FISA-Gate

The Democratic Party disaster is coming into full view.

Toward the end of Obama’s first term, things started to go wrong for the country’s first black president, who had entered office on an unprecedented surge of good press and good will from black and white America alike. But good press doesn’t make for gdp increases, the defeat of ISIS or swelling Democratic Party ranks, because Obama did not understand this one basic idea — popularity in a democracy is only the first step — execution of a legal agenda is a more complex matter.

Glenn Reynolds at USA Today — In 1972, some employees of President Nixon’s re-election committee were caught when they broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to plant a bug. This led to Nixon’s resignation and probably would have led to his felony prosecution had he not been pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford. What did Obama do? It has been recently unveiled the Obama administration program of massively spying on political opponents – was most probably a violation of clearly established law, and this is from the FISA Court no less. The safeguards that supposedly surround spying by the National Security Agency were flouted by the Obama administration — which then lied about its actions.

These three horrible trends were converging on the young president and he had no idea how to counter them. The first was his complete failure to translate his personal popularity into gains for the Democratic Party at the Congressional, State and local level — after his initial election — which definitely had coattails.

But ever since the pure party line Obamacare vote, Democratic office holders were endangered down ballot virtually everywhere and as Obama gradually discovered, he was powerless to stop it.

The second problem was just as very frustrating for the president, after an initial surge, the economy was not responding. And finally, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was becoming a serious problem. She had fucked up Benghazi royally and now all Obama could do, was cover up her mistakes and pray the private email server she was using, which he himself had communicated through, would also stay under wraps. This was the first step of his involvement — in a string of decisions — which I believe he would later regret, and finally have to turn away from.

In other words, I think the evidence, glean-able from all the hearings and reports — paints the following picture. Hillary, running for president herself, had crossed a number of legal barriers Obama knew about, and a few he didn’t, but suspected, and this concerned him. Obama knew if she failed at the ballot box, covering up her Clinton Foundation coercion scheme, her email server scheme, and her Benghazi whitewash, would be improbable. And some of this, he calculated, would count negatively toward his legacy. How far was he willing to go to keep the Democrats in power at the White House? His first answer to this question was a mistake.

This fateful habit of covering for Clinton had progressed to the point where it now led directly to his cooperation in a scheme to use the FBI to get incriminating dirt on candidate Trump. The Russian collusion scheme his people, and the Hillary people, were hatching — seemed like a win, win, win.

It was a foolproof scheme if a few parameters were observed. The first was not to use amateur wiretapping like Nixon. Obama knew the FBI could do this work and do it well, it just meant a FISA warrant would need to be obtained first, once that was done, the patina of legality would cover everything else they did downstream. Since out of the over 30,000 FISA requests the intelligence and law enforcement community had made over the years only a dozen had ever been refused – Obama was confident they would get the warrant without a fuss or even much notice from the court itself.

This was his first miscalculation. The NSA has just confessed to years of 702 surveillance abuses earlier in the year, and they were on high alert for further abuse as the FISA judges themselves, believed further abuses might threaten the court’s further existence — and we know all this – because the judges themselves wrote it all up in a 99 page FISA abuse report they issued in April of 2017.

A report from journalists John Solomon and Sara Carter, based on declassified documents, exposed what went on. As Solomon and Carter write:

More than 5%, or one out of every 20, searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards President Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to the declassified FISA Court report. The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying that the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor.” An “institutional lack of candor,” is the polite way the FISA Court used to say that it was lied to about what was going on. And what the NSA was doing, was violating the constitutional rights of thousands Americans, including the President’s political rivals.

The FISA court wanted more support for the Page warrant, forcing Hillary’s henchmen at Fusion GPS — and with the assistance of the Counter Intelligence branch of the FBI — to CREATE such evidence. On top of that were further complications. A regular warrant against Page was not going to be enough, to get taps on Trump and other Trump aides, they needed Page to be monitored under another category, one allowing them the ability to listen to the people around him – which meant getting him declared a foreign agent (spy), another step they took in the wrong direction that they should not have. Page was not working for the Russians; they KNEW this from other channels, and ignoring that information would be risky later on if any of this got out.

This then was the birth of the dossier.

This was a gigantic error.

Up until then, Obama, Hillary, Podesta and the insiders at DOJ and the FBI committed to this scheme — could justify almost everything they had done, up to that point, as part of their national security duties. But I’m ahead of myself. Up until that exact moment, the idea appeared brilliant from Obama’s point of view because it enabled a two bird with one stone attack. If Trump was dirty, they would have audio and he could actually be arrested, and would then lose for sure. Even a victory by Trump could potentially be undone, if he was really colluding and/or dirty — and they had audio. I believe Susan Rice was the architect of the logic here, because she was certain (after having worked for Obama) that if they got wiretaps on Trump, they would get SOME good dirt.

If he wasn’t dirty, they still had the duty to investigate whether he was or not – as a backstop for his privacy invasions– and therefore were justified legally in using the FISA warrant. But just the collusion allegations had proved insufficient for FISA, more was needed and that entailed a lot more risk. The FBI could be used to surface the dossier and even present it to FISA, but they could not be used to also assemble it, this would again, get them tangled up at FISA. Enter Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, Nellie and Bruce Orr, and of course, the guy and gals at the FBI, caught in the middle, coordinating all this, Comey, McCabe, Rosenstein and the team of Peter Strzok plus Lisa Page.

Glenn Reynolds at USA Today — The FISA Court stated in the report that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue.” The recently unsealed and partially declassified (heavily redacted) court document was dated April 26. This charge against Obama does not originate in the Republican Party but comes from a respected federal judge, serving on the FISA court, who has exhaustively detailed this activity — and the serious accusations against Barack Obama and/or Susan Rice, and others in his administration.

FoxNews journalist’s Solomon and Carter agree:

The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans. … The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself and safeguard Americans’ privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure. In fact, the NSA has admitted the problem was so severe, so widespread and so resistant to change; they have given up, and plan to use the Court’s plan to destroy the upstream in a 1-year age-off. But I doubt this is the truth and I doubt it will be done — until the Trump administration cleans the ranks of the NSA from these traitors and Democratic Party partisans.

Drafting the dossier was the easy part actually. Once that was done, “surfacing” it through non-Democratic Party circles was step two. This meant the press and a stooge. McCain was the stooge and Hillary/Obama handlers were hoping for The Washington Post and/or the New York Times to be the press side of the confirmation triangle – BUT, remarkably, considering how many lies they have been willing to run since then, both of these publications — smelled a rat — and refused to publish – so Steele had to use Buzzfeed to bring out the dossier, another decision that hurt the plan.

All of this, would have succeeded if not for Admiral Rogers at the NSA, who saw all this happening and reported in to his superiors, the FISA court and Donald Trump. The week he did all that, Clapper and Brennan asked the president to fire him. Look it up. That’s the moment Obama had to make a really big decision. The biggest of his presidency.

If he chose Coup, he would have fired and/or arrested Rogers, cooked up evidence against Trump and attempted to use his control over the DOJ, the FBI, CIA and the rest of the establishment he had corrupted, to put Hillary in office.

Obama chose not to do that.

This is why I believe the narrative outlined above.

If his objective from the start had been to hold onto power through a proxy president –right from the start — he would not have done these things the way they were done or in the order in which they were done. The evidence suggests Obama went along with Hillary and her henchmen — up to a point and then decided it was a a bridge to far — to take the next step.

That’s not how history will judge him of course, he will be vilified as the first president to attempt a coup by weaponizing the FBI and the DOJ – but I don’t agree, for whatever reason, cold feet, the effect of the presidency on a man, the love of something more than power, whatever it was, he never took the last fateful steps that would have sent America toward civil war.

USA Today’s Glenn concludes that the scandal raises serious questions about whether the “intelligence community” can continue to operate as it has in the past, and whether it deserves the support of Americans:

Glenn — This debacle also raises serious questions about the viability of our existing “intelligence community.” In the post-World War II era, we gave massive power to the national security apparatus. In part, that power was granted in the belief that professionalism and patriotism would lead people in those agencies to refuse to let their work be used for partisan political purposes. It now seems apparent that we overestimated the patriotism and professionalism of the people in these agencies.

Glenn makes an important point. It was Obama and Rice who ORDERED these agencies to use their unmasking capabilities and leaking abilities as a political weapon. That being provably true according to the FISA Court, if we value democracy, can we permit these agencies to exist in their current form? I say no, because next time, the next Obama, might not change his mind.

Glenn at USA Today — That’s a decision that President Trump and Congress will have to face. Ironically, they may be afraid to — for fear that intelligence agencies will engage in further targeted political leaks. That abuse was criminally compounded when Obama administration officials purposely leaked classified information to the Washington Post and the New York Times — in order to damage political opponents. Since we know for certain — that many felonies have been committed, someone should go to jail. Will Attorney General Jeff Sessions have the courage to ask: What did President Obama know, and when did he know it? Who else in his administration (Rice) was responsible for the scandal?

Of course, these questions are next and I think they spell disaster for the Democratic Party. This was not a failure by a single man or a small group of criminals, this was a widespread scheme involving multiple players in the WH, DOJ, FBI, an important law firm and Fusion GPS — financed by the DNC, Hillary and Obama.

Glenn in conclusion — The public needs to know not only who committed crimes, but how deep the corruption went inside the Obama administration, and THEN Congress needs to address, seriously, the question of whether our politicized intelligence agencies can continue to exist in their present form. As for President Trump, firing James Comey didn’t go anywhere near far enough. Heads should roll at the CIA, the NSA and the FBI. Those who are tainted with the abuses that took place during the Obama administration should be shown the door and, where crimes have been committed, prosecuted.

I agree with Glenn — except the part about the NSA, it looks to me, like they saved us all.