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
I have to believe Trump has seen everything by now. He wants congress to include this aspect in their investigation so it can be “discovered”. When the legislative branch make a criminal referral, Trump’s DOJ will be more than happy to drain some swamp.
So, Allahpundit, it must be perfectly legal to make public the words of the party that was NOT the target. That must be part of the law, written right into it: ‘if you intercept the words of an innocent American, NOT the target, that half of the conversation can be freely shared with any Leftist news outlet—providing the innocent party is a conservative.’
If not, surely the intelligent, sophisticated Allahpundit would have noted by how egregiously the existing law was broken.
Bol.
Thanks, this will be used as another hammer against the NY Slimes.
Flynn lied to Pence, no more, no less.
Ah, there’s that Rosenberg name again. A blast from the past. And we all know what happened to Julius and Ethel. Wondering if this guy is related?
“obammie=rockfish”
As I understand it, when asked by the Vice President if he had had any Russian contacts, he told the VP, no, which was a lie!
RE: How would Rosenberg claim that, unless connected?
It says in the article:
“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.”
So, there was an attempt to wiretap AMERICAN CITIZENS if the above statement is correct.
However, to make it look like the wire tapping was LEGAL, they had to make it look like it was the Russians they were doing surveillance on. They have a legal out if an independent investigator were to look into this.
Clever and lawyerly indeed ( but also sinister ).
Yes, in a way. Everyone you listed except Trump plays by the official political playbook where every utterance is precisely defined and analyzed, just like the box score in a baseball game will tell you how each inning of the game unfolded.
Trump however is more like a bar brawler than an organized sport. He tweets “My wires were tapped by Obama!” and every American with a 4th grade or higher education understands exactly what he means. It matters not who was the target or anything else. Trump is right, in essence. People will remember that he started swinging and people got the crap beat out of them, regardless of whether it was a black eye here or a broken arm there.
Trump doesn’t do “nuance” and doesn’t parse his words like a Clinton lawyer, so to the media, he’s wrong or “guilty” as you put it, and the others who hide behind legal weaselwords.
RE: So, Allahpundit, it must be perfectly legal to make public the words of the party that was NOT the target.
I don’t think that was the point of the article. The point of AllahPundit’s article was simply to show WHO the target of the surveillance really was.
The leak to the press itself is illegal and whoever did it must be discovered and prosecuted.
Some of the pictures you posted was already posted in the original article.
Yep!
I think Flynn was an Operative for Trump to draw this whole thing of spying and leaking out. He kept his cover even with the VP. So he wasn’t in this for the long haul. Now with all of this out on the table and his mission complete, the lie to the VP was mission cover for his exit.
Then why was a request to get a FISA warrant specifically TARGETING Trump get turned down? There was clearly intent.
The story as I recall it is that Obama ordered or requested the authority to keep listening to the Trump aids, so in effect they were added to the wiretapping of the Russians. Otherwise, the government would have had to sign off soon after the conversation with an American started. Not that I believe those rules ever stopped them, anyway, but they wanted legal cover.
However, Bannon posted on FB that they have absolute proof they were tapped.
If Flynn wasn’t the target, then the leak is a felony.
If Flynn was the target, then FISA docs will show it.
My bet is that flynn was not the target but that the felonious leak was one component of an attempt at a coup. There better be people in jail without pensions - or we’ll have this happening forever.
Flynn was fired for lying to the VP.
I agree. Flynn was bait. He was already controversial and despised by some in the US intelligence community. He was, to them, low hanging fruit and an apparently easy target. His mission was to be a ‘wild weasel’ to draw fire. Once his mission was complete he left the airspace.
RE: But Trump IS guilty because of how you define “wiretapped” and “target” and “inside the Trump Tower” .....
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Actually, the Times gave their own explanation.
Elisabeth Bumiller, the bureau chief, said the January story was referring to information picked up from wiretaps and other intelligence collected overseas, a process that requires no warrants.
It wasn’t the point of the article. But reading the article gives the absolute impression that as long as the Russian ambassador was the target, everything was legal. It would A, not encumber the article, and B, improve its accuracy fundamentally, to mention that leaking wiretapped conversations of innocent, non-targeted Americans is a major breach of the law.
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