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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWe need to find something that justifies [Trump's] crazy tweet about surveillance at Trump Towers'
The Continuing Fallout from Trump and Nuness Fake Scandal
http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/the-continuing-fallout-from-trump-and-nuness-fake-scandal
By Ryan Lizza April 18, 2017
Representative Devin Nunes is under investigation for possibly leaking classified information, but the bigger scandal is the coördinated effort to manufacture an excuse for President Trumps wiretapping allegation.PHOTOGRAPH BY J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE / AP
Recently, several members and staffers on the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russias role in the Presidential election, visited the National Security Agency, in Fort Meade, Maryland. Inside the enormous black glass headquarters of Americas largest spy agency, the congressmen and their aides were shown a binder of two to three dozen pages of highly classified intercepts, mostly transcripts of conversations between foreign government officials that took place during the Presidential transition. These intercepts were not related to the heart of the committees Russia investigation. In fact, only one of the documents had anything to do with Russia, according to an official who reviewed them.
What the intercepts all had in common is that the people being spied on made references to Donald Trump or to Trump officials. That wasnt even clear, though, from reading the transcripts. The names of any Americans were concealed, or masked, the intelligence communitys term for redacting references to Americans who are not the legal targets of surveillance when such intelligence reports are distributed to policy makers.
The binder of secret documents is at the center of the bizarre scandal created by what may be the most reckless lie President Trump has ever told. On March 4th, he tweeted, Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my wires tapped in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism! The White House made several efforts to justify Trumps claim, including using Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, as a conduit for the documents, which allegedly offered some substantiation. A former Nunes staffer now working for the White House dug up the transcripts and shared them with Nunes. As Bloomberg View reported, earlier this month, Susan Rice, Obamas national-security adviser, had used a process that allowed her to request that the masked names be revealed to her. Rice had to log her unmasking requests on a White House computer, which is how Trumps aides knew about them. Nunes and the White House presented this as a major scandal. I think the Susan Rice thing is a massive story, Trump told the Times, adding, while offering no evidence, that Rice may have committed a crime.
It is now clear that the scandal was not Rices normal review of the intelligence reports but the coördinated effort between the Trump Administration and Nunes to sift through classified information and computer logs that recorded Rices unmasking requests, and then leak a highly misleading characterization of those documents, all in an apparent effort to turn Rice, a longtime target of Republicans, into the face of alleged spying against Trump. It was a series of lies to manufacture a fake scandal. Last week, CNN was the first to report that both Democrats and Republicans who reviewed the Nunes material at the N.S.A. said that the documents provided no evidence that Obama Administration officials did anything unusual or illegal.
I spoke to two intelligence sources, one who read the entire binder of intercepts and one who was briefed on their contents. Theres absolutely nothing there, one source said. The Trump names remain masked in the documents, and Rice would not have been able to know in all cases that she was asking the N.S.A. to unmask the names of Trump officials.
Nunes is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee because, in talking about the documents, he may have leaked classified information. [/b................................
The intelligence source told me that he knows, from talking to people in the intelligence community, that the White House said, We are going to mobilize to find something to justify the Presidents tweet that he was being surveilled. They put out an all-points bulletina call to sift through intelligence reportsand said, We need to find something that justifies the Presidents crazy tweet about surveillance at Trump Tower. And Im telling you there is no way you get that from those transcripts, which are about as plain vanilla as can be. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.).....................
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We need to find something that justifies [Trump's] crazy tweet about surveillance at Trump Towers' (Original Post)
riversedge
Apr 2017
OP
Warpy
(111,140 posts)1. "You sell a bunch of luxury apartments to mobsters, you've got to expect
that somebody's going to be keeping an eye on their activities.
Moron.
That should do it.
Control-Z
(15,682 posts)2. Damn. Seriously, damn.
Isn't all this straight out illegal?
K&R