March 4, 2017, Donald Trump claimed that former President Barack Obama wiretapped him. At the time, most news services (and probably most of the U.S. population) dismissed it as political banter.
On March 20, at the House Intelligence Committee hearing, FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers both deny that there was any information supporting Trump’s allegations in his original claim. “With respect to the president’s tweets about alleged wiretapping directed at him by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets and we have looked carefully inside the FBI,” Comey said. “The Department of Justice has asked me to share with you that the answer is the same for the Department of Justice and all its components. The department has no information that supports those tweets.”
According to a Reuter’s report on March 4, Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis said it had been a “cardinal rule” of the Obama administration that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice.
“Neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false…” Lewis said in a statement.
The issue fell from media attention for the next 11 months, until…
Fast-forward to February 2, 2018…
A memo alleging that the FBI abused its surveillance authority became public after a push by House Republicans. The full text can be found here: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/fisa-memo-full-text/article/2647942
But, how does this memo connect with Donald Trump’s claim of wiretapping?
Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said, “The Committee has discovered serious violations of the public trust.”
The memo deals with the FBI asking for a FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant to tap the phone of Carter Page, a Foreign Policy Advisor to the then candidate Donald Trump. By tapping his phone, the FBI gained access to all kinds of inside information on the Trump Campaign. Whenever Page and Trump spoke on the phone, the FBI found itself surveilling a major Presidential candidate. A few days after the surveillance began, Donald Trump became President-Elect. Even after he became President, the warrant remained in effect.
The memo states,”..the dossier compiled by Christopher Steele on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application. Steele was a longtime FBI source who was paid over $160,000 by the DNC and Clinton campaign by the law firm Perkins Coie and research firm Fusion GPS, to obtain derogatory information on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.
The FBI never told the FISA court the source of their information, let alone the political bias of their source (Christopher Steele), who stated to Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr that he was “..desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” The memo goes on to state,
“During this same time period, Ohr’s wife was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump. Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS. The Ohr’s relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS was inexplicably concealed from the FISC (the FISA court).”
You should also be aware that, between 1979 and 2015, the FISC received 38,169 surveillance requests. Of these, only 12 were rejected. That’s a rejection rate of just .0003%. So, virtually ALL requests for surveillance to the FISC are granted.
So, in this deceptive and circuitous way, through a pawn (Carter Page) in another entity’s (DNC) game, Donald Trump was indeed wiretapped – both during his campaign and after he was elected – and even after he became President, the warrant continued in effect.
Former Secret Service Agent Dan Bongino gives this summary in a tweet on February 6. It pinpoints exactly what appears to be going on between the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, Russia and Donald Trump…
Thanks in a large part to Hal Lindsey for his fine-tuned analysis of this unconventional and secretive scheme. Unfortunately, it is more than a story about the trying times of Donald Trump – it is a look inside our own government at covert operations. The impact of such operations can be monumental, extending well beyond the U.S. borders.
