Vincent J. Curtis
20 Mar 2017
Several weeks ago, President Donald Trump set the news media
all a-twitter by saying that he had been wire-tapped by President Barak Obama
during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Immediately, denunciations started pouring in to the effect, “How could
Trump say such a thing?” and “There is no evidence of such a thing.” And so forth.
Today’s public hearings of the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence was enlightening on how politicalized selective
intelligence leaking has become, and how competitive media narratives are
either pushed or forgotten, depending on which Democrat talking point one is
speaking about.
Chris Wallace of Fox News was typical when he described
today as a bad day for President Trump because no proof of wiretapping by
President Obama was admitted to or presented to the committee by FBI Director
James Comey or NSA Director Mike Rogers.
In the world of intelligence, the parsing of sentences is extremely
important because it is in the nature of the business to mislead. What appears to be a denial is in fact a
non-denial denial, and what appears to be denied but isn’t can be revealing of
the actual truth.
The elephant in the room that no one wants to highlight is
that the American people are subject to NSA surveillance of their emails and
their telephone conversations 24/7/365 without a specific FISA warrant and have
been since 2006. It took Edward Snowden
to bring it to light, and forced the admission that DNI James Clapper lied in
public to a Senate Committee when he told the committee that the U.S. government
does not routinely monitor or collect information on Americans at random in any way. The NSA, in fact, collects meta-data on all electronic
communications that flow through the computers of American telephone
companies. Hence, it is a trivial
statement for President Trump say that he was wire-tapped by President
Obama during the campaign, for every American was. What might be missing is for that data to be
mined for intelligence.
The New York Times
and Washington Post were recipients
of “surveillance transcripts” of close advisors to Donald Trump. Nobody other than Trey Gowdy seems to
remember this. Either these news reports
were true or they were not, but they cannot be simultaneously both true and
false. If the news reports of the
contents of surveillance transcripts are true, then it is also true that surveillance
was taking place. If Trump himself was
not the direct object of surveillance, but everyone around him in his campaign
was, then what difference does it make, for Trump has to work through his campaign
team in order to campaign?
There are several political narratives in play here. The first is collusion between the Trump
campaign and the Russian effort to influence the election. The Democrats continue to insinuate the
Donald Trump is the Manchurian Candidate, that his apparent softness towards
Putin is suggestive that Putin wanted to help Trump win, and that whether there
was collusion or not Trump’s election was owing to Russian efforts to discredit
Hillary Clinton. Another narrative
follows from the first, that for all the suggestiveness of collusion and the
investigation of Russia’s interference in the American election, the Trump
campaign itself was never surveilled by the Obama Administration for evidence
of collusion.
The newspapers reported on a FISA request in June, 2016,
that was rejected and may have named Trump, and another in October, 2016, that
was approved. Today, both Comey and
Rogers denied there were FISA requests, and that the investigation into Russian
interference began in July, 2016. So
what do we make of the newspaper accounts that go into some detail? That seems to be forgotten.
There also has been repeated reference to “seeing no
evidence of collusion” between operatives of the Trump campaign and Russian
interference. Forgetting for the moment
that nobody owns Trump, what can we make of the statement “seeing no evidence.” That statement is ambiguous, for it could
mean that there is all kinds of intelligence collected on Trump and none of it
shows collusion, or that they don’t have any evidence of any kind, period. They don’t have evidence, not having collected any. Having no evidence could mean that there was
collusion all over the place, and the intelligence community cluelessly never
mined their data or wiretapped anybody.
So having no evidence is not exculpatory either.
Likewise, having no evidence that Trump was wiretapped is
ambiguous, and that statement also is not exculpatory.
Today, the Democrats were all about Roger Stone, and Paul
Manafort, and Mike Flynn being directly or indirectly in the pay of the Russian
government – however attenuated those connections may be. But the Democrats wants us to forget that
Bill Clinton received millions of dollars in speaking fees from some pretty
shady governments including the Kazakh government, and that the Clinton
Foundation would up receiving $145 million while Russian interests got
ownership of 20 % of the United States uranium production in a transaction
detailed in the book “Clinton Cash” by Peter Schweizer.
By claiming he had been wiretapped, Donald Trump set
Congress to investigating the business of the leaking of classified information
anonymously by outgoing Obama Administration officials that sought to portray
him as in collusion with the Russian government and his benefiting from Russian
interference in the election. Trump is
taking a beating from the news media about the factual content of the tweet
alleging that Obama wiretapped him. But
what is also suffering in the investigation are: the credibility of the news
media that reported on the contents of the now-disputed surveillance; the
Democrat contention of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia; and that
Trump owes his election to Russian efforts to bring down Hillary Clinton.
The Democrats are leaving many hostages to fortune in their
seeming hostility to Russia and their vilification of Vladimir Putin.
The one fact that simply can’t be erased is that former
National Security Advisor Mike Flynn was surveilled by American intelligence,
and his name was feloniously unmasked in the transcript of the surveillance and
released to the news media by a member of the Obama Administration. That criminal act we have yet to see the end
of.
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