You're reduced to arguing semantics. I am happy to have an independent investigation concerning the surveillance of Trump and his associates, who authorized it, who changed the rules concerning access to raw NSA intercepts(which happened as Obama was going out the door and let a vast number of Obama drones who had buried into the intell agencies have access to them), and how the supposed foreign targets were selected,ie were they pretexts for targeting Trump. It is unacceptable that after several months, we appear to be no closer to determining who illegally leaked Trump related intercepts. The FBI will not even acknowledge that they are investigating it. They have time to chase down Tom Brady's jersey and investigate a guy for sending a tweet, but they can't determine who did this leaking? Unacceptable and reason for a leadership change.
Are you sitting down? Good. Because I more or less agree with you. Except I don't agree we are arguing semantics. There are no other semantics ithat cn be invoked. Trumps tweets was clear. It is clear what trump meant. That's the beauty of tweets; short, an to the point! Trump meant that Obama ordered a government agency to spy on him. Right? He was accusing Obama of a felony, assuming Obama ordered him to be "spied on", without going through the proper legal channels. Most sane people are automatically going to think that is highly unlikely. I am one of those. Obama is now a private citizen. Does he have legal recourse against Trump? Maybe, once Trump is out of office. I doubt he would get involved. Why would he? The subject tweet came from a pathological liar. Who in their right mind would believe it, even if it were true? Where I agree with you fully is that we need an independent investigation. Independent of the White House and the Justice Department and either political party. And then I would like to know more about your assertion that the rules were changed "as Obama was going out the door." I want to know every thing that you want to know about this. I also want to know what is your source for this information/ And please don't tell me it is alex jones, or Breitbart, or you tube. We both want to know the same things. We both want answers from reliable sources.
I think we all understand that you cannot hold Trump to the literal accuracy you would expect from say, a Supreme Court justice. If any of his people were intercepted, incidentally or otherwise, and their identities were improperly unmasked and leaked, Trump will be seen as correct. Whether Obama personally ordered it or it came from his CIA chief or whoever, reasonable people are not going to care. It would be relevant in a criminal prosecution, but in terms of Obama's reputation, not so much. He will be seen as an unprincipled thug who weaponized the intell agencies against domestic opponents.
Jem is right on the money on this. Also, I would just note that according to the thesaurus at dictionary.com, spy is a synonym for wiretap. Was trump spied on? And if anyone in the Obama administration ordered these things be done, how could that not be reasonably associated with 'obama did it'? Just remember all the things that happened during the Bush admin that were referred to as 'Bush did it'. That's the way it works.
Ex-Asst FBI Director: 'Fifth Column Marching Strong' Against Trump A former assistant FBI director during the President Bill Clinton administration lashed out on the felonious intelligence community leaks, saying it is "disgusting" and "disgraceful" a "fifth column" is embedded working against President Donald Trump. "From time to time there's been leaks, but nothing like today," James Kallstrom told Sunday's "The Cats Roundtable" on 970 AM-N.Y. "We have a fifth column that's marching strong against our president, marching strong against our culture and the American way. "And it is just disgusting." Kallstrom said the surveillance of President Trump's campaign – whether it was lawful or not – should have been "shut down" when it incidentally captured American citizens, but "political appointments at high levels" have worked to discredit President Trump. "I hope there is an investigation, and I hope we get to the bottom of it," Kallstrom told host John Catsimatidis. "How many people had that information? Where was it disseminated? Who made the decision to release the names of American citizens? "We need to get to the bottom of it and get to the bottom of it quickly. And that's not a political thing. It doesn't matter what party you're from. This is about America and the rule of law." Kallstrom said the political embeds extend back to the Clinton administration. "The Clinton people don't leave – they don't leave until they're actually physically forced out of the building," he said. "For this group here, that's part of this fifth column, [you] have to blast them out with dynamite. They're going to do everything humanly possible to make the Donald Trump administration very difficult." "It's just outrageous," he added. "Obama handed Trump a basketful of hand grenades with the pins pulled." Kallstrom added even FBI Director James Comey "has been very very inconsistent on things he has said publicly and things he refuses to talk about." "The American people deserve more than that. . . . It's absolute lunacy. "The lying is totally out of control, we have to rein this back in." http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/james-kall/2017/03/26/id/780812/
I deleted my post... But, the point is if the NSA is recording everything... but only conversations by Trump and his team are unmasked and disseminated... for all intents and purposes that is a tap. And that during the last few days of his administration Obama made a new order saying those conversation could be widely shared... That my friends... is criminal coverup type activity. That he is out of the country... well we all know flight is considered evidence of guilt.
So let me break this down for the lefties... Piezoe admits the NSA gets everything. See the article below. The NSA taps the trunk lines. I must repeat this... what the NSA does is wiretap. a. Hence by Piezoe's own arguments Trump was correct stated he was tapped. (as we all are... and its a damn shame these leakers let the world know it. ) b. NSA is part of the executive branch. Therefore it works for Obama. Therefore Obama tapped Trump. But, we don't need to pin the NSA illegal taps on Obama. I will pin... the unmasking and dissemination on Obama. When Obama administration took the tapped info and chose to let trump and his teams conversation out... that is when the crimes happened. So Trump was 100 percent correct. c. And it looks like Obama actions manifest guilt. a. he has fled the country and flight is judged to be evidence of guilt frequently admissible in court. b. see the article below for proof that Obama's act expanding e.o. 12333 should be considered part of a criminal type coverup. Obama Opens NSA’s Vast Trove of Warrantless Data to Entire Intelligence Community, Just in Time for Trump WITH ONLY DAYS until Donald Trump takes office, the Obama administration on Thursday announced new rules that will let the NSA share vast amounts of private data gathered without warrant, court orders or congressional authorization with 16 other agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security. The new rules allow employees doing intelligence work for those agencies to sift through raw data collected under a broad, Reagan-era executive order that gives the NSA virtually unlimited authority to intercept communications abroad. Previously, NSA analysts would filter out information they deemed irrelevant and mask the names of innocent Americans before passing it along. The change was in the works long before there was any expectation that someone like Trump might become president. The last-minute adoption of the procedures is one of many examples of the Obama administration making new executive powers established by the Bush administration permanent, on the assumption that the executive branch could be trusted to police itself. Executive Order 12333, often referred to as “twelve triple-three,” has attracted less debate than congressional wiretapping laws, but serves as authorization for the NSA’s most massive surveillance programs — far more than the NSA’s other programs combined. Under 12333, the NSA taps phone and internet backbones throughout the world, records the phone calls of entire countries, vacuums up traffic from Google and Yahoo’s data centers overseas, and more. In 2014, The Intercept revealed that the NSA uses 12333 as a legal basis for an internal NSA search engine that spans more than 850 billion phone and internet records and contains the unfiltered private information of millions of Americans. In 2014, a former state department official described NSA surveillance under 12333 as a “universe of collection and storage” beyond what Congress has authorized. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who gave reporters documents that revealed the breadth of the 12333 surveillance, tweeted this: Follow Edward Snowden ✔@Snowden As he hands the White House to Trump, Obama just unchained NSA from basic limits on passing raw intercepts to others https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/nsa-gets-more-latitude-to-share-intercepted-communications.html … 8:54 AM - 12 Jan 2017 N.S.A. Gets More Latitude to Share Intercepted Communications New rules relax longstanding limits on what the National Security Agency may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations. nytimes.com 3,3833,383 Retweets 2,7502,750 likes
To be quite blunt, if you are going to continue to believe in Trump like this no matter what he says or does, you deserve the likely negatives coming down the pipe under his leadership. Your obsession with "lefties" isn't going to better your life either. Perhaps you need to consult all the happy investors in Trump Tower in Toronto, and see how it worked out for them. It matters not how well Trump made out in the project, because his lawyers may shield him from civil lawsuits that have started up. What matters is the impact on their brush with Trump had on their lives. The red flags on Trump are quite glaring. The obsession with blaming Obama still is pretty silly, he's not in power anymore and George W. Bush did far worse to your nation. Focus on what Trump and the Republicans are doing now, they have the power to do whatever they want and the mandate from voters like you to do so. Nothing to stop them really beyond national debt levels and you can pass that burden onto your children or their children. I am glad I live in Canada and my only direct connections to the US are some in laws and my daughter works remotely for a Silicon Valley firm ( but chooses not to live in the US ). It's going to get messy under Trump, I'm not sure Americans will take it well, and I have no idea what the long term will look like. I suspect the US, like Canada in the 1980's, has the ingenuity and ability to work through their issues and fix daunting short term economic problems.
My friend, were you awake last week. The head of the senate intel committee said he saw basically exactly that: that Obama ordered and had Trump spied on directly, and was reading the transcripts first-hand. So lets see where this goes. The entire media and Government apparatus is against Trump. Has been for the start. For standard GOP types to come out and hang their hat and career on Trumps tweet, the guy who heads the senate intel select committee for fucks sake. what would he know right. Anyway. Open your eyes. Stop being so obtuse.
The head of the senate intel committee used to work for Trump,has not produced this evidence and soon might be off that committee Russia probe in turmoil as top Dem calls for Nunes’ recusal Michael Isikoff Chief Investigative Correspondent Yahoo NewsMarch 27, 2017 The House intelligence committee investigation into Russian interference in last year’s election was thrown into new turmoil Monday night, after the ranking Democrat on the panel called on the Republican chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., to “recuse himself from any further involvement.” The call by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., came after Nunes acknowledged he had gone to the White House grounds to receive classified information from an unidentified source about U.S. intelligence community surveillance that, he says, had swept up conversations involving Trump transition officials. That information — which Trump has claimed partially vindicates his tweets charging that former President Barack Obama had “wiretapped” him — was never shared with others on the panel, Democrats charge. Schiff said his call for Nunes to step aside was not made “lightly,” because the two have worked well together for years. “But in much the same way that the attorney general was forced to recuse himself from the Russia investigation after failing to inform the Senate of his meetings with Russian officials, I believe the public cannot have the necessary confidence that matters involving the president’s campaign or transition team can be objectively investigated or overseen by the chairman,” Schiff said in his statement. The Schiff statement came as panel staffers speculated on the possible identity of Nunes’ White House source, focusing on Michael Ellis, a lawyer who worked for Nunes on the intelligence panel and who was recently hired to work on national security matters at the White House counsel’s office. A White House official and spokesman for Nunes declined to comment on whether Ellis was involved in providing information to Nunes, as did a spokesman for Schiff. White House press secretary Sean Spicer insisted that White House officials were not aware of Nunes’ secret trip to meet his source and referred all questions to Nunes’ office. Democrats have been furious that Nunes has yet to describe precisely the classified intelligence he has seen. Nor has he shared any documents with others on the House intelligence panel. Nunes, for his part, defended his previously undisclosed trip to the White House grounds, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he had to view the classified documents in an executive branch location because the intelligence community had not yet provided them to Congress. “The Congress has not been given this information, these documents, and that’s the problem,” Nunes said. “This is executive branch.” Last week, Nunes announced the postponement of a public hearing scheduled for Tuesday at which former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had been due to testify. Instead, Nunes said, FBI Director James Comey and NSA director Mike Rogers would be called back in closed session to explain the new material that he says shows Trump transition officials, and possibly even the president himself, were captured during U.S. surveillance of foreign targets. But late Monday, the committee confirmed that that session too had been postponed, and will be rescheduled. Comey and Rogers were said to be unavailable.