While weekends are sometimes slow news days, this morning we awoke to a slew of information coming from a variety of sources, including President Trump, known for breaking news on his Twitter account, which critics don't appreciate but does manage to get the news out without the filter of MSM spin, so we will start with that.
Early this morning Donald Trump put out a series of tweets indicating that he now has information that Barack Obama arranged to have his phones wire tapped before the election.
Why would Trump be putting this information out right now, when prior revelations already indicated that Obama was using the FISA court against the Trump campaign, had been turned down, just to resubmit a more narrow request to spy on Trump's campaign during the election process?
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.
That was followed up by Andrew McCarthy over at National Review, a former terrorism prosecutor, who stated "The idea that FISA could be used against political enemies always seemed far-fetched. Now it might not be."
In summary:
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. It’s a good example of why investigations properly proceed in secret and are not publicly announced unless and until the government is ready to put its money where its mouth is by charging someone. It’s a good example of why FISA surveillance is done in secret and its results are virtually never publicized — the problem is not just the possibility of tipping off the hostile foreign power; there is also the potential of tainting U.S. persons who may have done nothing wrong. While it’s too early to say for sure, it may also be an example of what I thought would never actually happen: the government pretextually using its national-security authority to continue a criminal investigation after determining it lacked evidence of crimes.
Emphasis mine.
The reason I highlighted that particular portion of the quote above is because of what Obama did when his surveillance tactics failed to produce any actionable evidence of wrong doing, in other words, nothing that Trump nor his campaign could be prosecuted for.
By January 12, 2017, eight days before Trump's inauguration, it was reported that Obama "expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections," as reported by the NYT.
Basically Obama made it so his lackies in 17 different government agencies had access to information obtained via supposedly secret information obtained through surveillance, that they could then leak because if there was nothing criminal that could be prosecuted legally, then his operatives could at least "leak" said information in order to attempt to taint Trump's presidency.
While all of that was known, pieced together in separate articles over a variety of organizations, now Trump is indicating he has data that shows Obama took it a step further and actually wire-tapped him, an opposing party's presidential candidate.
As it discussed below, that is a game changer. Barack Obama abused his position and the office of the president, in order to push for the ouster of the duly elected president, Trump.
Lt Col Tony Shaffer says if this is true about the wire-tapping of Trump, then it is an indictable offense of a "former sitting president and his staff."
By tweeting about this morning, Donald Trump is guaranteeing the MSM cannot ignore the story, although there is no doubt they will attempt to spin once they all converge on a narrative.
That is not all Obama did in his last weeks as president to abuse his power and to set up a silent coup against the Trump administration.
OBAMA GETS TRUMPED!
On February 10, 2017, as reported by USA Today, Obama attempted to stack the deck in the Department of Justice: "Seven days before he left office, President Obama changed the order of succession without explanation to remove Boente from the list. Obama's order had listed U.S. attorneys in the District of Columbia, the Northern District of Illinois and the Central District of California."
If that names sounds familiar it is because Boente is the man Trump appointed as acting Attorney General before Sessions was confirmed, after firing Sally Yates who was performing the duties when she refused to defend Trump's immigration order in court.
Obama was obviously hoping that in the chaos of transition the Trump administration would not notice that Boente was taken out of the line of succession, but according to the USA Today report, "Trump quietly signed an executive order restoring Boente to the line of succession."
Here is who Obama had attempted to stack the deck with, via The Weekly Standard:
Why would the Obama administration make this eleventh-hour change to the line of succession at the Justice Department? "At the time, I was told it was done in consultation with Trump transition," Gregory Korte, the USA Today reporter who wrote the story quoted above, told me Thursday. "Looking back, that's clearly not the case."
In fact, it seems like it was quite obviously not the case. The man Obama placed at the head of the line of succession is D.C.'s U.S. Attorney Channing Phillips, who is quite cozy with President Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder. He is a former senior adviser to Holder, and he stayed on to work under Obama's next AG Loretta Lynch before Obama appointed Phillips D.C.'s U.S. attorney in 2015. But Phillips goes way back with Holder—Holder first hired Philips in the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office in 1994. It's also safe to say that the AG offices in the Northern District of Illinois and the Central District of California are not hotbeds of Trump supporters.
Was the Democratic party in on Obama's plans? The last sentence of The Weekly Standard report certainly shows that is a likely scenario, as they state "As soon as it was evident Boentes was going to be handling any Russian investigations, Schumer called on him to appoint a special prosecutor."
This is true, in Sessions recusal he said he would allow Boente to oversee any investigations or prosecutions in his place, and the very same day, understanding that Trump had, indeed, put Boente back in the succession lineup, Schumer did indeed start pushing for a special prosecutor.
After cleaning house, which Trump has already started to do, and to which his advisors are encouraging him to escalate, the Trump administration is going to have to insist on a full out investigation into Barack Obama's deliberate and documented attempts, to not only sabotage the transition, but into whether the level of Obama's last minute actions meets the criteria of criminal behavior and whether any of his actions can be prosecuted in a court of law.
Below, Rush Limbaugh discusses more about Obama's attempt to set up a shadow government coup against Trump.
