POWERLINE
I assume this Washington
Post story is true: “FBI obtained FISA warrant to monitor former Trump
adviser Carter Page.” It confirms what has been sporadically reported since
late last year, that the Obama administration sought and ultimately received a
FISA order to spy on at least one associate of Donald Trump. So Trump’s famous
tweets were, in substance, true.
The FBI obtained a secret court order last summer to
monitor the communications of an adviser to presidential candidate Donald
Trump, part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the
campaign, law enforcement and other U.S. officials said.
Do the leaks come from the same Obama administration
holdovers who have leaked in the past, trying to get ahead of disclosures that
will confirm that President Trump’s suspicions were correct? Or do they come
from officials appointed by Trump? I don’t know, but the Post’s illicit sources
are pretty much always Democrats.
The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant
targeting Carter Page’s communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was
acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the
officials.
That’s a strong charge, but I doubt that there is
evidence to support it. Carter Page “worked in Moscow for Merrill Lynch a
decade ago and … has said he invested in Russian energy giant Gazprom.” He
never had any official association with the Trump campaign, but has been
referred to as an “informal adviser.” He has asked to testify before a
Congressional committee to clear his name.
The current leakers, whoever they are,
described the Obama administration’s FISA application in detail. Or else the
Post reporters have seen it.
The government’s application for the surveillance order
targeting Page included a lengthy declaration that laid out investigators’
basis for believing that Page was an agent of the Russian government and
knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of Moscow,
officials said.
Among other things, the application cited contacts that
he had with a Russian intelligence operative in New York City in 2013,
officials said. Those contacts had earlier surfaced in a federal espionage case
brought by the Justice Department against another Russian agent. In addition,
the application said Page had other contacts with Russian operatives that have
not been publicly disclosed, officials said.
The Obama administration was already trying, last Summer,
to find evidence that Russia’s government was “meddling” in our presidential
election:
The application also showed that the FBI and the Justice
Department’s national security division have been seeking since July to
determine how broad a network of accomplices Russia enlisted in attempting to
influence the 2016 presidential election, the officials said.
I find it hard to believe that Russia’s rulers, from
Vladimir Putin on down, wanted to help elect a president who vowed to rebuild
America’s dwindling military strength, and to put America first, in place of an
administration that was consistently supine in the face of Russian aggression
and was borderline anti-American. Possibly Putin and his advisers are that
dumb, but I doubt it.
In any event, the Obama administration failed to find any
evidence that anyone associated with Trump was somehow cooperating with the
Russians–not even a “junior member of the [Trump] campaign’s foreign policy
advisory group,” as Page described himself. If they had, we would have learned
about it long before now.
We haven’t heard the last of this story, but for the
moment one thing is clear: a great many people, inside and outside of the
media, owe President Trump an apology. Assuming that President Obama knew of,
and approved, the FISA application–a safe assumption, I think–Trump’s
much-reviled tweet was true:
Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower
just before the victory. Nothing found.
How much of this Trump knew all along is, at
this point, unclear.
UPDATE: We are now starting to get a picture of how
sinister this whole Democratic Party misinformation campaign is. Through the
last half of 2016, the Obama administration was desperately searching for
evidence of some link between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia. They
went to the length of seeking (twice, reportedly) and finally obtaining a FISA
order that allowed them to spy on at least one insignificant Trump associate.
In addition, we now know that Susan Rice
headed up an operation whereby raw NSA intelligence was sifted for names of
Trump associates, no doubt in hopes of uncovering dirt of some sort.* And we
also know that these efforts came up dry. The Obama administration found no
compromising information about Trump or any of his associates.
Nevertheless, ever since the Inauguration the
Democratic Party, especially its press wing in Washington and New York, has
relentlessly pushed the Trump/Russia story. What story? There isn’t one. But
that hasn’t stopped Democrats in the press from talking about little else for
the last three months.
And yet, all along, the Democrats have known that their
spying produced nothing. This whole story is almost unbelievably sordid. The
relevant Congressional committees should investigate thoroughly, and criminal
prosecutions should follow where laws have been broken.
It is time to get to the bottom of the Obama
spy scandal.
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* All of this is reminiscent of Watergate, in this sense:
after the fact, no one could figure out why the Plumbers bugged the Democratic
National Committee, given that President Nixon was obviously going to be
re-elected anyway. (The answer to that question may still be unknown, but that
is another story.) Similarly, Barack Obama and his
minion Susan Rice no doubt were confident that Hillary Clinton would win the
election and serve Obama’s third term. Yet, they weren’t taking any chances.
