ObamaGate is getting big
23 May 2017, 2:30 pm
How often is the public kept abreast of ongoing investigations? The last thing they need is to help the cover-up effort.
Watergate is a great example of this: there was no smoking gun tying Nixon to the break-in, a lot of threads that kept leading back to him, but no hard evidence. As the investigation went on more and more threads began to appear and Nixon eventually resigned before impeachment was actually voted upon because he knew it would inevitably lead to him. The Watergate investigation lasted nearly two years by that point-- just because an investigation, especially one at the highest levels of government, doesn't produce hard evidence to the public immediately doesn't mean it's not there.
Michael Flynn's lawyer announced today he would plead the 5th at the senate investigation hearing, that means he's refusing to incriminate himself as allowed by law, but it also means there's incriminating evidence there, at least on his end. It could be that Flynn was acting on his own and that's as far as it goes, but as Watergate showed, it could also be the first thread of many.
But in this case there has always supposedly been a smoking gun. Intelligence has supposedly held and examined the supposed smoking gun and submitted an official report full of conjecture regarding the smoking gun. A direct accusation was made from the very beginning.
This would be comparable to Watergate if at the very beginning it was being said that Nixon was tied to the break-in. If from the beginning they were directly singling out and investigating Nixon.
Read your initial argument: All that and still not an iota of empirical evidence has surfaced.
Yes, investigations don't start with reams of evidence, that's why there's an investigation. It takes time to research, interview, and uncover the facts. Watergate lasted 2 years, Whitewater lasted 7.5, the Teapot Dome scandal lasted 5, to expect a full conclusion after 4 months is not only absurd, it completely ignores the history of such investigation: they're long and comprehensive.
23 May 2017, 8:01 pm
But in this case there has always supposedly been a smoking gun. Intelligence has supposedly held and examined the supposed smoking gun and submitted an official report full of conjecture regarding the smoking gun. A direct accusation was made from the very beginning.
This would be comparable to Watergate if at the very beginning it was being said that Nixon was tied to the break-in. If from the beginning they were directly singling out and investigating Nixon.
And that would be a good analogy if Nixon had publicly called for the DNC to be illegally wiretapped.
Before last July, Trump was assumed to be the fortunate beneficiary of Putin's campaign against Clinton. While some were asking whether he had ties to Russia, those suspicions were no stronger than the suspicions around Clinton when the Watergate investigation started.
There was a very strong propagandist implication to outright accusation of a Trump Putin alliance before the election.
23 May 2017, 8:33 pm
How often is the public kept abreast of ongoing investigations? The last thing they need is to help the cover-up effort.
Watergate is a great example of this: there was no smoking gun tying Nixon to the break-in, a lot of threads that kept leading back to him, but no hard evidence. As the investigation went on more and more threads began to appear and Nixon eventually resigned before impeachment was actually voted upon because he knew it would inevitably lead to him. The Watergate investigation lasted nearly two years by that point-- just because an investigation, especially one at the highest levels of government, doesn't produce hard evidence to the public immediately doesn't mean it's not there.
Michael Flynn's lawyer announced today he would plead the 5th at the senate investigation hearing, that means he's refusing to incriminate himself as allowed by law, but it also means there's incriminating evidence there, at least on his end. It could be that Flynn was acting on his own and that's as far as it goes, but as Watergate showed, it could also be the first thread of many.
But in this case there has always supposedly been a smoking gun. Intelligence has supposedly held and examined the supposed smoking gun and submitted an official report full of conjecture regarding the smoking gun. A direct accusation was made from the very beginning.
This would be comparable to Watergate if at the very beginning it was being said that Nixon was tied to the break-in. If from the beginning they were directly singling out and investigating Nixon.
Read your initial argument: All that and still not an iota of empirical evidence has surfaced.
Yes, investigations don't start with reams of evidence, that's why there's an investigation. It takes time to research, interview, and uncover the facts. Watergate lasted 2 years, Whitewater lasted 7.5, the Teapot Dome scandal lasted 5, to expect a full conclusion after 4 months is not only absurd, it completely ignores the history of such investigation: they're long and comprehensive.
I didn't say reams of evidence. I said not one iota. As in not a single speck of evidence.
With Watergate the men who broke into the democratic offices located there were caught and named immediately. Lots of solid evidence was presented from the very beginning.
With the 2016 phishing scam incident, none of that has been the case. There's no actual concrete evidence of who sent the phishing email that has been presented. Only conjecture and hearsay has been presented.
Evidence doesn't equate as proof. But it's something solid with which to pursue an investigation. In this case, unlike the very beginning of the Watergate investigation, actual evidence is nonexistent.
It's not that I'm saying the investigation should be able to prove something within several months. I'm saying not a single speck of solid evidence as been presented in all this time.
All they have ever had to go on with all of this is, a single generic phishing scam that could have been sent been sent by anyone from anywhere who possessed very basic hacking skills. That's the so called smoking gun.
That's the huge difference I see in this compared to Watergate.
23 May 2017, 8:55 pm
Trump asked intelligence chiefs to push back against FBI collusion probe after Comey revealed its existence
Trump made separate appeals to the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and to Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, urging them to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.
Coats and Rogers refused to comply with the requests, which they both deemed to be inappropriate, according to two current and two former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private communications with the president.
Is there any news source other than the the notorious Washington Post backing this up?
23 May 2017, 9:11 pm
How often is the public kept abreast of ongoing investigations? The last thing they need is to help the cover-up effort.
Watergate is a great example of this: there was no smoking gun tying Nixon to the break-in, a lot of threads that kept leading back to him, but no hard evidence. As the investigation went on more and more threads began to appear and Nixon eventually resigned before impeachment was actually voted upon because he knew it would inevitably lead to him. The Watergate investigation lasted nearly two years by that point-- just because an investigation, especially one at the highest levels of government, doesn't produce hard evidence to the public immediately doesn't mean it's not there.
Michael Flynn's lawyer announced today he would plead the 5th at the senate investigation hearing, that means he's refusing to incriminate himself as allowed by law, but it also means there's incriminating evidence there, at least on his end. It could be that Flynn was acting on his own and that's as far as it goes, but as Watergate showed, it could also be the first thread of many.
But in this case there has always supposedly been a smoking gun. Intelligence has supposedly held and examined the supposed smoking gun and submitted an official report full of conjecture regarding the smoking gun. A direct accusation was made from the very beginning.
This would be comparable to Watergate if at the very beginning it was being said that Nixon was tied to the break-in. If from the beginning they were directly singling out and investigating Nixon.
Read your initial argument: All that and still not an iota of empirical evidence has surfaced.
Yes, investigations don't start with reams of evidence, that's why there's an investigation. It takes time to research, interview, and uncover the facts. Watergate lasted 2 years, Whitewater lasted 7.5, the Teapot Dome scandal lasted 5, to expect a full conclusion after 4 months is not only absurd, it completely ignores the history of such investigation: they're long and comprehensive.
I didn't say reams of evidence. I said not one iota. As in not a single speck of evidence.
With Watergate the men who broke into the democratic offices located there were caught and named immediately. Lots of solid evidence was presented from the very beginning.
With the 2016 phishing scam incident, none of that has been the case. There's no actual concrete evidence of who sent the phishing email that has been presented. Only conjecture and hearsay has been presented.
Evidence doesn't equate as proof. But it's something solid with which to pursue an investigation. In this case, unlike the very beginning of the Watergate investigation, actual evidence is nonexistent.
It's not that I'm saying the investigation should be able to prove something within several months. I'm saying not a single speck of solid evidence as been presented in all this time.
All they have ever had to go on with all of this is, a single generic phishing scam that could have been sent been sent by anyone from anywhere who possessed very basic hacking skills. That's the so called smoking gun.
That's the huge difference I see in this compared to Watergate.
Michael Flynn surfaced right off the bat, there's a grand jury out right now for admitted non-disclosure of 33k from Russian firms, he was also Trump's initial National Security Advisor. That right there is enough to warrant a thorough investigation. The fact that his lawyer informed congress he will plead the 5th amendment (right to avoid self incrimination) is a major red flag.
“The mob takes the Fifth Amendment. If you’re innocent why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” Donald J. Trump September 2016.
Edit: from John Brennan career CIA case operator, promoted to Director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center by G.W. Bush in 2005, promoted to Director of CIA by Obama in 2013, today in the senate hearing: "I saw interaction that in my mind raised questions of whether it was collusion."
26 May 2017, 10:19 am
ObamaGate is getting really big.
Obama intel agency secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for years
The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.
More than 5 percent, 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 Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa....
Speaking Wednesday on Fox News, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said there was an apparent effort under the Obama Administration to increase the number of unmaskings of Americans.
"If we determine this to be true, this is an enormous abuse of power," Paul said. “This will dwarf all other stories.”
“There are hundreds and hundreds of people,” Paul added.
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 American’s privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.
http://circa.com/politics/barack-obamas ... -americans
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27 May 2017, 12:21 pm
The Left really doesn't want anyone to look into this, and is desperately trying to divert attention from it. (Did you hear -- Trump gets two scoops of ice cream when everyone else gets one!! Fascist!!)
How Team Obama tried to hack the election
New revelations have surfaced that the Obama administration abused intelligence during the election by launching a massive domestic-spy campaign that included snooping on Trump officials.
The irony is mind-boggling: Targeting political opposition is long a technique of police states like Russia, which Team Obama has loudly condemned for allegedly using its own intelligence agencies to hack into our election.
The revelations, as well as testimony this week from former Obama intel officials, show the extent to which the Obama administration politicized and weaponized intelligence against Americans.
Thanks to Circa News, we now know the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama routinely violated privacy protections while snooping through foreign intercepts involving US citizens — and failed to disclose the breaches, prompting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court a month before the election to rebuke administration officials....
The FISA court called it a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue” that NSA analysts — in violation of a 2011 rule change prohibiting officials from searching Americans’ information without a warrant — “had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.”
A number of those searches were made from the White House, and included private citizens working for the Trump campaign, some of whose identities were leaked to the media. The revelations earned a stern rebuke from the ACLU and from civil-liberties champion Sen. Rand Paul.
http://nypost.com/2017/05/26/how-team-o ... -election/
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Kraichgauer
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Joined: 12 Apr 2010
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Posts: 47,794
Location: Spokane area, Washington state.
27 May 2017, 2:58 pm
How Team Obama tried to hack the election
New revelations have surfaced that the Obama administration abused intelligence during the election by launching a massive domestic-spy campaign that included snooping on Trump officials.
The irony is mind-boggling: Targeting political opposition is long a technique of police states like Russia, which Team Obama has loudly condemned for allegedly using its own intelligence agencies to hack into our election.
The revelations, as well as testimony this week from former Obama intel officials, show the extent to which the Obama administration politicized and weaponized intelligence against Americans.
Thanks to Circa News, we now know the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama routinely violated privacy protections while snooping through foreign intercepts involving US citizens — and failed to disclose the breaches, prompting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court a month before the election to rebuke administration officials....
The FISA court called it a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue” that NSA analysts — in violation of a 2011 rule change prohibiting officials from searching Americans’ information without a warrant — “had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.”
A number of those searches were made from the White House, and included private citizens working for the Trump campaign, some of whose identities were leaked to the media. The revelations earned a stern rebuke from the ACLU and from civil-liberties champion Sen. Rand Paul.
http://nypost.com/2017/05/26/how-team-o ... -election/
US intelligence is supposed to put foreigners under surveillance, especially if they are known intelligence operatives. If said foreign intelligence agents are talking to American citizens, then they still have to listen in. Hence, Trump and his minions were caught colluding with the Russians. Nothing sinister or illegal on Obama's part.
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-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer
30 May 2017, 10:54 am
Did Barack Obama try to hack the election?
The Obama administration's illegal spying may have been worse than Watergate.
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.
But if a single bugging of the political opposition is enough to bring down a presidency — and maybe lead to an unprecedented criminal prosecution of a former president — then what are we to make of the recently unveiled Obama administration program of massively spying on political opponents in violation of clearly established law?
Because that’s what was unveiled last week....
There are supposed to be strict safeguards on who can access the information, on how it can be used and on protecting American citizens’ privacy — because the NSA is forbidden by law from engaging in domestic spying. These safeguards were ignored wholesale under the Obama administration, and to many Republicans, it is no coincidence that intelligence leaks damaged Democrats' political opponents in the 2016 election....
As former anti-terrorism prosecutor and national security expert Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review, this is a very serious abuse. And potentially a crime. If such material were leaked to the press for political advantage, that's another crime.
McCarthy observes: “Enabling of domestic spying, contemptuous disregard of court-ordered minimization procedures (procedures the Obama administration itself proposed, then violated), and unlawful disclosure of classified intelligence to feed a media campaign against political adversaries. Quite the Obama legacy.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/ ... 102284058/
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Kraichgauer
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Joined: 12 Apr 2010
Gender: Male
Posts: 47,794
Location: Spokane area, Washington state.
30 May 2017, 11:56 am
The Obama administration's illegal spying may have been worse than Watergate.
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.
But if a single bugging of the political opposition is enough to bring down a presidency — and maybe lead to an unprecedented criminal prosecution of a former president — then what are we to make of the recently unveiled Obama administration program of massively spying on political opponents in violation of clearly established law?
Because that’s what was unveiled last week....
There are supposed to be strict safeguards on who can access the information, on how it can be used and on protecting American citizens’ privacy — because the NSA is forbidden by law from engaging in domestic spying. These safeguards were ignored wholesale under the Obama administration, and to many Republicans, it is no coincidence that intelligence leaks damaged Democrats' political opponents in the 2016 election....
As former anti-terrorism prosecutor and national security expert Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review, this is a very serious abuse. And potentially a crime. If such material were leaked to the press for political advantage, that's another crime.
McCarthy observes: “Enabling of domestic spying, contemptuous disregard of court-ordered minimization procedures (procedures the Obama administration itself proposed, then violated), and unlawful disclosure of classified intelligence to feed a media campaign against political adversaries. Quite the Obama legacy.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/ ... 102284058/
I don't like that Obama had such a wide range of domestic spying, as it could easily be turned against our right to privacy, not to mention other rights. But unfortunately, that's the world we live in, since Obama's predecessor began this hysteria called the War on Terror. And no, I'm not saying terror isn't a real concern, just that both government and populace have worked themselves up into a heightened state of paranoia.
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-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer
30 May 2017, 9:56 pm
THE SCANDAL HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
There is a deep irony in the fact that Democrats are hysterically demanding investigations of President Trump and his campaign team, and in fact multiple investigations are now in progress, even though there is zero evidence that anyone associated with the president has done anything wrong. On the other hand, we now know for certain that the Obama administration weaponized the intelligence agencies in order to use them against political opponents, in a manner that is unprecedented, highly dangerous to our democracy, and criminal.
This scandal, which dwarfs anything of which the Trump team is even suspected, has been exposed and lies largely in plain sight for all to see. Yet it has generally been greeted with yawns, if acknowledged at all, by politicians and commentators....
The Department of Justice needs to get to the bottom of Obama’s abuse of the intelligence agencies and the FBI. That abuse was criminally compounded when Obama administration officials leaked classified information to the Washington Post and the New York Times in order to damage political opponents. We know for certain that felonies have been committed, so someone should go to jail.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions needs to ask: What did President Obama know, and when did he know it? Who else in his administration was responsible for the scandal? Where criminal prosecution is warranted, it is up to Justice to bring the cases.
More broadly, once it has enacted tax reform, Obamacare repeal and other top priorities, Congress should set investigations in motion. The public needs to know not only who committed crimes, but how deep the corruption went inside the Obama administration. And Congress needs to address, seriously, the question whether our politicized intelligence agencies can continue to exist in their present form.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2 ... -sight.php
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Kraichgauer
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Joined: 12 Apr 2010
Gender: Male
Posts: 47,794
Location: Spokane area, Washington state.
30 May 2017, 11:51 pm
There is a deep irony in the fact that Democrats are hysterically demanding investigations of President Trump and his campaign team, and in fact multiple investigations are now in progress, even though there is zero evidence that anyone associated with the president has done anything wrong. On the other hand, we now know for certain that the Obama administration weaponized the intelligence agencies in order to use them against political opponents, in a manner that is unprecedented, highly dangerous to our democracy, and criminal.
This scandal, which dwarfs anything of which the Trump team is even suspected, has been exposed and lies largely in plain sight for all to see. Yet it has generally been greeted with yawns, if acknowledged at all, by politicians and commentators....
The Department of Justice needs to get to the bottom of Obama’s abuse of the intelligence agencies and the FBI. That abuse was criminally compounded when Obama administration officials leaked classified information to the Washington Post and the New York Times in order to damage political opponents. We know for certain that felonies have been committed, so someone should go to jail.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions needs to ask: What did President Obama know, and when did he know it? Who else in his administration was responsible for the scandal? Where criminal prosecution is warranted, it is up to Justice to bring the cases.
More broadly, once it has enacted tax reform, Obamacare repeal and other top priorities, Congress should set investigations in motion. The public needs to know not only who committed crimes, but how deep the corruption went inside the Obama administration. And Congress needs to address, seriously, the question whether our politicized intelligence agencies can continue to exist in their present form.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2 ... -sight.php
Well, let's see if Jeff Sessions has time to ask those questions, such as when he's free from his cross burnings.
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-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer
01 Jun 2017, 11:06 am
There is a deep irony in the fact that Democrats are hysterically demanding investigations of President Trump and his campaign team,...
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2 ... -sight.php
Blog spamLet us know when you have a serious source.
01 Jun 2017, 7:59 pm
The House Intelligence Committee is gradually peeling back the layers of corruption.
Samantha Power Unmasked
Why would a diplomat need to know the names of Trump officials?
Barack Obama in 2014 made a large to-do about his reforms of U.S. surveillance programs to “protect the privacy” of Americans. We may soon learn how that squares with his Administration’s unmasking of political opponents.
The House Intelligence Committee Wednesday issued seven subpoenas as part of its Russia probe. But the three most notable demanded that the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation turn over records related to the Obama Administration’s “unmasking” of Trump transition members.
We know that U.S. intelligence agencies routinely eavesdropped on foreign officials who were talking about or meeting with Trump aides. Much less routine is for political appointees to override privacy protections to “unmask,” or learn the identity of, U.S. citizens listed in a resulting intelligence report.
The new subpoenas seek details of all unmasking requests in 2016 by three people: former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power. Democrats claim Ms. Rice needed to unmask names to do her job, though this is questionable given that she wasn’t running counterintelligence investigations. They have a better claim with Mr. Brennan.
But Ms. Power’s job was diplomacy. Unmaskings are supposed to be rare, and if the mere ambassador to the U.N. could demand them, what privacy protection was the Obama White House really offering U.S. citizens? The House subpoenas should provide fascinating details about how often Ms. Power and her mates requested unmaskings, on which Trump officials, and with what justification. The public deserves to know given that unmasked details have been leaked to the press in violation of the law and privacy.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/samantha-p ... &mg=id-wsj
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25 Oct 2017, 11:10 pm
There has been a flood of information coming out in the last three or four days -- I haven't been able to absorb it all, but it's apparently big. The Hillary-Russia-uranium deal is breaking open. Bill was paid $500,000 for one speech shortly before Hillary's State Department sold American uranium to Russia through a Russian corporation that was bribing assorted people. (The story is complex and I haven't got all the details down.)
And the Trump-Russia thing is also cracking open, as it is emerging that the Democratic National Committee paid for the bogus Russian dossier on Trump and didn't report the payments as campaign expenses (a crime), and then publicly lied about the payments. The bogus DNC files were then used as a pretext by Obama's FBI to spy on Trump's campaign. Those are the outlines. And an FBI informant has now been cleared to testify before Congress (if he doesn't mysteriously turn up dead first).
FBI informant in Obama-era Russian nuclear bribery cleared to testify before Congress
The Justice Department on Wednesday night released a former FBI informant from a confidentiality agreement, allowing him to testify before Congress about what he witnessed undercover about the Russian nuclear industry’s efforts to win favorable decisions during the Obama administration.
Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores confirmed to The Hill a deal had been reached clearing the informant to talk to Congress for the first time, nearly eight years after he first went undercover for the FBI.
“As of tonight, the Department of Justice has authorized the informant to disclose to the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as one member of each of their staffs, any information or documents he has concerning alleged corruption or bribery involving transactions in the uranium market, including but not limited to anything related to Vadim Mikerin, Rosatom, Tenex, Uranium One, or the Clinton Foundation,” she said.
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3572 ... ify-before
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