What is the appropriate course of action for a sitting president who believes the opposing party’s candidate is in discussions with foreign states about illegally interfering with the election? We saw this very scenario play out over this past election. During the past year the Obama administration used the power of its office to order surveillance on multiple members of Trump’s campaign and possibly even attempted to surveil Trump himself. Then, after Trump’s victory, it changed long standing privacy protections in order to disseminate previously protected wiretaps of Trump’s surrogates to foreign governments and multiple federal agencies.

Do you need to say it these days? Russia hacked the DNC and Podesta. Or at least Russian agents did, or they ordered third parties, or through third parties to Wikileaks. The exact sources are somewhat muddled in cyberspace, but it was made clear that Russia, specifically Putin, ordered the hack. The Obama administration gave up a glimpse into US intelligence to make sure the US public knew.

Unprecedented behavior by Russia!? Well not exactly. They’ve been increasingly escalating and deescalating tensions in advance of their geopolitical agenda. Over Obama’s last term alone Russia has successfully annexed Crimea, kept eastern Ukraine in play, and saved its client in Syria. People like to claim that ‘the Russians intended to help elect Trump,’ but it’s more along the lines of they wanted to hurt Clinton’s eventual presidency. They saw her as the likely winner and aimed to handicap her from the start. So how does Trump come into the equation? Well there were a few public statements that joked about Russia releasing her server emails and he held a generally less assertive stance towards Russia. This all allowed the public perception of him and Russia to ingrain itself. These suspicions have had the effect of turning a political position into evidence of corruption. His position can perhaps be called naïve, but it is the broadly the same stance held by both George W. Bush and Barrack Obama when they entered the White House. And it’s not like Russia was an upstanding citizen during those times, in fact it invaded Georgia in August of 2008.

However, the story of Obama’s role begins when a server came to the attention of the FBI. When investigated, the server was found to be completely legal and the suspicious behavior was caused meaningless computer bots. However, this particular server was owned by Trump’s company and was communicating with a Russian bank or two. In June of 2016 the DOJ filed for a FISA warrant which reportedly named Trump and some of his associates. The warrant allows the NSA to gather data on targets though it’s unclear if Trump was a direct target of this warrant. However, the warrant was denied as was another in July, a very rare event for the FISA court. Months later a more narrowly tailored warrant was allowed and it targeted Russian banks in connection to Trump’s associates. Further, McClatchly reported that the administration had put together a working group of 6 agencies to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia, including Department of Defense agencies. Even this probe into Trump’s organization found no evidence of any untoward communications with Russia. With the administration’s term coming to an end, they remained convinced of their suspicions and made efforts to disseminate the information gleaned from their investigation into the incoming Republican administration. In early January it changed long standing rules that governed privacy protections at the NSA. The NSA records phone calls, emails, and other data and previously, prior to sharing this information with other agencies it was required to scrub personal information when concerning innocent individuals or irrelevant information. The change allowed other agencies search the NSA’s raw data including this personal information and then requires them to request full access officially. One reason for the change is to create fewer walls between law enforcement agencies, but it also lessens barriers to private information being released and even allows access by some foreign governments. As if preordained, shortly after the change, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had his phone call with the Russian ambassador leaked to journalists. Just to drive the point home, the Obama admin had no problem explaining to the NYT exactly why they instituted this rule,

‘At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low classification level to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government — and, in some cases, among European allies. This allowed the upload of as much intelligence as possible to Intellipedia, a secret wiki used by American analysts to share information.’

To sum it up. The Obama administration had members of the Trump campaign monitored under FISA warrants, corralled the power of six federal agencies to investigate, and then, when no wrong doing was found, declassified the NSA database to spread incomplete information on Trump.

Devil’s advocate time. Is it unreasonable to think that the Trump campaign might have had some interaction with the Russian government in relation to the hacking? Not entirely. His earlier campaign manager Paul Manafort has numerous ties to Russia and state officials in Eastern Europe, where the hacks reportedly originated from. So maybe he knew a guy who knew a guy who had access to Podesta emails and they made a deal to leak them late into the election. Maybe. It’s something that’s basically impossible to disprove, which is why it’s gained traction. Foreign policy interactions with Russia are now seen in a suspicious light. Everything is evidence of collusion, even a Senator briefly talking to an ambassador in a crowded auditorium. With no evidence though, it’s just a fairy tale.

So what standards of evidence are sufficient to launch a FISA order against one’s political opponents? Quite low by the Obama administration’s reading. Unless there is some damning piece of evidence that has been sat on, this entire fiasco is completely predicated on a suspicion over communications that have been found to be innocuous. Leaving aside the foreign policy debate, the ramifications are staggering if all it takes is a pretense to launch a massive investigation into political opponents. From there, the system will do the rest by allowing a wide range of sources to access and leak any information found. In the Obama administration’s attempt to take down Trump, they’ve legitimized a very dangerous precedent.