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Sunday, March 5, 2017

Vox Popoli: Towergate

Towergate
There is a very good case to be made that Obama and/or someone on his team is now in serious legal jeopardy as a result of the reported wire-tappings of Trump Tower:

If the stories are correct, Obama or his officials might even face prosecution. But, we are still early in all of this and there are a lot of rumors flying around so the key is if the reports are accurate. We just don’t know at this time. The stories currently are three-fold: first, that Obama’s team tried to get a warrant from a regular, Article III federal court on Trump, and was told no by someone along the way (maybe the FBI), as the evidence was that weak or non-existent; second, Obama’s team then tried to circumvent the federal judiciary’s independent role by trying to mislabel the issue one of “foreign agents,” and tried to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “courts”, and were again turned down, when the court saw Trump named (an extremely rare act of FISA court refusal of the government, suggesting the evidence was truly non-existent against Trump); and so, third, Obama circumvented both the regular command of the FBI and the regularly appointed federal courts, by placing the entire case as a FISA case (and apparently under Sally Yates at DOJ) as a “foreign” case, and then omitted Trump’s name from a surveillance warrant submitted to the FISA court, which the FISA court unwittingly granted, which Obama then misused to spy on Trump and many connected to Trump. Are these allegations true? We don’t know yet, but if any part of them are than Obama and/or his officials could face serious trouble.

Read the rest of it there. Robert Barnes goes into some detail concerning the legal minutia of the laws related to FISA and how the Obama administration almost certainly misbehaved if it even attempted to get a FISA warrant to spy on a presidential candidate.

I discussed some aspects of this at last night's Darkstream. And as I stated, the Trump administration is already on top of it: "A senior White House official said that Donald F. McGahn II, the president’s chief counsel, was working on Saturday to secure access to what the official described as a document issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing surveillance of Mr. Trump and his associates." 

It seems pretty clear now that a FISA warrant was secured and the subsequent wire-tapping took place. Reporter Cathy Aureu stated on Fox News that a female source, who worked in the Obama administration for nearly the whole of his two terms, confirmed that a FISA warrant was secured. However, she does not know who was responsible for securing it.