Obamagate involves real crimes and abuses

Charles Lipson:

Amid the flurry of details about spying on Michael Flynn, lying to secret courts about Carter Page, leaking classified documents, and more, it’s easy to get lost in the muck. It’s important to stand back, identify the worst abuses, and explain why they matter for American democracy. These abuses didn’t simply follow each other; their targets, goals, and principal players overlapped. Taken together, they represent some of the gravest violations of constitutional norms and legal protections in American history. Whether you are Democrat or Republican, whether you like Donald Trump or loathe him, these violations matter.

Some call this debacle “Obamagate” since the key officials were his appointees and the White House was directly involved. But they got plenty of help. Some came from the permanent bureaucracy, especially in law enforcement and intelligence. Still more came from the mainstream media, which served as conduits for classified leaks aimed at Trump, his campaign, and then his presidency. For over three years, the media’s top story was “Trump colluded with Russia.” When that imploded after the Mueller Report, they moved on to impeachment.

The entrenched elites behind these scandals are the Swamp at its most sulfurous. They spied illegally on Americans and used powerful tools of government to damage the party-out-of-power, its outsider candidate, and then his new presidency. It’s worse than a single surveillance scandal. It’s three huge ones, intertwined. All were abuses of power. Some were crimes.

Scandal No. 1: Massive, illegal surveillance of American citizens, using the database of the National Security Agency

During the second term of President Obama, and perhaps earlier, private firms from outside the government were allowed to trawl through the massive NSA database of phone calls, emails, and text messages. Without any warrants, they spied on vast numbers of American citizens. The public still doesn’t know who did it, who authorized it, or how the metadata was used.

This illegal practice ended in summer 2016 when the agency’s head, Adm. Mike Rogers, learned about it. He stopped it immediately and reported it to the Rosemary Collyer, chief judge of the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court. Judge Collyer issued a scathing, heavily redacted report about the illegal activity, but, so far, no one has been indicted.

Scandal No. 2: Spying on the Trump campaign

When NSA surveillance was halted, the Obama administration lost its secret eyes on domestic political activity and especially on the rising Trump campaign. To regain that vision, the CIA and FBI launched new surveillance efforts. Three elements stand out. First, the executive branch, then controlled by Democrats, was determined to spy on the opposition party. Second, much of the spying was conducted by agencies that are limited, by law, to foreign operations. Since their goal was actually domestic surveillance and since that was illegal, they apparently outsourced some of it to friendly foreign governments, who relayed the information back to Washington. Third, since the FBI wanted to spy on Trump aides who were not actually suspected of crimes, they couldn’t get regular warrants. To work around that, the FBI (under James Comey) and Department of Justice (under Loretta Lynch) falsely claimed the targets were foreign spies, making them eligible for FISA warrants. They also tried to entrap them (with help from CIA assets abroad), hoping they would commit illegal acts or say their colleagues had done so.

We know the FBI and CIA did all that, though we still don’t know all the details. We know, too, that the FBI and DoJ used opposition-party research and worthless gossip (the “Steele Dossier”) to gain the secret warrants on Carter Page. The second-ranking official in Comey’s FBI, Andrew McCabe, testified the warrants would never had been issued without the Steele material. Yet the FBI and DoJ never told the court it was unverified and never said who commissioned it.

Before the warrant was renewed, the FBI finally spoke with Steele’s main source, who told them the information was garbage. Instead of telling the court immediately, the bureau simply said the sub-source was truthful and falsely implied he backed Steele. This dunghill of deceit should lead to criminal indictments and major civil suits for damages.

Scandal No. 3: Covering up this spying, continuing it during the new administration, charging that Trump was not legitimately elected, and impeding his presidency with major investigations, based on false charges

After Trump was elected, top officials from the outgoing administration made two fundamental decisions. The first was to hide the earlier spying and continue it during the new presidency, using holdover officials and friendly bureaucrats. The second was to entangle the new administration in a series of sprawling investigations designed to prevent it from governing, even though Republicans had won the White House and both branches of Congress.

The Obama team did whatever it could to bring down the new administration, primarily with accusations Trump had won with Russia’s help. They went even further, saying Trump’s campaign had actively worked with the Kremlin. That’s treason. There was no evidence for it, but the mainstream media, led by the New York Times, Washington Post and all cable news channels except Fox, promoted it nonstop. The implication was clear: Because Trump was elected with help from a foreign enemy, he was not a legitimate president. This accusation has been the leitmotif of Democratic Party messaging and mainstream media coverage for the entire Trump presidency.
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There is more.

The mainstream media, if it still has any integrity at all should go to school on what Lipson has outlined here of the crimes associated with Obamagate.  The problem is they lack integrity at this point and they were co-conspirators with the Obamagate operatives who were pushing this illegal spying and coup attempt. 

They would rather run phony "fact checks" to make excuses for this criminal operation which appears to have been headed by President Obama.  He turned intelligence products meant to deal with foreign spies into a domestic political tool to attack perceived opponents and even journalists.

It will take cases by John Durham and other honest prosecutors in the DOJ to root out this corrupt operation and those who supported it, and the media is likely to be fighting on the side of the bad guys the whole time those trials are going on.