Admiral Mike Rogers, the former National Security Agency (NSA) director under the Obama administration, sat down with US Attorney John Durham to discuss his knowledge into the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion witch hunt investigation. The members of the Department of Justice (DOJ), FBI, and intelligence community folks involved in the 2016 attempted government coup to rig the election for Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump should be sweating about now. Rogers knows where the proverbial bodies are buried.
Rogers, who retired in 2018 after four years as NSA chief and the top guy at US Cyber Command, recently met with Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General William Barr to look into how the Russia probe was started and specifically into the conduct of those involved. Rogers is voluntarily cooperating with Durham’s in-depth analysis of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation regarding the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
The DOJ is interested in speaking with Rogers more-than-likely because of his high-ranking position in the intelligence community, and because he is the one who discovered the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) violations by the Obama administration during the 2016 election, and due to Rogers’ role in the assessment of Russian interference.
From the Washington Examiner:
The December report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz on FISA abuses by the DOJ and the FBI criticized the bureau’s reliance on British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s unverified dossier in pursuing electronic surveillance against Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
In 2016, Rogers helped expose FISA flaws of a different kind by the NSA and the FBI. That October, as the bureau received its first Page surveillance warrant, Rogers notified the FISA Court of an NSA inspector general report that found the agency was pulling data directly from the internet and improperly searching it for information related to Americans in violation of FISA laws dealing with foreigners outside the United States targeted by U.S. intelligence agencies.
A FISA Court ruling from April 2017 revealed the high volume of violations, and that month the NSA announced it ended all searches where the foreign intelligence target was neither the sender nor receiver of a communication but was mentioned within it.
“That in doing this we were going to lose some intelligence value, but my concern was I just felt it was important — we needed to be able to show that we are fully compliant with the law,” Rogers told the Senate in 2017.
The same FISA Court ruling stated that, by early 2016, the DOJ learned the FBI gave contractors access to massive amounts of FISA information well beyond what was necessary to respond to FBI requests. Another recently declassified October 2018 FISA Court ruling stemming from the court’s inquiry into these FISA abuses found the bureau violated constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The IG’s report also pointed out how the NSA and Rogers viewed Steele’s fake dossier with a lot of skepticism. They pushed back against efforts by fired and disgraced former FBI director James Comey and fired and disgraced former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe to add information from the dossier into the January 2017 assessment on Russian election interference that was compiled by John Brennan’s CIA, Comey’s FBI, and Rogers’ NSA.
The aforementioned three, along with the James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, briefed President-Elect Trump about their findings at Trump Tower. That’s the meeting where Comey stayed behind to advise Trump on some of the more salacious and unverified allegations found inside the dossier. That’s the same meeting where Comey told Trump he didn’t have to worry about the dossier, knowing full well that just a few weeks prior, Comey already used the dossier as evidence to sign off for a FISA warrant application to spy on Trump campaign staffer Carter Page.
To give you a perspective on Admiral Rogers’ character, ten days after the election, the NSA director traveled to Trump Tower, without advising his boss, James Clapper, to tell the President-Elect that the Obama administration had been spying on him and his campaign during the election. If you remember, that’s when Trump sent that famous tweet that Obama wiretapped his phones. The technological verbiage [wiretapped] was a little outdated, but that was when Rogers informed Trump of what the Obama administration did. The next day the Trump transition team left Trump Tower and went to a golf course in northern New Jersey that Trump owned to conduct the rest of the transition.
Allegedly when Trump asked Rogers why he came to him about the spying since he worked for Obama, Rogers said he did it because he doesn’t work for any particular president, but for the United States government, and what they did was wrong.
Now that’s a man of great character, and it’s why his cooperation with Durham’s investigation must be scaring the living hell out of the likes of John Brennan and James Clapper, along with Comey and his band of FBI misfits. We’ll know what Rogers is telling Durham around early spring 2020.
