There is a fascinating spin war taking place over possible government surveillance of the Trump campaign. According to multiple sources, including the New York Times, there were wiretaps, and there were also at least two applications for surveillance to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act courts — one in June that was refused, and one in October that was granted. There have been multiple leaks and references to intercepted communications. General Mike Flynn has already been defenestrated as a result, and Jeff Sessions is under pressure. (Needless to say, to leak such material is a felony.)

Last week Mark Levin made all of this the subject of his evening radio show, and the next day Donald Trump complained about it in a tweet. For Mr. Levin’s trouble, he’s been lambasted as a deranged right-wing conspiracy theorist, and former National Security Director James Clapper went so far as to say on Sunday that the FISA-authorized surveillance didn’t even happen.

All that Mr. Levin did, however, was to comment on widespread reporting from the Times and other (ostensibly) reliable sources. It certainly seems as if the surveillance story was a popular one when it looked bad for Mr. Trump and his people, but is being backpedaled hard now that it the opposition is using it to cast an unfavorable light on the Obama administration (that is, for using the power of government to snoop on the opposing party’s candidate during a presidential election. Which would be bad).

(Speaking of the Obama administration, they did two remarkable things in their last days: one, Loretta Lynch signed an order greatly expanding the circle of agencies that can receive this sort of (very secret) intelligence without violating privacy laws, and two, the administration “scrambled” to spread the information as far and wide as they could.)

The story is murky and complex, and still very much in motion. I have no idea what the truth is. I do, however, have an excellent article for you that explains some of the legal arcana. A longish excerpt:

Here are the problematic aspects of the Obama surveillance on Trump’s team, and on Trump himself. First, it is not apparent FISA could ever be invoked. Second, it is possible Obama’s team may have perjured themselves before the FISA court by withholding material information essential to the FISA court’s willingness to permit the government surveillance. Third, it could be that Obama’s team illegally disseminated and disclosed FISA information in direct violation of the statute precisely prohibiting such dissemination and disclosure. FISA prohibits, under criminal penalty, Obama’s team from doing any of the three. At the outset, the NSA should have never been involved in a domestic US election. Investigating the election, or any hacking of the DNC or the phishing of Podesta’s emails, would not be a FISA matter. It does not fit the definition of war sabotage or a “grave’ “hostile’ war-like attack on the United States, as constrictively covered by FISA. It is your run-of-the-mill hacking case covered by existing United States laws that require use of the regular departments of the FBI, Department of Justice, and Constitutionally Senate-appointed federal district court judges, and their appointed magistrates, not secretive, deferential FISA courts. Out of 35,000+ requests for surveillance, the FISA court has only ever rejected a whopping 12. Apparently, according to published reports, you can add one more to that ”” even the FISA court first rejected Obama’s request to spy on Trump’s team under the guise of an investigation into foreign agents of a pending war attack, intelligence agents apparently returned to the court, where, it is my assumption, that they did not disclose or divulge all material facts to the court when seeking the surveillance the second time around, some of which they would later wrongfully disseminate and distribute to the public. By itself, misuse of FISA procedures to obtain surveillance is itself, a crime. This raises the second problem: Obama’s team submission of an affidavit to to the FISA court. An application for a warrant of any kind requires an affidavit, and that affidavit may not omit material factors. A fact is “material’ if it could have the possible impact of impacting the judicial officer deciding whether to authorize the warrant. Such affidavits are the most carefully drawn up, reviewed, and approved affidavits of law enforcement in our system precisely because they must be fully-disclosing, forthcoming, and include any information a judge must know to decide whether to allow our government to spy on its own. My assumption would be that intelligence officials were trying to investigate hacking of DNC which is not even a FISA covered crime, so therefore serious questions arise about what Obama administration attorneys said to the FISA court to even consider the application. If the claim was “financial ties’ to Russia, then Obama knew he had no basis to use FISA at all. Since Trump was the obvious target, the alleged failure to disclose his name in the second application could be a serious and severe violation of the obligation to disclose all material facts. Lastly, given the later behavior, it is evident any promise in the affidavit to protect the surveilled information from ever being sourced or disseminated was a false promise, intended to induce the illicit surveillance. This is criminalized both by federal perjury statutes, conspiracy statutes, and the FISA criminal laws themselves. That raises the third problem: it seems the FISA-compelled protocols for precluding the dissemination of the information were violated, and that Obama’s team issued orders to achieve precisely what the law forbids, if published reports are true about the administration sharing the surveilled information far-and-wide to promote unlawful leaks to the press. This, too, would be its own crime, as it brings back the ghost of Hillary’s emails ”” by definition, FISA information is strictly confidential or it’s information that never should have been gathered. FISA strictly segregates its surveilled information into two categories: highly confidential information of the most serious of crimes involving foreign acts of war; or, if not that, then information that should never have been gathered, should be immediately deleted, and never sourced nor disseminated. It cannot be both. Recognizing this information did not fit FISA meant having to delete it and destroy it. According to published reports, Obama’s team did the opposite: order it preserved, ordered the NSA to search it, keep it, and share it; and then Obama’s Attorney General issued an order to allow broader sharing of information and, according to the New York Times, Obama aides acted to label the Trump information at a lower level of classification for massive-level sharing of the information. The problem for Obama is simple ”” if it could fit a lower level of classification, then it had to be deleted and destroyed, not disseminated and distributed, under crystal clear FISA law. Obama’s team’s admission it could be classified lower, yet taking actions to insure its broadest distribution, could even put Obama smack-middle of the biggest unlawful surveillance and political-opponent-smear campaign since Nixon. Except even Nixon didn’t use the FBI and NSA for his dirty tricks. Watergate would have never happened if Nixon felt like he could just ask the FBI or NSA to tape the calls.

Please go and read the whole thing, here.