of Russia’s ambassador.

The Times also reported that before leaving office, Obama officials tried to spread information about Russian meddling in the election and possible links between Russia and Trump associates, in order to leave a trail for government investigators.
Some Republicans suggested that Mr. Trump might have extrapolated that into an unfounded assertion. “I think the president was not correct, certainly, in saying that President Obama ordered a tap on a server in Trump Tower,” former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said on “This Week.” “However, I think he’s right in that there was surveillance and that it was conducted at the behest of the attorney — of the Justice Department,” through the special court that authorizes eavesdropping on suspected foreign agents inside the United States.


06tictoc-03-master675.jpg

Mr. Trump arriving at Andrews Air Force Base on Sunday. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Conservative radio hosts like Mr. Levin and Rush Limbaugh have focused on Mr. Obama’s “tactics” for a while. But it was not until Breitbart published its story that the specific claims crossed Mr. Trump’s desk.

Mr. Trump’s aides — including Mr. Bannon, an anti-establishment figure who has long questioned the motives of parts of the extensive intelligence bureaucracy — have believed for a long time that the Obama administration colluded with federal investigators who were searching for activity between Russian officials and the Trump campaign surrounding the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails.

They have never offered evidence, but Mr. Trump has long dabbled in conspiracy theories. So when Mr. Trump became aware of the claims in the Breitbart article, aides said, they were appealing to him. It was not immediately clear if someone printed the article out for him or if it was part of a collection of Twitter posts and news articles that his aides present to him each day. But it resonated.

Aides say Mr. Trump went into Friday in a foul mood. He had not known ahead of time that Mr. Sessions planned to recuse himself and never thought he should, even after Mr. Sessions acknowledged that he had talked to Mr. Kislyak despite suggesting otherwise in his Senate confirmation hearing.

Mr. Trump told some advisers that he thought Mr. Sessions had fumbled his answer at that hearing. But on Friday morning in an angry session in the Oval Office, the president railed at aides about the recusal, singling out the White House counsel’s office and the communications staff in a tirade visible through the window to a nearby television camera.

Still upset after arriving at Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Trump woke up Saturday morning and began posting on Twitter at 6:26 a.m. In a burst of six messages, he tried to turn the tables by noting that members of the Obama administration also met with Russia’s ambassador. Without citing a source, he asserted that Mr. Obama had tapped his phones, and compared it to Watergate. “Bad (or sick) guy,” the president wrote.

While the political world erupted over the allegation, Mr. Trump was adamant in conversations throughout the day that he was on to something. His chief strategist, Mr. Bannon, the former Breitbart chairman, flew down to Florida with Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, on Saturday.

Late Saturday morning, Mr. Trump’s aides spoke about how to get him to stop posting on Twitter, to avoid opening himself up to further problems. He golfed a little, then returned to the club and began working the phones. At dinner, he roamed the patio, telling a friend, Chris Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media, that his claims about Mr. Obama would prove true. By Sunday, advisers said, he was fuming that more people were not defending him.

And so he doubled down, calling for a congressional investigation.

“Reports concerning potentially politically motivated investigations immediately ahead of the 2016 election are very troubling,” Mr. Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, said on Twitter. Until then, he said, the president will not comment further.

Follow Peter Baker @peterbakernyt and Maggie Haberman @maggienyt.

Peter Baker reported from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New York. Michael D. Shear contributed reporting from West Palm Beach, Fla.

A version of this article appears in print on March 6, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Conspiracy Theory’s Journey From Talk Radio to Oval Office


SOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/05/...-radio-conspiracy-theory.html?_r=0#pt0-926195


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Obama Just Admitted To Wiretapping Trump In Hilarious Funny Or Die Skit


By Marisa Manfredo

Published on March 9, 2017

SHARE THIS STORY
Funny Or Die has released a video (see below) showing former President Barack Obama himself declaring that, when in office, he wiretapped current President Donald Trump. Trump recently accused Obama of wiretapping his campaign and transition on Twitter. He has yet to back up the claim with any evidence.

As Funny Or Die has proven, however, you can see video footage of Obama admitting to the alleged wiretap if you splice dozens of videos together, constructing entire sentences word by word. Obama even confesses to enjoying wires so much that he loves the HBO TV series “The Wire” and watches it every night.

So far this is the most compelling reason to think that Obama actually engaged in any unseemly espionage regarding Trump.

Maybe Trump wanted the media to consider whether the Obama Administration resembled an evil police state apparatus. Instead, the media has been considering the possibility of intelligence agencies obtaining probably cause warrants to monitor Trump and his aides’ communications.

The same two options have haunted Trump since his candidacy: either Trump is a liar, or Trump is a criminal. The wiretap case is just another example of this.

Watch the video here:
 

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Obama Just Admitted To Wiretapping Trump In Hilarious Funny Or Die Skit


By Marisa Manfredo

Published on March 9, 2017

SHARE THIS STORY
Funny Or Die has released a video (see below) showing former President Barack Obama himself declaring that, when in office, he wiretapped current President Donald Trump. Trump recently accused Obama of wiretapping his campaign and transition on Twitter. He has yet to back up the claim with any evidence.

As Funny Or Die has proven, however, you can see video footage of Obama admitting to the alleged wiretap if you splice dozens of videos together, constructing entire sentences word by word. Obama even confesses to enjoying wires so much that he loves the HBO TV series “The Wire” and watches it every night.

So far this is the most compelling reason to think that Obama actually engaged in any unseemly espionage regarding Trump.

Maybe Trump wanted the media to consider whether the Obama Administration resembled an evil police state apparatus. Instead, the media has been considering the possibility of intelligence agencies obtaining probably cause warrants to monitor Trump and his aides’ communications.

The same two options have haunted Trump since his candidacy: either Trump is a liar, or Trump is a criminal. The wiretap case is just another example of this.

Watch the video here:
 

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How does Trump turn his big lies into near truths? Watch our new video to discover his technique. Then make sure he stops getting away with it.
 

COINTELPRO

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The government does not have to go to a court and than submit the authorization to a phone company to conduct surveillance.

As in the case of GCHQ, they have splitters that can copy a fiber optic signal.

11.jpg


Based on Snowden revelations the system controls are very weak and even allowed them to spy on their wives to see if they were cheating. There could have been off the record spying.

Based on experience of IP being stolen and used by the government, anything is possible, there was no moral standards or honor.
 
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QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Based on experience of IP being stolen and used by the government, anything is possible, there was no moral standards or honor.

No one said "wiretapping" Trump was impossible. Who said that ???

The question is, as has been asked over and fucking over, is there any evidence of such ???

No one, especially Donald Trump, has presented even a shred of evidence that Barack Obama wiretapped him.


Do YOU have any evidence whatsoever that Barak Obama wiretapped Trump ???

Not just mere speculation of what could be possible.



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QueEx

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Why Trump Can’t Let Go of His Bogus Wiretapping Claim

p o l i t i c o
March 20, 2017

The following was excerpted from: Why Trump Can’t Let Go of His Bogus
Wiretapping Claim


[Both] Nixon and Trump share a common personality characteristic: a hatred of losing.

Nixon bitterly quipped at a press conference after losing the California governor’s race in 1962:
“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”


This dominant emotionfear and loathing of losing—has been studied by social
scientists like Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman. He found in a study that won the Nobel
Prize in 2002 that people facing losses -- act irrationally because all humans hate to
lose much more than they like to win—by a factor of almost three times. It is a deep,
ingrained aversion. Imagine what the factor is for people like Nixon and Trump.


So when people are faced with a sure loss, they are predisposed to do irrational
things like cover up mistakes or crimes rather than admit to wrongdoing. And the stronger
the feeling about the loss, the more irrational the behavior. Think of Bill Clinton in his
affair with Monica Lewinski: He could have taken the sure loss and admitted to the relationship or act
irrationally and lie under oath when the odds were long that he could keep a lid on things. He chose to
argue in a deposition about the meaning of the verb “is,” much like Trump’s press secretary argues
about the meaning of “wiretapping.”

* * *

So now we turn to Trump, and his claim that Obama was bugging his phones.
So far, the heads of the House and Senate intelligence committees have said it didn’t happen,
and Comey has reportedly denied it privately. Yet Trump has stubbornly doubled down,

recently adding a new dubious claim—that Obama used the Brits to do the snooping—rather
than simply apologizing for his error.

It’s enough to make this history buff wonder: Was Trump’s March 4 tweetstorm simply the
impetuous act of man who reacted to the latest news he read, fake or not, -- or -- was Trump

acting like Nixon in a deliberate way to distract attention from the growing concern about ties
between his campaign and the election-tampering Russians?


FULL ARTICLE: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/donald-trump-wiretapping-claim-214929

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QueEx

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Super Moderator
President Trump faces his hardest truth:
He was wrong


BByt8Bm.img

© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post President Trump listens with German Chancellor Angela Merkel by his
side during a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House on March 17.


On the 60th day of his presidency came the hardest truth for Donald Trump.

He was wrong.

James B. Comey Jr. — the FBI director whom Trump celebrated on the
campaign trail as a gutsy and honorable “Crooked Hillary” truth-teller — testified
under oath Monday what many Americans had already assumed: Trump had
falsely accused his predecessor of wiretapping his headquarters during
last year’s campaign.


Trump did not merely allege that former president Barack Obama ordered surveil-
lance on Trump Tower, of course. He asserted it as fact, and then reasserted it, and
then insisted that forthcoming evidence would prove him right.


But in Monday’s remarkable, marathon hearing of the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence, Comey said there was no such evidence. Trump’s
claim, first made in a series of tweets on March 4 at a moment when associates said
he was feeling under siege and stewing over the struggles of his young presidency,
remains unfounded.

Comey did not stop there. He confirmed publicly that the FBI was
investigating possible collusion between Trump campaign officials and
associates with Russia, part of an extraordinary effort by an adversary to
influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. election in Trump’s favor.


Questions about Russia have hung over Trump for months, but the president
always has dismissed them as “fake news.” That became much harder
Monday after the FBI director proclaimed the Russia probe to be anything
but fake.


“There’s a smell of treason in the air,” presidential historian Douglas
Brinkley said. “Imagine if J. Edgar Hoover or any other FBI director would
have testified against a sitting president? It would have been a mind-boggling
event.”


For Trump, Comey’s testimony punctuates what has been a troubling
first two months as president. His approval ratings, which were historically
low at his inauguration, have fallen even farther.
Gallup’s tracking poll as of
Sunday showed just 39 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job perfor-
mance, with 55 percent disapproving.


The Comey episode threatens to damage Trump’s credibility not only
with voters, but with lawmakers of his own party whose support he needs to
pass the health-care bill later this week in the House, the first legislative
project of his presidency.


Furthermore, the FBI’s far-reaching Russia investigation shows no
sign of concluding soon and is all but certain to remain a distraction for
the White House, spurring moments of presidential fury and rash tweets and
possibly inhibiting the administration’s ability to govern.



THE REST OF IT HERE: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...s-wrong/ar-BBysSRp?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartanntp


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COINTELPRO

Transnational Member
Registered
No one said "wiretapping" Trump was impossible. Who said that ???

The question is, as has been asked over and fucking over, is there any evidence of such ???

No one, especially Donald Trump, has presented even a shred of evidence that Barack Obama wiretapped him.


Do YOU have any evidence whatsoever that Barak Obama wiretapped Trump ???

Not just mere speculation of what could be possible.



.

President Trump can't disclose a classified capability as described. He can say in vague terms that it was done.

He can't even go after the people that did it, without compromising national security in court. Let say I decided to spy on you using some NSA capability and get caught, the government could not imprison me for illegal wiretapping without disclosing it in court. They would more likely take administrative action and strip you of your clearance or fire you.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT

These recent security breaches and missing laptop was these elements in the government sending a message that he had better shut up about this. He can end up like JFK talking vaguely about these programs. Look at how easily this person almost got to you.
 
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