There appears to be a sufficient quantity of news of high calibre at this point, suggesting that Trump was not only correct in his assertion that he was being illegally spied upon, and for purely political and not national security reasons. In fact he appears to have understated his own case.
Below are links and videos which will be updated throughout the day. Please add related links in the comments.
Bloomberg: Top Obama Adviser Sought Names of Trump Associates in Intel
FOX News reporter Adam Housley disclosed more information this morning on the surveillance of Donald Trump and his team by the Obama administration.
Housley said the investigation went on for more than a year – This is unprecedented.
UPDATE=> CONFIRMED: Obama NSA Advisor Susan Rice Requested the Unmasking of Incoming Trump Officials
Senior Fox News Correspondent, Adam Housley revealed on Friday that Intel Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) knows who unmasked the identities of Trump and his close associates.
Sources also told him that the unmasking was purely for political purposes to embarrass Trump and had NOTHING to do with national security.
Now this..
According to activist and author Mike Cernovich the leaker and unmasker is Susan Rice.
It is now widely accepted that Barack Obama spied on the Trump Transition Team.
The Rebel’s new Washington man on the ground:
Revealed: Obama’s national security adviser asked for Trump’s associates’ names to be ‘UNMASKED’ from intelligence reports dozens of times – before they were leaked
Former national security advisor Susan Rice asked dozens of times for the names of Donald Trump associates to be ‘unmasked’ in foreign surveillance reports.
Rice is the Obama administration official whose name became a punchline after her repeated false claims that the 2012 Benghazi terror attacks were caused by a crude Internet video.
From her position as chief of the National Security Council, according to a Bloomberg columnist, Rice asked government agencies to identify names that had been withheld from raw intelligence reports linked with Trump campaign and transition figures.
There is not necessarily anything illegal or unusual about a national security adviser seeking to unmask names in raw reports, in order to fully understand the meaning of intercepted conversations.
But in this case those identities – including the name of then-National Security Advisor Mike Flynn – were subsequently leaked and made public.
That is a federal felony.
The first drip of information hinting at Rice’s involvement came Friday when Fox News reported that the names of several Trumpworld figures were exposed by someone ‘very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world.’
Trump knows much more than what is currently reported. Info is drip-dripping for a reason. All leakers must be weeded out.
Someone directed Susan Rice to unmask the names. That would be Obama.
Will Susan Rice take the fall for Obama? Is she ever in deep trouble.
barry may not necessarily have directed her to do so but the result is still the same. After all, tricky dicky didn’t order the Water Gate break-in. As I have observed on several other blogs, NEVER underestimate what underlings will do to curry favor with their bosses or to advance the agenda.
Liddy seemed to think he did in his book Will. However Nixon was a saint compared to Obama using the same standards.
The Democrats are going to suffer the death of a thousand cuts. A little is leaked, the Dems lie for several days to a couple of weeks then infor comes out showing they are lying. Then more info comes out and they lie, It they want their political party they need to stop protecting Obama and company and throw them under the bus. I doubt if they and the propaganda media are smart enough to do this, they are all going down.
Bit by bit, Trump methodically undoing Obama policies
http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2017-04-03-US–? -Undoing%20Obm/id-c4fa9fa659394514aa645a7cfd3c31ed
http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2017-04-03-US–?-Undoing%20/id-c4fa9fa659394514aa645a7cfd3c31ed
Such a pleasure to see the man doing his job.
Tomorrow he’ll get his biweekly postcard from me. He prefers postcards because they don’t have to go through Secret Service screening. I write him online every other week.
If you’re not on the White House mailing list, you can go to:
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/contact
Here’s a link from the first postcard drive:
https://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2017/03/08/send-a-postcard-to-president-trump-on-march-15/
Nothing new here except what is the significance of posting this November missive today ?Is this an error: the Sign interpreting program link is from 2012, not May 2016.
https://vault.fbi.gov/recently-added
04.03.17 https://vault.fbi.gov/director-comey-letter-to-congress-dated-november-6th-2016
03.23.17 https://vault.fbi.gov/9-11-attacks-investigation-and-related-materials/9-11-images
03.21.17 https://vault.fbi.gov/director-comey-letter-to-congress-dated-october-28-2016
03.15.17 FBI Sign Language Interpreting and Reading Program 0889D
The FBI Sign Language Interpreting and Reading Program policy was implemented in May 2016. It controls the provision of sign language interpreting and reading services for Bureau personnel and those with whom the FBI interacts. https://vault.fbi.gov/fbi-sign-language-interpreting-and-reading-program-0889d/FBI%20Sign%20Language%20Interpreting%20and%20Reading%20Program%200889D%20Part%2001%20of%2001/view
03.02.17 The FBI’s Bureau Aviation Regulations: Policy Directive and Policy Guide was issued on 1/1/2015. Its purpose is “to provide safe and effective aviation and surveillance support” to FBI investigations in conjunction with the rules issued by the Federal Aviation Administration regarding airplane flight. https://vault.fbi.gov/bureau-aviation-regulations-policy-directive-and-policy-guide
02.15.17 https://vault.fbi.gov/trump-management-company This release consists of FBI materials on an investigation conducted between 1972 and 1974 into allegations that the Trump Management Company had discriminated against applicants for apartment rentals on account of their race.
https://vault.fbi.gov/recently-added
04.03.17 https://vault.fbi.gov/director-comey-letter-to-congress-dated-november-6th-2016
03.23.17 https://vault.fbi.gov/9-11-attacks-investigation-and-related-materials/9-11-images
03.21.17 https://vault.fbi.gov/director-comey-letter-to-congress-dated-october-28-2016
03.15.17 FBI Sign Language Interpreting and Reading Program 0889D
The FBI Sign Language Interpreting and Reading Program policy was implemented in May 2016.
FOX NEWS – Susan Rice requested to unmask names of Trump transition officials, sources say
Multiple sources tell Fox News that Susan Rice, former national security adviser under then-President Barack Obama, requested to unmask the names of Trump transition officials caught up in surveillance.
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 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.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, asked about the revelations at Monday’s briefing, declined to comment specifically on what role Rice may have played or officials’ motives.
“I’m not going to comment on this any further until [congressional] committees have come to a conclusion,” he said, while contrasting the media’s alleged “lack” of interest in these revelations with the intense coverage of suspected Trump-Russia links.
When names of Americans are incidentally collected, they are supposed to be masked, meaning the name or names are redacted from reports – whether it is international or domestic collection, unless it is an issue of national security, crime or if their security is threatened in any way. There are loopholes and ways to unmask through backchannels, but Americans are supposed to be protected from incidental collection. Sources told Fox News that in this case, they were not.
This comes in the wake of Evelyn Farkas’ television interview last month in which the former Obama deputy secretary of defense said in part: “I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill – it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration.”
Meanwhile, Fox News also is told that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes knew about unmasking and leaking back in January, well before President Trump’s tweet in March alleging wiretapping.
Nunes has faced criticism from Democrats for viewing pertinent documents on White House grounds and announcing their contents to the press. But sources said “the intelligence agencies slow-rolled Nunes. He could have seen the logs at other places besides the White House SCIF [secure facility], but it had already been a few weeks. So he went to the White House because he could protect his sources and he could get to the logs.”
As the Obama administration left office, it also approved new rules that gave the NSA much broader powers by relaxing the rules about sharing intercepted personal communications and the ability to share those with 16 other intelligence agencies.
Rice is no stranger to controversy. As the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, she appeared on several Sunday news shows to defend the adminstration’s later debunked claim that the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on a U.S. consulate in Libya was triggered by an Internet video.
Rice also told ABC News in 2014 that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl “served the United States with honor and distinction” and that he “wasn’t simply a hostage; he was an American prisoner of war captured on the battlefield.”
Bergdahl is currently facing court-martial on charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy for allegedly walking off his post in Afghanistan.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/04/03/susan-rice-requested-to-unmask-names-trump-transition-officials-sources-say.html
Report: Obama adviser Susan Rice sought to unmask Trump associates
Jennings: New surveillance details are ‘political bombshell’
Rice asked for Trump transition associates to be unmasked
Where does the Susan Rice story go from here?
Report: Susan Rice behind unmasking of Trump officials
Rep. DeSantis on the Susan Rice controversy
Tucker: Susan Rice revelation more disturbing than Russia
CNN – Sources: Unmasking allegation is false
Sources says Trump’s allegation that former Ambassador Susan Rice unmasked information improperly is false.
zero hedge – Cernovich Explains How He Learned About Susan Rice
Ever since Mike Cernovich dropped the bombshell report over the weekend outing Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, as the person behind the unmasking of the identity of various members of Trump’s team who were ‘incidentally’ surveilled during the 2016 campaign (see “Confirmed: Susan Rice “Unmasked” Trump Team”), a report which was subsequently confirmed by Eli Lake of Bloomberg earlier this morning, everyone has been wondering who within the Trump White House or the intelligence community supplied him with such a massive scoop.
But, as it turns out, Cernovich didn’t need a ‘deep throat’ within the NSA or CIA for his blockbuster scoop, all he needed was some well-placed sources inside of a couple of America’s corrupt mainstream media outlets. As Cernovich explains below, his sources for the Susan Rice story were actually folks working at Bloomberg and the New York Times who revealed that both Eli Lake (Bloomberg) and Maggie Haberman (NYT) were sitting on the Susan Rice story in order to protect the Obama administration.
“Maggie Haberman had it. She will not run any articles that are critical of the Obama administration.”
“Eli Lake had it. He didn’t want to run it and Bloomberg didn’t want to run it because it vindicates Trump’s claim that he had been spied upon. And Eli Lake is a ‘never Trumper.’ Bloomberg was a ‘never Trump’ publication.”
“I’m showing you the politics of ‘real journalism’. ‘Real journalism’ is that Bloomberg had it and the New York Times had it but they wouldn’t run it because they don’t want to run any stories that would make Obama look bad or that will vindicate Trump. They only want to run stories that make Trump look bad so that’s why they sat on it.”
“So where did I get the story? I didn’t get it from the intelligence community. Everybody’s trying to figure out where I got it from. I got it from somebody who works in one of those media companies. I have spies in every media organization. I got people in news rooms. I got it from a source within the news room who said ‘Cernovich, they’re sitting on this story, they’re not going to run it, so you can run it’.”
“If you’re at Bloomberg, I have people in there. If you’re at the New York Times, I have people in there. LA Times, Washington Post, you name it, I have my people in there. I got IT people in every major news room in this country. The IT people see every email so that’s how I knew it.”
And while this could certainly be interpreted as a clever ploy to protect his real sources, Cernovich’s video comments seem to be validated by both his tweet from yesterday afternoon…
Obama may be the first POTUS brought down by a scandal after he left office. Every major outlet had this scoop, none would run it. https://t.co/LvPEGqJxtk
— Mike Cernovich ???????? (@Cernovich) April 2, 2017
…and the fact that Eli Lake of Bloomberg was able to conveniently confirm Cernovich’s story with his own article this morning.
All of which just begs the question of what other stories the mainstream media is sitting on in an effort to protect their chosen candidates.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-03/cernovich-explains-how-he-learned-about-susan-rice
the daily caller -Rand Paul Calls For Susan Rice To Testify On Unmasking Trump Officials
GOP Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said he believes former National Security Advisor Susan Rice should testify before Congress on her request to unmask the names of Trump transition officials collected during routine intelligence-gathering operations.
Paul argued the situation should not be downplayed, saying reforms need to be made to prevent individuals from being blackmailed on personal aspects of their lives through unmasking. He noted there was nothing stopping the former administration from looking through Trump officials and national security advisors’ conversations during the transition window.
“If it is allowed, we shouldn’t be allowing it, but I don’t think should just discount how big a deal it is that Susan Rice was looking at these,” he told reporters Monday. “And she needs to be asked, ‘Did President Obama ask her to do this? Was this a directive from President Obama? I think she should testify under oath on this.”
Paul said he has long thought there are too many people with the ability to unmask individuals.
“The law says you can’t reverse target people, but how would you know that once you get inside the brain and the people that are unmasking people,” Paul continued. “So, what if I decided to unmask and I’m there and I only unmask the conversations of my Democrat opponents — shouldn’t there be more restrictions for unmasking people in the political process?”
He said he believes there should be two individuals at the top of the agency to allow for identities to be unmasked. Paul noted the process is indiscriminate, noting the United States previously captured every phone call in Italy for a month.
“Basically there’s no Fourth Amendment when you use these kinds of things, you go with a lower standard because we’ve got to protect the country and we don’t care about spying on foreigners,” he said, adding there are said to be millions of Americans caught up in the country’s foreign targeting.
Paul said the president did not bring up the matter on their golf trip Sunday, but he voiced his opinion on the matter.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/04/03/rand-paul-calls-for-susan-rice-to-testify-on-unmasking-trump-officials/
White House logs indicate Susan Rice consumed unmasked intel on Trump associates
Computer logs that former President Obama’s team left behind in the White House indicate his national security adviser Susan Rice accessed numerous intelligence reports during Obama’s last seven months in office that contained National Security Agency intercepts involving Donald Trump and his associates, Circa has learned.
Intelligence sources said the logs discovered by National Security Council staff suggested Rice’s interest in the NSA materials, some of which included unmasked Americans’ identities, appeared to begin last July around the time Trump secured the GOP nomination and accelerated after Trump’s election in November launched a transition that continued through January.
The intelligence reports included some intercepts of Americans talking to foreigners and many more involving foreign leaders talking about the future president, his campaign associates or his transition, the sources said. Most if not all had nothing to do with the Russian election interference scandal, the sources said, speaking only on condition of anonymity given the sensitive nature of the materials.
Ordinarily, such references to Americans would be redacted or minimized by the NSA before being shared with outside intelligence sources, but in these cases, names were sometimes unmasked at the request of Rice or the intelligence reports were specific enough that the American’s identity was easily ascertained, the sources said.
The exact national security justifications for Rice accessing the reports isn’t clear and may require additional documentation that the House and Senate intelligence committees have requested from the NSA, America’s lead agency in spying on foreign powers.
How the information was disseminated beyond Rice will also be a potential focus of congressional oversight, since lawmakers may want to know if it was briefed to Obama or shared with members of her larger circle of advisers, like deputy Ben Rhodes.
Rice has not returned repeated calls for comment from Circa. But in an interview with PBS recently, she said she had no idea what House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes was talking about when he said Obama officials were monitoring Trump associates after the election.
One intelligence professional with detailed knowledge of how the NSA and other intelligence agencies share information with the White House during transitions told Circa that U.S. intelligence reporting on foreign leaders’ perceptions of Trump spiked after his unexpected election win in November, creating a trove of information that could be accessed by the outgoing White House.
“There’s always intelligence reporting on an incoming president and how the world is reacting but this election was not like others, and that reporting spiked,” the source said. “Whether and how it was used by the Obama team will have to be evaluated separate of the fact that the reporting this time around was richer and more robust because of the circumstances of the election.”
Both the Republican chairman and Democratic vice chairman of the Housing Intelligence Committee have been shown the documents discovered by the NSC over the last 10 days.
The NSA can legally intercept foreigners’ conversations without court permission under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but it cannot target Americans’ conversations overseas. If an American is accidentally intercepted or two foreigners are caught talking about an American, that name is supposed to be redacted in intelligence reports and replaced by a description like “U.S. citizen 1.”
But Circa reported last week that Obama opened the door for his political aides like Rice to more easily gain access to unmasked Americans’ names in NSA intercepts through a series of rule changes beginning in 2011.
Obama’s rule changes opened door for NSA intercepts of Americans to reach political hands
http://circa.com/politics/accountability/white-house-logs-indicate-susan-rice-consumed-unmasked-intel-on-trump-associates
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DAILY MAIL – Revealed: Obama’s national security adviser asked for Trump’s associates’ names to be ‘UNMASKED’ from intelligence reports dozens of times – before they were leaked
Obama national security adviser asked U.S. agencies dozens of times to ‘unmask’ Trumpworld names from raw intelligence reports
Susan Rice is already the Obama aide conservatives love to hate, following her false claims that a crude Internet video caused the 2012 Benghazi terror attacks
It’s not unusual for a high-ranking national security official to ask for the names of people ‘incidentally’ surveilled, in order to understand a report’s context
But some names, including Rice’s successor Mike Flynn, were subsequently leaked to the press – which constitutes a felony
more :
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4376288/Obama-s-national-security-advisor-ASKED-unmasking.html