Way back during the transition from the Obama Administration, the evidence of illegal surveillance of the Trump Campaign began to appear. First, Admiral Mike Rogers warned Donald Trump, the president-elect, that he was under surveillance by the Obama Administration.
June 2016: FISA 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 2016: 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.
On Tuesday November 8th, 2016 the election was held. Results announced Wednesday November 9th, 2016.
On Thursday November 17th, 2016, NSA Director Mike Rogers traveled to New York and met with President-Elect Donald Trump.
Trump moved his transition team to his private golf course immediately.
The other Mike Rogers, a Republican who was deeply compromised by the Benghazi matter, was quickly dropped from the Trump transition team.
This worried the DNC mouthpiece WaPoo. Admiral Rogers probably also warned Trump about the former Intel Committee Chair.
The FBI surveillance and CIA complicity has continued with the appointment of insider Mueller.
Then they took down Mike Flynn who had once written a letter supporting the complaint of a woman named Robyn Gritz, an FBI agent who had worked with McCabe’s team, and accused him of sexual harassment.
In 2013, she filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint against her FBI supervisors alleging sexual discrimination and hostile work environment. In 2014, she amended her complaint by averring that she suffered “a hostile [work] environment, defamation of character through continued targeting by Andrew McCabe.”
The FBI’s response claimed that she had become “underperforming, tardy to work, insubordinate, possibly mentally ill…”
She was forced out.
In May 2014, Flynn provided a letter on Pentagon stationery which stated that Gritz “was well-known, liked and respected in the military counter-terrorism community for her energy, commitment and professional capacity, and over the years worked in several interagency groups on counter-terrorism targeting initiatives.” He added, “Her work consistently produced outstanding results in the most challenging environments.”
That is the back story of why the FBI went after General Flynn. Plus, of course, he had resisted Obama’s out reach to Muslims.
Despite his underlings’ concerns, McCabe’s plan of retaliation against Flynn proceeded apace. According to Joseph diGenova, the newest member of President Trump’s legal team, McCabe set up Flynn for the interview that led to the general’s indictment for lying to the FBI. One of the agents who was tasked with this maneuver sought private legal advice.
Now, the New York Times, at last, admits the presence of a spy in the Trump campaign. Of course, the Times’ version is the FBI/CIA version with enough spin to make the left feel justified.
President Trump accused the F.B.I. on Friday, without evidence, of sending a spy to secretly infiltrate his 2016 campaign “for political purposes” even before the bureau had any inkling of the “phony Russia hoax.”
In fact, F.B.I. agents sent an informant to talk to two campaign advisers only after they received evidence that the pair had suspicious contacts linked to Russia during the campaign. The informant, an American academic who teaches in Britain, made contact late that summer with one campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, according to people familiar with the matter. He also met repeatedly in the ensuing months with the other aide, Carter Page, who was also under F.B.I. scrutiny for his ties to Russia..
The “informant’ was a man named Stephan Halper who has a history with the CIA and MI-6, the British SIS. Why the British let themselves get entangled in this mess is a mystery. Somewhere Kim Philby is laughing.
Andy McCarthy has some corrective thoughts on this. He has been following this for a year. No fan of Trump, his is the cold reality opinion.
As we contended in rebuttal on Thursday, the Times’ facts are selective and its narrative theme of disparate treatment is hogwash: Clinton’s bid was saved, not destroyed, by Obama’s law-enforcement agencies, which tanked a criminal case on which she should have been indicted. And the hush-hush approach taken to the counterintelligence case against Donald Trump was not intended to protect the Republican candidate; it was intended to protect the Obama administration from the specter of a Watergate-level scandal had its spying on the opposition party’s presidential campaign been revealed.
He lays out the whole connection between the Hillary salvage job and the effort to take down Trump to save her campaign. It’s worth reading the whole thing. Conservative Tree House has been the source of the minutiae of the story but McCarthy does the best summary.
The OIG report comes out in a week or two. Battlefield prep is underway by the CIA/FBI.
An interesting fact about Stefan Halper is his ex-wife was the daughter of Ray Cline, a CIA heavyweight during the 1960’s and 1970’s. What better reference to get in the CIA by having such a father-in-law. This doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been hired on his own, but such a connection certainly didn’t hurt.
I subscribe to Hillsdale’s Imprimis and had read diGenova’s article a few months ago. I was shocked to read this part:
“So why was the FBI interrogating Flynn about legal conduct? What more did the FBI need to know? I am told by sources that when Flynn’s indictment was announced, McCabe was on a video conference call—cheering!”
Now it makes sense. McCabe had a personal vendetta against Flynn.
McCabe is a real villain in all this. The vendetta against Flynn who had supported an unjustly maligned FBI agent who had filed an EEOC complaint. Then McAuliffe bribed him rather crudely with $700,000 to leave Hillary alone.
Obama’s Director of Intelligence James Clapper recently saying that it was “a good thing” there was an FBI informant spying on the Trump campaign reminds me of this Twilight Zone episode:
Thanks for putting this together. I’ve never understood why McCabe didn’t recuse himself from anything to do with Flynn. Perhaps that wasn’t necessary – or perhaps that was one of the reasons the IG suggested he be fired.
“The OIG report comes out in a week or two.”
It’s all very confusing. The internet crazies have been talking about the report for six months. My worry is that there are multiple reports, and this one is about the Hillary emails, not the domestic spying, and the MSM is going to spin it as a big nothingburger, yet another “…but her emails” bag of nonsense, and so poison the well for the future report on the spying. However, the fact that the MSM is losing its mind seems to indicate that the report about to drop is the big one.
“My worry is that there are multiple reports, and this one is about the Hillary emails,”
I have read that there are three reports and the delays are because he keeps finding more stuff.
What is crazy is that I have to keep logging in to approve my own comments. Moderation is out of control.
[The WordPress comment management system doesn’t seem to handle CB’s many authors well. If anyone who is reading this knows of a remedy, or knows of someone who knows, I am all ears. Jonathan]
“F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims”
I find it impossible to believe anyone can honestly believe this. And yet, I cruise around twitter, and real-life, major media and political commentators, not just crazys in the replies, are speaking as if this is obviously the truth. Madness walks the land.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
I’ve found that I have trouble submitting comments with DuckDuckGo or when I’m using certain adblockers on the other browsers. When I log in the comments are fine. You might try either turning off any privacy addons or whitelisting Chicagoboyz.
Although when I read things like this–
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/997951982467014656
“If the FBI or DOJ was infiltrating a campaign for the benefit of another campaign, that is a really big deal. Only the release or review of documents that the House Intelligence Committee (also, Senate Judiciary) is asking for can give the conclusive answers. Drain the Swamp!”
–I almost believe again that the plan is and has always been for the nuclear bombs about the outrageous domestic spying that Obama & cronies did on Trump to be dropped close enough to the midterms that there’s no chance for voters to forget about them.
Brian, Victor Davis Hanson’s take on Trump’s timing:
What made Trump different from his competitors? Likely, his cunning, his almost Thucydidean reading of human nature, and his sixth sense about timing and salesmanship.
Why Trump Is a President Like No Other, American Greatness, 15 May 2018
If you and he are right, we’re going to have a fun October.
Was Halper something more than just an informant? It’s all very confused, of course, but the fact that he initiated the contacts with Papadopolous and Page seem to hint that he might have been a provocateur.
I have begun reading Conrad Black’s biography of Trump. I will post some excerpts.
Roy: Yes, Halper’s mission was to concoct justification for FISA monitoring of Team Trump. The MSM hasn’t even gotten to the best part yet. As has been reported by the internet crazies for 6+ months, Dem operatives FusionGPS and Crowdstrike had full access to NSA databases to spy on anyone they wanted. Only after Mike Rogers cut them off in mid 2016 did they have to go the FISA route. It will all come out by October.
The key issue that is emerging is the failure of the FBI to get access to the DNC/Hillary server.
This argument now coming from the left is that the FBI was going to “protect” Trump from the Russians who had hacked the server.
The trouble is that there is NO evidence the server was hacked instead of an inside job (Seth Rich) with a thumb drive. It all depends on the Crowdstrike version of “facts.”
Roy : I generally agree with Brian but I think we’re starting to get the basic picture, and it’s bad enough. I’m not so sure about the more conspiratorial stuff.
It sounds like there were two avenues in use to get a pretext to spy on Trump’s campaign via supposedly ‘counter-intelligence’ activities. One was the Steele Dossier path alleging Trump was in some way compromised by the Russians and required an investigation of his campaign to see who was pulling his strings. The other path is the one that Stefan Halper is leading us down. Float rumors that the Russians have dirt on Hillary then push Trump staffers to admit interest in or to want to act on them to a third party, ergo collusion. The DNC hack and her homebrew email server were just opportunities. If they had not existed there were dozens of other things (Clinton Foundation activities, her role in Benghazi, Bill’s sexploits, etc) that could have served the purpose. Carter Page says he thinks Halper was taping him during their meetings, and trying to get him to imply that the campaign was working with the Russians.
It kinda puts Trump’s “maybe the Russians have Hillary’s emails” comment in a slightly different light. While I still think he didn’t mean it in a serious sense, I’m thinking it reflects a constant stream of rumors flowing into the campaign from individuals who were in the employ of or being worked by Fusion GPS, the DNC, and Hillary’s campaign.
I refer to the internet crazies because their stuff seems, well, crazy. And I thought so too for most of last year. But they show their work, they say when they’re just speculating vs. when they have proof, and their stuff seemed to almost always check out.
And I don’t know how to interpret the document shown here and in many other places in any other way than that FusionGPS had direct access to NSA databases and could run queries for anything they wanted.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/01/11/the-doj-and-fbi-worked-with-fusion-gps-on-operation-trump/
The following was going to be a separate post, but for some reason my pass word has failed, so here goes —
————–
THE DEEP STATE CIVIL WAR AND THE COUP DE ETAT AGAINST PRESIDENT TRUMP
In case you all had not noticed, a -Lot- of what is going on in the news between the Deep State and Pres. Trump here in the USA is a intra-Deep State factional Civil War over Iran.
It’s Iran, STUPID!
This can be shown via the fact that the Obama “Iran Nuclear Deal” faction used the full powers of the FISA counter-intelligence to ram the Iran deal through Congress in 2015. (See the text immediately below and the Tablet on-line magazine link further down to their April 2017 article on the subject)
In a December 29, 2015 article, The Wall Street Journal described how the Obama administration had conducted surveillance on Israeli officials to understand how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, like Ambassador Ron Dermer, intended to fight the Iran Deal. The Journal reported that the targeting “also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”
and
The reason the prior abuse of the foreign-intelligence surveillance apparatus is clear only now is because the Russia campaign has illuminated it. As The New York Times reported last month, the administration distributed the intelligence gathered on the Trump transition team widely throughout government agencies, after it had changed the rules on distributing intercepted communications. The point of distributing the information so widely was to “preserve it,” the administration and its friends in the press explained—“preserve” being a euphemism for “leak.” The Obama team seems not to have understood that in proliferating that material they have exposed themselves to risk, by creating a potential criminal trail that may expose systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection.
Now you know why General Flynn was under counter-intelligence surveillance by the Sally Yates at the DoJ and Andrew McCabe at the FBI in 2015.
The Obama Administration was afraid ex-Defense Intelligence Agency head Gen Flynn would be called to testify before Congress about how CIA Chief Brennen and NIA director Clapper were cooking the Iran intelligence books.
(It turned out the illegal FISA surveillance by the Obama Administration got enough dirt on Congressional leaders to prevent that from happening.)
The Deep State’s Iran Deal factional plans might have worked if Trump had lost…but he didn’t.
Everything regards the spying on the Trump campaign and attempted coup de etat by special council/lawfare/impeachment against President Trump is about hiding the facts of that Iran Nuclear Deal from the American people and law enforcement.
But while the Obama/Iran Nuclear Deal faction was the largest and strongest Deep State faction…it wasn’t the only one.
Pres. Trump has the anti-Iran Deep State faction on his side as well — which is mainly uniformed US military intelligence, See Gen Flynn and Adm Mike Rogers formally head at NSA — with a foreign intervention in the form of Saudi Arabia, the Israeli Mossad and Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu on Trump’s side of the ledger.
Some would argue that this gets into fine shades of “what is treason” regards Trump.
This argument ignores the fact that the Obama/Iran Nuclear Deal Deep State faction — the DoJ, FBI, CIA, the State Department and a small faction in the senior civil service at the Defense Department — had the support of the EU political and IC elites as well as Iran’s Mullah’s & the Moslem Brotherhood in ramming home the Iran deal.
IMO, the bottom line up front here is that the Trump faction was and remains constitutional in its actions while the Iran Deal faction is anything but in its attempted coup de etat.
Whether or not President Trump finally wins over the Obama faction and takes down the Iranian Mullah’s. The Iranian mullah’s and the Obama’s Deep State Faction has done deep, lasting and permanent “Gramscian damage” (See: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260) to the American Republic, because they attempted a Coup De Etat against the tradition of peaceful succession of executive political power.
We can no longer take for granted peaceful transitions of power in the American political system.
—–
Did the Obama Administration’s Abuse of Foreign-Intelligence Collection Start Before Trump?
One clue: The Russia story is a replay of how the former White House smeared pro-Israel activists in the lead-up to the Iran Deal
By Lee Smith
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/229062/did-the-obama-administrations-abuse-of-foreign-intelligence-collection-start-before-trump
Boom, as the kids say.
https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2018/05/20/shortest-constitutional-crisis-ever-deputy-ag-rosenstein-orders-ig-to-investigate-if-fbidoj-infiltrated-or-surveilled-the-trump-campaign/
Obama lackeys up to the very very top are going down, hard:
CTH has been the best source in this case, as they have been on other major conspiracies like Trayvon Martin and Ferguson, MO.
We will see the whole ugly mess, hopefully revealed in a series of trials in Utah where Jeff Sessions seems to have enlisted the USA to handle the cases.
This was an attempted coup but the last time, with Nixon, it was successful.
I just keep hoping that Trump has his pwn security around him. I don’t trust the USSS.
I had to log in to approve my own comment, again.
Christopher & Brian,
I’m not too sure about the conspiratorial stuff myself. Actually, I am very sure. What follows is a bit disorganized as I don’t feel like mapping out the time line(s) but there’s a lot to consider.
1. Russia owns Hillary, as much as you can buy somebody for millions of dollars. There is also the matter of Uranium One which might involve criminal acts – basis for blackmail.
2. Russia sure as hell didn’t want Trump.
3. The Steele dossier was commissioned and paid for by Hillary’s campaign.
4. The dossier got to the FBI by at least three routes:
Former British ambassador to Moscow Sir Andrew Wood contacted McCain aide David J. Kramer then Steele gave the dossier to Kramer who gave it to McCain who gave it to Comey.
Steele gave the dossier to FBI agents in Rome.
Sid Blumenthal (Sid Vicious) got it into State Department channels.
5. Halper, who was a paid agent of the CIA, initiated the contacts with Carter Page and Papadopoulis. Page got suspicious and backed off. Halper got Papa to London by paying $3000 for a “study”. He then wined and dined him and it is rumored he tried to catch him in a “honey trap”. Having failed, Papa “just happened” to run into an Australian intelligence operative in a bar and mentioned the hacked e-mails that Halper was talking about. The Aussie, who had worked with the FBI and CIA reported the conversation to the FBI. Papa then got the 302 flu – doesn’t matter what you actually said, it’s what’s on the 302 that will send you to jail.
6. Veselnetskaya, the Russian lawyer, lured Trump Jr. to a meeting in Trump Tower. She had dinner with Simson (head of Fusion GPS) the night before the meeting and also lunch the day after.
I could very well be wrong/misinformed/a conspiracy nut, but if I were a betting man…
Roy, you’ve got what I consider to be the main points, and none of it is conspiracy theory stuff. All of this has been admitted by the DOJ/FBI/Mueller in various court filings and Congressional testimony and has been widely reported. Halper is even being burned now in the NYT and WaPo to try to limit the damage.
The key thing to realize over the last two and a half years of searching no evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and any foreign interests has come to light, unlike the clear coordination between Hillary’s campaign and the Russians vvia Steele.
Since 1932 the American people have voted for more taxes, more government, more lies, more spying to build a totalitarian state apparatus repudiating their founding. They will now be governed by it.
The level of chicanery exceeds anything since 1860 and maybe ever in our history.
A lot of money is involved, not just here in the US.
Moderation is the worst I’ve ever seen it.
“The level of chicanery exceeds anything since 1860 and maybe ever in our history.”
Of course it’s the worst. Never before has the spying apparatus built in the last decade existed.
“more spying to build a totalitarian state apparatus repudiating their founding.”
The thing is, you’re right. There is broad, bipartisan consensus that spying is A-OK, that “I have nothing to hide so I have nothing to fear” among the public. But by overtly spying for partisan political purposes, these Deep State morons may have destroyed that. I say may, because the overwhelming odds are that some Obama lackeys will go down, but the system will remain.
Brian, similar to your observation about never having a surveillance apparatus like this, we’ve also had an explosion in statutes that criminalize not self-reporting various activities to the government. Manafort may have been working for some unsavory characters in the Ukraine but he wasn’t charged with anything related to the Big 10. He got in trouble for failure to report on his own business dealings.