While Democrats focus on persecuting Republicans for any interaction with the leaders of a country they exalted for nearly a century, a secondary question became a “live wire” based on a tweet by President Trump. But is there any “there there?”
For me this issue started on March 2nd while watching "Special Report with Bret Baier" on Fox News. Anchor Bret Baier was gazing at his laptop near the end of the show and mentioned a late breaking item about how Trump had been surveilled. This was amidst heated discussion about Russia and how they had supposedly turned the election for Trump. Saturday morning brought the famous Trump tweet accusing Obama of wiretapping him.
The next day the Sunday shows brought a large focus to the issue, as did my discussions with friends. I was leaning Trump, but the entire matter became murky to me and I feared being out ahead of the facts. That is when I watched the Mark Levin video regarding the comments he made on his radio show that had generated both Baier’s comment and the source for Trump’s tweet.
I am neither a fan nor a detractor of Levin. I respect him as a very smart guy, but I find him a little edgy on his radio show. He has a prestigious background and is a serious guy who previously was the chief of staff for a U.S. attorney general.
Watching the various videos of Levin citing what he had stated on his show was quite a head kick. He went through a series of articles that came from The Guardian (U.K.), McClatchy, The New York Times (multiple articles) and the Washington Post from March 2nd, the day of the broadcast. These MSM (liberal) publications talked of FISA court requests, wiretapping, surveillance and, of course, unnamed sources. When one listens to what Levin has compiled from these legitimate sources, one cannot come to any other conclusion than Trump was on to something.
The political world went after Trump with a vengeance for the next three weeks. They completely ignored the source of the information and focused solely on the words used by Trump. Trump stated Obama wiretapped him. The Trump haters took that literally and ignored what Trump was really saying. Did it matter whether Obama ordered it? We know that his fingerprints would never be found on the activities, just like they were never found on Lois Lerner and the criminals at the IRS, but we know there was approval from above and it was not some errant souls in Cincinnati. Just like in that scandal, Obama would retain plausible deniability of his approval.
Even if a document were produced with the signature of Barack Obama on it, the adoring and compliant press would deny its existence. Their hero would never do anything wrong.
And was it wiretapping? If you are being surveilled, would you care about the way you were being watched? After all, “wiretapping” is a dated term today when people communicate today in so many ways. If you were being followed or your cell phone was being listened to by the NSA or your emails were being intercepted or it was some other spy craft, would you start mincing words? Have you ever heard someone say “I was being surveilled”? We knew Trump was conveying that he and his people were having information collected by the Intelligence Community and illegally released. It was obvious. He knew it because it was in the “Paper of Record.” Members of the former Obama administration and/or the Intelligence Community were releasing information that was collected by them to poison the well.
As members of the Intelligence Community came out to state there was no evidence to back up Trump’s statement of Obama wiretapping, it became dark for Trump. There was an onslaught as his enemies latched on to his exact words instead of what was behind them. For over a week, I asked everyone possible one simple question: “If there is no surveillance, then where are the retractions by these major newspapers?” Instead the newspapers ignored their supposed inappropriate reports and had the chutzpah to attack Trump while having a bad case of amnesia.
This is concurrent with the report that the Obama administration had left a trail of bread crumbs to find a Trump-Russia connection. Matthew Rosenberg of The New York Times on March 2nd stated, "American allies, including the British and the Dutch, have provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials and others close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and associates of President-elect Trump." The Times stated this was supposedly based on three anonymous sources with access to classified intelligence. It is clear they were trying to destroy the new administration in its infancy with sordid charges. But if these charges were true, why was no one ever willing to go on record. There are no Daniel Ellsbergs here.
That followed a Times story the previous day which stated: “In the Obama Administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election – and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians across the government.” More bread crumbs.
In fact, the Times reported in another article that Attorney General Loretta Lynch on January 12th signed rules that let the National Security Agency disseminate “raw signals intelligence information” to the 16 other intelligence agencies. This had never been done before. Yet Mr. Obama had nothing to do with this?
In my humble opinion, what we have here is a conspiracy by the Obama administration and members of the security apparatus of this country to illegally spread innuendo and lies about the Trump campaign and transition team to damage their efforts to overturn Obama’s policies and expansion of the federal regulatory state.
We now have a new wonky term – “unmasked.” Translation: a limited number of people who had access to certain information illegally revealed conversations of American citizens with the malicious intent to destroy their reputations. Not one of these criminals has the guts to stand up and say “I did it.” In that way, they are lower than Edward Snowden.
Remember when former Senator Harry Reid stated “he didn’t win, did he” when asked about his Mitt Romney lies? We’re a mere two years from hearing former President Obama state “They didn’t repeal Obamacare, did they?”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member