Apr 17 2018

Farewell AJ – RIP

Published by under All General Discussions

As we have passed the one year anniversary of his last post, I have finally felt like I could share my pain with everyone. AJStrata, my husband, was dedicated to the truth. He used this blog as the platform for sharing his investigations with the world. His first post was in May of 2005. Early on he found that he could not stomach the MSM and wanted to do his own due diligence to find the truth. He loved finding new sources and fellow bloggers who shared his own passion for politics, current events, and climate change myths.

Even though he is gone, know that he enjoyed the debates with readers and was always humbled that others wanted to visit this site.

LJStrata

4 responses so far

Apr 04 2017

More Rice Lies [Just Another Inspector Clouseau]

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Please note the trip down memory lane above, when Susie and Hillary were cohorts at the UN.

Major Update: If you don’t want to take my word for all this, how about Andrew McCarthy:

The thing to bear in mind is that the White House does not do investigations. Not criminal investigations, not intelligence investigations. Remember that.

In general, it is the FBI that conducts investigations that bear on American citizens suspected of committing crimes or of acting as agents of foreign powers. In the matter of alleged Russian meddling, the investigative camp also includes the CIA and the NSA.

Consequently, if unmasking was relevant to the Russia investigation, it would have been done by those three agencies.

Basically what these tools have done is confess to the crime. Rice did not deny she did this, she claims she had the authority to do this.

She did not.

Bring on the prosecutors – end update

Susan Rice (and her protectors in the news media – one of which is her husband at ABC News) have been putting out a new trial balloon to see if they can avoid the coming Constitutional crisis over the Obama administration using NSA surveillance data to data-mine their political opposition: a.k.a. Team Trump.

The contortions by which Rice and her news media allies (democrats all) are going through to deflect this smoking gun has hit the absurd:

Rice denied those charges Tuesday, saying she was “shocked” to read the claims when they emerged. She said the White House isn’t responsible for ordering that type of surveillance.

She maintained, however, that asking for more information about names included in intelligence reports was a routine and necessary aspect of her job in protecting American security.

Uh – no.  The White House – which is where she worked when National Security Advisor (please not the emphasis on “Advisor”) – cannot investigate US citizens for criminal acts. The White House cannot even direct the FBI who to investigate or not!

Here is her job description:

The Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA) is appointed by the President without confirmation by the Senate.[3] The influence and role of the National Security Advisor varies from administration to administration and depends not only on the qualities of the person appointed to the position but also on the style and management philosophy of the incumbent President.[4] Ideally, the APNSA serves as an honest broker of policy options for the President in the field of national security, rather than as an advocate for his or her own policy agenda.[5]

This role is to assist in drafting policies, strategies, regulations, etc.

So one has to ask, why was she unmasking these innocent people and violating their 4th Amendment Rights? She actually should have no ability to peak into the lives of Americans. None. Not in her job-jar.

The White House is NOT authorized to investigate – not even foreign players. Those authorities are given to a select few organizations in the federal government.

And when it comes to investigating US Citizens, that falls to one and only one federal organization: The FBI.

I know the Democrat News Media is trying to shield Rice and Obama from their bumbling, stumbling activities that will destroy their legacy.

But at least come up with something that passes the laugh test and does not remind us of another overly-clever sleuth protecting the masses:

 

One response so far

Apr 03 2017

Susan Rice, Obama’s Dirty Surveillance Rat

Published by under All General Discussions

 

So now we know who requested the raw intelligence on Team Trump with the names of American Citizens ‘unmasked’. It was then National Security Advisor Susan Rice:

White House lawyers last month discovered that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.”

Maybe she will claim a video caused her to commit a felony?

As I noted a while back, while Obama and Loretta Lynch authorized the expansion of who could request the unmasking of Americans caught up in surveillance, the process still required a paper trail of who the request was from and for what purpose. From the law itself:

For every entity in the US Intelligence Community involved with the intercepts of Team Trump, the head of that entity should have filled out this request, including:

  1. (U) Use of information. The IC element will explain how it will use the raw SIGINT, to include identifying the particular authorized foreign intelligence or counterintelligence missions or functions that are the basis for its request.

Skipping down, we get to another key item: who reviewed and approved these requests:

C. (U) Evaluation of requests. A high-level NSA official designated by the DIRNSA will review requests for raw SIGINT covered by these Procedures. NSA will document its approval decisions in writing and include a statement explaining how the request fully complies with paragraph A.

OK, a key person who should have participated in the legal distribution of intercepts involving members of Team Trump would be the Director of NSA and whomever they designated to review the requests.

Note that the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) is accepting the requests made by the National Security Advisor (a different NSA). Today that would be one Micheal Rogers, who had to review and concur on Rice’s request.

Interesting enough, one would have thought the FBI would be the organization with due cause to unmask Americans for investigation. Why would the head of NSA be investigating Americans and violating their 4th Amendment rights?

Well, that seems pretty obvious given that all this ill-gotten information landed in the hands of the left wing news media, to fuel diversionary stories about some elusive Trump-Russian connection. The fact this information takes a left turn through the office of NSA on its way to the news media is telling in itself.

Clearly what caught Susan Rice was the paper trail of her requests, as is confirmed in the article:

In February Cohen-Watnick discovered Rice’s multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel’s office, who reviewed more of Rice’s requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy.

The strange thing is, if not for all the leaks to the newspapers, I doubt this review of the logs would have happened! She and Team Obama triggered their own demise.

Of course, all this was leaked to a Dem-Friendly news outlet, which tried to spin this as a nothing-burger and claim this is not the smoking gun.

But of course it’s the smoking gun!

Let’s pick up where the left wing news media tried to stop us from proceeding. Who tipped off Rice on which raw data to unmask? And who was unmasked? The answers will inform us on her intentions.

For example, if Rice’s request was broad and yielded a range of Americans unmasked that would be a general request without a target.

But if her request was against specific events with specific foreign players,  which only yielded results that led to only Team Trump, then that is a different matter.  That would be political targeting and a felony.

Finally, Susan Rice would never, ever do this on her own initiative. She would never risk “The Obama Legacy” over this. A legacy, I must say, that is now in tatters based on this news. It is just a question of whether the destruction of his legacy was due to ineptitude or criminal intent.

There is much more to learn here. Everyone who did this knew they were crossing some serious lines. They knew this because they had to put in place the processes to allow it. And since these unmasking processes were laid out in January of this year, everyone knew they were up to, if not over, those Constitutional lines.

Rice should be pulled in front of Congress and asked point blank under what authority was she, the National Security Advisor, requesting names of US Citizens and their communication contenrs? Recall, some of these requests are not related to Russia at all!

One response so far

Apr 02 2017

DNC’s Russian Hack NOT Investigated By FBI – But By DNC Contractor

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The fantasy story line inside the Political Industrial Complex* (PIC) is that Team Trump colluded with Russia to tilt last year’s election to Trump. Of course the endless screw ups by Team Clinton, and the high level of frustration across this great land with PIC and its elites, had nothing to do with the election results. It has to be those pesky Russkies!

The story goes that the FBI – and all 16 intelligence agencies – concur that the Russians were targeting the Democrats, and this began with the exposure of DNC emails prior to the Democrat convention last year.

Well, that’s ONE STORY

A fuller picture is becoming evident. One where nearly all the conclusions of Russian influence are based upon a report from one company – a company contracted by the DNC!

On Thursday, a senior law enforcement official told CNN that the DNC “rebuffed” the agency’s request to physically examine its computer servers after the alleged hacking. Instead, the FBI relied on CrowdStrike’s assessment that the servers had most likely been hacked by Russian agents.

“The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated,” CNN quoted the senior law enforcement official as saying. “This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information.

Sounds just like Hillary Clinton and her email server – where the government cannot do a real investigation of the actual computer evidence. If this sounds fishy, it is. Because this company is not a middle of the road, independent agent.

It is, in fact, a young start-up with much of its prior success tied to the Obama administration (less now than when it began 6 years ago), and of course its future rests in the hands of the Intelligence Community and the niche community of federal cyber-security specialists.  All who make their living off the federal government in one way or the other. They know who is lining their bank accounts

One of the founders is Dmitri Alperovitch who was born in Moscow, Russia in 1980 and who moved with his family to the US in 1990. Clearly he had not forged nefarious ties to Putin’s regime by the age of 10 when he emigrated, so his Russian background is not really of much interest. But he does have an interesting past, which I will get to in a second.

While I was attempting to do some digging on all this I discovered someone had done all the work already. So let me give credit where credit is due: CrowdStrike leadership has significant ties to Obama and the Democrats:

Founder Dmitri Alperovitch has been the best known face of CrowdStrike, partly due to the profile feature done on him by Esquire in late 2016.  But his co-founder, George Kurtz – like Alperovitch, a former executive at McAfee – has had a high professional profile as well.

Worth noting at the outset is that Kurtz obtained a $26 million financing deal for the CrowdStrike start-up in February 2012 from equity giant Warburg Pincus, after Kurtz had been serving there as the “entrepreneur in residence.”

This equity firm is where the initial seed money for CrowdStrike came from (Warburg was the only capital investor at the beginning; Google came in with the $100 million in 2015).

Warburg Pincus remains a primary investor in CrowdStrike, along with Google and Accel Partners.  In 2016, Warburg, whose president since 2014 has been Tim Geithner, Obama’s former secretary of the treasury, raised $29,709 for Hillary Clinton, the largest single recipient of campaign funds raised by Warburg employees and PACs.  (No contributions were made through Warburg-related entities to Donald Trump.)

Then there’s the linked-ness of the CrowdStrike executive stable.  Steven Chabinsky, CrowdStrike’s General Counsel and Chief Risk Officer, was named to Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity in April 2016.

That’s partly because Chabinsky was Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Cyber Division and Chief of the FBI’s Cyber Intelligence Section before he left the Bureau for private life in 2012 (the year he joined CrowdStrike).

But there’s more.  [Shawn] Henry is the president of CrowdStrike Services, and the Chief Security Officer (CSO) for the company.  But when he came on with CrowdStrike, in April 2012, he was coming off his final position with the FBI: Executive Assistant Director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Service Branch.  (Or, as he was usually referred to, the “FBI’s top cyber official.”)

In other words, CrowdStrike scored the FBI’s two biggest Obama-era cybersecurity names – Henry and Chabinsky – the year it was formed as a start-up.

Strong ties to Obama’s FBI, and one would assume FBI Director Comey. Hmmm….

Let’s get back to Dimitri now, and his connections to the Democrats:

Alperovitch’s first big break in cyberdefense came in 2010, while he was at McAfee. The head of cybersecurity at Google told Alperovitch that Gmail accounts belonging to human-rights activists in China had been breached. Google suspected the Chinese government. Alperovitch found that the breach was unprecedented in scale; it affected more than a dozen of McAfee’s clients.

Three days after his discovery, Alperovitch was on a plane to Washington. He’d been asked to vet a paragraph in a speech by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. She’d decided, for the first time, to call out another country for a cyberattack. “In an interconnected world,” she said, “an attack on one nation’s networks can be an attack on all.”

Now just hold on one second here. How in the world does a nobody at MacAfee get on a plane to meet the Secretary of State in just 3 days? No vetting? No preliminaries with underlings? Just fly out to DC to review a single paragraph??

This has to be fictional drama.

BTW, earlier in the same article we have this contrary story line:

In 2011, he was working in Atlanta as the chief threat officer at the antivirus software firm McAfee. While sifting through server logs in his apartment one night, he discovered evidence of a hacking campaign by the Chinese government. Eventually he learned that the campaign had been going on undetected for five years, and that the Chinese had compromised at least seventy-one companies and organizations, including thirteen defense contractors, three electronics firms, and the International Olympic Committee.

While Alperovitch was writing up his report on the breach, he received a call from Renee James, an executive at Intel, which had recently purchased McAfee. According to Alperovitch, James told him, “Dmitri, Intel has a lot of business in China. You cannot call out China in this report.”

Alperovitch removed the word China from his analysis, calling the operation Shady Rat instead. He told me that James’s intervention accelerated his plans to leave Intel.

So which story-line is the right one? Not sure, but let’s just say not just anyone gets called to review Hillary’s speeches.

So these guys had FBI contacts and they had Clinton contacts. What else did they have? Would anyone believe connections to DHS:

Through their common roots in McAfee, Alperovitch and Kurtz have an extensive history with top cyber expert Phyllis Schneck, who appears in the Esquire piece from October.  In fact, Alperovitch and Schneck were at Georgia Tech together (see the Esquire article), and later were vice presidents of McAfee at the same time Kurtz was McAfee’s chief technology officer (CTO).  Alperovitch has obviously had a close professional relationship with Schneck; their names are both on four separate patent applications.

What is Schneck doing today?  Since 2013, she’s been the Deputy Under Secretary for Cybersecurity and Communications for the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD) – i.e., the chief cybersecurity official for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

To recap, all the claims of Russian involvement with DNC (and by extension Team Trump) is based on claims by a firm with roots back to the Obama FBI, to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and to DHS? This is the only evidence we have of Russian efforts to tilt this election (as opposed to efforts by Democrat operatives in the Deep State to tilt the election)?

Some final perspectives on how this is all playing out [note: this site is a bit tinfoil hat for me, but I liked the way these paragraphs summarized where we are on this]

Also remember that it is only Alperovitch and CrowdStrike that claim to have evidence that it was Russian hackers. In fact, only two hackers were found to have been in the system and were both identified by Alperovitch as Russian FSB (CIA) and the Russian GRU (DoD). It is only Alperovitch who claims that he knows that it is Putin behind these two hackers.

The ridiculously fake cyber-attack assessment done by Alperovitch and CrowdStrike naïvely flies in the face of the fact that a DNC insider admitted that he had released the DNC documents.

It is also absurd to hear Alperovitch state that the Russian FSB (equivalent to the CIA) had been monitoring the DNC site for over a year and had done nothing. No attack, no theft, and no harm was done to the system by this “false-flag cyber-attack” on the DNC – or at least, Alperovitch “reported” there was an attack.

I just seems crazy that all this diversion by the news media and Democrats is based on the unsubstantiated claims of a company that epitomizes what it means to be part of the Political Industrial Complex*

 

*  The Political Industrial Complex encompasses all those elites whose livelihoods are predicated on central-control of resources and who determine who is allowed to succeed in society. It is a bipartisan exclusive club. It includes the Politicians and their career staffers. It includes crony donors and lobbyists who reap government windfalls and special treatment that average citizens cannot obtain. It includes the PIC industrial base of pollsters, consultants, etc. And it includes the pliant news media, whose success rest on access to those in power, and in return for access making sure no bad news will disrupt said power.

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Apr 01 2017

Situation Normal, All Farkased Up

 

The Democrats & News Media (there’s a difference?) are deteriorating into insanity as President Trump’s “surveillance” tweet continues to disrupt DC and expose one of the Capitol’s dirtiest secrets. A secret kept under cover by the self-absorbed Political Industrial Complex (PIC*), whose members have been wrapping themselves in the American Flag to coverup gross abuses of power. A secret they themselves have benefited from.

That power has kept many careers in the PIC on the rise. It has led to political dynasties within the PIC (anyone think it coincidental “Bush the 1st” was once head of the CIA?).  Those who fail to learn from history are destined to repeat it:

Later in life and after his death, [J Edgar] Hoover became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive abuses of power began to surface. He was found to have exceeded the jurisdiction of the FBI,[1] and to have used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders,[2] and to collect evidence using illegal methods.[3] Hoover consequently amassed a great deal of power and was in a position to intimidate and threaten sitting presidents.

The power I speak of today is the power to surveillance anyone, any time. It was created out of sincere, good intentions. To stop another 9-11 massacre. But as with all great power, it has corrupted our current leaders who began to see themselves as the defenders of America – and so somehow more important than any normal citizen. They bequeathed to themselves extra-legal authority and rationalized obliterating the 4th Amendment. “Better to snoop on everyone (which is lazy) than miss an attack”.

That thinking is akin to locking everyone up just so we don’t miss any murderers or drunk drivers. Like I said: Lazy.

If you are in the inner circle of Federal Politics you have had access to information that is a pure goldmine. You have insights into political leaders and players,  insights into international strategies and thinking. You can see through the normal veil of “private conversations” on a grand scale, detect events as they are being planned, before they happen. And you can fight off those who naively (in your own warped mind) want to take or curtail your weapon against evil!

The problem is – that surveillance capability was meant to protect Americans from terrorism and other forms of outside attack. It is illegal – in that it is a violation of the 4th Amendment of the Constitution – to have access to this kind of detailed information on Americans without demonstrable due cause, confirmed in the form of a warrant (either from a normal criminal court or the FISA court). A critical detail that has been ignored by too many for too long.

What Washington DC forgot is that Donald Trump is not from the Political Industrial Complex. He does not rely on this fountain of ill-gotten power to achieve his goals. He was able to beat the denizens of the PIC without this devil’s crutch. And he is more than likely ready to put this evil genie back in the bottle, to be opened by a few and only when a cause has been demonstrated.

It is now clear from news media reports on damning details in surveillance records – plus the loose-lips of one bit player in a political strategery – that  during the primaries, during the election and during the post-election transition Democrats used surveillance data about Americans for political purposes. This is not refutable anymore.

Here is a quick run down of the mounting evidence of gross illegal activities by those in power. Let’s begin with the news media faithfully regurgitating the ill-gotten surveillance details that can only come from a few places inside the government:

“In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians — across the government,” reported the New York Times.   “American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence. Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump associates.”

Emphasis mine. Even the release of details regarding foreign players is illegal. It exposes our capabilities and notifies our enemies they need to take steps to cover their tracks better. But we have much more than that here.

Please note Judge Andrew Napolitano is actually vindicated in this reporting by the NY Times, when it notes the British provided information. There is more:

Further confirmation of his comments comes from Circa News, which says that former CIA director John Brennan, among other Obama aides, had access to intercepted foreign communications involving Trump aides:

Dozens of times in 2016, those intelligence reports identified Americans who were directly intercepted talking to foreign sources or were the subject of conversations between two or more monitored foreign figures. Sometimes the Americans’ names were officially unmasked; other times they were so specifically described in the reports that their identities were readily discernible. Among those cleared to request and consume unmasked NSA-based intelligence reports about U.S. citizens were Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice, his CIA Director John Brennan and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Some intercepted communications from November to January involved Trump transition figures or foreign figures’ perceptions of the incoming president and his administration.

The evidence documented by the news media of wrong doing is extensive. But they want the gravy-train of leaked surveillance data on Americans to continue. It suites their bottom line. So don’t expect the news media to be open about what is going on. They will deflect from their sources and try and keep the nation distracted by rumors of collusion outside America. All the better to keep people from seeing the collusion from within.

The Obama grand plan to disperse cherry-picked surveillance throughout government in order to keep pushing the diversionary story about Trump and Russia had a serious flaw in it. To disperse the ill-gotten propaganda would mean it would fall into less seasoned hands. And these less seasoned hands may blow the whole deal.

In steps Evelyn Farkas, former Deputy Secretary of Defense under Obama and member of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign. Think of her as a liaison between team Hillary, Team Obama and the Congressional Democrats on “The Hill”:

Well, I was urging my former colleagues, and, and, frankly speaking, [to] the people on the Hill, it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can – get as much intelligence as you can – before President Obama leaves the administration. Because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior [Obama] people who left. So it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy, um, that the Trump folks – if they found out HOW we knew what we knew about their, the Trump staff, dealing with Russians – that they would try to compromise those sources and methods — meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. So I became very worried because not enough was coming out into the open and I knew that there was more. We have very good intelligence on Russia. So then I had talked to some of my former colleagues and I knew that they were also trying to help get information to the Hill…That’s why you have the leaking.

“If they [Team Trump] found out how we [team Obama/Clinton] knew what we knew”….  Just savor that for a while. If the new Sheriff in town found out what the previous Sheriff had done ….  This is a constitutional crisis. It will consume many top level people who have given cover to these abuses of power for too long. In another report Farkas notes she was communicating with members of both parties on “The Hill”.

Don’t believe for an instant Democrats will take all the hits on this one – just most of them.

Poor Ms. Farkas has been trying to undo the damage she has done. She has even gone so far as to blame the Russians for her loose-lips. My guess is she has been given a short time period to try and undo this before she herself gets thrown under the bus. But make no mistake, all she did was confirm the NY Times’ claims.

This issue is toxic to political careers. You don’t get caught red-handed violating the Constitution (our privacy and the assumption we are innocent until proven guilty) and survive as a politician.

There appears to be a good many heads on the line given the screeching cries for House Intelligence Chairman Nunes to step down and Trump to be Impeached. The pitch and volume of cries from the left mean some big players are about to be hoisted on their own petards. The more fevered the cries from the left, the bigger this thing has become. The Sunday shows should be wall-to-wall Democrats and Media circling the wagons and trying to get everyone to look at Russia and not Obama/Clinton.

It won’t work. Just recently we have seen reports on the smoking gun evidence. As I noted in a prior posts (here), to disperse unmasked surveillance data still requires someone in the government to sign an affidavit of due cause:

For every entity in the US Intelligence Community involved with the intercepts of Team Trump, the head of that entity should have filled out this request, including:

  1. (U) Use of information. The IC element will explain how it will use the raw SIGINT, to include identifying the particular authorized foreign intelligence or counterintelligence missions or functions that are the basis for its request.

Skipping down, we get to another key item: who reviewed and approved these requests:

C. (U) Evaluation of requests. A high-level NSA official designated by the DIRNSA will review requests for raw SIGINT covered by these Procedures. NSA will document its approval decisions in writing and include a statement explaining how the request fully complies with paragraph A.

OK, a key person who should have participated in the legal distribution of intercepts involving members of Team Trump would be the Director of NSA and whomever they designated to review the requests.

Given that the intelligence community is not partisan, but is made up of people with diverse political views attempting to work towards one goal (defending this nation), it is not surprising that some of these good folks stepped forward and pointed the Intelligence Committee Chairman to the smoking gun(s):

For a private citizen to be “unmasked,” or named, in an intelligence report is extremely rare. Typically, the American is a suspect in a crime, is in danger or has to be named to explain the context of the report.

“The main issue in this case, is not only the unmasking of these names of private citizens, but the spreading of these names for political purposes that have nothing to do with national security or an investigation into Russia’s interference in the U.S. election,” a congressional source close to the investigation told Fox News.

Nunes has known about the unmasking controversy since January, when two sources in the intelligence community approached him. The sources told Nunes who was responsible and at least one of the Trump team names that was unmasked. They also gave him serial numbers of reports that documented the activity.

Nunes had asked intelligence agencies to see the reports in question, but was stonewalled.

Emphasis mine. This is Obama’s (and Farkas’) worst nightmare. Someone willing to come forward and skip the long dance of congressional requests and executive delay and just toss out the document ID numbers that hold the evidence. This is why the Democrats and the News Media (again, is there any difference – I guess in a few corners of Fox News) are going nuts this week.

They desperately need to keep this story from coming out. But it is coming out and some big-name heads are about to roll (or roll over):

The U.S. intelligence official who “unmasked,” or exposed, the names of multiple private citizens affiliated with the Trump team is someone “very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world,” a source told Fox News on Friday.

Intelligence and House sources with direct knowledge of the disclosure of classified names told Fox News that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., now knows who is responsible — and that person is not in the FBI.

 

My guess is Team Obama was so shaken with the realization that Team Trump would have access to all the evidence one would want to show illegal activities before the election, this desperate last minute move to disperse cherry-picked data to deflect from the true crimes seemed like their only play.

But of course the cover up is always worse than the crime. This is one big and ugly iceberg that needs to come out into the sun and be melted away. This is akin to a military coupe, where military resources are used to influence an election. While no tanks or fighter jets were used to ‘influence’ voter decisions, the awesome power of our National Security Intelligence resources may have been. So don’t let the News Media/Democrats distract us from the true crime here.

Russians did not vote in Donald Trump – fed up Les Deplorables did. Russians did not make Hillary Clinton the worst candidate in memory – the Democrats did. And Russians did not make Obama turn this nation’s defense systems against his political opponent.

He did that all on his own.

Everyone in DC assumed Trump would protect this grotesque use of our national defense as those before him had. I have seen ridiculous interviews with the likes of Gen Wesley Clark on Fox News trying to divert attention from this to protect the unfettered monitoring of Americans. It never occurred to the denizens of the PIC that the best defense from this kind of abuse was sunlight. And sunlight would also cleanse us of the decay that had created this rot.

It never crossed their feeble minds that Trump would simply expose the whole ugly mess to not only protect himself and his team – but to drain the swamp itself.

The Intelligence Community is not monolithic  politically, and generally they prefer to stay apolitical. Therefore I am not surprised there are people willing to turn on team Obama. I am just curious how big the wave will be now that the damn has cracked.

 

*  The Political Industrial Complex encompasses all those elites whose livelihoods are predicated on central-control of resources and who determine who is allowed to succeed in society. It is a bipartisan exclusive club. It includes the Politicians and their career staffers. It includes crony donors and lobbyists who reap government windfalls and special treatment that average citizens cannot obtain. It includes the PIC industrial base of pollsters, consultants, etc. And it includes the pliant news media, whose success rest on access to those in power, and in return for access making sure no bad news will disrupt said power.

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Mar 13 2017

Congress Wants Evidence On Illegal Surveillance – Here It Is!

 

If Congress wants evidence of illegal surveillance of “Team Trump” I have the answers.

But first, please note the deliberate and specific subject of this sentence. The evidence will be about “Team Trump: which includes the Trump Campaign and its associates (i.e., “associates” = all those US Person not formally on the campaign but ready to serve in the administration if called).  And “illegal surveillance” will not only cover the method of capturing the parties and the content of their communications, but whether the intercepted names and content were legally handled in accordance to the US Constitution its the 4th Amendment protections:

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides, “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The ultimate goal of this provision is to protect people’s right to privacy and freedom from arbitrary governmental intrusions.

The childish and slippery word games being used by both Congress (Dem and Rep alike) and the Fake News Media is fooling no one. The fact a surveillance of possible national threats is legally allowed DOES NOT in turn mean the 4th Amendment is suspended in any shape or form regarding US Persons impacted during that surveillance.

The illegal application of our intelligence capabilities – to divert them from protecting this nation and instead using them for political purposes – is not a slippery or semantic problem. The law is precise: it is illegal.

If a US Person is ‘caught up” in an intelligence gathering activity targeting someone else, that fact (i.e., their name or their part of the conversation) SHOULD NEVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY!

To continue to pretend ‘framing’ the topic of this issue will confuse the voters is simply confirming the wisdom and insight of the pro-Trump voting block. We won’t get fooled again by the denizens of the Political Industrial Complex*. The PIC have been to the “Wordsmith’s Well” too many times. Their credibility is shot.

 

 

If Sen John McCain (already caught distributing fake dossiers about Donald Trump) wants evidence of illegal surveillance activities, he simply needs to call on Sen Rand Paul to testify:

Paul explained how the NSA routinely and deliberately spies on Americans’ communications — listens to their calls and reads their emails — without a judicial warrant of any kind:

The way it works is, the FISA court, through Section 702, wiretaps foreigners and then [NSA] listens to Americans. It is a backdoor search of Americans. And because they have so much data, they can tap — type Donald Trump into their vast resources of people they are tapping overseas, and they get all of his phone calls.

And so they did this to President Obama. They — 1,227 times eavesdrops on President Obama’s phone calls. Then they mask him. But here is the problem. And General Hayden said this the other day. He said even low-level employees can unmask the caller. That is probably what happened to Flynn.

My apologies to Gen Hayden and Sen Graham, but while someone “can” unmask the details of surveillance details about a US Person, they really cannot without running afoul of the US Constitution. Robbers “can” rob banks, Generals can issue kill orders on civilians, Police can shoot innocent people and Politicians can break laws as they see fit. If they do and are caught doing so they need to prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

No sane person claims laws stop illegal behavior. But do illegal acts by our leaders mean laws should be ignored?

What you see in these kinds of statements is resignation by our leadership to allowing rampant illegal activities. “It’s always done” is how rampant bribery and kickbacks become the norm. This kind of complacency is grotesque.

No one leaked Obama’s calls because the broader government entities knew it was unethical. Yet Donald Trump’s calls (and is campaign associates calls) are leaked to the public because …

What? He is not what these tools wanted as President?

In this prior post I noted the paper trail required for any details about US Person to be unmasked and distributed to points inside the Intelligence Community where they could be later be leaked (most likely via Congress where members (or their staff) caught leaking cannot be “fired”).

If Congress has not reviewed the FISA applications, or these records required for distribution, or any assertion by President Obama to use his independent powers to implement a surveillance program (see this early post), then they are not doing their job.

And one has to wonder why Congress would want to hold back and not look into every possible avenue? What are they concerned about uncovering?

*  The Political Industrial Complex encompasses all those elites whose livelihoods are predicated on central-control of resources and who determine who is allowed to succeed in society. It is a bipartisan exclusive club. It includes the Politicians and their career staffers. It includes crony donors and lobbyists who reap government windfalls and special treatment that average citizens cannot obtain. It includes the PIC industrial base of pollsters, consultants, etc. And it includes the pliant news media, whose success rest on access to those in power, and in return for access making sure no bad news will disrupt said power.

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Mar 10 2017

About That Infamous “Trump Server”

 

If you are wondering what in the world was the basis for all the investigating of candidate Trump and his ties to Russian banks, you have to refer back to the detailed (I would say “too detailed”) article from Slate.com on Oct 31, 2016. This is the article Hillary Clinton famously tweeted out on the same day (H/T to Kevin Johnson for the image below):

The article and tweet appear to be too well timed, giving the impression of an orchestrated media blitz. Especially since it is also in October that the Obama administration supposedly gets a court warrant (FISA or otherwise is still not clear) into this very matter. We know today that the only remaining element of the investigation of Team Trump is financial ties to Russian banks, which seems to have been initiated by events covered in the original Slate story.

To be clear, I think the Slate reporter was given a bounty of details and help from all his sources, who probably are more than he lets on (or he understood). He could have been the useful tool of a broader effort. He writes like he wants to protect the world from evil. His sources seem a bit more cunning. So let’s see what we can find?

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Mar 09 2017

NY Times’ Orwellian Rewrite Of History

 

Andrew McCarthy is all over the news that the NY Times is rewriting history. They are doing this because they were the source of information about Donald Trump and his Associates being monitored by electronic surveillance – and then having their constitutional rights abused by the leaking of those surveillance intercepts to the media:

Turns out the story has suddenly, quietly been given a new headline. No longer is it “Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides.” Instead, readers are now told, “Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry into Trump Associates.”

Why would the Times change its headline in this manner, weeks after the fact?

Now that they [the NY Times] don’t want you to believe there was an investigation — because that would be an Obama abuse of power — they want to convince you that Trump associates were never targeted for surveillance.

Let’s see the FISA applications and warrants. If there was no targeting of the Trump campaign, as the media and Democrats now say, let’s hear an explanation of why they’ve pretended otherwise for four months. If the Trump campaign was targeted for an investigation, let’s hear why.

Emphasis mine. We now know there is a cover up under way by the Ministry of Truth:

The Ministry of Truth is the propaganda ministry. As with the other ministries in the novel, the name Ministry of Truth is a misnomer because in reality it serves the opposite: it is responsible for any necessary falsification of historical events.

Life is now as strange (and as horrible) as fiction

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Mar 09 2017

Obama’s Surveillance Of Team Trump: A Probable Paper Trail

Published by under Obama and FISA

 

In the shifting saga of how members of the Trump campaign/administration ended up having their phone conversations tapped under the Obama administration, the American people have been fed a series of shifting excuses on how the Obama administration would never violate the laws concerning surveillance of US Persons.

We were told the President cannot order such surveillance (which we know is a false statement, see here and here).

Then we were given the impression by the Fake News Media these “intercepts” were under a FISA court warrant. But later we learned the FISA court rejected the application by Team Obama in June 2016.

Apparently, the Obama’s administration tried twice last year to monitor members of Trump’s campaign. Once via the regular (Title III) courts and once through the FISA Court. So let’s stop pretending this was not something Team Obama desperately wanted to do. The fact they failed does not erase the efforts behind the attempts.

But then something else happened in October.  What it was is unclear. Speculation was Team Obama tried either a second run at the FISA court with a more focused application, or they possibly appealed to the FIS Review Court. The initial reports were of a successful FISA application and surveillance warrant in October.

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Mar 08 2017

Judge Napolitano Confirms Obama Could Order Surveillance On US Persons

Published by under Obama and FISA

In my previous post (see here) I cited the specific federal statute that allows the President, with concurrence from his Attorney General (under oath),  to order surveillance on any party – including US Persons. Judge Andrew Napolitano was on Fox & Friends and confirmed everything I posted (for those who need a more experienced opinion on this matter):

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