1. June 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration files a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is denied.
2. July 2016: The Russia joke. Wikileaks releases emails from the Democratic National Committee that show an effort to prevent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) from winning the presidential nomination. In a press conference, Donald Trump refers to Hillary Clinton\u2019s own missing emails, joking: \u201cRussia, if you\u2019re listening, I hope you\u2019re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing.\u201d That remark becomes the basis for accusations by Clinton and the media that Trump invited further hacking.
3. October 2016: Podesta emails. In October, Wikileaks releases the emails of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, rolling out batches every day until the election, creating new mini-scandals. The Clinton campaign blames Trump and the Russians.
4. October 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found \u2014 but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at National Review later notes. The Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.
5. January 2017: Buzzfeed\/CNN dossier. Buzzfeed releases, and CNN reports, a supposed intelligence \u201cdossier\u201d compiled by a foreign former spy. It purports to show continuous contact between Russia and the Trump campaign, and says that the Russians have compromising information about Trump. None of the allegations can be verified and some are proven false. Several media outlets claim that they had been aware of the dossier for months and that it had been circulating in Washington.
6. January 2017: Obama expands NSA sharing. As Michael Walsh later notes, and as the New York Times reports, the outgoing Obama administration \u201cexpanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government\u2019s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.\u201d The new powers, and reduced protections, could make it easier for intelligence on private citizens to be circulated improperly or leaked.
7. January 2017: Times report. The New York Times reports, on the eve of Inauguration Day, that several agencies \u2014 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Treasury Department are monitoring several associates of the Trump campaign suspected of Russian ties. Other news outlets also report the exisentence of \u201ca multiagency working group to coordinate investigations across the government,\u201d though it is unclear how they found out, since the investigations would have been secret and involved classified information.
8. February 2017: Mike Flynn scandal. Reports emerge that the FBI intercepted a conversation in 2016 between future National Security Adviser Michael Flynn \u2014 then a private citizen \u2014 and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The intercept supposedly was part of routine spying on the ambassador, not monitoring of the Trump campaign. The FBI transcripts reportedly show the two discussing Obama\u2019s newly-imposed sanctions on Russia, though Flynn earlier denied discussing them. Sally Yates, whom Trump would later fire as acting Attorney General for insubordination, is involved in the investigation. In the end, Flynn resigns over having misled Vice President Mike Pence (perhaps inadvertently) about the content of the conversation.
9. February 2017: Times claims extensive Russian contacts. The New York Times cites \u201cfour current and former American officials\u201d in reporting that the Trump campaign had \u201crepeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials. The Trump campaign denies the claims \u2014 and the Times admits that there is \u201cno evidence\u201d of coordination between the campaign and the Russians. The White House and some congressional Republicans begin to raise questions about illegal intelligence leaks.
10. March 2017: the Washington Post targets Jeff Sessions. The Washington Post reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had contact twice with the Russian ambassador during the campaign \u2014 once at a Heritage Foundation event and once at a meeting in Sessions\u2019s Senate office. The Post suggests that the two meetings contradict Sessions\u2019s testimony at his confirmation hearings that he had no contacts with the Russians, though in context (not presented by the Post) it was clear he meant in his capacity as a campaign surrogate, and that he was responding to claims in the \u201cdossier\u201d of ongoing contacts. The New York Times, in covering the story, adds that the Obama White House \u201crushed to preserve\u201d intelligence related to alleged Russian links with the Trump campaign. By \u201cpreserve\u201d it really means \u201cdisseminate\u201d: officials spread evidence throughout other government agencies \u201cto leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators\u201d and perhaps the media as well.
In summary: the Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media.
All in a bid to stop or overthrow a Trump administration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
1. June 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration files a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is denied.2. July 2016: The Russia joke. Wikileaks releases emails from the Democratic National Committee that show an effort to prevent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13,14,18,21,22,23,30,33,34,37,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-clinton-lies","category-clinton-scams","category-clinton-wikileak-emails","category-crooked-clinton","category-dnc-lies","category-fbi-security","category-fbi-tales","category-national-security","category-obama-spies","category-obamas-laws","category-pandering-clinton","category-president-trumps-actions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendreger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendreger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendreger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendreger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendreger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kendreger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendreger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendreger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendreger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}