Opinion | Two weeks prior to Republican Presidential Donald Trump’s inauguration, Senate Minority Leader, Democrat Chuck Schumer went on MSNBC and was interviewed by alt-left show host, Rachel Maddow, where he warned anyone who was listening that the intelligence community would bring its full weight to bear against the duly elected president.
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community they have six ways to Sunday in getting back at you.”
In hindsight it appears that Schumer knew a lot more than he was letting on.
For starters let’s look back at what had been previously reported about the Obama administration’s abuse of its surveillance powers.
USNews reported that Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper openly lied to Congress in 2013 by flatly denying that the NSA was involved in massive data collection of millions of Americans.
The writer states that Clapper had been provided with the question prior to the start of his testimony, yet he still lied.
According to a Washington Post article, a 2014 internal investigation by the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general found that the CIA “improperly” spied on US Senate staffers. Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan had blatantly lied to Senate investigators and denied it ever happened.
None of this should come as a surprise after we learned how the Obama administration had weaponized the IRS during his first term.
Sundance writing at the Conservative Treehouse has tied much of the evidence against the IRS together. What follows are his conclusions:
Political spying 1.0 was actually the weaponization of the IRS [in 2010]. This is where the term “Secret Research Project” originated as a description from the Obama team. It involved the U.S. Department of Justice under Eric Holder and the FBI under Robert Mueller. It never made sense why Eric Holder requested over 1 million tax records via CD ROM, until overlaying the timeline of the FISA abuse:
The IRS sent the FBI “21 disks constituting a 1.1 million page database of information from 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The transaction occurred in October 2010 (link)
Why disks? Why send a stack of DISKS to the DOJ and FBI when there’s a pre-existing financial crimes unit within the IRS. All of the evidence within this sketchy operation came directly to the surface in early spring 2012.
The IRS scandal was never really about the IRS, it was always about the DOJ asking the IRS for the database of information. That is why it was transparently a conflict when the same DOJ was tasked with investigating the DOJ/IRS scandal. Additionally, Obama sent his chief-of-staff Jack Lew to become Treasury Secretary; effectively placing an ally to oversee/cover-up any issues. As Treasury Secretary Lew did just that.
Spying on their political enemies, through a variety of corrupt mechanisms, seems to have been the norm for the Obama administration since at least 2010.
NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers had discovered that 85% of the queries of the NSA database from November 1, 2015 to May 1, 2016, were unlawful or “non compliant”.
FISA judge Rosemary Collyer issued a scathing 99-page report detailing that abuse of the NSA search function targeting of U.S. persons. She wrote:
“while the government reports it is unable to provide a reliable estimate of” these non lawful searches “since 2012, there is no apparent reason to believe the November 2015 [to] April 2016 coincided with an unusually high error rate”.
Donald Trump wasn’t even on the radar in 2012. Not in 2013, 2014, and not for most of 2015, either.
Yet, virtually every protection against unlawful search and seizure of our most private records was being violated by the elements of the Obama administration that had the means to do so.
When it became apparent that Donald Trump might be elected president the Obama White House and the corrupt elements of the intelligence community became panicked.
They needed an insurance policy so that in the event that Trump did win, they had a plausible excuse for having surveilled him. So they lied to the FISC on the FISA warrant application about the veracity of the Steele Dossier that claimed Russia was in possession of serious Kompromat on Trump.
Yes lied. Not surprising given their history of denying all of the other illegal spying operations they had engaged in.
Corrupt elements at the highest levels of the FBI and DOJ swore to the court that the Steele Dossier, that was essentially the only justification they had for requesting the surveillance warrant, had been verified.
Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) was one of two Republicans who actually saw the unredacted application:
“… when they’re [the FISA court] asked to grant a warrant to spy on Carter Page the first thing they see in big bold letters are “VERIFIED” – all capitals.
“So Jim Comey and Sally Yates and everyone else that signed off on those are verifying to the court what’s in there.
“And, they’re verifying to the court that Christopher Steele was a credible source. They’re verifying that the Steele Dossier had been corroborated. None of that was true.”
After an exhaustive investigation, Special Counsel Mueller determined that the Steele Dossier was nothing but a compilation of lies and innuendo. This means that Comey, Yates, et al, had lies to the court.
The Special Counsel, the Intelligence Community, and the mainstream media – almost pulled off toppling one branch of elected government for their own selfish purposes – to keep hidden their long-running criminal abuse (weaponization) of the powers of our intel agencies by Obama appointees.
Yes, the mainstream media. Without the relentless drumbeat, from the propagandist media, that continues to this day, none of this would have been possible.
This is the manner in which a police state operates.
President Trump managed to survive only because there are still good people who supported him. What chance would an ordinary person like you have if the government targeted you for political reasons?
