While the Democrats whine and moan about "Russia," there has always been an element of this entire affair that the media has been reluctant to talk about. From the very beginning of this witch hunt, it has been clear that the Obama administration was building its "case" on a foundation of illegality.
A new report making the rounds on social media accuses the Obama administration of illegally and unconstitutionally spying on American citizens, creating renewed criticism on the allegation that President Trump and his team were caught up in this illegal surveillance.
Here is how the scheme worked. Typically, in order for the Federal government to spy on American citizens, a warrant would be required from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. However there is a loophole within the law that allows the Feds to listen in on Americans' conversations if they happen to contact someone overseas.
According to leaked classified documents, use of this loophole increased as many as three-fold under the Obama administration, with one in every twenty domestic surveillance attempts explicitly breaking the law and and breaking the NSA's own regulations.
The ACLU, which is hardly a conservative organization, has even come out and declared that this domestic spying is among the worst civil rights violations ever recorded.
Why is this important? This is the same infrastructure that was required for the Obama administration to illegally spy on the Trump campaign!
Here is what we know about the Obama administration's efforts to spy on Candidate Trump.
We know that Obama sought a warrant to surveil the Trump campaign and the FISA Court rejected the application, one of only a handful of rejections in American history. We know that the Obama White House proceeded to spy on Trump and his aides anyway, taking advantage of the very loophole that is now being reported.
The Obama administration listened in and recorded Trump campaign officials when they called non-citizens. We know this because the transcript of at least one of these conversations - between Mike Flynn and the Russian Ambassador - was unmasked and leaked to the Washington Post in order to get Flynn fired.
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects Americans from warrantless searches or seizures. A warrant is required to spy on American citizens. If an American is caught up in an investigation and the government does not have a warrant to surveil that person, then their identity must be kept confidential. Without this protection, the Fourth Amendment would mean nothing.
The Obama administration tried to get a warrant to place surveillance on the Trump administration. They were turned down. Yet, transcripts of conversations were still collected and used for political purposes. Either the Obama administration spied on Trump without a warrant or they “incidentally” collected information on the Trump team and then illegally unmasked it. There is no difference.
This is very illegal, not just because these extra-legal tactics were used to spy on a political opponent, but because the Obama administration circumvented the Constitution and the law to spy on millions of Americans without a warrant.
Someone from the Obama administration is going to go to prison over this. Who will be determined by this simple question: Is it possible for the White House to spy on a political opponent without the President of the United States knowing about it?
The answer is obviously “no.” Barack Obama had to know about this.
I say this because in the final days of his Presidency, Barack Obama signed an executive order making it easier for intelligence agencies to share unmasked intelligence collected on Americans. Democrats have been bragging for months that this was designed to stop the incoming Trump administration from figuring out what Obama did.
Unless the President was signing executive orders without realizing it, this entire scandal goes all the way to the top.
Yesterday, more Obama officials went before Congress under oath and admitted that there was never any evidence of collusion between the Trump administration and the Russians. This whole Russia story is fake news.
The real crime is the illegal weaponization of unmasked surveillance. Someone from the Obama years is going to prison.
The only question is, “who?”
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