Not even the most powerful man in the world can escape the Deep State. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes revealed March 22 that U.S. intelligence agents had access to loads of information on what then-President-Elect Trump and his transition team were up to during the waning days of the Obama Administration.
In his statement and subsequent press conference, Nunes spoke to the following points.
Did U.S. intel get that information as part of an investigation into foreign governments colluding with the Trump team?
No.
Did U.S. intel have a court-issued warrant to collect information on the Trump transition team?
No.
Did the chairman of the U.S. government’s intel oversight committee just vindicate what President Trump has alleged — that then-President Obama had wiretapped Trump at Trump Tower in New York City?
Is it legal for a sitting President to be "wire tapping" a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
Yes.
Leave it to whistleblower and former National Security Agency spy Edward Snowden to make it clear for all those open minds still uninfected by CNN tripe:
If your calls were monitored, you were spied on. Which end of the calls were "targeted" speaks to propriety, not whether it was spying.
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) March 22, 2017
I loved the question posed by one reporter: “Let me just clarify. The President of the United States’ personal communications were intercepted?”
Nunes danced around the question but his facial expressions and body language clearly indicated that he knew that U.S. intel, and thus his committee, are in deep doo-doo.
The idea that one part of the U.S. government is spying on another part of it, or that a prior administration spied on an incoming administration — incidentally or intentionally — is the stuff of North Korean-style governments, not the land of the free and the home of the brave.
If a Democratic administration can spy on an incoming Republican administration, why can’t the tables be turned at any moment? What’s to say Trump can’t spy on Elizabeth Warren or Jeff Bezos?
If a president-elect can be spied upon, what’s to say that you and I can’t be spied upon? Clearly Sen. Rand Paul and his ilk have been right to warn against the surveillance state all these years.
Nunes’ entire press conference describing the “incidental” wiretapping is on C-SPAN here.
Democrats and their apologists like Joe Scarborough have been attacking Nunes despite the fact that he has gone to lengths to deny Trump’s claims that Obama physically wiretapped Trump Tower. Of course, the reality is that they are splitting hairs like their mentor, former President Bill Clinton, split hairs over the definitions of “is” and “sex” when he had to answer for his affair with Monica Lewinsky in 1998.
Whether a super-secret FBI/CIA/NSA spy walked into Trump Tower and installed a mechanical object in Trump’s phone, or whether those agencies simply collected communications coming in and out of Trump Tower, the fact is that federal government agents from one party’s administration spied on top officials (including the president-elect) from another party. No one but the Beltway elite/Ivory Tower types cares whether a physical phone line was tapped or not. It’s a 1980’s distinction without a 2017 difference.
The only question that matters in the age of omnipresent electronic communications is: Did the U.S. government collect information on Trump and his staff? And if so, unless they did so under the provisions of the Fourth Amendment, the act of “incidental” or other collection of information on the Trump transition team would have such a chilling effect on our free, fair, open elections and the very concept of government by the people, as to require major blowback against the lying press and the lying, surveilling Deep State.
How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
As Glenn Greenwald wrote recently,
Congress has now begun debating whether to allow these provisions of the 2008 law to expire at the end of the year, whether to meaningfully reform them, or whether to let them be renewed again. The post-9/11 history has been that once even “temporary” measures (such as the Patriot Act) are enacted, they become permanent fixtures of our political landscape.
Perhaps the growing recognition that nobody is immune from such abusive powers will finally reverse that tide. Those eager to preserve these domestic surveillance powers in their maximalist state rely on the same tactic that has worked so well for them for 15 years now: rank disinformation.
If the Deep State goes bye-bye, We the People might actually have a chance to turn this thing around. And if the American people can turn the U.S. around, who knows how far we can go to assist our brethren in the U.K., Germany, Australia, and elsewhere to reclaim their fathers’ legacies and redeem themselves from their overlords? If one nation becomes a safe space, why not two or 20?
It all started with Trump’s tweet, which the Left found absolutely ridiculous and which the conservative establishment dismissed with equal disdain. And yet days later here we are, on the verge of peeling back years of well-established surveillance of Americans in America.
Once again, in his own 4D chess sort of a way, President Trump has set in motion a domino effect that could end with the fall of the enemies of our people.
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