Obama Admin wiretapping Trump?

[glocktogo]

What's incredible is how the msm can continue chasing Trump/Russia collusion smoke, but wilfully ignore the dumpster fire of Obama administration spying on Team Trump by dismissing it as a diversion from the "real" story of Trump rigging the election with Putin, for which they don't have a single shred of evidence.

[SteyrAUG]

What's incredible is how the msm can continue chasing Trump/Russia collusion smoke, but wilfully ignore the dumpster fire of Obama administration spying on Team Trump by dismissing it as a diversion from the "real" story of Trump rigging the election with Putin, for which they don't have a single shred of evidence.

Rice who?

[C-grunt]

Question and sorry if this has been covered already...

I was out to lunch with my mother today who is very liberal and very anti Trump. To her credit she has been anti Trump for many years already. She said she read about a meeting that was found out where someone from the Trump admin met with the Russians to broker a deal about oil. Something to do with pumping oil if we don't bitch about Crimea.

I haven't heard ANYTHING about this. Is this something real or just a Democratic Underground conspiracy?

[Averageman]

Question and sorry if this has been covered already...

I was out to lunch with my mother today who is very liberal and very anti Trump. To her credit she has been anti Trump for many years already. She said she read about a meeting that was found out where someone from the Trump admin met with the Russians to broker a deal about oil. Something to do with pumping oil if we don't bitch about Crimea.

I haven't heard ANYTHING about this. Is this something real or just a Democratic Underground conspiracy?

That's a little difficult to pin down.
The Left is reaching right now, reaching far to find any link between Trump and Russia. Now they are using a possible meeting between the founder of Blackwater , someone on the fringes of the Administration and a Russian Diplomat that happened somewhere off of the coast of Africa...
No evidence, but it sounds like a great spy novel.
The echo from the left is amazing, they simply redirect the story, ignore the facts and throw out some fiction like this.
https://www.rt.com/news/383529-russi...kwater-spicer/
Earlier Monday, the Washington Post reported, citing unnamed US, European and Arab officials, that the UAE in January arranged secret talks between Erik Prince, the founder of notorious private US military firm Blackwater, and “a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin.”
Grigoriy SisoevPutin: Tycoon Deripaska accused of ties with Trump's aide should speak in Congress
According to the paper, the meeting at the Seychelles was organized to establish a “back-channel line of communication” between the Russian government and the administration of President Trump.
The White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, has rejected the report, calling it “a bunch of flimsy pieces of information all tied together.Spicer pointed out that Prince had no role in Trump’s campaign or his transition when the alleged meeting took place on January 11, with this fact not being contested by Washington Post.
The paper “can’t identify the other individuals” except the Blackwater founder, who participated in the talks, he added.
“Apparently, he [Prince] knows somebody, who knew somebody, who knew a guy in the UAE, who also knew a guy in Russia,” Spicer said, describing the article.
edit to add;
Then there are the denials;
https://news.grabien.com/story-cnn-g...instructs-view
nce news broke Monday that the Obama Administration's National Security Adviser, Susan Rice, directed the "unmasking" of NSA intercepts of Trump associates, CNN has raced to shoot down the blockbuster report.
CNN Tonight's Don Lemon went so far as to announce he would ignore the news at all costs.
While interviewing a Democratic congressman, CNN's Chris Cuomo claimed it was "demonstrably untrue" Rice sought surveillance of the Trump team, even as that's exactly what yesterday's reports prove. He further announced that the story is a "fake scandal."
"There is no evidence of any wrongdoing," Cuomo concluded. "In fact if anything, the NSA asking for identities was foreign players. The White House blasting the press for not reporting on another fake scandal being peddled by right-wing media."
Over the last 24 hours, the network has also repeatedly called on its chief national security correspondent — who was also a political appointee in the Obama White House — Jim Sciutto, to dismiss the reports as a non-story; Sciutto has even excused Rice claiming ignorance of the unmasking scandal two weeks ago, arguing Rice "wasn't aware" what unmasking Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) was referring to.
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/...rice-unmasking
On Tuesday’s edition of Hardball, MSNBC host Chris Matthews and MSNBC political analyst/Mother Jones D.C. bureau chief David Corn were unglued over the Susan Rice “unmasking” controversy, suggesting that it was racist and sexist for these accusations to be leveled at the former National Security Adviser because she’s never done anything wrong.
Matthews was off his rocker from the show’s opening minute, denouncing the Rice story as something pushed by the President to “distract attention from the investigation” even though he immediately touted colleague Andrea Mitchell’s lengthy interview with Rice hours earlier.

Let the Games begin!!

[Averageman]

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/...masking-names/
Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” host Joe Scarborough posed the question;
“What if Dick Cheney had asked for the unmasking of names for Barack Obama’s incoming administration?” Scarborough added. “It’s a very simple question to ask the next time anybody says this is much ado about nothing.”
“This Bloomberg report says that one official familiar with reports say they contained valuable political information, not intel, but valuable political information on what the Trump transition team was doing, including who Trump was meeting, who the Trump team was meeting, what the views were of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration,” he said.



I still have faith they will actually do something about this.

Edit to add:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/u...leak.html?_r=0
A longtime Democratic foreign policy official who served as President Barack Obama’s last national security adviser, Ms. Rice has become an inkblot test in the controversy over Russian meddling in last year’s election. Republicans see a partisan who mined intelligence reports to spy on Mr. Trump’s team. Democrats see a scapegoat tarred for doing her job and used as a distraction from an F.B.I. investigation into Mr. Trump’s associates.
At issue are her requests for the identities of Americans caught up in electronic surveillance of foreigners, as cited in reports provided to her by intelligence agencies: Americans who were affiliated with Mr. Trump. Ms. Rice went public in her own defense on television and Twitter on Tuesday, neither confirming nor disputing that she made such requests but arguing that any she might have made were proper and necessary, not part of political espionage against the Trump campaign.
“The allegation is that somehow the Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes,” Ms. Rice told the journalist Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC. “That’s absolutely false.”
Ms. Rice said she had sometimes asked for the names of Americans whose identities were redacted in her daily intelligence briefings in order to understand the context of what she was being told. The purpose, she said, was “to do our jobs,” but “absolutely not for any political purpose, to spy, expose, anything.”

So part of Susan Rice's job was to conduct an investigation outside of an agency such as the FBI or the IC?
Simply by asking and receiving the names of the American people involved in these conversations she committed a crime, but so did the person who revealed them.
She had no authority to conduct an investigation, nor did revealing these names have any purpose for her other than to have the knowledge of what the Trump Administration was doing, who they were talking with and what their future plans might be.
That whole "Privacy Act" thing might be the first domino to fall.

Another good article;
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017...cials-say.html
While Susan Rice is defending as routine her requests for the identities of Americans caught up in surveillance of foreign targets, others who’ve served in the intelligence community and at high levels of government say the former national security adviser's requests were quite unusual.
Rice asked for Trump associates to be identified – or “unmasked” – in intelligence reports and those names were then widely disseminated at the top levels of the government. In an interview Tuesday on MSNBC, Rice largely skirted talking specifically about those allegations, however, she said it was “absolutely false” that Obama officials utilized intelligence “for political purposes.”
Rice’s defenders also have said unmasking requests would be a typical part of her job -- and her authority to make such requests generally is not being questioned. Rice said Tuesday the process helped provide context “in order to understand the importance of the report and understand the significance.”
Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau tweeted his coarsely-worded case: "It was her f------ job to know this information! This is utter bulls---."
(I'm not sure what makes Favreau an expert on these matters, after all he is a speech writer.)
Her detractors, however, say that’s not the case.
“From my direct experience dealing at this level, that is never done,” retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer told Fox News. Shaffer has experience in intelligence operations focused on foreign actors in which U.S. citizens’ involvement could surface.
“The national security adviser person is a manager position, not an analyst position,” he said. “You have analysts in the intelligence community whose job is to sort through who is doing what with what. Susan Rice is a senior manager looking over the entire intelligence community. She should not have time to be unmasking individuals having conversations. It’s insane. It’s never done.”
Ex-CIA analyst Fred Fleitz agreed in a Fox News op-ed.
“Rice’s denials don’t add up,” Fleitz wrote. “It is hard to fathom how the demasking of multiple Trump campaign and transition officials was not politically motivated.”
Former Ambassador to the United Nations and Fox News contributor John Bolton told “America’s Newsroom” that Rice’s requests may have been improper depending on what reason she gave for wanting the information.
Rice is going to have to testify, I hope she does so under oath. Susan Rice is after all a serial liar, Benghazi anyone?

[Averageman]

Suddenly all evidence of this criminal action has been brushed aside by,.....well, nearly anything, Russia, North Korea, Syria, fill in the blank...

Oh yeah, News Flash !
Barry Manilow is Gay..
Who would have thunk it?

[Averageman]

Great article in RedState;
http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2017...olitical-ends/
Rice apparently had some help?
And just as Ben Rhodes was involved in his echo chamber, it has been reported that he was part of the “resistance” formed by ousted Obama appointees to damage the Trump administration. When you look at the unmasking conducted by Susan Rice and Rhodes’s activities, including the boast by former Obama officials about spreading classified information widely to prevent it from being “destroyed,” you see a replay of the Iran nuclear deal and how the NSA was corrupted during that episode.

One wonders when this started and how deep it goes. And Congress certainly needs to find out.

https://spectator.org/new-systemic-s...-re-iran-deal/

“At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents,” says a pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the day-to-day fight over the Iran Deal. “The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans engaged in perfectly legitimate political activism—activism, due to the nature of the issue, that naturally involved conversations with foreigners. We began to notice the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our own paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.”
This is what systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection for domestic political purposes looks like: Intelligence collected on Americans, lawmakers, and figures in the pro-Israel community was fed back to the Obama White House as part of its political operations. The administration got the drop on its opponents by using classified information, which it then used to draw up its own game plan to block and freeze those on the other side. And—with the help of certain journalists whose stories (and thus careers) depend on high-level access—terrorize them.
Who would have access to this sort of unmasking ability? Why, Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes. Remember from yesterday? Ben Rhodes’ brother runs CBS News.
So here’s the procedure, broken down:

Policy Goal -> Listen to foreign agents associated with policy goal -> Surveil and grab American citizen activists and politician communications to foreign agents associated with policy (specifically those against it) -> Give those communications to media -> Start whisper campaign -> Threaten personal or professional security -> Achieve policy goal by fear, intimidation, and treachery.

[ABNAK]

Great article in RedState;
http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2017...olitical-ends/
Rice apparently had some help?
And just as Ben Rhodes was involved in his echo chamber, it has been reported that he was part of the “resistance” formed by ousted Obama appointees to damage the Trump administration. When you look at the unmasking conducted by Susan Rice and Rhodes’s activities, including the boast by former Obama officials about spreading classified information widely to prevent it from being “destroyed,” you see a replay of the Iran nuclear deal and how the NSA was corrupted during that episode.

One wonders when this started and how deep it goes. And Congress certainly needs to find out.

https://spectator.org/new-systemic-s...-re-iran-deal/

“At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents,” says a pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the day-to-day fight over the Iran Deal. “The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans engaged in perfectly legitimate political activism—activism, due to the nature of the issue, that naturally involved conversations with foreigners. We began to notice the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our own paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.”
This is what systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection for domestic political purposes looks like: Intelligence collected on Americans, lawmakers, and figures in the pro-Israel community was fed back to the Obama White House as part of its political operations. The administration got the drop on its opponents by using classified information, which it then used to draw up its own game plan to block and freeze those on the other side. And—with the help of certain journalists whose stories (and thus careers) depend on high-level access—terrorize them.
Who would have access to this sort of unmasking ability? Why, Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes. Remember from yesterday? Ben Rhodes’ brother runs CBS News.
So here’s the procedure, broken down:

Policy Goal -> Listen to foreign agents associated with policy goal -> Surveil and grab American citizen activists and politician communications to foreign agents associated with policy (specifically those against it) -> Give those communications to media -> Start whisper campaign -> Threaten personal or professional security -> Achieve policy goal by fear, intimidation, and treachery.

Unlike Susan Rice (and I don't agree with it at all mind you), Rhodes certainly can't claim his position allowed him to see this information. Rice is a freaking lying bitch, but for sure Rhodes is a hack who had no damn business having access to this BS.