Posted on 03/08/2017 6:50:11 AM PST by SeekAndFind
This is a worth a post given how much confusion there was about it on conservative Twitter last night. It began with this tweet from NYT writer Matthew Rosenberg, insisting that his paper never reported that Trump or members his campaign had been wiretapped.
To Be Clear: The @nytimes never reported Trump campaign was wiretapped. Stories about “intercepted” comms never said whose comms intercepted
— Matthew Rosenberg (@AllMattNYT) March 6, 2017
Hold up. Wasn’t … this the front page of the Times on the morning of the inauguration?
Indeed it was. Focus on the second sentence of Rosenberg’s tweet, though: He’s not claiming that Trump’s aides were never recorded, he’s claiming that they were never the targets of FBI wiretaps. Obviously, when two people are talking on the phone, there are two ways for U.S. intelligence to record that conversation — by ‘tapping party A or by ‘tapping party B. Trump’s tweetstorm on Saturday morning claimed that Obama had wiretapped him, party A:
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
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
But what if the feds actually wiretapped party B, Russian agents, and picked up conversations involving Trump aides that way? Here’s the relevant passage from the Times’s January 20th story, co-authored by, er, Matthew Rosenberg. Note what it doesn’t say:
Mr. Manafort is among at least three Trump campaign advisers whose possible links to Russia are under scrutiny. Two others are Carter Page, a businessman and former foreign policy adviser to the campaign, and Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative.
The F.B.I. is leading the investigations, aided by the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit. The investigators have accelerated their efforts in recent weeks but have found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, the officials said. One official said intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House.
It doesn’t say that the feds ‘tapped party A, i.e. Manafort, Page, or Stone. The far more likely possibility is that they ‘tapped party B, i.e. Russians suspected of being operatives for Moscow to some greater or lesser degree, and ended up recording incidental conversations that those Russians had with Trump’s aides. The FBI wiretaps foreign agents all the time, after all, including the Russian ambassador, Sergei Kislyak. That’s how they came to discover Mike Flynn’s conversation with him in late December about sanctions.
There was no wiretap on Flynn, party A, the soon-to-be national security advisor; the ‘tap was on Kislyak, party B. (Flynn, an intelligence veteran, surely knew that Kislyak was being wiretapped when he spoke to him.) It would be, in the words of Julian Sanchez, highly shady if the feds wiretapped the Russians only because they were trying to gather info on Manafort et al., a practice known as “reverse targeting.” But there’s no evidence (yet) that they did. They’re probably monitoring hundreds of Russians at any given time as a matter of course in their counterintelligence practices. If any of those Russians had reason to speak to a Trump staffer, even for innocent reasons, the call would have been recorded. And if there were multiple calls over time, that could have piqued the FBI’s curiosity.
Rosenberg all but confirmed that this is what happened in a separate tweet last night. The feds didn’t target any of Trump’s aides. They recorded their conversations in the course of targeting foreign agents:
No the 1/19 NYT story did NOT say Trump's phones tapped. It spoke of "intercepted" & "wiretapped" comms, but did say not whose phones tapped https://t.co/h7NW3gi5mk
— Matthew Rosenberg (@AllMattNYT) March 6, 2017
When I responded that it sounds like they got the Trump staffers’ communications the same way they got Flynn’s, by wiretapping Russians, he answered “Precisely.” Likewise, the Times itself noted yesterday that it never claimed in the January 20th story that Trump’s aides were the target of the FBI’s wiretaps. All of which is important, again, because that’s the core of Trump’s accusation against Obama: He claimed that O’s DOJ specifically targeted phones in Trump Tower, a grave charge if true as that would mean either illegal wiretapping of an American citizen for political reasons or reasonable suspicion that someone inside the building was themselves an agent of a foreign power. But if in fact it was Russians, not Trumpers, who were being wiretapped? Well, that happens every day. So long as there was no deliberate “reverse targeting,” what were the feds supposed to do — mute the line when they heard their Russian target in conversation with an American? The law doesn’t ask them to do that:
Under FISA, any information that does not have “foreign intelligence” value must be “minimized” or masked in the transcript. That includes the names of U.S. citizens who are picked up speaking to the target unless their identities are relevant to understanding the foreign intelligence.
In a typical counterintelligence investigation, if an agent is trying to figure out a target’s network, conversations — even those that might appear innocuous at first — are more likely to be considered relevant. Thus the minimization rules for national-security wiretaps are more lenient than those for criminal wiretaps because spies and terrorists generally use more sophisticated tradecraft to evade surveillance.
There’s an exception to minimizing identifying information about an American, the Times pointed out in a different story yesterday, “if the conversation constituted foreign intelligence and the American’s identity is necessary to understand its significance, as would be the case with Mr. Flynn’s discussion of sanctions.” Did the communications between the Russians and Trump’s aides fall under the same exception? There’s not enough reporting out there to be sure, but the Intercept noted a few weeks ago after Flynn’s resignation that “incidental communications” involving Americans are routinely picked up in wiretaps of foreign persons and Congress has thus far resisted efforts to strengthen the protection of those Americans’ identities. None of which is meant to excuse the obviously politically motivated leaking about the wiretaps to the media, to create suspicion around Trump and his advisors. But to return to the baseline question — “Didn’t the Times already claim that Team Trump was being targeted with wiretaps by the Obama administration?” — the answer is no. No targeting, merely incidental communications.
One last note. The Times claimed yesterday that it’s trying to confirm the reports from Heat Street, the Guardian, and the BBC that the FISA court granted an order last October to monitor a server in Trump Tower that was communicating with a Russian bank. No dice so far: “To date, reporters for The New York Times with demonstrated sources in that world have been unable to corroborate that the court issued any such order. (Computer specialists have also pointed out that the server in question does not appear to be located in Trump Tower.)”
Update: We can’t take the president literally when he accuses his predecessor of wiretapping him during the campaign?
Devin Nunes just chastised press for taking Trump literally w/Obama accusation
Yes—he's POTUS. He accused fmr POTUS of committing a felony. pic.twitter.com/YzrBj4JSYk
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) March 7, 2017
>>>he’s claiming that they were never the targets of FBI wiretaps
How would Rosenberg claim that, unless connected?
This feels like the Bill Clinton wagging his finger in our face “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” moment, when the lap dog media ran with it...Oooppppssss, only to discover that there was blue dress...hahahaha!
Yeah, it feels like that!
Gee. Obola, and Clinton, and Hillary, and Podesta are not guilty because of how you define the meaning of “is”, “sex”, and “alone” “ and “ordered” ....
But Trump IS guilty because of how you define “wiretapped” and “target” and “inside the Trump Tower” .....
Allah pundit, always towing then Democrat line.
The headline says “inquiry of Trump aides, but the targets of the intercepts were the Russians?
lol
It’s just great to watch the dumbocrats falling into a trap.
Someone should go to jail....Loretta Lynch is my first choice. Valerie Jarrett would be second. Comey my third.
The Russian Trump connection is as fictitious as the Benghazi "video".
” It would be ...highly shady if the feds wiretapped the Russians only because they were trying to gather info on Manafort et al., a practice known as “reverse targeting.” “
Because we should trust the Obama administration not to have done that?
Also, the import of the new Wikileaks data dump is that the CIA has constructed a parallel electronic collection structure of its own unconnected to the NSA. Not sure this CIA capability would have gone through FISA. Perhaps, it should have. But did it / would it have?
If the intercepts were reported to the WH, why does Trump not have them? Is he really using his full powers as head of the executive branch?
The nice thing is they always give President TrumpTHEMSELVES the benefit of doubt at least.
Now, having caused all the confusion over an already complicated story, confusion that, rightly or wrongly, is fully demonstrated in the circled image of that front page and the one (Mar. 4) in reversing themselves, they are stuck in their own tarpit. Couldn't happen to a better bunch of slimes.
RE: I’m still confused by Flynn’s resignation. We still don’t know the gist of the real allegations against him
Here’s how I understand it:
1) Flynn spoke to the Russian Ambassador as a member of Trump’s team and as the likely ( no yet confirmed ) National Security Adviser.
2) The Ambassador brought up the sanctions that Obama was placing on Russia as a result of the suspected hacking during the elections. The discussion was tangential and Flynn probably said he will bring this up with Trump but made no promises.
3) The Ambassador’s conversation with Flynn was being tapped.
4) Someone illegally LEAKED to the press about the conversation. THAT someone still has to be identified.
5) Because of the above leak, there was a huge brouhaha regarding whether or not Flynn violated the Logan Act ( an over 200 year old law that was never seriously implemented ).
6) When VP Mike Pence asked Flynn whether or not sanctions with Russia were discussed, Flynn flatly denied having spoken to Kislyak in December 2016 about the sanctions placed on Russia by the Obama administration; however, the next day, U.S. intelligence officials shared an account indicating that such discussions did in fact take place.
The above constituted a misleading statement to the VP.
Following this revelation, Flynn’s spokesman released a statement that Flynn “indicated that while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up”.
7) Now here’s where Trump could have steadfastly said publicly that he still stood by Flynn. He did not. There was a trust issue involved and he had to ask Flynn to resign.
So, THERE WAS INDEED SURVEILLANCE. The more disturbing issue is WHO LEAKED THE CONTENTS OF THE SURVEILLANCE TO THE PRESS?
However they are trying to parse it now, any reasonable person - based on the exact language of the story - would assume that the Trump associates were themselves wiretapped, and that is probably the impression the Times was trying to create. The article emphatically did NOT say, “Wiretaps of Russian diplomats have uncovered contacts with Trump campaign officials.”
Trump tweeted om March 4 that he just found out about the wiretap. However the ny times article was dated jan 20. Those two things dont jive. Trump was not going by the times article but must have other info.
Actually, I think General Flynn will come back at some point and was possibly used to flush out intelligence personnel who are the leakers.
Thanks, this will be used as another hammer against the NY Slimes.
There is a way all the puzzle pieces fit together and a clue comes in the precise words that are being used by everyone except Trump.
For example,this explanation perfectly explains Comey’s request of the DOJ.
Excellent summary!!!
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