-By Warner Todd Huston
On Saturday morning President Donald J. Trump put a bee in the media’s bonnet by tweeting how shameful it was that Obama tapped his phones during the late campaign for president. It set off two full days of liberals acting shocked and outraged that Trump could say such a thing, got the media to covering for Barack Obama, and spurred weak kneed RINO Republicans siding with the left in attacking Trump. So, what of all this? Thus far, anyway, it seems completely true that Trump is right. Obama did spy on candidate Trump.
The media went into a feeding frenzy on Saturday morning when President Trump tweeted out his accusation.
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
He followed that up with several more on the issue.
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
I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
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
…. and the media went wild. I won’t bother to outline the left’s foolishness. Anyone can see it with a quick Google search, so no need to waste the time here.
Trump’s round of tweets may have been kicked off by conservative radio talker Mark Levin who laid out the case of Obama’s illicit actions on his Thursday radio broadcast. Levin laid out a forceful case that Congress should investigate the “silent coup” that the Obama administration has been perpetrating against the still nascent Trump administration.
Levin also appeared on “Fox & Friends” on Sunday with more…
One of Levin’s quotes bears repeating. After revealing instance after instance of Obama spying on Trump, Levin told Fox, “Are you telling me Barack Obama didn’t know what was going on in six agencies?”
A good question, indeed.
Part of the case proving Obama’s wire tapping is the fact that in June the Obama administration filed a FISA request to tap the Trump campaign’s phones. The request was denied at the time, but Obama came back in October and at that time got permission.
But, the truth is this all isn’t exactly new news. The New York Times reported early in January that there were discussions of recordings of the Trump campaign and some of its operatives recorded by Obama’s intelligence agencies. Even the Times noted that these recordings could only exist if Obama’s government was to some extent surveilling Trump.
Several other sites took up the evidence, one of them was HeatStreet.com which laid out the evidence of the FISA warrants that were granted for the Obama administration to begin surveilling Trump and his operatives. Heat Street also corrected something the Times reported.
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. Contrary to earlier reporting in the New York Times, which cited FBI sources as saying that the agency did not believe that the private server in Donald Trump’s Trump Tower which was connected to a Russian bank had any nefarious purpose, the FBI’s counter-intelligence arm, sources say, re-drew an earlier FISA court request around possible financial and banking offenses related to the server. The first request, which, sources say, named Trump, was denied back in June, but the second was drawn more narrowly and was granted in October after evidence was presented of a server, possibly related to the Trump campaign, and its alleged links to two banks; SVB Bank and Russia’s Alfa Bank.
The only sticking point between the facts we know and what Trump tweeted is that to date we have no proof that Obama himself was aware about all this. But, as Mark Levin said, can we believe that Obama’s government — involving at least six federal agencies — was wire tapping Trump yet Obama never had even a hint of it? For what the left claimed was the “smartest man to ever be president,” that seems a bit hard to believe, doesn’t it?
Others have also spoken of the evidence. Former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey also noted that Trump is absolutely right. Obama’s administration did surveil Trump.
Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” General Mukasey said, “This is the difference between being correct and right. The president was not correct in saying President Obama ordered a tap on a server in Trump Tower. However, I think he’s right in that there was surveillance and that it was conducted at the behest of the attorney general – at the Justice Department through the FISA court.”
At least one Obama insider is saying that the White House must have known of the wire tapping. Appearing on Fox News, Cathy Areu, the Former HHS Department Senior Advisor, said that her sources tells her the White House knew of the wire taps.
But we also know that Obama has done this sort of stuff before.
Former Trump Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski told Fox News’ Judge Jeanine that the Obama Administration had wiretapped sitting US Senator Jeff Sessions while he was still a Senator.
Lewandowski: What we’ve seen from the previous administration is that they did spend time listening to conversations between then Senator Jeff Sessions and the ambassador to Russia while he was in his US Senate office. if that were to take place which supposedly did take place, what other conversations did they listen in on?
Government officials aren’t the only people Obama set up wire taps to spy on. He also did it to the media.
Obama was also exposed as having spied on 100 members of the Associated Press when he decided he didn’t like what the AP was publishing.
Naturally, the AP was furious. In a letter of protest, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said that the probe could not be justified.
“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” Pruitt said.
Pruitt demanded the phone records in the hands of the DOJ be destroyed. Unsurprisingly, the rest of the media completely ignored the story in order to cover for Barack Obama.
Additionally, Fox News reporter James Rosen just might have a few things to say about Obama surveillance. You might recall Rosen was targeted by Obama back in 2013.
And let’s not forget that Obama used his IRS to attack tea party groups and conservatives in an attempt to intimidate them from their political activism.
But there is one more part of this whole episode that all too easily gets lost in this Trump tweet over wire tapping. The whole thing began when liberals and Obama let their fevered imagination run away with them with the false claims that Donald Trump was working hand-in-hand with the Russian government.
There is no… absolutely NO proof at all… that Trump is connected to the Russians or that the Russians hacked the 2016 election. But that is what spurred Obama and his government to start surveilling Trump in the first place.
It was Obama’s paranoia and the left’s lies that drove this illicit surveillance of a major national presidential candidate.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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