Posts Tagged ‘Richard M. Nixon’

More Susan Rice Domestic Surveillance Fallout

Thursday, April 6th, 2017

The fallout continues from the Susan Rice/Obama Administration domestic surveillance “unmasking” scandal:

  • The Trump campaign wasn’t the Obama Administration’s first use of America’s National Security intelligence gathering against domestic targets. They first used them against supporters of Israel and opponents of Obama’s Iran deal:

    “At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents,” says a pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the day-to-day fight over the Iran Deal. “The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans engaged in perfectly legitimate political activism—activism, due to the nature of the issue, that naturally involved conversations with foreigners. We began to notice the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our own paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.”

    This is what systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection for domestic political purposes looks like: Intelligence collected on Americans, lawmakers, and figures in the pro-Israel community was fed back to the Obama White House as part of its political operations. The administration got the drop on its opponents by using classified information, which it then used to draw up its own game plan to block and freeze those on the other side. And—with the help of certain journalists whose stories (and thus careers) depend on high-level access—terrorize them.

    Two inquiries now underway on Capitol Hill, conducted by the Senate intelligence committee and the House intelligence committee, may discover the extent to which Obama administration officials unmasked the identities of Trump team members caught in foreign-intelligence intercepts. What we know so far is that Obama administration officials unmasked the identity of one Trump team member, Michael Flynn, and leaked his name to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius.

    “According to a senior U.S. government official,” Ignatius wrote in his Jan. 12 column, “Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking. What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions?”

    Nothing, the Times and the Post later reported. But exposing Flynn’s name in the intercept for political purposes was an abuse of the national-security apparatus, and leaking it to the press is a crime.

    This is familiar territory. In spying on the representatives of the American people and members of the pro-Israel community, the Obama administration learned how far it could go in manipulating the foreign-intelligence surveillance apparatus for its own domestic political advantage. In both instances, the ostensible targets—Israel and Russia—were simply instruments used to go after the real targets at home.

    In order to spy on U.S. congressmen before the Iran Deal vote, the Obama administration exploited a loophole, which is described in the original Journal article. The U.S. intelligence community is supposed to keep tabs on foreign officials, even those representing allies. Hence, everyone in Washington knows that Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer is under surveillance. But it’s different for his American interlocutors, especially U.S. lawmakers, whose identities are, according to NSA protocol, supposed to be, at the very least, redacted. But the standard for collecting and disseminating “intercepted communications involving U.S. lawmakers” is much less strict if it is swept up through “foreign-foreign” intercepts, for instance between a foreign ambassador and his capital. Washington, i.e. the seat of the American government, is where foreign ambassadors are supposed to meet with American officials. The Obama administration turned an ancient diplomatic convention inside out—foreign ambassadors were so dangerous that meeting them signaled betrayal of your own country.

    During the long and contentious lead-up to the Iran Deal the Israeli ambassador was regularly briefing senior officials in Jerusalem, including the prime minister, about the situation, including his meetings with American lawmakers and Jewish community leaders. The Obama administration would be less interested in what the Israelis were doing than in the actions of those who actually had the ability to block the deal—namely, Senate and House members. The administration then fed this information to members of the press, who were happy to relay thinly veiled anti-Semitic conceits by accusing deal opponents of dual loyalty and being in the pay of foreign interests.

    Snip.

    The reason the prior abuse of the foreign-intelligence surveillance apparatus is clear only now is because the Russia campaign has illuminated it. As The New York Timesreported last month, the administration distributed the intelligence gathered on the Trump transition team widely throughout government agencies, after it had changed the rules on distributing intercepted communications. The point of distributing the information so widely was to “preserve it,” the administration and its friends in the press explained—“preserve” being a euphemism for “leak.” The Obama team seems not to have understood that in proliferating that material they have exposed themselves to risk, by creating a potential criminal trail that may expose systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • The question of which (if any) laws the Obama Administration broke is secondary to the bigger question of abuse of power:

    Abuses of power are offenses against the public trust. They often overlap with a criminal offense, but they are not the same thing as a criminal offense. For example, a politician who accepts money in exchange for political favors commits both the crime of bribery and an impeachable offense of corruption. The jurors in the bribery case need not find that the politician breached his public trust; they need only find an intentional quid pro quo — payoff in exchange for favor. By contrast, the breach of public trust is central to the impeachment case: To remove the pol from office, there would be no need to prove the legal elements of a criminal bribery charge beyond a reasonable doubt, but it would have to be demonstrated that the politician is unfit for office. If it is a petty bribe, a prosecutor might ignore it, but the public should want to throw the bum out.

    This is why a “high crime and misdemeanor” — the constitutional standard for impeachment — need not be an indictable criminal offense. It may be a chargeable crime, but it need not be one.

    A famous example (though one not much remarked on during the last several years) is the second article of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon. It alleged (my italics):

    Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purpose[s] of these agencies.

    The impeachment allegation went on to describe how Nixon had, among other things, directed the FBI, CIA, and IRS to investigate innocent Americans for reasons unrelated to national security or law enforcement. For the most part, these directives were not violations of penal statutes. But they were, individually and collectively, heinous abuses of presidential power warranting impeachment.

    If the new reporting is to be believed, Rice orchestrated the unmasking of communications involving the Democrats’ political rivals — the Trump campaign. Her current stress on the lawfulness of the intelligence collection is a straw man. No credible commentator is claiming (based on what we currently know) that the intelligence-collection activities of the FBI, CIA, and NSA were illegal. As I explained yesterday in my aforementioned column, the surveillance and collection operations were undertaken pursuant to statute (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) as well as to the president’s constitutional authority to collect foreign intelligence (the exercise of which authority is laid out in a longstanding executive order, EO 12,333).

  • Susan Rice is a crummy liar.
  • “Funny how no ‘unmasking’ was done for the Hillary campaign:”

    CNN and a lot of the media aren’t covering the Rice story at all, but when the Associated Press, the New York Times, and others report it, many say the Trump administration is trying to divert attention from the Trump-Russia collusion story. The media present the Trump-Russia collusion story as true even though there is absolutely nothing yet to show that. They present the claim that Trump was spied on as a false story even though we have 100% proof that Trump people were listened to and that the information was leaked to the press.

    Anyone who believes that Trump wasn’t specifically targeted for political reasons probably still believes that the Benghazi killings were caused by a video, that Obama had no idea the IRS was targeting political opponents, that Obama had no idea Hillary was violating the law by using a non-secure server until three years after she left, that Obama had no idea his administration was gun-running to Mexico, and that Hillary and her aides had no intent to break the law.

    The media and Democrats should be absolutely ashamed that they haven’t had any concern about facts for a long time. If there is any collusion, it is between the media and Democrats to destroy Trump, no matter what the facts are.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Why is mainstream media trying to cover up the Susan Rice story?”

    The New York Times, for example, didn’t feature the Rice story at all on Monday. And in the piece it did publish buried on page A16 that was hilariously titled, “Trump Tries to Deflect Russia Scrutiny, Citing ‘Crooked Scheme’ by Obama,” the paper of record shrugged off the controversy because the story came from “conservative news media outlets.”

    You know, “conservative” like the impossibly down-the-middle Eli Lake of Bloomberg View or via an objective reporter like Fox’s Adam Housley.

    The Washington Post also failed to feature the story in any capacity either, instead relegating it to a blog post that referred to the Rice story as a “fake scandal.” Democracy dies in darkness, as they say.

    “Fake scandal” was also the way CNN anchor Chris Cuomo described the story to viewers of “New Day” on Tuesday.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.) Of course, to ask the question is to answer it:

  • “The media only has an interest in intrigue when it involves Republicans.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • The House Intelligence Panel wants Susan Rice to testify.
  • Scott Adams: “We don’t know all the facts yet, but we do know that Trump’s claim of being “wiretapped” by Obama is starting to look dangerously close to something similar to the truth. CNN did not see that coming, and it would be awkward to walk-back all of their mocking. So they just sort of ignored it.”
  • DNC Data Breach: Less Security Concern, More Clinton Dirty Tricks

    Friday, December 18th, 2015

    I included the DNC data breach story in my LinkSwarm roundup, but the more I look at it, the less the story seems like “data breach by Bernie Sanders team” and more like “dirty tricks by Hillary Clinton’s team.”

    Here’s a description by Slashdot poster Chris Johnson that states the case:

    NGP-VAN, the company that stores this data, which is run by an old Clinton hand who worked for them in 1992, the company paid $34,000 by Ready For Hillary, was repeatedly dropping their firewall between the two major Dem campaigns, Clinton and Sanders.

    A guy who’s now fired from the Sanders team observed this. They complained once and were given assurances by the company that it was a mistake and wouldn’t happen again. Then it happened again. The guy decided to gauge how deeply the Clinton campaign was able to read into the Sanders campaign, by experimenting to see how much of the Clinton data he could get. That’s a bad call but by information security standards it’s not unthinkable: it’d be called a white hat intrusion, seeing how much of the firewall was down by probing the other side and assuming your own data was revealed exactly the same way. It does matter, but you still have to fire the guy.

    One thing we can be sure of is, anything open to ‘stealing’ on the Clinton side was just as open on the Sanders side, literally. It’s the same system and the same firewall, and if the firewall keeps mysteriously going down for no good reason you have to wonder what’s up and more relevantly what’s being made available to those on the other side of the firewall, which might explain why the firewall’s going down like that.

    The Sanders people did NOT throw a fit the first time this happened. But this time, the Sanders guy got caught crossing the nonexistent firewall. We have no information at all on whether anybody from the Clinton side was doing the same thing. During that time there WAS NO firewall and the guy wasn’t hacking, he was browsing, as anybody on either side could have done during those windows.

    I think that’s accurate so far. The behavior of the firewall is important, whether or not it’s suspicious as a planned exploit of the Sanders data run by Clinton people who are at the DNC and at NGP-VAN.

    In response to the Sanders guy browsing over and seeing data (how do they know? Because HE TOLD THEM. The Sanders team were the ones reporting this, that’s part of the story), the DNC suspended access by the Sanders campaign to THEIR OWN DATA at a crucial time. In order to get access back, at least as of this morning, the requirement is for the Sanders campaign to prove it has destroyed all data that it didn’t necessarily even download (remember, Sanders guy claims he was exploring the Clinton system because it would mirror the vulnerability of the Sanders system, and he’s not IN the Clinton system to go and browse the Sanders side to see how much is revealed, but he was IN the Sanders side and could look at the Clinton side and reasonably conclude that his own side was equally compromised)

    And social media is blowing the hell up, not unreasonably, because it’s a goddamn hatchet job combined with a kneecapping to yank access by the Bernie campaign to its OWN DATA because a guy from the Bernie campaign passively browsed through a firewall he didn’t himself disable, a firewall run by a company controlled by Clinton partisans which had been going down already for reasons unknown.

    This seems consistent with the facts, consistent with the DNC being “all in” on the Hillary coronation, and consistent with the Sanders campaign suing the DNC for access to their own freaking data.

    Says the Sanders campaign:

    by their action, the leadership of the Democratic National Committee is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign. This is unacceptable. Individual leaders of the DNC can support Hillary Clinton in any way they want, but they are not going to sabotage our campaign – one of the strongest grassroots campaigns in modern history.

    We are announcing today that if the DNC continues to hold our data hostage, and continues to try to attack the heart and soul of our campaign, we will be in federal court this afternoon seeking an immediate injunction.

    What is required here is a full and independent audit of the DNC’s handling of this data and its security from the beginning of this campaign to the present, including the incident in October that we alerted them to.

    The incident is also consistent with Hillary’s own repeated Nixonian dishonesty. It’s not enough that she has the weakest slate of primary challengers for a non-incumbent since Nelson Rockefeller decided to bow out and let Nixon have the GOP nomination in 1960. Hillary is so used to winning through lies and dirty tricks she does it even when she doesn’t need to. It’s simply who she is.

    LinkSwarm for June 18, 2014

    Wednesday, June 18th, 2014

    There’s so much news going on in the world that it’s hard to sit down and focus on one story to get a single blog post out of it when there’s another huge story coming down the pike. Iraq, Ukraine, the VA Scandal, the dog eating Lois Lerner’s emails (“Barack Obama has brought us Jimmy Carter’s economy and Richard Nixon’s excuses”); too damn much going on to focus on one thing. So here’s a LinkSwarm instead:

  • Barack Obama is not interested in war, but war is interested in Obama.
  • Obama golfs while the world burns. “Oh Lord, I was born a golfing man!/I get in a round whenever I can…”
  • Obama Administration admits that ObamaCare will cost people more for health care, even with the subsidies.
  • Russia cuts off natural gas supplies to Ukraine.
  • Russian tanks appear in eastern Ukraine.
  • Russia’s top anti-corruption cop decides to take up flying.
  • One reason the IRS went after the Tea Party: Chuck Schumer asked them to.
  • “The Obama administration has reached levels of hitherto unknown incompetence.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • A majority of Americans do not believe that Obama is trustworthy. You don’t say.
  • Another day, another 48 people dead at the hands of Jihadists in Kenya. There are days when 48 people killed at a hotel would top the news…
  • The Obama Administration also released 12 Jihadists in Afghanistan.
  • Won’t someone please think about poor, impoverished Hillary Clinton?
  • The Obama Administration’s intentionally lax border control enforcement is letting letting Mexican gang members waltz into the country.
  • “Thousands of young, poor would-be immigrants—90,000 this year alone—have swarmed across the border, the logical fruition of the entire cynical approach of the Obama administration toward illegal immigration.”
  • Bill Gates wants to propagandize you into accepting illegal alien amnesty. Actually, what Gates and his high tech baron compatriots really want is more H1-B visas, but since that doesn’t help the Democratic Party as much as illegal alien amnesty, it gets rolled into the giant “comprehensive immigration reform” ball.
  • Should Obama have erased the IRS emails Nixon have erased the tapes?
  • Turning point in the Brat campaign: crashing a staged event to prove Cantor was lying about amnesty.
  • “Prostitutes more than double their earnings by moonlighting as currency traders” in Venezuela.
  • Argentina runs out of rope.
  • European cab drivers protest Uber by halting traffic. Result? Uber sees 850% increase in signups.
  • I’m going to boil this down to the essentials: Never open an account with a Georgia bank.
  • But maybe they need to seize your money to pay for all that food stamp fraud.
  • Does anyone really think West Virginia Democratic Senate candidate Natalie Tennant is any more “pro-coal” or “pro-gun” than Bart Stupak was “pro-life”?
  • Another year, another lefty writer caught plagiarizing the work of others. And not just any lefty writer, but a Pulitzer Prize winner to boot…
  • Chelsea Clinton got paid $600,000 by MSNBC. That worked out to $26,724 for each minute she was on the air. In other news, your betters in the overclass really don’t care what you think of the financial compensation one member of the class gives to another…
  • Millions in “urban redevelopment” money in Democratic-controlled Philadelphia ends up in certain people’s pockets with almost nothing to show for it. Try to contain your shock. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • South Carolina university professors: “How dare you make us teach the Constitution?”
  • Violence and subway strike in advance of Brazil’s World Cup.
  • New guidelines for ignoring due process in accusations of college campus sexual assault = Lawsuitapalooza!
  • Erick Erickson calls out Ted Cruz for not endorsing more conservatives.
  • Dwight does some gun geeking for you Smith & Wesson fans.
  • Dear anyone who’s ever self-published their own book: you’re a fascist Ayn Rand supporter, using your evil individualism to bypass the holy gatekeepers of traditional publishing.
  • And if you think that’s the stupidest left-wing essay you’ll read today, think again.
  • There was enough voter fraud in a Weslaco City Commissioner Race for the judge to order a new election. “Some of the disallowed ballots were cast by voters claiming Rivera’s childhood home as their address.” Note: Weslaco is down in the valley right next to Donna, Texas, which had its own voting scandal.
  • Doggies! (Patriotic doggies, no less.) (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “This harlot-sized ensemble will make you the envy of your trampish posse on your fraudulent wedding day.”
  • The Obama/Nixon Moment

    Tuesday, May 14th, 2013

    I was about 10 hours ahead of the curve:

    George Will:

    The burglary occurred in 1972, the climax came in 1974, but40 years ago this week — May 17, 1973 — the Senate Watergate hearings began exploring the nature of Richard Nixon’s administration. Now the nature of Barack Obama’s administration is being clarified as revelations about IRS targeting of conservative groups merge with myriad Benghazi mendacities.

    Snip.

    Jay Carney, whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his employers say, calls the IRS’s behavior “inappropriate.” No, using the salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes is a criminal offense.

    The IRS was using the information to build an enemies list.

    In fact, the Obama Administration’s use of the IRS to harass political enemies, and the threat to do so, has been long-running and pervasive.

    The Boston Herald also breaks out the N Word (Nixon):

    President Obama’s second-term campaign slogan was “Forward,” but instead we’ve got cover-ups, congressional investigations and the government persecution of political opponents and reporters.

    That sounds like “backward” to me. All the way to, say, 1972.

    Who would have guessed that just a few months into his second term, President Obama would be compared to Tricky Dick. And by a liberal Massachusetts Democrat — U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano.

    Republicans could not even have scripted this one. The agency most hated by voters, the Internal Revenue Service, admits to going on a Nixonian witch hunt against Tea Party and conservative groups during the re-election campaign.

    This is a story even the most partisan Massachusetts liberal cannot defend. It’s so bad that even Ed Markey is calling for heads to roll.

    The man behind The Pentagon Papers thinks that Obama is worse than Nixon ever was.

    The multiple scandals are so obvious that even the MSM is waking up. Jay Carney has spent six months peeing on reporters’ legs and calling it rain. Reporters have finally started waking up. “Hey, wait a minute! I don’t think rain is usually this warm!”

    And here’s a nice image from Buzzfeed:

    Obama Is Not A Crook!

    Monday, May 13th, 2013

    Or so he would have us believe. But the Obama Administration has been acting pretty Nixonian as of late.

    First there’s how the White House lied about Benghazi, and how the CIA’s original talking points were altered to support the lie. (Exactly how those edits in talking points evolved can be found here.) And they’re still lying.

    Then there’s the IRS scandal. Not only was the IRS targeting and auditing Tea Party groups, there were asking for a ridiculous amount of personal information. Like the names of family members and a list of all the members of the news media the group has ever interacted with. Then they released some completed comments to ProPublica before they had been approved, i.e., they weren’t public documents yet.

    And here’s the IRS crew responsible.

    Then there’s that whole getting all AP telephone records for two months thing.

    Time even breaks out the Kleins in an attempt to poo-poo the very idea of Obama’s resemblance to Tricky Dick.

    Indeed, Obama seems to be following the Nixonian blueprint far more effectively than Nixon ever could.

    Of course, there is one big difference between Obama and Nixon…