Wow, some funny stuff here. So here's a post I wrote for another forum; seems like people here need some facts. Yeah, it's a little long but it lays out precisely what Durham is investigating . . .
NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers, who, without informing Clapper or Brennan or anyone, in what can only be described as "White Hat" frustration, went to Trump Tower a week and a half after election day and told Trump about the incredible amount of spying on him and his people done by the Obama administration. Trump vacated Trump Tower the next day and moved critical transition operations to Trump National in Bedminster NJ, never to return to Trump Tower.
Make no mistake, Trump has known what was done to him from the earliest days . . .
Here's how we got
there . . .
In late 2015, Admiral Rogers had discovered anomalies in the use of NSA metadata searches, set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). He tried various controls to tighten things up but to no avail. We have come to know this activity as "unmasking".
This specifically means abuse of FISA §702(16)(17) queries; a "702" is an American citizen, subsection 16 refers to searches with "To or From" parameters, subsection 17 denotes an "About" search.
Anytime an American citizen is swept up in NSA surveillance, all identifiers (email address, phone number, name, etc) must be shielded and can only be exposed under certain highly regulated conditions.
In April of 2016, Admiral Rogers became aware that the FBI was allowing "private contractors" to have complete access to the NSA database; this was shocking to him . . .
On
April 18, 2016, Admiral Rogers shut down this private contractor access;
remember that date.
Rogers then asked NSA’s Office of Compliance to conduct a “fundamental baseline review of compliance associated with 702” and issue a report to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). They issued a report to the court in October that was complete BS. . . The NSA lied to the court and Rogers knew it.
Admiral Rogers then went straight to the FISA court and told them the report was bogus and there were problems in the use of the NSA database. The court began its own investigation and they issued a order in April of 2017 (note, that is after Trump was sworn in).
In the court's top secret report (declassified by Trump) they found that in the short 6 month window they examined, 85% of the queries were illegal and that (going by the at least 5 character redaction) amounted to thousands of searches and there was nothing to lead them to believe that number was an outlier . . . It wasn't outrageous to think that volume of illegal searches could be typical
going back to 2012:
The FISC reported that the decision to allow this
private contractors access was the result of "
deliberate decisionmaking" and that the NSA and FBI kept this hidden from the court until Admiral Rogers informed them.
The FISC also ruled that no matter what agreements were made between agencies or with outside contractors, that would not overrule the rules for keeping US citizen identifiers confidential:
The FISC also reported that the
private contractors had unfettered access to the database and that access was well beyond any reasonable need:
There's that date again, April 18, 2016, in the last sentence of the screen grab above . . . It is important because the very next day after
"private contractor" access to the NSA database was shut-down by Rogers, Mary Jacoby, wife of Glenn Simpson, founder of
Fusion GPS, was at the White House and stayed there for 14 hours . . .
Now, that's a transcript I'd like to see . . .
Screen grab of White House visitor log:
By the end of April, Fusion GPS was hired by the DNC/Hillary, no doubt willing and able to use all the illegal data harvested out of the NSA, on HRC opponents and later, Trump and associates.
There is no denying that when the IG report comes out and the Barr / Durham investigation is released, it will be evident that the Obama administration spied on hundreds if not thousands of US citizens for years,
for political purposes, and that illegal activity mutated into an absolute monster once Trump became the nominee.
This illegality goes right into the Oval Office. This illegal and 4th Amendment violating information on US citizens, was incorporated into the Presidential Daily Briefing so it could be distributed in a very secure manner to people in the administration for political action. Samantha Powers, Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes are the primary actors in the White House involved in unmasking.
It will be evident that the entire Russia Hoax (including the Mueller investigation) was an elaborate, ever evolving and expanding cover-up of the illegal activities done before election day, essentially trying to get all the illegal "spying" onto some semblance of a legal footing with falsely obtained FISA warrants.
Looking into those falsely obtained FISA warrants is why Barr and Durham have been crossing the globe, traveling to Italy and Australia and the UK, finding out about CIA 's work with foreign governments doing things against US citizens that was actually illegal.
This is only a short, superficial look at what the
REAL investigations are all about. The depth and degree of criminality of the Obama administration will be shocking and breathtaking and the reckoning will be delicious.