The War for America's Soul
Page 3
This may seem the opposite of scandalous, since killing terrorists is a good thing, correct? Yes, it is. But first there is the absurdity of having the president of the United States make tactical decisions about which terrorist should be killed today. That is not what a president does. In World War II, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman would never have toyed with lists of which Third Reich tank commander or fighter pilot to kill next just to look “tough.” But the real scandal is that this list included U.S. citizens, some of whom were chosen by Obama for assassination and then actually killed, with zero due process, in flagrant contravention of an American citizen’s constitutional rights before the law.16 One day it’s Americans targeted by hell-fire missiles on foreign soil, what if next it’s Americans targeted here in America, similarly without access to justice?
This was Obama’s White House. From the targeting of American patriots at home via the IRS, to missile strikes killing Americans abroad without due process before the law, the Obama administration had no qualms—none—with using the incredible might of the federal government against those it did not like, or wanted to eliminate. That is how we arrive at the plot to subvert candidate Trump’s campaign through the use of the Department of Justice (DOJ), FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency (NSA), for political purposes.
Let us start with the NSA. After the 9/11 attacks of 2001, the powers and capacities of the NSA grew exponentially, and this continued under the Obama administration, to the point that in 2011 the nation’s premier electronic surveillance agency had to build a new data storage facility in the middle of the desert in Utah. The Obama administration spent $1.5 billion of taxpayer funds for a site that stretches over 1.5 million square feet to house up to twelve exabytes of surveilled data.17 To understand just how gargantuan a capability that represents, U. C. Berkeley scientists estimate that five exabytes is equivalent to the amount of words all human beings have ever spoken, in all languages, since we started to use language.18 The NSA can store more than twice that amount of classified information at just its Utah facility, and—as far as we know at the moment—this is where the crimes against Donald Trump begin.
Government officials with the requisite clearances may “query” the NSA database. Since the NSA can snoop on telephone conversations, texts, emails, radio communications, and basically any form of electronic information transmittal around the world, this allows them to “touch” anyone anywhere who has moved beyond stone tablets, papyrus scrolls, or old-school snail mail for communication and record-keeping. This is a level of power that spymasters of yore such as Cardinal Richelieu, or even Ian Fleming’s fictional “M,” could barely imagine.
Since the advent of the Internet has made communications truly global and practically instantaneous, the NSA can be used to target any bad guy on the web, but in doing so, the vaunted “six steps of separation” mean that one justified request for an intercept on a high value target will ensnare totally innocent people in the net of “meta-data” which the NSA has at its disposal.19 For example, the CIA or the Drug Enforcement Administration may make a request for all the available communications of a specific jihadi terrorist or a businessman running a front company for a drug cartel, and the NSA will be able to retrieve said target’s emails, intercept his phone-calls, and even penetrate his hard drives should his personal computers have a connection to the Internet.20 And of course, those communications will include thousands upon thousands of interactions with totally innocent people.21 Terrorists and drug-runners make calls to the dentist too when they need a root-canal. They hire cars via email from reputable rental companies. They send birthday greetings to grandma. The NSA will pick up all of these communications as well, including totally innocent exchanges with American citizens who have done nothing wrong. That’s why they need a twelve exabyte storage facility in Utah.
When a government official makes a justifiable request to surveil a target individual, any intercepted communication that involves an American citizen who is not otherwise under investigation—who is not being surveilled as an individual of primary interest because he committed a crime or because there is reason to suspect that he will—must be handled in such a way that that individual’s identity is “masked” or redacted within the intercepted material, so as to protect that U.S. citizen’s constitutional rights.22 There is, however, an exception.
If a senior government official is curious as to why this American’s name can be connected to a person deemed a threat to national security, they can request that the person’s name be revealed. This is called “unmasking” and should be invoked rarely and only if there is some valid national security justification for injuring that citizen’s Fourth Amendment rights. Having spoken to senior political appointees and intelligence professionals with multiple decades of government service, I was told that if you make more than a handful of unmasking requests in your entire time in government that is highly unusual. But not for President Obama and his team. To quote Dan Bongino, former member of the NYPD and former presidential service detailee with the U.S. Secret Service:
The Obama administration figures out that through unmasking, in other words wiretapping people, pretending they’re targeting foreigners, and then querying information in this [NSA] database, that they can get all the political opposition research in the world that they need against the Trump team.23
And the numbers are astounding. In the last year of the Obama administration, according to PBS, hardly a rabid rightwing source, more than 1,900 Americans’ identities were revealed based on these previously incredibly rare requests.24 In just one year.
One individual alone, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, made hundreds of unmasking requests in just twelve months, almost one per working day.25 And this by a person who has no formal position in the law enforcement or intelligence community. On what grounds does the head of our diplomatic mission to the UN need to reveal the identities of hundreds and hundreds of American citizens? This has nothing to do with the work of an ambassador or with representing American interests at the United Nations headquarters in New York. No, the reason is a political reason.
Spying directly upon members of the Trump campaign and the Trump family for political purposes during an election year is unjustifiable. But find a public event in New York where the Russian ambassador is in the same room with General Mike Flynn, or find a reception to honor the Chinese New Year that is attended by a Trump campaign adviser and the Chinese ambassador, and there you go. Target the diplomats, scoop up all the data, and then start unmasking your political opponents in the hope that you can find anything resembling dirt that Hillary Clinton and the DNC can use as opposition research to guarantee her victory in the election and so maintain the Left’s grip on the White House for another eight years.
But there was a snag. Not everyone is a disciple of Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals, and not everyone, even in Washington, agrees with the philosophy that the ends justify the means. One man in Washington took a principled stand, and if it weren’t for the director of the National Security Agency itself, we might have ended up living in a very different America. The hero of the hour was Admiral Mike Rogers.
Admiral Rogers realized that his NSA database was being queried to find information about American citizens at an unprecedented rate. He started to investigate who was doing the querying and what, if any, justification was being given to gather information from his systems, information that is meant to be used exclusively to subvert and derail the operations of terrorists and spies working for adversarial nations, not to spy on domestic political rivals of the president or the Democrat party. Admiral Rogers made his concerns known to the officials at the secret court that issues surveillance warrants against American citizens under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).26
Since the scandals of the Nixon years, if the DOJ or FBI wants to surveil an American on U.S. soil, a case has had to be made in front of a FISA court judge that requisite evidence ex
ists to presume the individual concerned is collaborating, or was associated, with an enemy nation or terrorist organization and that as such the target’s constitutional rights to privacy, and against unreasonable searches, can be temporarily suspended due to probable cause.27 Rogers saw a pattern that indicated that Americans were being targeted who had no connection to America’s enemies but who were simply conservatives who worked for or were associated with Hillary Clinton’s rival for the highest position in the land.28 And the situation turned out to be so egregious that after a preliminary investigation, the FISA Court issued a scathing report following the 2016 election, which included the shocking revelation that the ultra-classified NSA database of communications intercepts was being queried regularly by contractors working with the FBI, by people who weren’t even government employees and had no mandate or legal authority to spy on anyone, let alone illegally reveal the identities of innocent American nationals who just happened to have been caught up in the NSA’s electronic nets.29
But let’s get back to the original conspiracy.
The elections have occurred. The woman who everyone in the media and on the Left said would win was trounced in the Electoral College. Donald Trump will be president of the United States. Thanks to the peculiar system we have developed in our nation, however, the transition of power is a very slow one. In the United Kingdom, after an election, the old prime minister starts packing straight away, and the new head of government and his cabinet officials move into power within a matter of days. In our Republic, you may win in early November, but you don’t take up the reins of government for months—not until noon on January 20, when the new president takes his oath of office before the chief justice of the Supreme Court and the world.
But Admiral Rogers knew the law had been broken in a systematic conspiracy to politically target the president-elect. Before even more damage could be done during the frantic weeks while Obama’s minions were still operating the levers of government and running the most powerful intelligence apparatus in the world, Admiral Rogers felt duty-bound to tell the soon-to-be 45th president that he and his people had been illegally spied upon. So ten days after the election, without telling the outgoing President Obama, or his director of national intelligence, James Clapper, Admiral Rogers traveled unheralded to New York to visit President-elect Trump and inform him that he had been targeted by Obama and his team, who had made illegal use of the NSA surveillance database to unmask people affiliated with the Trump campaign.30
When the soon-to-be commander in chief heard how he, his family, and his team had been illegally surveilled for months, he immediately decided to leave the compromised Trump Tower and move operations to Bedminster, New Jersey.31 Later, President Trump went public with what he had learned, with his famous tweets about being spied upon, starting with “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”32 Eventually, after Team Trump’s evacuation of their New York headquarters, Obama found out that Admiral Rogers had revealed his administration’s illegal activities and took action by having his people attack Rogers and call for his removal over spurious accusations related to drone strikes.33 Rogers survived the obviously false charges. His British counterpart, however, was implicated in the Obama administration’s conspiracy against Trump.
The anodyne sounding Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, is the United Kingdom’s signals intelligence agency, the British intelligence community’s analog to the NSA. Over the last few years we have learned more and more about how John Brennan, Obama’s director of central intelligence, circumvented the U.S. Constitution and used allied nations to do his dirty work of spying on American citizens for him.34 So far, this international web includes Australia, Italy, and, most importantly, the United Kingdom.35
It is important to understand who John Brennan was and is. By his own admission, Brennan was a radical who voted for the Communist party candidate for president at the height of the Cold War, just four years before he interviewed to join the CIA and incredibly was allowed to join that agency. His career in intelligence was not an illustrious one. He tried to become a case officer but failed badly, ending up instead as a less than mediocre and embittered desk-jockey analyst, whose promotions—finally to acting interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center for a year—were largely a matter of seniority and political favor. After about twenty-five years at the CIA, he left to work in the private sector and cash in on his intelligence experience.36 Then Obama pulled this former Communist sympathizer out of obscurity and made him first his deputy national security adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and then director of the CIA, a position from where he would take revenge on the capable agents and operators whose ranks he was not fit to join, by completely reorganizing the agency and elevating analysts to positions where they could make operational decisions in a series of new functional centers he structurally imposed upon Langley.
When it became clear that Donald Trump was no longer a challenger just to be laughed at but a serious threat to Hillary Clinton’s election and Barack Obama’s “legacy,” Brennan became the key player in the illegal conspiracy to undermine and sabotage the Trump campaign and the Trump presidency.
Again, I cannot stress enough the fact that we are still at the beginning of finding out the depth and breadth of corruption encouraged by President Obama and executed by his cabinet members and his advisers, and that the fullest accountings to date are to be found in the investigative reporting by my friends named above, and in the key books already published on Obamagate: Dan Bongino’s Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump and Gregg Jarrett’s The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump and Andy McCarthy’s Ball of Collusion. But for the purposes of this book, here are the major additional pieces of basic information you need to know.
Soon after Admiral Rogers decided to fight the corruption of his political masters, strange things started to occur, most significant of all, the sudden resignation “for personal family reasons” of GCHQ Director Bob Hannigan—this after a leak to the press that GCHQ had forwarded electronic intercepts of Trump campaign officials to the Obama administration. Remember: when a foreign intelligence agency is spying on U.S. citizens, they’re not breaking our laws. And that’s how Brennan, Clapper, and their boss, Barack Obama managed to circumvent our Constitution and the laws against political espionage targeting American citizens once they had realized that Donald Trump’s candidacy for the highest position in the land wasn’t so funny and outlandish an idea anymore. But this is not the full extent of their perversion of our intelligence and law enforcement communities. And here we return to the incredible powers of the FISA court.
In a childish reference to a Rolling Stones lyric, presumably as an inside joke since candidate Trump liked to use the Stones’ song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” to end his rallies, the highest levels of the Obama Administration authorized Operation CrossFire Hurricane—a truly unprecedented exploitation of the combined counterintelligence powers of the FBI, CIA, and NSA aimed at the Trump campaign based on the accusation that the Russians had “colluded” with the Trump campaign to win the election. That accusation was ludicrous on its face, and, as we now know after three years of constant media hysteria and forty million dollars spent on the Mueller investigation and the publication of its report, there was never any evidence to back it up.
The outrageous “collusion” accusation was based upon a “dossier” of alleged compromising “intelligence” compiled by a former British MI-6 intelligence agent named Christopher Steele.37 Steele had excellent connections to the Kremlin and admitted to a visceral hatred of Donald Trump.38 This man was paid millions of dollars by Hillary Clinton’s lawyers and the DNC to provide a file of opposition research against Donald Trump.39 The final product turned out to be an utter fabrication built in large part upon disinformation provided to Steele by his
contacts in the Russian government. But that didn’t matter to key intelligence and law enforcement officials including John Brennan, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch, James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, Andrew McCabe, and Peter Strzok, among others, who acted as Obama’s praetorian guard.40 In flagrant disregard for the rule of law, regulations on abuse of power, and perhaps perjury, the fake “dossier” file was used to obtain multiple secret FISA warrants, warrants that would allow unfettered surveillance of all the people working for or related to Donald Trump thanks to something called the “two hop rule.” Here I will again quote former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino, as he explained Obama’s use of this rule:
Meaning, if I spy on you, and you’re a member of the Trump team, I can hop to everybody you emailed and then everybody they emailed. So basically all I need to do is get a FISA warrant on the guy cleaning the floors in Trump Tower, and I’ve got everyone. Because if he emailed his boss, and his boss emailed Don, Jr., I get everybody.41
And that’s exactly what they did.
Without any probable cause they obtained a secret warrant to spy on Carter Page, a minor figure advising the Trump campaign. Using information that was paid for by the Democrat party and the Hillary Clinton campaign, Obama’s Department of Justice and the FBI applied for a warrant to spy on a man who had not only committed no crime, but as a former naval officer and Annapolis grad, had in the past confidentially assisted the FBI in catching Russian spies in the United States—I repeat, catch them, not work for them!42
And they did all this while hiding the fact that the “intelligence” they were using to justify the illegal surveillance was in fact opposition research generated for political purposes, compiled by a foreign spy with a political agenda, and included disinformation provided by the Russian government. This is who Barack Obama and his team are. Hardened ideologues who had no compunction in using the most powerful tools of government anywhere in the Western world and conspiring with foreign agents to subvert our Constitution and our Republic. But they didn’t count on the will of the American people to take back their country.