Free Republic

On Saturday, conservative talk radio host Don Smith replayed an interview he conducted with then-Republican frontrunner Donald Trump in November 2015. The roughly 12-minute long interview was repeatedly interrupted by a strange static humming, and other noises. “During this interview there was something going on. I’ve never experienced this before,” Mr. Smith said on air Saturday. “I’ve done thousands of interviews, and I have never experienced this before. You could hear something.” “Something was going on.” The host of the namesake Don Smith Show said he initially thought the campaign was taping the interview for posterity. The media had repeatedly...

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo grilled President Donald Trump's top counselor Kellyanne Conway on Monday about the president's unfounded surveillance claims and the quality of the Republican plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. When asked on Sunday about Trump's unfounded claims that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower before the election, Conway had responded by citing the "many ways to surveil each other now, unfortunately." "There was an article this week that talked about how you can surveil someone through their phones, certainly through their television sets," Conway said Sunday. "Any number of different ways. Microwaves that turn into cameras,...

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper apparently lent some credibility Wednesday to President Donald Trump’s theory that the Obama administration wiretapped him, telling CNN “it’s possible” the president was in fact recorded during the administration’s investigation of the president’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

Tuesday, September 19, 2017 Did Obama Spy on America to Protect Islamists? Posted by Daniel Greenfield After months of denials, the pretext for Susan Rice’s eavesdropping on Trump officials has finally been made public. It had been widely known that Obama’s former National Security Adviser had contrived to unmask the names of top Trump officials who had been spied on by the administration. And the same media that still treats Watergate as the Great American Scandal had claimed that there was nothing “improper” in an Obama loyalist eavesdropping on members of the opposition party. Every time Obama Inc. was caught...

Last week, CNN revealed (and excused) one phase of the Obama spying operation on Trump. After lying about it on MSNBC, Susan Rice admitted unmasking the identities of Trump officials to Congress. Rice was unmasking the names of Trump officials a month before leaving office. The targets may have included her own successor, General Flynn, who was forced out of office using leaked surveillance. While Rice’s targets weren’t named, the CNN story listed a meeting with Flynn, Bannon and Kushner. Bannon was Trump’s former campaign chief executive and a senior adviser. Kushner is a senior adviser. Those are exactly the...

Following reports that Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman was under surveillance, Fox News pundits jumped to the president’s defense Tuesday, asserting that his claims the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower have now been vindicated. Yet they couldn’t be more wrong, said legal experts. It all goes back to Trump’s tweet on March 4 that he “found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” Trump also compared it to “Nixon/Watergate,” when President Richard Nixon attempted to bug the Democratic Party headquarters. Defending Trump’s months-old claim, Fox News pundit Tucker...

Yet even as Trump spoke, a threat to his presidency gained new steam. Reports that special counsel Robert Mueller had wiretapped former Trump campaign boss Paul Manafort and plans to indict him sent Washington into a new tizzy of speculation. According to CNN, which first carried the wiretapping report, Manafort was surveilled under a FISA warrant, meaning the FBI suspected he was operating as a foreign agent. The network said it is possible G-men listened to the president talking to Manafort because the wiretap continued into this year and Trump and Manafort often talked in 2017. If so, that would...

Obama admin 'unmasking' right up to inauguration, sources say Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was 'unmasking' at such a rapid pace in the final months of the Obama administration that she averaged more than one request for every working day in 2016 – and even sought information in the days leading up to President Trump’s inauguration, multiple sources close to the matter told Fox News. Two sources, who were not authorized to speak on the record, said the requests to identify Americans whose names surfaced in foreign intelligence reporting, known as unmasking, exceeded 260 last...

Luckily people moved to higher ground and there are no reports of injuries or deaths. An under construction Nam Ao Hydropower Project in Phaxay district, Xieng Khuang Province of Laos burst on September 11, 2017, causing severe flash flooding

Many in the media are diving deeply into minutiae in order to discredit any notion that President Trump might have been onto something in March when he fired off a series of tweets claiming President Obama had “tapped” “wires” in Trump Tower just before the election. According to media reports this week, the FBI did indeed “wiretap” the former head of Trump’s campaign, Paul Manafort, both before and after Trump was elected. If Trump officials — or Trump himself — communicated with Manafort during the wiretaps, they would have been recorded, too. But we’re missing the bigger story. If these...

According to CBS, conversations between Manafort and Trump may have been scooped up in the surveillance: Long before the special counsel began investigating Russian meddling in the U.S. election — and whether anyone in the Trump campaign was involved — Paul Manafort was the target of an FBI investigation. It included electronic surveillance of the one-time Trump campaign chairman....the surveillance on Manafort occurred during the 2016 presidential campaign. According to a former U.S. official, the intercepts picked up conversations between Manafort and Russian individuals about the campaign. The intercepts potentially include conversations between Manafort and President Trump.... If the Manafort...

Warrant came under authority to build counterintelligence operations focused on foreign nations, not criminal cases CNN on Tuesday loudly trumpeted but then overhyped its big scoop in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation — that the former chairman of President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was the subject of a wiretap. News anchors around the clock suggested that the wiretap authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court means that political operative Paul Manafort was probably guilty and speculated that perhaps Trump himself was implicated.

From the beginning it was a set up to find dirt on Trump campaign insiders and if possible to topple Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations. Before and after the 2016 election. And while this operation had many moving parts and alternating players, the mission to unseat Trump never changed. And it remains ongoing. Paul Manafort was wiretapped. Cater Page was wiretapped. Donald Trump Jr. was wiretapped. Jared Kushner was wiretapped. Gen. Michael Flynn was wiretapped. And likely there were others. Find Out More > 62,840 And none of it was very legal. In fact, most of it was very illegal, according...

RUSH: So last night, Anderson Cooper 360 spoke with David Rodham Gergen about the New York Times report that federal agents wiretapped Manafort. And during the discussion, Cooper and Gergen have this little exchange. COOPER: I assume he could now say, “Well, look, you know, there was some wiretapping going on.” GERGEN: There… (laughing). Well, there was wiretapping under a federal court order, I mean, federal court of approval. And with top Justice Department officials and his own Justice Department it appears may be since the Obama team, that — that okay, we’ll have to — to wait and see....

James Clapper told NBC the deep state did not wiretap Trump Tower or the Trump campaign. We now know these were both lies. James Comey has lied under oath several times.

Washington (CNN)US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election, sources tell CNN, an extraordinary step involving a high-ranking campaign official now at the center of the Russia meddling probe. The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump. Some of the intelligence collected includes communications that sparked concerns among investigators that Manafort had encouraged the Russians to help with the campaign, according to three sources familiar with the investigation. Two of these sources, however, cautioned that the evidence...

EXCERPTS: Rice’s influence flows from her close relationship with Obama. Their ties go back to 2006, when she signed onto his first presidential campaign as a foreign policy advisor. “There is a reason why Obama has an intense loyalty to Susan,” a former NSC staffer said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House politics. “In 2006, she could have easily gone to the Hillary camp. She took a significant career risk by signing on with his campaign. He views her like a sister.”