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Judicial Watch Sues for Records on Obama White House Unmasking Trump Associates

May 26, 2017

Judicial Watch Sues for Records on Obama White House Unmasking Trump Associates, CNS News, Michael W. Chapman, May 26, 2017

(Will the Department of Justice confess error and turn over the records? — DM)

Former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice. (Screenshot: CBS News)

Columnist Andrew C. McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, says,  “The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president’s staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests.”

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(CNSNews.com) — Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department (DOJ) and the National Security Agency (NSA) for information about Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s communications concerning alleged Russian involvement in the 2016 election, the hacking of DNC computers, and the “unmasking” (identification by name) of any Trump campaign or transition team personnel as part of U.S. intelligence gathering activities.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton explained: “We want to know about the Obama White House involvement in the unprecedented spying on Donald Trump and other political opponents.”

“This intelligence operation may have led to the illegal ‘unmasking’ of Americans and the leaking of intelligence information to foment the story of Russian hacking of the DNC and sinister Russian influence on Trump and his associates,” he said.   “The Trump administration has an opportunity to expose what the Obama White House was up to.”

President Barack Obama and his National Security Adviser Susan Rice. (Inforwars.)

The lawsuit was filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia because the DOJ and NSA did not respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests previously submitted by Judicial Watch.

Those FOIA requests, submitted on April 4, 2017, asked for the following:

— Any and all requests for information, analyses, summaries, assessments, transcripts, or similar records submitted to the Department of Justice (National Security Agency) or any official, employee, or representative thereof by former National Security Advisor Susan Rice regarding, concerning, or related to the following:

— Any actual or suspected effort by the Russian government or any individual acting on behalf of the Russian government to influence or otherwise interfere with the 2016 presidential election;

— The alleged hacking of computer systems utilized by the Democratic National Committee and/or the Clinton presidential campaign;

— Any or actual or suspected communication between any member of the Trump presidential campaign or transition team and any official or employee of the Russian government or any individual acting on behalf of the Russian government; or

— The identities of U.S. citizens associated with the Trump presidential campaign or transition team who were identified pursuant to intelligence collection activities.

The timeframe for any communications is from Jan. 1, 2016 to the present, more than a year.

Susan Rice, the former National Security Adviser to President Obama,  has refused to testify before a subcommittee of the Senate Intelligence Committee about her reported role in revealing the identities (unmasking) of people in the Trump campaign who were swept up in regular intelligence gathering by U.S. entitities.

Columnist Andrew C. McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, says,  “The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president’s staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests.”

Rice is also the former Obama official who went on national television after the Benghazi attack in 2012, when four Americans were killed, and falsely blamed the attack on an anti-Muslim video.

Categories: 2016 elections and Russia, Department of Justice, Judicial Watch, Obama administration, Susan Rice, Trump associates, Unmasking
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Judicial Watch Sues Justice Department for Sally Yates’ Emails While She Served as Trump Acting Attorney General

May 9, 2017

Judicial Watch Sues Justice Department for Sally Yates’ Emails While She Served as Trump Acting Attorney General, Judicial Watch, May 8, 2017

“Between her involvement in the Russian surveillance scandal and her lawless effort to thwart President Trump’s immigration executive order, Sally Yates’ short tenure as the acting Attorney General was remarkably troubling,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Her email traffic might provide a window into how the anti-Trump ‘deep state’ abused the Justice Department.”

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(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for emails of former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates from her government account.  The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:17-cv-00832)).

The suit was filed after the Justice Department failed to respond to a February 1, 2017, FOIA request seeking access to her emails between January 21, 2017, and January 31, 2017.

Yates was appointed by President Obama as U.S. Attorney in northern Georgia and was later confirmed as Deputy Attorney General. In January 2017 she became acting Attorney General for President Trump.

Ms. Yates was involved in the controversy concerning Gen. Michael Flynn, allegedly warning the Trump White House in early January about General Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador, Sergei Kislyak.  (Judicial Watch is separately suing for records concerning the surveillance and subsequent leaks regarding General Flynn.)

On January 30, Yates ordered the Justice Department not to defend President Trump’s January 27 executive order seeking a travel ban from seven Middle Eastern countries.  That same day, President Trump fired her for refusing to defend the action.

“Between her involvement in the Russian surveillance scandal and her lawless effort to thwart President Trump’s immigration executive order, Sally Yates’ short tenure as the acting Attorney General was remarkably troubling,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Her email traffic might provide a window into how the anti-Trump ‘deep state’ abused the Justice Department.”

 

Categories: "Muslim ban", Deep state, Executive order, General Flynn and Russia, Leaks, Sally Yates, Unmasking
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Confirmed: John Brennan Colluded With Foreign Spies to Defeat Trump

April 19, 2017

Confirmed: John Brennan Colluded With Foreign Spies to Defeat Trump, American Spectator, George Neumayr, April 19, 2017

A supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, Brennan brought into the CIA a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump. He bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as “non-partisan.”

The Guardian story is written in a style designed to flatter its sources (they are cast as high-minded whistleblowers), but the upshot of it is devastating for them, nonetheless, and explains why all the criminal leaks against Trump first originated in the British press. According to the story, Brennan got his anti-Trump tips primarily from British spies but also Estonian spies and others.

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An article in the Guardian last week provides more confirmation that John Brennan was the American progenitor of political espionage aimed at defeating Donald Trump. One side did collude with foreign powers to tip the election — Hillary’s.

Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump’s candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people.

John Brennan’s CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump. An official in the intelligence community tells TAS that Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with “Hillary for president cups” and other campaign paraphernalia.

A supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, Brennan brought into the CIA a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump. He bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as “non-partisan.”

The Guardian story is written in a style designed to flatter its sources (they are cast as high-minded whistleblowers), but the upshot of it is devastating for them, nonetheless, and explains why all the criminal leaks against Trump first originated in the British press. According to the story, Brennan got his anti-Trump tips primarily from British spies but also Estonian spies and others. The story confirms that the seed of the espionage into Trump was planted by Estonia. The BBC’s Paul Wood reported last year that the intelligence agency of an unnamed Baltic State had tipped Brennan off in April 2016 to a conversation purporting to show that the Kremlin was funneling cash into the Trump campaign.

Any other CIA director would have disregarded such a flaky tip, recognizing that Estonia was eager to see Trump lose (its officials had bought into Hillary’s propaganda that Trump was going to pull out of NATO and leave Baltic countries exposed to Putin). But Brennan opportunistically seized on it, as he later that summer seized on the half-baked intelligence of British spy agencies (also full of officials who wanted to see Trump lose).

The Guardian says that British spy head Robert Hannigan “passed material in summer 2016 to the CIA chief, John Brennan.” To ensure that these flaky tips leaked out, Brennan disseminated them on Capitol Hill. In August and September of 2016, he gave briefings to the “Gang of Eight” about them, which then turned up on the front page of the New York Times.

All of this took place at the very moment Brennan was auditioning for Hillary. He desperately wanted to keep his job and despised Trump for his alleged “Muslim ban,” a matter near and dear to Brennan’s heart. Not only was he an apologist for the Muslim Brotherhood, but Brennan’s Islamophilia dated to his days in college, when he spent a year in Cairo learning Arabic and taking courses in Middle Eastern studies. He later got a graduate degree with an emphasis in Middle Eastern studies. In 1996, his ties to the Islamic world tightened after he became the CIA’s station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He once recalled that “during a 25-year career in government, I was privileged to serve in positions across the Middle East — as a political officer with the State Department and as a CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, I saw how our Saudi partners fulfilled their duty as custodians of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina. I marveled at the majesty of the Hajj and the devotion of those who fulfilled their duty as Muslims by making that privilege — that pilgrimage.”

Out of this Islamophilia came a special dislike of Michael Flynn, who had planned to rip up the Obama-era “reset” with Muslim countries. Furious with Flynn for his apostasy from political correctness, Brennan and other Obama aides couldn’t resist the temptation to take him out after rifling through transcripts of his calls with the Russian ambassador. They caught him in a lie to Mike Pence and made sure the press knew about it.

Were the media not so completely in the tank for Obama and Hillary, all of this political mischief would make for a compelling 2016 version of All the President’s Men. Instead, the public gets a steady stream of Orwellian propaganda about the sudden propriety of political espionage. The headline writers at Pravda couldn’t improve on this week’s official lie, tweeted out by the Maggie Habermans: “Susan Rice Did Nothing Wrong, Say Both Dem and Republican House Aides.”

Liberals pompously quote the saying — “the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed” — even as their media enshrine it. Historians will look back on 2016 and marvel at the audacity of its big lie: whispers of an imaginary Trump-Russia collusion that wafted up from the fever swamps of a real collusion between John Brennan and foreign powers seeking Trump’s defeat.

Categories: CIA, CIA and politics, Democrats and Trump, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Spies, Susan Rice, Unmasking
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When “incidental” intel collection—isn’t incidental

April 13, 2017

When “incidental” intel collection—isn’t incidental, Sharylattkisson.com, April 12, 2017

I’ve spoken to a small group of reliable, formerly high-placed intelligence officials who have dropped a few interesting tidbits on me of late. Here’s my understanding, based on the discussions:

  • It’s not true that wiretaps and/or electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens can “only” be done with a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court order.
  • Besides the FISA court, “wiretapping” or electronic surveillance can also be done under Title III authority. The government used this authority, for example, in the Justice Department’s secret Fast and Furious “gunwalking” case.
  • Additionally, U.S. Presidents have the power to issue secret presidential directives that can authorize otherwise illegal acts (theoretically in the country’s best interests). These directives may come with pre-planned cover stories to be used in the event the operation is exposed, and they come with indemnity for those involved, giving them permission to lie about the operation or their involvement without fear of prosecution.

  • The public will rarely know about such presidential directives since most who see them must sign agreements that promise nondisclosure and consent to polygraphs.
  • Computer surveillance is a grey area in the intelligence community where many insiders argue the traditional privacy restrictions and surveillance rules don’t necessarily apply.
  • The term “wiretapping” is used in a general sense to refer to electronic eavesdropping, even though the actual “tapping” of “wires” is not routinely necessary with today’s technology.
Telekom Malaysia technician wiretaps a serving area interface. Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas
  • Surveillance of domestic communications can be conducted in international waters where U.S. law doesn’t apply.
A U.S. submarine at sea.
  • There are “back-door” ways to collect and report on a target without Title III or FISA court authority. If it’s for political purposes or blackmail, this may consist of “inventing” an excuse to surveil the target.

  • If the work of targeting an individual cannot be accomplished by government intel officers, it can be contracted out to third parties or to foreign parties who aren’t bound by U.S. law.

  • Incidental collection of a U.S. citizen target may be “orchestrated” for political reasons by those who have tools and tradecraft available to them because of their positions of power. There are ways to do it with no fingerprints.

For example:

1. Locate a foreign target already under CIA surveillance.
2. Have a government agent use the foreign target’s phone and/or computer to make it look like the foreigner contacted the U.S. citizen whose communications are sought. The contacts can be benign, but they establish a record that falsely implies a relationship exists between the U.S. citizen and the foreign target.
3. The government agent can also mimic a communication back from the U.S. citizen to the foreign target, creating an appearance that the U.S. citizen initiated contacts. This could be favorable to justifying a warrant on the U.S. citizen later.
4. The U.S. citizen is now tied to the foreign entity and is now an “incidental” collection target that can be surveilled in a “masked” format. Although “masked,” the surveilling agency knows the U.S. citizen’s identity.
5. If the U.S. citizen does anything that can be construed as illegal or suspicious, it’s possible the intel agency can then receive approval to surveil him directly rather than only “incidentally.”

  • Possibly inappropriate requests to “unmask” names of U.S. citizens captured during surveillance of a foreign target may be preceded by a chain of communications intended to provide a pretense or cover story to justify the unmasking.

Categories: "Incidental" intelligence collection, Intelligence community, Intelligence leaks, Spying, Unmasking
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Report: House Investigation of Susan Rice Scandal Expanding

April 12, 2017

Report: House Investigation of Susan Rice Scandal Expanding, PJ Media, Debra Heine, April 12, 2017

(Please see also, A Shoe Drops: Obama Administration Spied on Carter Page [Updated] — DM)

(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

Fox News reported Tuesday night that members of the House Intelligence Committee have expanded their investigation into the Susan Rice surveillance controversy.

Appearing on The O’Reilly Factor, investigative reporter Adam Housley said the following:

They’re looking into allegations where Americans including politicians have possibly been unmasked and had their information collected into the files, similar to what they did to the Trump team.

Housley also said that both the House and Senate investigations are being stonewalled:

They say the FBI is being very difficult. We’re told [investigators] just want to know about the unmasking. How frequent was this? Who was doing it? Why were they being unmasked?

Housley added:

[A Committee member says the FBI is] going to have to turn everything over or we’re not going to authorize the congressionally approved 702 program which allows them to do this in the first place. This investigation is full-blown.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, is up for reauthorization in 2017. The program surveils non-U.S. persons believed to be located outside the United States, incidentally sweeping up the communications of Americans as well, in order to acquire foreign intelligence.

O’Reilly asked Malia Zimmerman, an investigative reporter working with Housley, if the FBI was investigating the case. Zimmerman answered:

There’s a big question about the FBI’s role in this and there’s concern in the House about generally how the FBI is handling this case.

She added that FBI Director James Comey has yet to come back to the Hill to answer the 100 questions the House Intelligence Committee wants answered:

The FBI claims to be “preparing the information,” but it’s been four weeks, Bill.

O’Reilly suggested getting Attorney General Jeff Sessions involved, “because he’s Comey’s boss.”

Housley said they were making progress on the story, but because of the sensitive and classified nature of the information, it’s been difficult work.

Zimmerman added that some of the whistleblowers who have been talking to them may come forward and provide testimony to the House Intelligence Committee:

That would really start to expand this investigation even further.

Categories: Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Comey, FBI, FISA, Intelligence community, Intelligence leaks, Obama administration, Susan Rice, Unmasking, US Congress
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A Shoe Drops: Obama Administration Spied on Carter Page [Updated]

April 12, 2017

A Shoe Drops: Obama Administration Spied on Carter Page [Updated], Power Line, John Hinderaker, April 11, 2017

[E]ver since the Inauguration the Democratic Party, especially its press wing in Washington and New York, has relentlessly pushed the Trump/Russia story. What story? There isn’t one. But that hasn’t stopped Democrats in the press from talking about little else for the last three months.

And yet, all along, the Democrats have known that their spying produced nothing. This whole story is almost unbelievably sordid. The relevant Congressional committees should investigate thoroughly, and criminal prosecutions should follow where laws have been broken.

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I assume this Washington Post story is true: “FBI obtained FISA warrant to monitor former Trump adviser Carter Page.” It confirms what has been sporadically reported since late last year, that the Obama administration sought and ultimately received a FISA order to spy on at least one associate of Donald Trump. So Trump’s famous tweets were, in substance, true.

The FBI obtained a secret court order last summer to monitor the communications of an adviser to presidential candidate Donald Trump, part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign, law enforcement and other U.S. officials said.

Do the leaks come from the same Obama administration holdovers who have leaked in the past, trying to get ahead of disclosures that will confirm that President Trump’s suspicions were correct? Or do they come from officials appointed by Trump? I don’t know, but the Post’s illicit sources are pretty much always Democrats.

The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page’s communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials.

That’s a strong charge, but I doubt that there is evidence to support it. Carter Page “worked in Moscow for Merrill Lynch a decade ago and … has said he invested in Russian energy giant Gazprom.” He never had any official association with the Trump campaign, but has been referred to as an “informal adviser.” He has asked to testify before a Congressional committee to clear his name.

The current leakers, whoever they are, described the Obama administration’s FISA application in detail. Or else the Post reporters have seen it.

The government’s application for the surveillance order targeting Page included a lengthy declaration that laid out investigators’ basis for believing that Page was an agent of the Russian government and knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of Moscow, officials said.

Among other things, the application cited contacts that he had with a Russian intelligence operative in New York City in 2013, officials said. Those contacts had earlier surfaced in a federal espionage case brought by the Justice Department against another Russian agent. In addition, the application said Page had other contacts with Russian operatives that have not been publicly disclosed, officials said.

The Obama administration was already trying, last Summer, to find evidence that Russia’s government was “meddling” in our presidential election:

The application also showed that the FBI and the Justice Department’s national security division have been seeking since July to determine how broad a network of accomplices Russia enlisted in attempting to influence the 2016 presidential election, the officials said.

I find it hard to believe that Russia’s rulers, from Vladimir Putin on down, wanted to help elect a president who vowed to rebuild America’s dwindling military strength, and to put America first, in place of an administration that was consistently supine in the face of Russian aggression and was borderline anti-American. Possibly Putin and his advisers are that dumb, but I doubt it.

In any event, the Obama administration failed to find any evidence that anyone associated with Trump was somehow cooperating with the Russians–not even a “junior member of the [Trump] campaign’s foreign policy advisory group,” as Page described himself. If they had, we would have learned about it long before now.

We haven’t heard the last of this story, but for the moment one thing is clear: a great many people, inside and outside of the media, owe President Trump an apology. Assuming that President Obama knew of, and approved, the FISA application–a safe assumption, I think–Trump’s much-reviled tweet was true:

Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found.

How much of this Trump knew all along is, at this point, unclear.

UPDATE: We are now starting to get a picture of how sinister this whole Democratic Party misinformation campaign is. Through the last half of 2016, the Obama administration was desperately searching for evidence of some link between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia. They went to the length of seeking (twice, reportedly) and finally obtaining a FISA order that allowed them to spy on at least one insignificant Trump associate.

In addition, we now know that Susan Rice headed up an operation whereby raw NSA intelligence was sifted for names of Trump associates, no doubt in hopes of uncovering dirt of some sort.* And we also know that these efforts came up dry. The Obama administration found no compromising information about Trump or any of his associates.

Nevertheless, ever since the Inauguration the Democratic Party, especially its press wing in Washington and New York, has relentlessly pushed the Trump/Russia story. What story? There isn’t one. But that hasn’t stopped Democrats in the press from talking about little else for the last three months.

And yet, all along, the Democrats have known that their spying produced nothing. This whole story is almost unbelievably sordid. The relevant Congressional committees should investigate thoroughly, and criminal prosecutions should follow where laws have been broken.

It is time to get to the bottom of the Obama spy scandal.
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* All of this is reminiscent of Watergate, in this sense: after the fact, no one could figure out why the Plumbers bugged the Democratic National Committee, given that President Nixon was obviously going to be re-elected anyway. (The answer to that question may still be unknown, but that is another story.) Similarly, Barack Obama and his minion Susan Rice no doubt were confident that Hillary Clinton would win the election and serve Obama’s third term. Yet, they weren’t taking any chances.

Categories: 2016 elections and Russia, Carter Page, Democrats and Trump, FBI, FISA, Intelligence leaks, Obama administration and Trump, Spies, Trump and Russia, Unmasking
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Humor | An epidemic of TDS in the Marx Bros. media

April 7, 2017

An epidemic of TDS in the Marx Bros. media, Washington Times, Wesley Pruden, April 6, 2017

President Donald Trump speaks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., Thursday, April 6, 2017, after the U.S. fired a barrage of cruise missiles into Syria Thursday night in retaliation for this week’s gruesome chemical weapons attack against civilians. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Just about the time the fever on the nut left seems to be subsiding there’s another outbreak of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Normal-looking folk who sound like they escaped a Marx Bros. movie fall into a relapse.

The bombshell that Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s chief source of intelligence, was guilty of “unmasking” Trump campaigners identified in intelligence findings, unhinged several commentators on the television networks. Colleagues and bystanders couldn’t decide whether to call security or medics.

The Chicken Noodle Network demonstrated why it has fallen on hard times, saying it would not report bad news about its favorite political personalities. “Let us be very clear about this,” said Don Lemon, one of CNN’s star news readers and part-time house dick. “There is no evidence whatsoever that the Trump team was spied on illegally. There is no evidence that backs up the president’s original claim. And on this program tonight, we will not insult your intelligence by pretending otherwise, nor will we aid and abet the people who are trying to misinform you [with] a diversion.” Mr. Lemon’s viewers who want to know would have to go to another channel for another investigator.

At MSNBC, the leading television network on Planet Pluto, Chris Matthews was more than willing to talk about the bombshell but first he had to find someone to help him get a grip. The bug that crawls up his leg when he thinks about Barack Obama was biting again.

When he thought about it, he was sure that the Rice bombshell, with the implication that whatever U.S. intelligence sources had picked up about the Trump campaign had been passed on to the Insurrection, was fake news the new president was pushing to distract attention from the investigations into contacts, if any, between Mr. Trump and the Russians.

“Why is [the president] going after Susan Rice?” he demanded of no one present. “It’s like he pulls out — he’s like an old [disc jockey]. He pulls out old records from 20 years ago and plays them again.”

Then he played video clips from three Republican senators — Rand Paul of Kentucky, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — raising questions about Miss Rice’s behavior, and read a tweet from Mike Huckabee speculating about Susan Rice in an orange prison jump suit. Sen. Cotton called her Typhoid Mary, for showing up every time there was a scandal or shame in the Obama administration.

“Oh, God,” cried David Corn, a guest panelist.

“I mean,” said Chris, “Huckabee has no shame. These guys are trooping along, like camp followers of Trump.”

Piped up another guest, one Simon Marks: “They’re looking for a pinata. They found one in Susan Rice. I do think — “

Chris allows no thinking on his show, so he cut him off in midsentence. “Notice it’s a female. Just a thought.” (Only Chris is permitted an occasional random thought.)

“Well, said Simon Marks, trying to get back in the conversation, “that’s true. That’s also true. But I do think she slightly played into her hand — into their hands.

“Typhoid Mary?” asked Chris.

Well, no. Mr. Marks was talking about Susan Rice. Chris does not always pay attention when someone else is talking. He interrupted again.

“Susan Rice’s job is to watch national security,” Chris said, apparently unaware that Susan Rice hasn’t had that job since America changed presidents. There’s not only a new president, but a new adviser with the job of “watching national security.”

But then Chris wanted to talk about the movies. He suggested that Susan Rice, or maybe it was Tom Cotton or Mike Huckabee, he wasn’t sure, had been living in the Bates Motel, with a deranged killer from the famous Alfred Hitchcock movie “Psycho.” Chris watches a lot of movies and sometimes has trouble keeping the characters straight.

Then it was off for a history lesson. The Trump family, particularly First Daughter Ivanka Trump Kushner, reminds him of the Romanovs, the Imperial Russian family slain by revolutionaries in 1917. Trump Derangement Syndrome apparently encourages fantasies about assassinations. A columnist for The Washington Post seemed to observe not long ago that assassinations often put an end to unhappy eras.

Treating Trump Derangement Syndrome is not easy. Dr. Quackenbush, the celebrated physician would tell you that we must be patient, because there will be episodes of intense derangement, and then the affliction subsides, only to flare again. The confirmation this week of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to unhinge Chris, David and Don again.

Dr. Quackenbush, who achieved celluloid immortality in the Marx Brothers movie “A Day at the Races,” was trained to doctor horses, and he would know which end of Chris and the guys to examine. If only he were here.

Categories: Humor, Intelligence community, Intelligence leaks, Media and Trump, Susan Rice, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Unmasking
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Susan Rice, Obama’s Hatchet Woman, Proves Lord Acton Right Again

April 4, 2017

Susan Rice, Obama’s Hatchet Woman, Proves Lord Acton Right Again, PJ Media, Roger L Simon, April 3, 2017

Forget G. Gordon Liddy and the White House plumbers of Watergate days.  If you’re looking for a my-president-right-or-wrong apparatchik in the grand tradition of the Soviet Union, willing to do anything for her leader, look no further than former national security adviser Susan Elizabeth Rice.

Rice, who evidently exploited the world’s most technically advanced intelligence agency, the NSA, for similar purposes (spying on the opposition), has made Liddy et al seem like primitives.  Apparently, the former Obama adviser was the one who “requested to unmask the names of Trump transition officials caught up in surveillance.”  The final unmaskings took place in January, days before Trump’s inauguration. (Eli Lake at Bloomberg, Adam Housley and John Roberts at Fox, and Sara Carter and John Solomon at Circa have reported this story in only slightly varying ways.)

Failing some extraordinary  explanation (so far Rice isn’t talking), the onetime national security adviser exhibited an arrogance that once again proves Lord Acton’s famous apothegm: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Rice undoubtedly believed she was undertaking her sub rosa, possibly felonious, activities for a greater good, but in reality she has been undermining the very basis of our democratic republic in a manner calling forth another quote from the 19th century British lord: “End justifies the means. This is still the most widespread of all the opinions inimical to liberty.” That Rice was able to prevaricate so casually during a recent PBS interview, claiming she “knew nothing” about the unmaskings of Trump officials when she had instigated them,  proves Acton right yet again and exposes the “ends justify the means” mentality as Rice’s default position.

(Speaking of Acton, he also wrote: “Men cannot be made good by the state, but they can easily be made bad.”)

From her serial lies about the Benghazi terror attack being caused by a video to this latest surveilling — incidental or otherwise — of political enemies and its own attendant dishonesties, Rice seems to have been the “go to” person for Obama White House dirty work and cover-ups, Obama’s hatchet woman.  She did not and could not, however, have acted alone.  She was part of a culture.

The unmasked names, of people associated with Donald Trump, were then sent to all those at the National Security Council, some at the Defense Department, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan – essentially, the officials at the top, including former Rice deputy [Iran deal fixer] Ben Rhodes.

The names were part of incidental electronic surveillance of candidate and President-elect Trump and people close to him, including family members, for up to a year before he took office.[bold mine]

Up to a year?  Is it possible it was even longer? When did it actually start?  It would be interesting to see how “incidental” this all was. Will the Senate Intelligence Committee be sufficiently bipartisan to really investigate that?  Or will they be mired in the supposedly nefarious Russian connection that Clapper himself found no evidence of, even after, as we now learn, having been privy to all this “incidental” information for months or years? You would have to assume this Trump-Russia collusion was remarkably subtle to have withstood such constant investigation by so many for so long.

No, the real story here is the Russification, more accurately the Sovietization, of the Obama administration.  They did believe, unlike Lord Acton, that “the ends justify the means.”  That phrase, incidentally, is sometimes incorrectly ascribed to Machiavelli, who wrote something far more sophisticated.  In reality, it was coined, or at least codified, by the 19th century Russian revolutionary Sergey Nechayev and used by Lenin and Stalin to justify their murderous acts.

I hasten to say there are no murders going on here that I know of.  But there is a massive subversion of the principles of our republic. The moment the party in power is permitted to exploit the extraordinary capabilities of our intelligence agencies to surveil in any way the party out of power is the moment that we are well on the road to high-tech totalitarianism. We may already be there.

Difficult as it would be, what is called for now is a full airing not of Russian espionage, which has been going on pretty much constantly since the 1920s, but of our own intelligence agencies and how they function and how they are interacting with current and past administrations. We must be certain that existing privacy laws have actually been observed and, if those laws have not been sufficient, that they be revised to protect the apparently already violated civil liberties of our citizens.

Meanwhile, when it comes to actual punishable law-breaking, the person most vulnerable is, of course, the leaker (or leakers).  Those who accidentally or purposefully  “unmask” identities unfortunately can skate away under current readings of the law.  But if I were to guess, in this instance, the unmasker and the leaker are quite possibly one and the same.  Ms. Rice has much to answer for — and she should do it under oath.

As the scandal evolves, will the finger point even higher? In fact, it already has.  Unbeknownst to almost all of the American public, back in 2011 Barack Obama eased the rules on the unmasking of American citizens in NSA surveillances, putatively to counter foreign espionage threats.  Six years letter and the tables have been turned on us.  Was that always the intention? Or was it simply absolute power corrupting absolutely?

Categories: Intelligence community, Intelligence leaks, Obama and intelligence, Obama and Trump, Susan Rice, Trump transition, Unmasking
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CNN’s Cuomo: Susan Rice Allegations Are ‘Fake Scandal’ Peddled by ‘Right-Wing Media’

April 4, 2017

CNN’s Cuomo: Susan Rice Allegations Are ‘Fake Scandal’ Peddled by ‘Right-Wing Media’, Washington Free Beacon, , April 4, 2017

CNN “New Day” host Chris Cuomo on Tuesday dismissed recent reporting that Obama administration official Susan Rice requested the “unmasking” of members of President Trump’s transition team and campaign as nothing more than right-wing propaganda.

“President Trump [and] right-wing media types [are] peddling a fake scandal,” Cuomo reported, when opening an interview with Rep. Jim Hines (D., Conn.).

“This suggestion that former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice improperly unmasked the identity of Trump associates is part of what the president calls a crooked scheme,” Cuomo said. “An associate of Rice says it’s just plain false.”

Cuomo’s comments came after CNN’s Jim Sciutto dismissed the story as “largely ginned up, partly as a distraction from this larger [Russia] investigation,” also citing assurances from a friend of Rice. Before joining CNN, Sciutto served as chief of staff to Obama’s China Ambassador Gary Locke.

Bloomberg reported Monday that the Trump administration had discovered Rice’s involvement during a National Security Council review of the “government’s policy on ‘unmasking’ the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally.” The Wall Street Journal and Circa reported the same.

Typically, when U.S. citizens get caught up in incidental surveillance of foreign actors, their names are redacted. “Unmasking” private U.S. citizens to make their names appear on intelligence reports is not illegal when tied to a legitimate investigation, but civil libertarians warn the process could be used to skirt regulations that prevent the federal government from spying on Americans.

When asked on “PBS NewsHour” about claims that the Obama White House had “unmasked” Trump team officials, Rice denied all knowledge.

“I know nothing about this,” she said. “I was surprised to see reports from [House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes] on that count today.”

Categories: Intelligence community, Intelligence leaks, Media and Democrats, Media and Trump, Susan Rice, Unmasking
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Unmasking Susan Rice and her NSC dead-enders

April 3, 2017

Unmasking Susan Rice and her NSC dead-enders, American Thinker, Monica Showalter, April 3, 2017

It’s time to start investigating this arrogant abuse of power now. Comey has not stated whether he is investigating these people or not, and this is proper. But with these dead-enders clearly threatening the Trump presidency, it’s time to see a hard hand come out against these deep-staters who don’t know when to leave office, and who subscribe to the leftist situational ethics of ‘by any means necessary.’ They are poison for our republic and if they are not removed, they will destroy the Trump presidency

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Journalist/activist Mike Cernovich reports that former White House National Security Advisor Susan Rice obtained intelligence reports showing the identities of innocent Americans who incidentally spoke to foreign officials under security sweeps for spying or intelligence activities. Under U.S. law, U.S. persons are protected from such disclosure, which could be dry-cleaners asking envoys to pick up their laundry or wrong number phone messages spilling their guts about their mothers-in-law. If such U.S. persons get swept up in surveillance, they are protected. But only if they remain ‘masked,’ which is the law of the land.

Cernovich says the White House Counsel’s office has confirmed that Rice was one of the few officials with the authority to make the requests to unmask the innocent Americans caught up in surveillance dragnets. There was no national security reason to do so, but she did. It makes a lot of sense if the aim is political, however, and White House spokesman Sean Spicer has pointed out that their goal was ‘to leak stuff.’ Based on White House logs, she did, during the transition back when angry miserable Obama White House officials frowned in a group photo for the cameras.

The White House counsel’s office disclosed these logs to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who has been as responsible a steward of America’s secrets as anyone (and said nothing). But it would mean that Rice had to have been responsible for the illegal leaking to the press of the legitimate activities of people like her NSC successor Mike Flynn, for political rather than national security purposes. This would be true whether she did it herself or dispatched a flunky like fellow NSC official Ben Rhodes or Joe Biden’s NSC man Colin Kahl to execute the dirty-tricks skullduggery.

It’s par for the course. Rice was the speaker of the infamous phony White House talking points on why four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were slaughtered in Benghazi on 9/11/12, repeatedly stating for the press that the attack on the U.S. compound was the act of a spontaneous crowd that got out of control over a video, and not the pre-planned, lethally executed al-Qaida terrorist attack it was. After that, she went onto support the admittedly phony narratives about the Iran Deal, which her buddy Ben Rhodes, a creative writing major, cooked up out of thin air, just as he did the Benghazi talking points.

Cernovich reports that New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman (caught on Wikileaks for being in the tank with Obama) had the information, and chose to sit on it to protect the former president.

But based on the White House counsel act, the news nevertheless got out. The story meshes well with what FBI Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee, in response to Nunes’ request for information on leaks last March 20. Comey told the committee that only 20 people would have had access to the names of innocent Americans caught up in the spy dragnet during the transition. Rice was one of them.

Rice, like Rhodes, has the farthest of far-left backgrounds, and the highest of malice against the incoming president. Rhodes never was able to pass a background check to obtain a security clearance and continues to mock and berate Trump & Co, as if he thinks he owned the job and now they took it. Another coeval at NSC, Colin Kahl, who was attached to Joe Biden, seems to have laid out the diabolical plans for picking off Trump’s lieutenants one by one. The tweets he issues are unbelievable, here is one:

Colin Kahl‏ @ColinKahl

The 2nd essential step is purging or marginalizing the “Axis of Ideologues” in the West Wing: Bannon, Miller, Anton, Gorka, KT McFarland.14/

6:21 AM – 11 Mar 2017

With a pattern of malice and mishandled security information centered around NSC dead-enders, the one thing we can see is that there is a coterie of illegal leakers who will compromise national security to enact their political aims.

Devin Nunes pointedly asked Comey whether he knew that illegally leaking national security secrets was a jailtime offense. The FBI director said yes.

It’s time to start investigating this arrogant abuse of power now. Comey has not stated whether he is investigating these people or not, and this is proper. But with these dead-enders clearly threatening the Trump presidency, it’s time to see a hard hand come out against these deep-staters who don’t know when to leave office, and who subscribe to the leftist situational ethics of ‘by any means necessary.’ They are poison for our republic and if they are not removed, they will destroy the Trump presidency.

 

Categories: Ben Rhodes, Comey, Deep state, Devin Nunes, Intelligence community, Intelligence leaks, Surveillance, Susan Rice, Trump administration, Trump transition, Unmasking
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