“TowerGate” begins…
Robert Barnes at LawNewz has a well structured outline showing how current public information does indeed appear to lay out a solid case that President Obama manipulated the legal use of intelligence gathering tools to monitor candidate, then president-elect, Donald Trump.
Based on what we already know from Public Sources – HERE– and –HERE– and –HERE– there is a reasonable outline pointing to an Obama agenda. Well worth reading in full:
Robert Barnes – President Trump recently tweeted claiming that former President Obama wiretapped him during his campaign. One can only imagine how nuts the media would have gone if the roles had been reversed: President Trump wiretapping either Obama or the Clintons, though his DOJ could have authority to do just that given the expansive leaks of intelligence information by Obama and Clinton supporters the last few months.
Heck, he could wiretap the media at this point, legally and legitimately, as the sources of these unlawful leaks, for which Obama himself set precedent. Do liberals understand what Pandora’s Box Obama opened up by Obama using the powers of the NSA, CIA and FBI to spy on his political opponents? Even Nixon never did that.
If the stories are correct, Obama or his officials might even face prosecution. But, we are still early in all of this and there are a lot of rumors flying around so the key is if the stories are correct. We just don’t know at this time.
The stories currently are three-fold: ♦ first, that Obama’s team tried to get a warrant from a regular, Article III federal court on Trump, and was told no by someone along the way (maybe the FBI), as the evidence was that weak or non-existent; ♦ second, Obama’s team then tried to circumvent the federal judiciary’s independent role by trying to mislabel the issue one of “foreign agents,” and tried to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “courts”, and were again turned down, when the court saw Trump named (an extremely rare act of FISA court refusal of the government, suggesting the evidence was truly non-existent against Trump); and so, ♦ third, Obama circumvented both the regular command of the FBI and the regularly appointed federal courts, by placing the entire case as a FISA case (and apparently under Sally Yates at DOJ) as a “foreign” case, and then omitted Trump’s name from a surveillance warrant submitted to the FISA court, which the FISA court unwittingly granted, which Obama then misused to spy on Trump and many connected to Trump.
Which parts of these stories are true is not yet fully known, but if any part of them then Obama could face serious trouble. (read more)
Additional Reference Material:
- The Obama TowerGate Timeline.
- The NSA talks to President Elect about TowerGate.
- The Media attempt to deny TowerGate
