About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

51 Replies to “April 4 post on the Trump-tap issue”

  1. Judge Jeanine Pirro on Susan Rice ‘unmasking’ scandal of Trump campaign officials

  2. the daily caller – Former US Attorney: Susan Rice Ordered Spy Agencies To Produce ‘Detailed Spreadsheets’ Involving Trump

    Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova.

    “What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.

    “The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”

    Other official sources with direct knowledge and who requested anonymity confirmed to TheDCNF diGenova’s description of surveillance reports Rice ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election.

    Also on Monday, Fox News and Bloomberg News, citing multiple sources reported that Rice had requested the intelligence information that was produced in a highly organized operation. Fox said the unmasked names of Trump aides were given to officials at the National Security Council (NSC), the Department of Defense, James Clapper, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan, Obama’s CIA Director.

    Joining Rice in the alleged White House operations was her deputy Ben Rhodes, according to Fox.

    Critics of the atmosphere prevailing throughout the Obama administration’s last year in office point to former Obama Deputy Defense Secretary Evelyn Farkas who admitted in a March 2 television interview on MSNBC that she “was urging my former colleagues,” to “get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration.”

    Farkas sought to walk back her comments in the weeks following: “I didn’t give anybody anything except advice.”

    Col. (Ret.) James Waurishuk, an NSC veteran and former deputy director for intelligence at the U.S. Central Command, told TheDCNF that many hands had to be involved throughout the Obama administration to launch such a political spying program.

    “The surveillance initially is the responsibility of the National Security Agency,” Waurishuk said. “They have to abide by this guidance when one of the other agencies says, ‘we’re looking at this particular person which we would like to unmask.’”

    “The lawyers and counsel at the NSA surely would be talking to the lawyers and members of counsel at CIA, or at the National Security Council or at the Director of National Intelligence or at the FBI,” he said. “It’s unbelievable of the level and degree of the administration to look for information on Donald Trump and his associates, his campaign team and his transition team. This is really, really serious stuff.”

    Michael Doran, former NSC senior director, told TheDCNF Monday that “somebody blew a hole in the wall between national security secrets and partisan politics.” This “was a stream of information that was supposed to be hermetically sealed from politics and the Obama administration found a way to blow a hole in that wall,” he said.

    Doran charged that potential serious crimes were undertaken because “this is a leaking of signal intelligence.”

    “That’s a felony,” he told TheDCNF. “And you can get 10 years for that. It is a tremendous abuse of the system. We’re not supposed to be monitoring American citizens. Bigger than the crime, is the breach of public trust.”

    Waurishuk said he was most dismayed that “this is now using national intelligence assets and capabilities to spy on the elected, yet-to-be-seated president.”

    “We’re looking at a potential constitutional crisis from the standpoint that we used an extremely strong capability that’s supposed to be used to safeguard and protect the country,” he said. “And we used it for political purposes by a sitting president. That takes on a new precedent.”

    http://dailycaller.com/2017/04/03/susan-rice-ordered-spy-agencies-to-produce-detailed-spreadsheets-involving-trump/

    • Michael Doran – he’s as good as it gets. Top mideast analyst, vast experience and reputation for integrity.

  3. MSNBC – SUSAN RICE FULL ONE-ON-ONE EXPLOSIVE INTERVIEW WITH ANDREA MITCHELL –

    • zero hedge – Susan Rice Responds To Trump Unmasking Allegations: “I Leaked Nothing To Nobody”

      If anyone expected former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, the same Susan Rice who “stretched the truth” about Benghazi, to admit in her first public appearance after news that she unmasked members of the Trump team to admit she did something wrong, will be disappointed. Instead, moments ago she told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that she categorically denied that the Obama administration inappropriately spied on members of the Trump transition team.

      “The allegation is that somehow, Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes,” Rice told Mitchell. “That’s absolutely false…. My job is to protect the American people and the security of our country. “

      “There was no such collection or surveillance on Trump Tower or Trump individuals, it is important to understand, directed by the White House or targeted at Trump individuals,” Rice said.

      “I don’t solicit reports,” Rice said Tuesday. “They’re giving it to me, if I read it, and I think that in order for me to understand, is it significant or not so significant, I need to know who the ‘U.S. Person’ is, I can make that request.” She did concede that it is “possible” the Trump team was picked up in “incidental surveillance.”

      “The notion, which some people are trying to suggest, that by asking for the identity of the American person is the same is leaking it — that’s completely false,” Rice said. “There is no equivalence between so-called unmasking and leaking.”

      That said, Rice did not discuss what motive she may have had behind what Bloomberg, Fox and others have confirmed, was her unmasking of members of the Trump team.

      Rice also flatly denied exposing President Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who was forced to resign in February after media reports revealed that he misled Vice President Pence about the contents of a phone call with the Russian ambassador. Asked by Mitchell if she seeked to unmask the names of people involved in the Trump campaign in order to spy on them, Rice says: “absolutely not, for any political purpose, to spy, expose, anything.” And yet, that is what happened. She was then asked if she leaked if she leaked the name of Mike Flynn: “I leaked nothing to nobody.”

      In a follow up question, Rice said that when it comes to Mike Flynn with whom she had “civil and cordial relations”, that she learned “in the press” that he was an unregistered agent for the Turkish government.

      We doubt that anyone’s opinion will change after hearing the above especially considering that, in addition to Benghazi, Rice is the official who praised Bowe Bergdahl for his “honorable service” and claimed he was captured “on the battlefield”, and then just two weeks ago, she told PBS that she didn’t know anything about the unmasking.

      Unfortunately, Mitchell’s list of questions did not go so far as to ask about her false claim in the PBS interview, in which she said “I know nothing about unmasking Trump officials.”

      It is thus hardly surprising that now that her memory has been “refreshed” about her role in the unmasking, that Rice clearly remembers doing nothing at all wrong.

      On Monday night, Rand Paul and other Republicans called for Rice to testify under oath, a request she sidestepped on Tuesday. “Let’s see what comes,” she told Mitchell, when asked if she would testify on the matter. “I’m not going to sit here and prejudge.”

      http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-04/susan-rice-responds-unmasking-allegations

      • We alll know Susan Rice is a major league liar and a partisan hack, what we don’t know is why the people were unmasked? Given the Obama administrations history in abuse of ignoring the law and abusing the power of the Presidency combined with her history of lying we can have very legitimate doubts about everything she says.

  4. Finally people other then FOX are talking about the level of the crimes committed by the Obama people and Obama himself. These revelations are so damning that if Republicans had committed them there would be rioting on the streets and lynch mobs hunting for everyone involved.

  5. Breaking down the Susan Rice unmasking scandal

    Former FBI assistant director Ron Hosko, breaks down the scandal surrounding former national security advisor Susan Rice and the unmasking of members of President Trump’s transition team.

  6. the gateway pundit – BREAKING on Rice-Gate:Obama Admin Spied on SEAN HANNITY and ERIK PRINCE Too!

    Independent Journalist, Mike Cernovich had a phone conference live on air with GotNews founder, Chuck Johnson when he broke the news that Sean Hannity and Blackwater founder, Erik Prince were being spied on by the Obama administration.

    Per Chuck Johnson—– Sean Hannity and Erik Prince, Blackwater founder, were spied on by the Obama administration.

    This on the heels of the news that Blackwater founder, Erik Prince had a secret meeting in the Seychelles to establish a so-called ‘Trump-Putin back channel’, according to leftist media.

    http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/04/breaking-rice-gate-obama-admin-spied-sean-hannity-erik-prince-video/

  7. Socialism, as it exists in our environment, is not a matter of the proletariat or the people or the disenfranchised, or anything like that. The reality of socialism exists inside the government sector unions and pretty much nowhere else, starting with the schoolteachers through the nurses and the government employees etc. The eternal problem with that type of “socialism” is that, when the people getting paid by the government become a majority, they vote monolithically and begin to use their employment positions for political means, like the IRS going after conservative groups or the teachers indoctrinating their students with left wing propaganda, for instance.

    Once this critical mass has been reached and the majority can vote to give themselves a raise, all is lost. Next stop Venezuela. The same corrupt government will get in and stay there ’til the end of time or the economy collapses completely, whichever comes first.

    And that is why socialism is a bad thing…

    • Thank-you for linking this to socialism, Chris. I wouldn’t have put it together myself.
      It’s like Perfectchild’s ongoing explanation of how sexsquirrel-iness, Islam, and socialism are connected.

      • Yes, Chris, your words clarify. The hard-working private sector–not large political-influencing companies with millions and billions–but the small mom and pop enterprises that must survive without government corporate welfare–pay for this socialism. We live by our wits and, sadly, the benefactors of private risk capital live by our wits too!

    • This is how all socialism turns out, the people working for the government gets rich and the rest get poorer, they maintain power through the help of the useful idiots that today come in two forms, 1) the SJW types and 2) the 60s holdovers who hate all private enterprise.

    • Allowing collective bargaining by government employees was one of the biggest mistakes in recent history. Taxpayers represent the ultimate “deep pocket” and there is no way that the federal government is about to declare bankruptcy.

      A democracy can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.

      — Alexis de Tocqueville

      Merely substitute “the voters” with “government employees”.

    • “The reality of socialism exists inside the government sector unions and pretty much nowhere else, starting with the schoolteachers through the nurses and the government employees etc.”

      In the UK:
      The Minimum Wage.
      The Employer Pension Contribution even if you hire one person.. (Even though every employee already pays National Insurance for their State Pension).
      On the horizon the Maximum Wage.
      The Communists are dismantling the Free Market. Then there will only be a centrally planned oligarchy, and the public will be forced to turn to the Black Market. Paving the way for the Thought Police as the true path to justice.

      These totalitarian Kingdoms of Peace, for people wanting a Safe Space; and by setting up shop a sanctuary offered by their handlers with blashemy laws in return for their servitude.

      The developing brain can miss vital stages of child development by negligence, absence or abuse.

      The imprint from fear, pathologically makes a person yearns to be safe and secure. At every level of emotional damage until they come out as a solit personality, bipolar, submitting and surrendering to Allah, Collective, or Gender. To substitute into a new non-self and say the old self did it. The murderer St Paul changed his name and indentified as a self-aclaimed Apostle. This new persona is brittle and just had to avoid the temptations of the thorns of the flesh. Catholic Priests have had no such luck either.

      A Muslim, Feminist, LGBTQ+. or any name but their own. Muslims seek to find their manhood by lording over women forced to wear latrine-outfits; Feminists to find their womanhood if only they could get rid of all the men; and the sexual-compulsive needy for affection to get rid of all those monogamous relationships that can generate love from the slightest of smiles.

      The envy and gnashing of teeth is venemous.

      The Three Dark Lords gravitate to their lowest common denominator of self-harm and harming others for a sense of life.

      Piss-Hijabs:
      https://vladtepesblog.com/2017/04/04/readers-links-for-april-4-2017/#comment-353061

      • Paving the way for the Thought Police as the true path to justice.
        These days Thought Police are jumping the gun.

      • Humiliation before their three respective Fantasies, is the only return for affection they know.

        Giving them nothing, is kryptonite. Egos in distress will terrorize a pen of pigs.

        Mansplaining.
        Womansplaining.
        Invertsplaining.

        So its alright then. Big business. Exploiting their bottomless pit of perpetual emotion to need to stand in the place of the sane.

        MFG. Muslim Feminist Gay. Genital Female Mutilation. Body Mind and Soul.

  8. Dear CNN: Why Is a Former Obama Appointee Reporting on Susan Rice Revelation?

    Eli Lake at Bloomberg wrote an explosive piece that set the political world on fire for a few hours yesterday. Lake detailed how Susan Rice, President Obama’s National Security Adviser sought to “unmask” the identities of Trump campaign transition members and his campaign.

    From Lake’s story:

    White House lawyers last month discovered that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

    The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in 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. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.”

    One absurdity uncovered with Lake’s story is it shines a light on her ability to lie at the drop of a hat:

    Rice herself has not spoken directly on the issue of unmasking. Last month when she was asked on the “PBS NewsHour” about reports that Trump transition officials, including Trump himself, were swept up in incidental intelligence collection, Rice said: “I know nothing about this,” adding, “I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that account today.”

    A smarter person would say, “The FBI, House, and Senate are all investigating, so it’s better that I don’t say anything about it.” Did she not think the information would come out at some point?

    Where it all gets somewhat ridiculous is when CNN’s Jim Sciutto tweeted the following:

    Just in: “The idea that Ambassador Rice improperly sought the identities of Americans is false.” – person close to Rice tells me

    — Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) April 3, 2017

    For the record, Jim Sciutto worked in the Obama administration. It is a fact not mentioned in Sciutto’s CNN biography, but it certainly should be.

    Two things about this tweet:

    1. Note the careful language – The anonymous source says “improperly sought.” It likely means Lake’s reporting is valid and Rice did in fact, make requests to unmask. The question of whether it was proper or not remains to be seen.

    2. The “person close to Rice” is likely somebody Sciutto knows – Before Sciutto worked at the White House, he worked at ABC. Do you know who he worked with at ABC? Ian Officer Cameron. Do you know who’s married to Cameron? Susan Rice.

    Total mystery who Sciutto’s trusted source close to Rice is pic.twitter.com/n2Hpx5mKSx

    — Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) April 4, 2017

    As the Church Lady would say…”How convenient!”

    Sciutto later tweeted:

    Statement cont’d: “There is nothing unusual abt making these requests when serving as a sr. national security official, whether Dem or GOP”

    — Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) April 4, 2017

    Well except for the part where she denied knowing at all about it.

    CNN would be wise to have a different reporter work on the story. We don’t know for sure if Cameron is Sciutto’s source, but he’s likely not going to say anything. The use of an anonymous source to “ho-hum” the story is not where CNN should go especially since Jim Scuitto is tied to the Obama administration and to Susan Rice.

    http://www.redstate.com/jaycaruso/2017/04/04/dear-cnn-why-former-obama-appointee-reporting-susan-rice-revelation/

    • It goes deeper than that: Key Marriages, Links
      ABC – Susan Rice; CBS – Ben Rhodes; CNN – multiple connections.
      Here’s the link: http://i.imgur.com/FaIVQum.png

      I’ve found another dozen connections at the very top. It’s quite literally all in the family, and it’s the most natural thing in the world. These are normal people in a system gone bad.

      Parents live/work in Boston, NYC, the Beltway. Families belong to certain clubs, you go to certain schools. You socialize, get internships for each others’ kids. It’s simply an Establishment path that doesn’t fork Democrat-Republican.

      The Media has gone corporate, and ’journalism’ is an Establishment career. Or ceased to exist as such. In this intensely incestuous community, there are no more gatekeepers. They’ve holed up inside the fortress …

      …surrounded by a moat filled with IEDs placed by intelligence community dirty tricksters. And just beyond the perimeter are citizens carrying torches and pitchforks. The kingdom under siege.

  9. NEW: Susan Rice may ‘be of interest to us,’ says Senate Intelligence chairman

    WASHINGTON – The Senate Intelligence Committee chairman is not ruling out interviewing former national security adviser Susan Rice over allegations that she sought to have the identities of President Donald Trump and members of his transition team revealed in foreign surveillance reports.

    “If the reports are right,” Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., said Tuesday, “then she will be of interest to us.”

    Some Republican lawmakers have been clamoring for the Senate Intelligence Committee to force Rice to testify under oath after a report from Bloomberg’s Eli Lake suggested Rice on dozens of occasions requested the identities of people connected to Trump be “unmasked.”

    “When it comes to Susan Rice, you need to verify, not trust,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Tuesday during an interview on Fox News. “I think every American should know whether or not the national security adviser to President Obama was involved in unmasking Trump transition figures for political purposes.”

    Rice has denied the allegations, calling them “absolutely false” in an MSNBC interview on Tuesday.

    The focus on Rice comes as lawmakers are trying to iron out why House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., went to the White House grounds two weeks ago to view documents that he says suggest members of the Trump transition team’s identities were potentially improperly unmasked. A Washington Post report found that at least three White House officials are tied to the files that were shared with Nunes, while the Bloomberg report suggests that those officials began handling the files after they discovered Rice’s requests to unmask certain people’s identities.

    Nunes would not comment Monday night on whether Rice was in any way associated with the documents he had seen.

    But Republicans have long been suspicious of Rice, who emerged as a central figure in the party’s long probe of what led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya in 2012.

    “Susan Rice is the Typhoid Mary of the Obama administration foreign policy. Every time something went wrong, she seemed to turn up in the middle of it,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Tuesday on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program.

    He also said there was “no doubt” that Rice should be the subject of a committee hearing, pledging that the Intelligence Committee “ought to review . . . and will review” both Rice’s alleged actions and questions raised by Nunes’ claims.

    http://breaking911.com/new-susan-rice-may-interest-us-says-senate-intelligence-chairman/

    • CNN Report: Trump donor met Russians in Seychelles

      Erik Prince, who founded Blackwater and is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s brother, was part of a secret meeting in January in the Seychelles Islands with a Russian close to Vladimir Putin, according to reporting from the Washington Post.

  10. Rep. Ron DeSantis on Susan Rice’s role unmasking Trump transition officials

    Freedom Caucus Member Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) on why he wants a full investigation into Susan Rice’s role unmasking the names of Trump transition officials during incidental surveillance before he took office.

  11. It may come as a surprise to some, but Hungarian universities have been punching above their weight class for a couple of hundred years. Indeed, they have created perhaps more Nobel Prize winners per capita than any other country. So it is pretty rich when western socialists, who are pretty much winning and running us into the ground at every turn save for Trump (hold breath), tell us how damaging it is when they dont get their way in a proud nation such as Hungary. I truly hope Orban wins this one. Hungarian students will manage just fine without.

    https://www.google.ca/amp/www.foxnews.com/world/2017/04/04/soros-funded-university-closer-to-shutting-down-after-hungary-approves-new-rules.amp.html

    • It’s a much more complex place than the Western Establishment chooses to understand.

      Members of the Hungarian branch of The Tribe in that list. 😉

      • The Hun branch of The Tribe has been changing the world for a long time. Something in the water…But the gene pool has been mixing for so long most realize they’re mixed-breeds.

        • My Dad said it had a lot to do with the language, its ancient evolution with tribes. Great place for genetics research, some of the earliest.

    • If you believe this liar I have some ocean front property in New Mexico I want to sell you.

  12. Affirmative Action or not. You have to say Harvard is excellent at creating
    Liars=Lawyers:

    Ted Cruz : he did not know he was a Canadian Citizen : Natural Born Citizen from Canada. School, passport records sealed

    Barry Soetoro: real name? Papers sealed.

    Elizabeth Warren : … liar . Fake Indian

    Congress, SCotus…

    Who they think we are?
    Executive order :13467 signed by GWB on June 30 th 2008. Just in time for Barry to be pResident of USA. 535 people lied under oath. The people finally wake up . Prez Trump drain the swamp and bring law & Justice to our Country.
    For you children,
    Stand against the enemy within.

  13. When ‘unmasking’ is considered illegal

    Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano on whether Susan Rice committed a felony by allegedly ‘unmasking’ Trump team members.

  14. Rand Paul Shreds Susan Rice On Inappropriate Surveillance Of Trump’s Team, Morning Joe MSNBC News

  15. zero hedge – Paul Craig Roberts On The Real Russiagate: “Obama’s Stasi State”

    Mike Whitney has written an excellent expose of the “Russiagate” cover story for Obama’s political use of national security to help his party oppose Republicans.

    Covert surveillance of politicians on Obama’s Nixon-like “Enemies List” has been going on for many years, but is only now being unmasked as a result of the failure of Obama’s cover story–“We weren’t spying on political opponents; only on Russians to protect America.”

    The presstitute media has passed on the cover story authored by former Obama-administration officials led by CIA director John Brennan, FBI director James Comey, the DNC, and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff. The loose ends in this cover-up have now been so widely exposed as hearsay and political that only 13% of Republicans believe the fact-free story – but 67% of Democrats cling to it.

    Whitney reports that Comey began the investigation in July 2016. As of last Friday (March 31, 2017) not a scrap of evidence has turned up. This did not deter Comey from telling Congress that Putin “hated Secretary Clinton so much that the flip side of that coin was that he had a clear preference for the person running against the person he hated so much.” So the Russians allegedly “engaged in a multifaceted campaign to undermine our democracy.”

    Comey based this conclusion on what has become a hilarious bit of gullibililty.

    The Russians, he said “were unusually loud in their intervention. It’s almost as if they didn’t care that we knew, that they wanted us to see what they were doing.”

    Alternatively, someone wanted investigators to infer that the Russians were doing the hacking. As Wikeleaks Vault 7 releases prove, the CIA can hack computers and leave anyone else’s signature. Due to poor security, the CIA’s cybertechnology ended up in the Internet domain.

    “They’ll be back. They’ll be back, in 2020. They may be back in 2018,” warned Mr. Comey. But who is the “they”? “They” seem to be “us,” or at least what numerous former national security officials have suggested: either the NSC, CIA or its “Five Eyes” partner, British MI6.

    Wall Street Journal editorialist Kimberley A. Strassel poses the real question: Why hasn’t the Trump administration had the Secret Service to arrest Comey, Brennan, Schiff, the DNC and Hillary for trying to overthrow the President of the United States?

    “Mr. Nunes has said he has seen proof that the Obama White House surveilled the incoming administration—on subjects that had nothing to do with Russia—and that it further unmasked (identified by name) transition officials. This goes far beyond a mere scandal. It’s a potential crime.”

    What we are watching is turning out to be traces of a plot against a government elected by the American people. Attempts to get at the truth by House national security committee Chairman Devin Nunes have been countered with demands by Democrats to recuse himself so as to stop his exposé of how “Team Obama was spying broadly on the incoming administration.”

    It seems that this has been going on for many years now. Former Rep. Dennis Kucinich has dropped a bombshell about what appears to be his own illegal surveillance under Obama’s NSC.

    “When the president raised the question of wiretapping on his phones in Trump Tower, he was challenged to prove that such a thing could happen. It happened to me.”

    Here’s what happened, which was revealed two years after he left office in 2013 when the Democrats were overjoyed to see Ohio Republicans redraw the election district lines to get rid of his candidacy. The Washington Times asked him to authenticate a secret recording of a cell phone call “from Saif el-Islam Qaddafi, a high-ranking official in Libya’s government and a son of the country’s ruler, Moammar Qaddafi.”

    Before taking the call, Rep. Kucinich “checked with the House’s general counsel to ensure that such a discussion by a member of Congress with a foreign power was permitted by law.”

    “I was assured that under the Constitution a lawmaker had a fundamental duty to ask questions and gather information—activity expressly protected by the Article I clauses covering separation of powers and congressional speech and debate.”

    Given the quality of the recordings was excellent on both ends of the call, Kucinich concluded that “the tape was made by an American intelligence agency and then leaked to the Times for political reasons. If so, this episode represented a gross violation of the separation of powers.”

    His repeated Freedom of Information Act requests made in 2012 before leaving office have been stonewalled by the intelligence agencies for five years.

    We are now in a position to see the real story behind “Russiagate.”

    It’s not about Russia. The real news is the Obama regime’s abuse of the government’s surveillance powers to spy on Donald Trump and other Republicans in order to build a dossier for the DNC to leak to the press in an attempt to slander or compromise Trump and throw the election to Hillary.

    They’ve been caught, but we can now see that they took steps to protect themselves against this. They prepared a cover story. They pretend they were not spying on Trump, but on Russians – which only by fortuitous happenchance turned up alleged incriminating smoke against Trump.

    This cover story was buttressed by the fake news story prepared by former MI6 freelancer Christopher Steele. As Whitney reports, Steele “was hired as an opposition researcher last June to dig up derogatory information on Donald Trump.” Unvetted and unverified information by so-called informants somehow found its way into U.S. intelligence agency reports. These reports were then leaked to Democrat-friendly media. This is where the crime lies. Obama regime and DNC were using these agencies for domestic political use, KGB style.

    The Obama/Clinton cover story is now falling to pieces. That explains the desperation in the attack by Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, on Committee Chairman Devin Nunes to stop the exposure. Russiagate is not a Trump/Putin collusion but a domestic spy job carried out by Democrats.

    Law requires Trump to arrest those responsible and to put them on trial for treason and conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. If Trump fears to prosecute the Obama operatives within the Deep State, they will try all the harder to attack him to the point of forcing his removal or at least discrediting him and his fellow Republicans to pave the way for the 2018 elections.

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-04/real-russiagate-obamas-stasi-state

  16. Did Susan Rice spy on the Trump transition team?

    Rep. Peter King and Sen. James Lankford join ‘The O’Reilly Factor’ to discuss unmasking controversy

  17. National Review – Susan Rice’s White House Unmasking: A Watergate-style Scandal

    Andrew C. McCarthy

    Her interest was not in national security but to advance the political interests of the Democratic party.

    The thing to bear in mind is that the White House does not do investigations. Not criminal investigations, not intelligence investigations.

    Remember that.

    Why is that so important in the context of explosive revelations that Susan Rice, President Obama’s national-security adviser, confidant, and chief dissembler, called for the “unmasking” of Trump campaign and transition officials whose identities and communications were captured in the collection of U.S. intelligence on foreign targets?

    Because we’ve been told for weeks that any unmasking of people in Trump’s circle that may have occurred had two innocent explanations: (1) the FBI’s investigation of Russian meddling in the election and (2) the need to know, for purposes of understanding the communications of foreign intelligence targets, the identities of Americans incidentally intercepted or mentioned. The unmasking, Obama apologists insist, had nothing to do with targeting Trump or his people.

    That won’t wash.

    In general, it is the FBI that conducts investigations that bear on American citizens suspected of committing crimes or of acting as agents of foreign powers. In the matter of alleged Russian meddling, the investigative camp also includes the CIA and the NSA. All three agencies conducted a probe and issued a joint report in January. That was after Obama, despite having previously acknowledged that the Russian activity was inconsequential, suddenly made a great show of ordering an inquiry and issuing sanctions.

    Consequently, if unmasking was relevant to the Russia investigation, it would have been done by those three agencies. And if it had been critical to know the identities of Americans caught up in other foreign intelligence efforts, the agencies that collect the information and conduct investigations would have unmasked it. Because they are the agencies that collect and refine intelligence “products” for the rest of the “intelligence community,” they are responsible for any unmasking; and they do it under “minimization” standards that FBI Director James Comey, in recent congressional testimony, described as “obsessive” in their determination to protect the identities and privacy of Americans.

    Understand: There would have been no intelligence need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked. If there had been a real need to reveal the identities — an intelligence need based on American interests — the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies.

    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.

    The FBI, CIA, and NSA generate or collect the intelligence in, essentially, three ways: conducting surveillance on suspected agents of foreign powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and carrying out more-sweeping collections under two other authorities — a different provision of FISA, and a Reagan-era executive order that has been amended several times over the ensuing decades, EO 12,333.

    As Director Comey explained, in answering questions posed by Representative Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), those three agencies do collection, investigation, and analysis. In general, they handle any necessary unmasking — which, due to the aforementioned privacy obsessiveness, is extremely rare. Unlike Democratic-party operatives whose obsession is vanquishing Republicans, the three agencies have to be concerned about the privacy rights of Americans. If they’re not, their legal authority to collect the intelligence — a vital national-security power — could be severely curtailed when it periodically comes up for review by Congress, as it will later this year.

    Those three collecting agencies — FBI, CIA, and NSA — must be distinguished from other components of the government, such as the White House. Those other components, Comey elaborated, “are consumers of our products.” That is, they do not collect raw intelligence and refine it into useful reports — i.e., reports that balance informational value and required privacy protections. They read those reports and make policy recommendations based on them. White House staffers are not supposed to be in the business of controlling the content of the reports; they merely act on the reports.

    Thus, Comey added, these consumers “can ask the collectors to unmask.” But the unmasking authority “resides with those who collected the information.”

    Of course, the consumer doing the asking in this case was not just any government official. We’re talking about Susan Rice. This was Obama’s right hand doing the asking. If she made an unmasking “request,” do you suppose anyone at the FBI, CIA, or NSA was going to say no?

    That brings us to three interesting points.

    The first involves political intrusion into law enforcement — something that the White House is supposed to avoid. (You may remember that Democrats ran Bush attorney general Alberto Gonzales out of town over suspicions about it.) As I have noted repeatedly, in publishing the illegally leaked classified information about former national-security adviser Michael Flynn’s communications with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, the New York Times informs us that “Obama advisers” and “Obama officials” were up to their eyeballs in the investigation:

    Obama advisers heard separately from the F.B.I. about Mr. Flynn’s conversation with Mr. Kislyak, whose calls were routinely monitored by American intelligence agencies that track Russian diplomats. The Obama advisers grew suspicious that perhaps there had been a secret deal between the incoming team and Moscow, which could violate the rarely enforced, two-century-old Logan Act barring private citizens from negotiating with foreign powers in disputes with the United States.

    The Obama officials asked the F.B.I. if a quid pro quo had been discussed on the call, and the answer came back no, according to one of the officials, who like others asked not to be named discussing delicate communications. [Translation: “asked not to be named committing felony unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”] The topic of sanctions came up, they were told, but there was no deal. [Emphasis added.]

    It appears very likely that Susan Rice was involved in the unmasking of Michael Flynn. Was she also monitoring the FBI’s investigation? Was she involved in the administration’s consideration of (bogus) criminal charges against Flynn? With the subsequent decision to have the FBI interrogate Flynn (or “grill” him, as the Times put it)?

    The second point is that, while not a pillar of rectitude, Ms. Rice is not an idiot. Besides being shrewd, she was a highly involved, highly informed consumer of intelligence, and a key Obama political collaborator. Unlike the casual reader, she would have known who the Trump-team players were without needing to have their identities unmasked. Do you really think her purpose in demanding that names be revealed was to enhance her understanding of intelligence about the activities and intentions of foreign targets? Seriously? I’m betting it was so that others down the dissemination chain could see the names of Trump associates — names the investigating agencies that originally collected the information had determined not to unmask.

    Third, and finally, let’s consider the dissemination chain Rice had in mind.

    The most telling remark that former Obama deputy defense secretary Evelyn Farkas made in her now-infamous MSNBC interview was the throw-away line at the end: “That’s why you have all the leaking.”

    Put this in context: Farkas had left the Obama administration in 2015, subsequently joining the presidential campaign of, yes, Hillary Clinton — Trump’s opponent. She told MSNBC that she had been encouraging her former Obama-administration colleagues and members of Congress to seek “as much information as you can” from the intelligence community.

    “That’s why you have the leaking.”

    To summarize: At a high level, officials like Susan Rice had names unmasked that would not ordinarily be unmasked. That information was then being pushed widely throughout the intelligence community in unmasked form . . . particularly after Obama, toward the end of his presidency, suddenly — and seemingly apropos of nothing — changed the rules so that all of the intelligence agencies (not just the collecting agencies) could have access to raw intelligence information.

    As we know, the community of intelligence agencies leaks like a sieve, and the more access there is to juicy information, the more leaks there are. Meanwhile, former Obama officials and Clinton-campaign advisers, like Farkas, were pushing to get the information transferred from the intelligence community to members of Congress, geometrically increasing the likelihood of intelligence leaks.

    By the way, have you noticed that there have been lots of intelligence leaks in the press?

    There’s an old saying in the criminal law: The best evidence of a conspiracy is success.

    The criminal law also has another good rule of thumb: Consciousness of guilt is best proved by false exculpatory statements. That’s a genre in which Susan Rice has rich experience.

    Two weeks ago, she was asked in an interview about allegations by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) that the Obama administration had unmasked Trump-team members.

    “I know nothing about this,” Rice replied. “I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today.”

    Well, at least she didn’t blame it on a video.

    http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446415/susan-rice-unmasking-trump-campaign-members-obama-administration-fbi-cia-nsa

  18. “When Ziad Ahmed was asked on his Stanford University application “What matters to you, and why?”, his answer was clear.

    He wrote: “#BlackLivesMatter”, repeating the hashtag exactly 100 times to highlight the excessive use of police force which disproportionately kills black men and women.

    The practising Muslim senior high school student in New Jersey has since been accepted to the prestigious University.”

    “To me, to be Muslim is to be a BLM ally, and I honestly can’t imagine it being any other way for me,” Mr Ahmed said.

    “Furthermore, it’s critical to realise that one-fourth to one-third of the Muslim community in America are black… and to separate justice for Muslims from justices for the black community is to erase the realities of the plurality of our community.”

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/muslim-teenager-ziad-ahmed-blacklivesmatter-stanford-application-100-times-repeat-university-a7665591.html

    • “Intersectionality” – another commie concept to make life miserable for Jewish kids on campus. But only a minority of the minority. Because 80% of those born to a Jewish mother are Leftists. So while they may be Jew-ish, they dwell in the congregation of Jew-haters, profess a Jew-hating creed.