Hey, Clapper—If there were no FISA warrrants, what the hell were the FBI, CIA, NSA and the rest investigating?

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Mark Levin:

It is only conservatives who are concerned about what they are reading in liberal media.

Have you you noticed that? The media is very confounded right now, they are very confused. They don’t know whether to trash themselves, trash their colleagues, or what.

What did Obama know? We know he knows this much: everything you just read, he knew. Because it’s in the newspapers. That is pretty big. Number two, we know that if a FISA warrant was secured, it is very likely in his daily intelligence briefing or a call from the Attorney General or the director of the FBI the president would be given a heads up. There’s nothing illegal about it but he would have been given a heads up.

Here’s what else we know:

There are all kinds of, based on these reports, investigative activities going on. McClatchy reported the agencies involved, the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, Justice Department, Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Unit network, I assume Obama knew something. I mean unless he is Helen Keller. Let me make another point about this. That is a hell of a lot of agency resources. Those are a hell of a lot of investigators.

The news reports should mention The New York Times, January 20th, I just want to make sure CNN and MSNBC are aware of this. ‘Wiretapped Data Used In Inquiry Of Trump Aides.’ I never said independent of news reports about the wiretaps — ‘wiretapped data used in inquiry of trump aides.’

Well, didn’t [former DNI] Mr. Clapper say there were no FISA orders?

It’s very important because if Clapper says there was no FISA order and he was very broad and definite, and he said no… then what the hell are we talking about? That means that they did not have enough information for probable cause to get a warrant in front of the FISA court.

So what’s the FBI, the CIA, National Security Agency, Justice Department, Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Unit network investigating?

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There needs to be a special prosecutor for these police State tactics going after American citizens with out warrants, as confirmed by Clapper on MSLSD. Finally they have a source a real person with real quotes.
So no follow up questions huh MSLSD, where did the transcripts come from, You said there was no Russian connections but didn’t investigate or investigated without warrant.
If this isnt confusing enough..WIKILEAKS confirms you should not badmouth the CIA in front of your smart appliances or you are 12 ways screwed. Dont plan that bankjob, discuss your tax dodging, or that you have tapped into the line and are getting free cable, unless you are a liberal they can get away with anything, sell guns to drug runners lie to congress anything!

clapper is a political , illiterate, ass kissing demorat piece of shit. he is a habitual liar. the terrorist pres made only 42% of the PDB, so who attended the other 58%. Oh, the terrorist was on the golf course.

clapper is a political , illiterate, ass kissing demorat piece of shit. he is a habitual liar. the terrorist pres made only 42% of the PDB, so who attended the other 58%. Oh, the terrorist was on the golf course.

If there was no FISA warrant or any surveillance, how did the media learn there were transcripts of the Flynn call and the telephone conversations between President Trump and the PM of Australia and President of Mexico?

Any FISA surveillance authorizations would have involved foreign nationals. It’s the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, isn’t it?

So, you’re legally monitoring a foreign party’s communications—because there have been repeated instances of targeted Russian hacking that clearly add up to election meddling, and they’re known to be working with the Russian intelligence community—and, lo and behold, you suddenly realize they’re getting regular calls from parties inside the Trump organization.

That’s how the information could come to the attention of our own investigators, when nobody originally signed off on wiretaps of Trump’s people.

This looks like it could be something very, very wrong. So, what are you going to do? Destroy the recordings or transcripts? Aid in covering up something that could indicate a serious threat to national security?

Why the Russia Story Is a Minefield for Democrats and the Media

FISA-gate: The New York Times Revises History in Real Time

Now that the media-Democrat complex has been caught in its own web, there is some serious skullduggery underway. It’s revisionist history, Soviet style. You know, the kind where the bad stuff gets “disappeared.” The New York Times is disappearing its claim that Obama investigated Trump.

For four months, the mainstream press was very content to have Americans believe — indeed, they encouraged Americans to believe — that a vigorous national-security investigation of the Trump presidential campaign was ongoing. “A counterintelligence investigation,” the New York Times called it.

As I contended in a column this weekend, it was essential for the media and Democrats to promote the perception of an investigation because the scandalous narrative they were peddling — namely, that Trump-campaign operatives conspired with the Putin regime to “hack the election” — required it.

Russia obviously did not hack the election. Russian intelligence services may have hacked e-mail accounts of prominent Democrats, although even that has not been proved. And there is even less evidence of collusion by the Trump campaign in that effort — as one would expect, in light of the intelligence agencies’ conclusion that the Russians sought to hack accounts of both major parties.

So, for this fatally flawed storyline to pass the laugh test, the Left needed the FBI. Even if the election-hacking conspiracy story sounded far-fetched, the public might be induced to believe there must be something to it if the Bureau was investigating it.

But when the election-hacking narrative went on too long without proof, the risk the Democrats were running became clear. If the FBI had been investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded in purported “Russian hacking of the election,” that meant the incumbent Obama administration must have been investigating the campaign of the opposition party’s presidential candidate.

Moreover, if such an investigation had involved national-security wiretaps under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), that would suggest that the Obama Justice Department had alleged, in court, that Trump associates had acted as “agents of a foreign power” — in this case, Russia.

Get it? If there is no hacking conspiracy — and there manifestly is not — the big scandal here is not possible Trump-campaign collusion with Russia. It is that the Obama Justice Department may have used its legal authorities to investigate the Democrats’ top political adversary. And not to be overlooked: This would have been done at the very same time the same Obama Justice Department was bending over backwards to whitewash the extremely serious criminal case against the Democrats’ nominee, Hillary Clinton. It would have meant Obama had his thumb on the election scale.

I began pointing this out in early January, but matters did not come to a head until last Saturday morning. In a tweet-burst, President Trump made the controversial allegation that President Obama had ordered that Trump be subjected to wiretapping at Trump Tower, where his campaign had been headquartered.

To say the least, it is unfortunate that this was the angle Trump chose to pursue. There is plenty of support for the overarching proposition that the Obama administration used its law-enforcement and intelligence powers to investigate Trump associates during the campaign. There is, to my knowledge, no evidence that Trump personally was wiretapped. So instead of highlighting the alarming things that may be true, President Trump’s tweets obsessed over something that probably is not true.

Nevertheless, even if Trump’s allegation was false, the tweets demanded attention to the real scandal: Was the Obama administration investigating the Trump campaign?

That was the uh-oh moment for the media-Democrat complex. That was when it dawned on them not only that the election-hacking conspiracy narrative wasn’t working, but that the investigation of the Trump campaign could be a much bigger scandal.

So, after insisting for four months that the Trump campaign was under investigation for conspiring with Putin to steal the election from Hillary Clinton, the media decided that it better adopt a different strategy: “Investigation? What investigation?”

Thus the claim, suddenly, is that Obama was never investigating Trump. How could we possibly believe such a thing . . . even if it’s the thing the media have wanted us to believe for four months.

That brings us back to the New York Times.

On January 20, when the paper was trying to promote the “government investigating Trump–Russia conspiracy to steal the election” narrative, here’s the headline that appeared on the big story: “Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides.”

See? They wanted you to assume the “inquiry” was focused on Trump aides who had connections to the Trump campaign. The report elaborated that investigators were poring over “intercepted communications” of three associates of Donald Trump. Among them was Paul Manafort, who had been Trump’s campaign chairman until August. The intimation was clear: The FBI was conducting a FISA investigation targeting Trump associates to determine whether the campaign had colluded with the Putin regime to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. Only in the fine print did the Times acknowledge that whatever the government might be investigating may have nothing to do with Trump, the Trump campaign, or Russian hacking.

But now that the media have been called on this, now that the Obama administration has been called on investigating the Trump campaign, what happens?

Have you checked the Times’s January 20 story lately?

Turns out the story has suddenly, quietly been given a new headline. No longer is it “Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides.” Instead, readers are now told, “Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry into Trump Associates.”

Why would the Times change its headline in this manner, weeks after the fact?

Because, during the four months when the media-Democrat complex wanted you to believe there was a Trump–Putin conspiracy to hack the election, they needed you to believe that the Justice Department was targeting Trump associates for surveillance because they were Russian agents.

Now that they don’t want you to believe there was an investigation — because that would be an Obama abuse of power — they want to convince you that Trump associates were never targeted for surveillance. “If the conversations of these Trump guys were intercepted,” they want you to conclude, “it’s not because we were targeting them. No, no, no: It’s because we were monitoring Russian agents whom they just happened to call.”

Nothing to see here . . . move along.

We shouldn’t move along. Let’s see the FISA applications and warrants. If there was no targeting of the Trump campaign, as the media and Democrats now say, let’s hear an explanation of why they’ve pretended otherwise for four months. If the Trump campaign was targeted for an investigation, let’s hear why.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

AG SUGGESTS OPENNESS TO REVIEW OF PREDECESSORS’ ACTIONS
AP ^

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Jeff Sessions suggested Thursday that he would be open to the appointment of an outside counsel to review actions taken by the Justice Department during the Obama administration.

Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Sessions in an interview if the new attorney general would consider designating an outside counsel “not connected to politics” to take a second look at Justice Department actions that provoked Republican ire in the last eight years. Those include the Fast and Furious gun scandal and the decisions against bringing criminal charges over Hillary Clinton’s email practices or the Internal Revenue Service’s treatment of conservative groups.

Hewitt contended during his radio interview that the department had become “highly politicized” in the Obama administration and floated the idea of a special review by an attorney with the authority to bring criminal charges and “just generally to look at how the Department of Justice operated.”

(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org …

@July 4th American, #7:

FISA-gate: The New York Times Revises History in Real Time

No, the New York Times did not revise history. The editor of the National Review subsequently added this note at the beginning of the article:

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following piece is based on an error. The Times did not in fact change the headline of a January 19 article after its publication as was alleged. Andrew C. McCarthy acknowledges and explains the error in this post. The text of his column as originally published remains below for reference. We regret the error and apologize to our readers.

The editor is acknowledging that their article’s headline accusation directed against the New York Times was bullshit.

New York Times January Wiretapping Headline Goes Viral

New York Times ‘fixes’ headline
PROPAGANDAGUARD ^ | MARCH 9, 2017

http://minutemennews.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Screen-Shot-2017-03-05-at-9.34.35-PM-copy-2-1080×675.jpg

http://minutemennews.com/ny-times-reporter-wrote-jan-trump-wiretap-writes-march-trump-no-evidence/

The New York Times has changed the headline of a story to remove the word “wiretapped” from its reporting on data being used by the federal government to investigate aides to President Donald Trump, from just before he was inaugurated.

The stunning move comes as Trump has openly charged he believes his communications were wiretapped by the federal government during that time period, and longtime federal employees as well as Democrat opponents and critics ridiculed the statement.

The text of the story, for which the headline was changed from “Wiretapped data used in inquiry of Trump aides” to “Intercepted Russian communications part of inquiry into Trump associates,” still, however, includes “wiretapped.”

A report in WND a few days ago referenced the issue.

That was when, following President Trump’s weekend claim that the federal government conducted surveillance at Trump Tower, and the media generally laughed, an examination revealed that the original sources of that claim were the mainstream media elements themselves.

Including the Times.

On Jan. 19, just as Trump was preparing for his inauguration the next day, the Times revealed, in story text, “American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as a part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump.”

While the report speculated whether the “intercepted communications had anything to do with Mr. Trump’s campaign, or Mr. Trump himself,” it didn’t have the answer.

The Times referred to intelligence reports that are “based on some of the wiretapped communications” and said they were provided to the White House, at the time still under Barack Obama.

On Thursday, talk radio icon Rush Limbaugh was at full speed on the issue.

“Say, have you noticed, my friends, that the whole Russians-stole-the-election theme is gone? Have you noticed it’s not out there today? You can’t find a story on it? I’m gonna tell you why, ’cause we had a major role in this I am convinced right here on the EIB Network yesterday ’cause we nailed ’em.”

He posted an image of the original headline, and said, “Have you seen any stories about the Russians hacking the elections? It’s gone, and so is the New York Times headline from the January 20th story with ‘wiretaps.’ They have gone back and they have changed it. ‘Wiretaps’ is not in that headline anymore.”

He continued, “What has happened to the Democrats’ and media’s story on the Russians working with Trump to steal the election from Hillary? It’s gone. It’s not out there today. There aren’t any updates. We’ve got a revised New York Times headline – sneaky, sneaky, sneaky – as they postdate-change the headline, wiping out the word ‘wiretaps’ and ‘wiretapped’ from their headline on a story January 20th.”

At the Master of None blog, the writer pointed out that the article still uses “wiretapped” and wonders whether someone figured out “that the word ‘wiretapped’ would prove troublesome.”

WND had reported that the original Times piece, which carried four bylines and a contributor, speculated about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and said its discoveries would mean that Trump “will take the oath of office on Friday with his associates under investigation.”

“Mr. Manafort is among at least three Trump campaign advisers whose possible links to Russia are under scrutiny. Two others are Carter Page, a businessman and former foreign policy adviser to the campaign, and Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative,” the report said.

The Times had to admit, however, that, while “investigators have accelerated their efforts in recent weeks [they] have found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing.”

McClatchy, only a day earlier, had quoted two people “familiar” with the issue saying that the FBI and five other agencies were collaborating on an investigation into “Russian attempts to influence the November election.”

That probe was helped along by “a former British spy hired to develop politically damaging and unverified research about Trump,” the report said.

The report repeatedly refers to “email hacks” referencing the break-ins into the digital domain of the Democratic National Committee and others.

The claim at the time was that the hacks were done to hurt the campaign of Hillary Clinton.

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said she even believed Russia’s tactics altered the election result.

And Breitbart pointed out over the weekend, shortly after Trump’s comments, the New York Times “has inadvertently attacked the credibility of its own reporting on the Obama administration’s investigation of Russia and now-President Donald Trump.”

“Times reporters Michael Schmidt and Michael Shear write that Trump believes the ‘deep state’ intelligence community, staffed with holdovers from the Obama administration, wiretapped several of his campaign associates because of a spurious article from Breitbart News.”

The report said Trump’s demand for a congressional inquiry into the issue “appears to be based, at least in part, on unproved claims by Breitbart News and conservative talk radio hosts that secret warrants were issued authorizing the tapping of the phones of Mr. Trump and his aides at Trump Tower in New York.”

But the Breitbart article “cites the Times’ own reporting on the intelligence community. Their January 19th article … quotes an anonymous source who says that ‘wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House.’”

Obama, who has been documented to have used the surveillance apparatus of the U.S. government against his foes, has been defended by spokesmen who have been careful to leave “open the possibility of sensational executive overreach if not outright illegal activities.”

Critics were of a differing opinion.

Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch said the “deep state” is in full rebellion against Trump and they will go to any lengths to cover their tracks.

“I’ve been saying for some time that the scandal involves surveillance and illegal leaks of information concerning the Trump team. The left had been trying to distract the public with the unicorn theory of election and the Russians quote ‘stealing’ the election when in fact you had the president’s people in the Obama administration surveilling and trying to influence the election prior to it and then afterward leaking information in a way to destroy the Trump administration.”