The walls close in on Team Obama

[Joe Cooper]

It goes without saying that conservatives and their Sean Hannity media
megaphones hated Barack Obama with a passion, and now realize that his
administration facilitated and orchestrated a smear attack on the GOP
candidate for President.

For instance, the Daily Caller was all over the case yesterday with even
more inflammatory detail from a former U.S. Attorney and two White House
National Security Council (NSC) veterans:

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice
ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal
phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for
president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova.

“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,”
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.”

Col. (Ret.) James Waurishuk, an NSC veteran and former deputy director
for intelligence at the U.S. Central Command, told the Daily Caller News
Foundation’s (DCNF) that many hands had to be involved throughout the
Obama administration to launch such a political spying program.

“We’re looking at a potential constitutional crisis from the standpoint
that we used an extremely strong capability that’s supposed to be used to
safeguard and protect the country,” he said. “And we used it for
political purposes by a sitting president. That takes on a new
precedent.”

Michael Doran, former NSC senior director, told the DCNF Monday that
“somebody blew a hole in the wall between national security secrets and
partisan politics.” This “was a stream of information that was supposed
to be hermetically sealed from politics and the Obama administration
found a way to blow a hole in that wall,” he said.

“That’s a felony,” he told the DCNF. “And you can get 10 years for that.
It is a tremendous abuse of the system. We’re not supposed to be
monitoring American citizens. Bigger than the crime, is the breach of
public trust.”

Senator Rand Paul pointed the finger at Susan Rice. And now that Obama’s
fingerprints are all over the Deep State’s 2016 election intrusions,
there is an opening for junior GOP legislators to follow Senator Paul’s
brilliant lead.

In pouncing on the Susan Rice smoking gun Rand has managed to meld a
partisan attack on Team Obama with a spirited and cogent defense of
constitutional liberties under the 4th Amendment; and to expose the Deep
State’s frightening potential for abuse of power.

At the moment, the pro-establishment spinners and their boosters in the
mainstream editorial pages are trying desperately to distract from the
case they can no longer deny.

That is to say, yes, Susan Rice — and probably CIA Director Brennan and
others — did “unmask” the names of Trump associates. But it was all done,
they maintain, in the pursuit of their duties to acquire “foreign
intelligence information” and was in no way improper.

Likewise, they are loudly insisting that the Deep State surveillance
apparatus was just going about its ordinary business of monitoring nasty
foreigners when Trump associates — or even the Donald himself — became an
inadvertent victim of “incidental” surveillance. So there is nothing
sinister about that, either.

It’s not gonna wash…

There can be little doubt that the whole Russian hacking narrative was
invented by the Deep State, and then massaged and leaked by top Obama
officials including Rice, Brennan and numerous others for one purpose
alone that had nothing to do with national security.

That is, to prevent the election of an impetuous, strong-willed anti-
globalist that the establishment deeply disapproved and then to re-
litigate the election once the unthinkable happened on November 8th.

So not only is the whole hacking story essentially a glorified piece of
opposition research peddled by the DNC and its affiliates, whatever
“forensic evidence” that may exist was undoubtedly manufactured by the
Deep State itself.

That’s right. Owing to the latest Wikileaks disclosures of March 2017 via
a trove of leaked CIA documents it calls “Vault 7,” it now appears that
all of the other dubious intelligence community’s claims and
“assessments” about Russian hacking have been ash-canned.

That is, Vault 7 suggests the CIA has the ability to manufacture and
deposit electronic trails to “misdirect attribution” by leaving false
cyber fingerprints.

Using a library of foreign malware and hacking tools, the CIA can plant
Russian, Chinese, Iranian or other hackers’ fingerprints to make the
hackers appear to be from one of those countries — even as they do the
job from the comfort of their offices in Langley, VA.

Needless to say, that explains how the alleged Russian hackers could be
so “clumsy” as to leave obvious and damning fingerprints on their work.

So it is probable that the Russians were “clumsy” because they weren’t
actually “Russians”. They were undoubtedly CIA operatives from the Center
for Cyber Intelligence.

But every single dirty deed of this illicit campaign will come out
because the Deep State is not a monolith; it’s still populated with
whistleblowers and operators with a score to settle.

I actually have some authoritative experience on this matter.

As an aide to a top House GOP leader back in the day, I had an insider’s
bird’s-eye view of the Watergate drama between early 1973 and August 1974
when Nixon famously boarded the helicopter and bugged out of town with a
pardon soon thereafter. And there was virtually nothing that didn’t come
out once people started covering their backsides and settling scores.

If the Donald has the courage of his convictions, he will authorize the
Department of Justice (DOJ) to unleash one or more ambitious U.S.
Attorneys against Susan Rice, Brennan and others. Owing to their massive
leaking campaign from the illicit Trump surveillance operation, they are
all surely felons.

But I also expect that the dueling narratives about the election meddling
of “Vlad versus Barry” will expose the soft underbelly of the Deep State
and the toxic anti-constitutional essence of its operations.

I am speaking of NSA’s bulk collection of all the email, voice and data
bits which pass through the internet and communications arteries of the
nation.

Here’s the thing. The most pressing danger the nation faces arises from a
few thousand barbarous jihadis bumping around the rubble-strewn cities
and villages of the middle east that Imperial Washington has destroyed.
But even this remnant no longer uses cell-phones or any other digital
devices.

If they need to be tracked, it can be done the old-fashioned way with
greenbacks on the barrel. Human intelligence (HUMINT) wouldn’t cost even
1% of the $75 billion now spent on the intelligence agencies annually,
and would give the American constitution and our process of democratic
self-government another lease on life.

In the meanwhile, the coming war of the two election hacking narratives
–Vlad v. Barry — will absolutely dominate the Imperial City.

That beltway brawl will result in absolute paralysis and dysfunction in
Washington soon — if it has not arrived already.

And so nothing constructive will happen on the Trump Stimulus, and a
continuous Fiscal Bloodbath around continuing resolutions and debt
ceiling increases will become the order of the day.

So, as I keep saying, get out of the casino. Now!

Regards,

David Stockman

Source: http://bit.ly/2oaCPpX

--
"You will never understand today's rage on the left, or its real effort
to overthrow American constitutional government, if you do not understand
lynch mobs -- KKK, Leninist, Soros-sponsored, and Obama-controlled."--
James Lewis, "Lynch Mobs of the Left," http://bit.ly/2lwmH2y