https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/obama-camp-disingenuous-denials-fisa-surveillance-trump/
March 5, 2017
Trump’s tweets on Saturday prompted some interesting “denials” from the Obama camp. These can be summarized in the statement put out by Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis:
A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.
This seems disingenuous on several levels.
First, as Obama officials well know, under the FISA process, it is technically the FISA court that “orders” surveillance. And by statute, it is the Justice Department, not the White House, that represents the government in proceedings before the FISA court. So, the issue is not whether Obama or some member of his White House staff “ordered” surveillance of Trump and his associates. The issues are (a) whether the Obama Justice Department sought such surveillance authorization from the FISA court, and (b) whether, if the Justice Department did that, the White House was aware of or complicit in the decision to do so. Personally, given the explosive and controversial nature of the surveillance request we are talking about – an application to wiretap the presidential candidate of the opposition party, and some of his associates, during the heat of the presidential campaign, based on the allegation that the candidate and his associates were acting as Russian agents – it seems to me that there is less than zero chance that could have happened without consultation between the Justice Department and the White House.
Second, the business about never ordering surveillance against American citizens is nonsense. Obama had American citizens killed in drone operations. Obviously, that was not done in the U.S. or through the FISA process; it was done overseas, under the president’s commander-in-chief and statutory authority during wartime. But the notion that Obama would never have an American subject to surveillance is absurd.
Third, that brings us to a related point: FISA national-security investigations are not like criminal investigations. They are more like covert intelligence operations – which presidents personally sign off on. The intention is not to build a criminal case; it is to gather information about what foreign powers are up, particularly on U.S. soil. One of the points in FISA proceedings’ being classified is that they remain secret – the idea is not to prejudice an American citizen with publication of the fact that he has been subjected to surveillance even though he is not alleged to have engaged in criminal wrongdoing.
http://theamericanreport.org/2017/07/20/obamas-surveillance-hammer-trump-worse-watergate/
As part of what President Trump has repeatedly called a “witch hunt,” the Obama administration collected confidential data on Trump and others, according to freedom activist lawyer Larry Klayman, who is also the founder of both Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch.
Klayman’s claim is not new. In fact, it is not even really his claim. It comes from his client, former NSA and CIA contractor Dennis Montgomery, who “left the NSA and CIA with 47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of information, much of which is classified,” showing “the spy agencies were engaged for years in systematic illegal surveillance on prominent Americans, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen such as Donald Trump” and Larry Klayman himself, according to a an op-ed piece written by Klayman in March 2017. The purpose of that illegal Deep State surveillance — Klayman surmises — is “for potential coercion, blackmail or other nefarious purposes.”
When Montgomery walked away from his NSA/CIA contract in 2015 with those hundreds of millions of damning documents, he did so as a whistleblower. But — as Klayman wrote in the above-cited op-ed piece, “when Montgomery came forward as a whistleblower to congressional intelligence committees and various other congressmen and senators, including Senator Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who, like Comey, once had a reputation for integrity, he was ‘blown off;’ no one wanted to even hear what he had to say.” Klayman offers two believable possible reasons for the cold shoulder Montgomery received from the congressional intelligence and judiciary committees: “Montgomery’s allegations were either too hot to handle” or those committees “already knew that this unconstitutional surveillance was being undertaken.” The second option would mean that the Deep State has deep roots and may well be controlling some on those committees. It could be that the coercion and blackmail Klayman mentioned is at the foundation of that control.
Unfortunately, none of this will convince a diehard who is desperately clutching onto their normalcy bias that only non-fox MSM outlets have legitimacy and truth.
Try listening to George Webb’s archived Day 68.2 , moving to the roughly 6 minute mark for Obama’s involvement in the FISAs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wJ7GrQkUVg