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
From this end, it looks lithe wiretapping has stopped and that's when Trump spoke up.
I’m not sure that with regard to the NY Times, the target of the wiretapping is relevant. It’s classified information and they were given some of that information. That’s a felony.
Flynn didn't need to be confirmed.
McMaster needs it only because he wants to maintain his military rank and active duty status.
and because the hated him,that made all the more tempting for these people to show their true colors. Made him perfect bait for the sting.
The thing that does fit is the FISA stuff. Unless that came from some gather thru the incidental contact.
1-They believe Trump is in with the Russians
2-Bug all the Russians & see what else turns up
3-Use that suspicion to get a FISA to cover their butts
4-Use the FISA to get Trump campaign play-book
5-Why Hillary thought TX & GA was in play. They planted that mis-information and it sucked her away from WI & MI
6-Bill Belichek would be proud
I’m thinking that the obvious is much more likely than a alternate scenario...
“Podesta emails prove that Hill & Obama were planning to spread the “Trump/ Russia” lies since April!”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3532639/posts
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RE: It’s classified information and they were given some of that information. That’s a felony.
Well, the one who GAVE THEM THE INFORMATION committed the felony and that person’s identity needs to be discovered.
The Times or the Post or any other news agency cannot be prosecuted for receiving the information under the first amendment.
A political “Flea Flicker”. :-)
The Times or the Post or any other news agency cannot be prosecuted for receiving the information under the first amendment.
Agreed. I should have been more careful in clarifying that.
“So long as there was no deliberate “reverse targeting,” what were the feds supposed to do...”
Reverse targeting is ipso facto.
Allah Pundit is obtuse.
But let’s not forget that the Obama DOJ asserted just that in their justification for the warrant to wiretap James Rosen... that the act of a journalist soliciting classified information was criminal. I’m assuming all of the ‘journalists’ that have ‘checked with their well-placed sources inside the intelligence community’’ for the existence of FISA warrants are currently under surveillance then? After all, isn’t that soliciting classified information?
I think from a pure football perspective it was a misdirection play, or a Reverse. We called it a Y-Reverse, as Y was the tight end, he went right, all the blockers went left like for a screen pass, The tight end grabbed the pitch from the QB who was looking like he was going to pass to the RB on the left as part of the fake screen pass.
Someone should go to jail....Loretta Lynch is my first choice. Valerie Jarrett would be second. Comey my third.You don't set your sights near high enough
“...only to discover that there was blue dress...hahahaha!”
(I apologize for the following crudeness)
Heck, that didn’t stop them. They then went on and on about how oral sex wasn’t sex and didn’t count. That was the first time OS was mentioned on television. That discussion led to high school girls thinking it was OK to blow guys. That led to outbreaks of syphilis in schools across the country, and guys finding out the girl they wanted to kiss has had the entire football team dump in her mouth. Thanks a lot, Clinton and MSM. You’ve made the world so much better. I hope I live to see them all publically disgraced and rightfully incarcerated.
The NY article states Trump Associates as Wiretapped. That not the same as tapping a foreigner stumble across someone from Trump campaign calling them
Here is the original Heat Street ( part of the News Corporation ) Report:
https://heatst.com/world/exclusive-fbi-granted-fisa-warrant-covering-trump-camps-ties-to-russia/
The first request, which, sources say, named Trump, was denied back in June, but the second was drawn more narrowly and was granted in October after evidence was presented of a server, possibly related to the Trump campaign, and its alleged links to two banks; SVB Bank and Russia’s Alfa Bank.
While the Times story speaks of metadata, sources suggest that a FISA warrant was granted to look at the full content of emails and other related documents that may concern US persons.
[SNIP]
The FISA warrant was granted in connection with the investigation of suspected activity between the server and two banks, SVB Bank and Alfa Bank. However, it is thought in the intelligence community that the warrant covers any ‘US person’ connected to this investigation, and thus covers Donald Trump and at least three further men who have either formed part of his campaign or acted as his media surrogates.
The warrant was sought, they say, because actionable intelligence on the matter provided by friendly foreign agencies could not properly be examined without a warrant by US intelligence as it involves ‘US Persons’ who come under the remit of the FBI and not the CIA. Should a counter-intelligence investigation lead to criminal prosecutions, sources say, the Justice Department is concerned that the chain of evidence have a basis in a clear warrant.
In June, when the first FISA warrant was denied, the FBI was reportedly alarmed at Carter Page’s trip to Moscow and meetings with Russian officials, one week before the DNC was hacked.
Counter intelligence agencies later reported to both Presidential candidates that Russia had carried out this hack; Donald Trump said publicly in the third debate that ‘our country has no idea’ if Russia did the hacking. The discovery of the Trump Tower private Russian server, however, communicating with Alfa Bank, changed matters, sources report.
Thanks, I had no idea.
Redwulf
Bttt.
5.56mm
Very good, Allahpundit, how many wiretaps can dance on your pinhead? LOL
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