This seems to be the way the world works now:
- President Trump: Tweets something crazy.
- Democrats: Look at that! Trump’s crazy! And also SuperMegaHitler controlled by Putin!
- National Review writer: Trump must stop tweeting immediately.
- World: Hey look, that totally crazy thing Trump tweeted happens to be the truth! What are the odds?
The latest example is that Obama National Security advisor Susan Rice ordered surveillance of President Trump’s transition team:
White House lawyers last month learned 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.”
The National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was conducting the review, according to two U.S. officials who spoke with Bloomberg View on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. 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 intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations — primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.
That’s from Eli Lake at Bloomberg, but the person who first broke the story was Mike Cernovich at Medium. He was able to break the story because folks working at Bloomberg and the New York Times revealed that both Lake and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times were sitting on the story to protect the Obama administration. “‘Real journalism’ is that Bloomberg had it and the New York Times had it but they wouldn’t run it because they don’t want to run any stories that would make Obama look bad or that will vindicate Trump. They only want to run stories that make Trump look bad so that’s why they sat on it.”
It seems that Rice ordered preparation of detailed spreadsheets “of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president”:
“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” [former U.S. Attorney Joseph] diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.
“The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”
Other official sources with direct knowledge and who requested anonymity confirmed to TheDCNF diGenova’s description of surveillance reports Rice ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election.
Also on Monday, Fox News and Bloomberg News, citing multiple sources reported that Rice had requested the intelligence information that was produced in a highly organized operation. Fox said the unmasked names of Trump aides were given to officials at the National Security Council (NSC), the Department of Defense, James Clapper, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan, Obama’s CIA Director.
Joining Rice in the alleged White House operations was her deputy Ben Rhodes, according to Fox.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit. Also Instapundit at Instapundit. “I’ll leave both up, because it’s that big a story.”)
So the Obama Administration was using the National Security state to illegally gather information on Trump and his associated a year before the election. A single break-in by Nixon’s bumbling plumbers are pathetically small potatoes by comparison.
What are the odds that Rice just out of the blue decided to start gathering surveillance information on Trump and his associates rather than being told to by Obama?
None of this should come as any surprise, since the Obama Administration has been caught conducting illegal domestic surveillance, including targeting Fox News reporter James Rosen, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Associated Press, to say nothing of their hacking Sharyl Attkisson’s computer.
And add the previously revealed Trump wiretapping as the cherry on top of the “using the national security apparatus to surveil domestic political enemies” cake.
Given all this, why on earth would President Trump stop tweeting? His hit rate seems higher than the Oracle at Delphi…