This is THE scandal of the century in US politics, governance and intelligence gathering.
This goes all the way up to the top, the investigations under way however, by real journalists like Adam Housely at Fox and Eli Lake at Bloomberg News, are still at the beginning phase of this scandal. They will not say anything at this point point about the roles Loretta Lynch and Obama played in it, but just wait and see. This is Stasi/Soviet-like police state tactics, and watch the media and the Dem run even more obstruction as real journos and sincere politicians seek to unravel this mess.
Don’t get fixated on Susan Rice as the authority behind back-door surveillance of Trump
Don’t get fixated on Susan Rice as the authority behind back-door surveillance of Trump
As everybody and his dog is reporting today, including LU contributor Onan Coca, former National Security Adviser Susan Rice has been fingered as having signed an “unmasking” request for NSA surveillance data on the Trump team. White House logs reportedly show that she did it.
This indeed implicates the White House in at least some of the surveillance of Trump during the Obama administration. That’s a big thing to verify.
But I want to caution you immediately that this will not be all there is to find, nor is it the most important thing to find out. We already have some key clues as to why that is so.
Susan Rice probably made an authorization for unmasking. But she wasn’t the only official who could do it. Others include John Brennan, former CIA director, and Loretta Lynch, former attorney general.
And we know from Adam Housley’s report on Fox News on Friday that Devin Nunes has been stonewalled by the intelligence agencies since January. We now have an accounting – such as it is (we can’t be certain it’s comprehensive) – of the White House logs. But according to Housley, we don’t have the same accounting from the CIA or ODNI. We don’t know what John Brennan did (or possibly James Clapper).
As for Loretta Lynch, I’ve been inclined all along to assume that this business didn’t go through the Justice Department. That doesn’t mean she had no knowledge at all that it was happening, but it’s unlikely her unmasking authority was used. (That said, I don’t entirely count DOJ participation out. Whatever unmasking was done would have used some flimsy pretext of national security justification. It presumably wasn’t terrorism, narcotics trafficking, or military defense, but fake pretexts invoking counterintelligence and finance may have been used, and DOJ could have been a player in either.)
