Trump accuses Obama of wire tapping phones in Trump tower during campaign
Its no longer news that the Trump administration has been in a war of attrition with the Democrats and liberals digging in and ready for a drawn out battle, neither is it new that President Trump makes bold allegations and claims. It is however news that a sitting president will order a wire tap on an opposing campaign at least in the post Nixon presidency; this is the allegation levelled against the former president Obama by president Trump in a series of his now expected and famous tweets.
President Trump courtesy Getty
How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 4 March 2017
I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 4 March 2017
Is it legal for a sitting President to be “wire tapping” a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 4 March 2017
Just out: The same Russian Ambassador that met Jeff Sessions visited the Obama White House 22 times, and 4 times last year alone.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 4 March 2017
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 4 March 2017
The response to these flurry of tweets had been silence from Obama and denial by Obama’s spokesman Kevin Lewis whom aljazeera quoted as saying “Neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any US citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”
James Comey
According to the Washingtonpost, the FBI Director James B. Comey asked the Justice Department over that weekend to issue a statement refuting President Trump’s claim that President Barack Obama ordered a wiretap of Trump’s phones before the election, according to U.S. officials, but the department did not do so. Comey made the request the Saturday after Trump accused Obama on Twitter of having his “ ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower.
President Trump had refused to provide evidence of his claims choosing instead to pass the buck to the congress for an investigation.
The fact is that as far back as November 2016, exclusive news from Heatstreet did confirm that an earlier FISA request that initially named Trump was denied back in June but later granted after it was redrawn more narrowly in October. Since FISA warrants are given based on well established probable cause, it would mean that the judge that signed off the warrant found sufficient grounds to do so although there are conflicting reports about the scope of the warrant whether it was simply for the metadata or full content of emails. The probable cause was evidence of server communications between a private server in Trump’s Tower and two banks, SVB Bank and Russia’s Alfa Bank which was thought to relate to Trumps’s campaign.
The story behind this news perhaps would be that the FISA warrant was not vacated after evidence of wrong doing by Trump campaign wasn’t found.
More importantly would be why President Obama still punished Russia with sanctions after finding no evidence of collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign, note that the democrats base their current antagonism to the Trumps administration on their allegations bothering on the illegitimacy of his election.
The pointer to how president Trump wants to pursue this allegations is in the way he has shown that several democrats too did meet with the Russian ambassador and his request that the Intelligence Committee investigate his allegations and come out with a report.
James Comey denial might just be his way of absolving the FBI of culpability in the wiretap saga because it begs the question, if the legally obtained FISA warrant threw up no evidence of collusion between Russia and Trump campaigns, what evidence did president Obama and the DNC base their accusations of Russian interference that is so strong that President Obama had to expel several Russian officials from the US?
This move by Trump might just be the strategy he will use to purge the intelligence community (which had been fraught with continuous leaks since his administration) of the remnants of the Obama loyalist working full blast to undermine Trump’s presidency.
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