Unsurprisingly, President Donald J. Trump was correct.
Though he originally spoke, or tweeted, clumsily, the gist of his claim was correct: The administration of his predecessor, Barack H. Obama, had indeed been surveilling Trump and those close to his campaign.
As I showed in a previous article, The New York Times, Slate, Mother Jones, and Heat Street—i.e. Democratic Party propaganda organs—are among the media outlets that confirmed months ago the President’s claim. Theses surveillance efforts had been transpiring from at least the time of last summer.
It’s true that it has not yet been proven that either Trump or any other private American citizens in his orbit were subjects or targets of these surveillance efforts. Ostensibly, foreigners, specifically, Russians, were the subjects. But it is equally true that arrangements were made by those within Obama’s government—the so-called “Deep State”—to illegally unmask and leak public information regarding those private citizens that allegedly got swept up in these spying operations.
For those still not convinced by this, Evelyn Farkas should remove all doubt.
Under Obama, Farkas was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for “Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia,” according to the website for the U.S. Department of Defense. She left her position in 2015 to become an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Earlier in March, she appeared on MSNBC and made the following comments on Morning Joe:
“I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, people on the Hill…[to] get as much information as you can, as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration.”
Farkas admitted that she “had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior people [from the Obama administration] who left.” She feared that it would disappear into the abyss of “the bureaucracy,” and “that the Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about…the Trump staff’s dealing with Russia, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods.”
There are several telling insights to glean from Farkas’ remarks.
First, Farkas here acknowledges that the Obama administration, essentially, had indeed been gathering intelligence, or spying, on private citizens.
Second, being the Democrat partisan that she obviously is, Farkas’ intention in making these comments, and making them in the left-friendly venue of MSNBC, was to suggest that the Democrats’ “The Russians Made Us Do It (Lose)” narrative has substance.
Yet, notice, Farkas never said that the intel proved anything so much as resembling “collusion” between Putin or “the Russians” and Trump. Had there been anything there, she would have done what no one has yet to do and offer at least a scintilla of evidence to substantiate this charge.
Third, in fact, Farkas never even mentions any correspondence between Trump and “the Russians.” No, she instead references “Trump folks” and “the Trump staff” when talking about Russia.
Fourth, while Farkas obviously wanted for audiences to think that Obama’s government discovered some nefarious connection between “Trump folks” and those dastardly Russians, the only allusion that she ever manages to make is to the “dealings” that she alleges transpired between these groups.
In other words, Farkas’s wording here is profoundly vague.
Fifth, Farkas unwittingly confesses that she worried about “the Trump folks” discovering “how we knew what we knew….” Is it not eminently reasonable to infer from this statement that the “how” in question, the methods by which intelligence was supposedly gathered, consists of surveillance of the “Trump folks?”
Finally, Farkas admits to being worried about how the Trump administration would react when it found out “how we knew what we knew….” Who is this “we?” Farkas was no longer in the government as of 2015. Yet her choice of words would have us think that she is still very much involved in and allied with bureaucrats in the Deep State. Moreover, given her standing as a Democrat and her position in the Obama administration, it’s all too sensible to think that Farkas’ selection of the first person-plural in this context refers to Farkas and her fellow partisans that remain embedded in the bureaucracy over which her former boss presided.
Farkas has tried retreating from her comments. The left-leaning media has been busy spinning them away. But the cat is out of the bag:
The Deep State, under Obama, surveilled American citizens, in this case, Trump and his “folks.” They wanted the information that they had gathered to be as widely disseminated—leaked—as possible.