The FBI has illegally spied on thousands of US citizens and has denied it for years. Now, the National Security Agency (NSA) has agreed to release records that prove it really happened. This means that all the yokels who work for the mainstream news media and Fake News outlets like CNN and MSNBC spread misinformation every one of the thousands of times they said the Obama administration did not spy on Americans.
The agreement may signal a schism between the NSA and the FBI, according to attorney Ty Clevenger, a former attorney in the Special Litigation Section (“SPL”) of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
Last year, Clevenger filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for The Transparency Project, a Texas nonprofit group. He was looking for information about improper searches of intelligence databases by the FBI for information on 16,000 American citizens.
The searches conducted by the FBI violated laws that determine how the US government’s foreign intelligence database can be used as US District Judge James Boasberg wrote in a 2019 memo and an order that was declassified last year.
The NSA database is the largest intelligence database in the world.
Judge Boasberg is an Obama appointee who served for seven years on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and presided from January 2020 to May 2021.
If the name of that court seems somewhat familiar it’s because that is the court that approves FISA warrants. That court back in the summer of 2016 approved a FISA warrant for James Comey’s FBI to spy on Carter Page, a one-time volunteer for the Trump campaign. Comey and his FBI lied on the application for the FISA warrant by, among other things, failing to let the court know that Page was an asset for the CIA. The spy agency multiple times requested that Page gather intelligence they wanted when he was traveling to Russia for business. Page complied every time because he is an American patriot. But the FBI, and by their silence, the CIA, threw this patriot under the bus just to get Trump.
The reason they used Page to get a FISA warrant was that they couldn’t do all of the illegal activities they were engaged in to destroy Trump’s chances in the 2016 election out in the open, so they wanted to get their activities moved into the secretive FISA section of government. Working under the guise of the FISC court they were able to work in secret so that other employees in the FBI and intelligence agencies, the non-scumbag personnel, would never learn of their illegal activities.
They chose Page because they wanted to use what is called the “two-hop rule,” which allows agents to surveil any communications with a target of a FISA warrant. So, with a FISA warrant on Page, the rogue FBI agents involved could look at the communications of hundreds of other campaign folks of all ranks who communicated with Page, and since Page was a campaign volunteer, he obviously had a lot of communication with other members of the Trump campaign.
Of course, the FBI asserted that the search queries for the 16,000 Americans “were reasonably likely to return foreign-intelligence information or evidence of a crime because…” and the rest is redacted, the judge wrote. Boasberg decided that the FBI’s position was “unsupportable” on all but 7 of the 16,000 people.
Even so, the judge allowed the searches to continue. That motivated Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice to argue that the judge’s decision on the FBI’s data collection program was “even more inexplicable given that the opinion was issued shortly after the government reported submitting FISA applications riddled with errors and omissions in the Carter Page investigation.”
What would it take for the FISA Court to say no? In this case, its lenience is even more inexplicable given that the opinion was issued shortly after the government reported submitting FISA applications riddled with errors and omissions in the Carter Page investigation. 4/17
— Elizabeth Goitein (@LizaGoitein) September 4, 2020
When the judge’s order was made public, Clevenger went into action and filed FOIA requests for information on the bad searches from both the FBI and the NSA. In the end, the FBI rejected the FOIA request.
In a letter sent in February, an official made the excuse to Clevenger that the letter he sent “does not contain enough descriptive information to permit a search of our records.”
The NSA originally also declined the FOIA request, but then granted an appeal to the decision later on, according to NSA official Linda Kiyosaki wrote in a letter this month.
“You had requested all documents, records, and other tangible evidence reflecting the improper surveillance of 16,000 individuals described in a 6 December, 2019, FISC Opinion,” Kiyosaki wrote.
Clevenger theorizes that the NSA’s change of heart is a sign that there may be a rift between the FBI and the NSA, conceivably because the corrupted FBI has repeatedly abused the rules in place that dictate how searches of intelligence data are to be handled and the NSA largely hasn’t.
“There’s been a battle between them; for example, Admiral Mike Rogers tried to shut off FBI access to the NSA database back in 2016,” Clevenger said.
What happened was one day Rogers, who ran the NSA, came to work and discovered that thousands of hits were being made against the agency’s intelligence database, so many that he looked into it himself. He discovered that there were a lot of private firms accessing the data, and though it is not too unusual to give special access to private corporations when doing contract work for the agency, what Rogers witnessed was way out of the ordinary, so he shut the access completely down. Dan Bongino wrote three books about Spygate and he postulates that those searches by private companies were paid for by the Democrats who hired them to find dirt on candidate Donald Trump. Bongino and others also theorize that when that flow of data information was shut down, the Democrats panicked and had to find another way to screw over Trump in the 2016 election. They contacted Glenn Simpson, a former journalist for the Wall Street Journal who later co-founded the Washington, DC-based opposition research firm Fusion GPS. Hillary Clinton had a problem with an illegal private email server she used while serving as Obama’s secretary of state and it was harming her campaign against Trump. Simpson wrote a plug-and-play script years ago that Clinton could use against Trump about Russian collusion in order to get the media to focus off of Hillary’s illegal email server.
In fact, Admiral Rogers made a trip to Trump Tower in New York City to let the new President-Elect know that the Obama administration had been spying on him. Remember when Trump tweeted out that Obama wire-tapped him and the same day he moved all of his transition team’s operations out of Trump Tower to a golf court he owns in northern New Jersey. The media hacks called Trump crazy and spreading lies about Obama and yet he was right because the NSA director told him so.
Rogers did not tell his superior, James Clapper, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, that he was making the trip to Trump Tower because he believed Clapper probably knew about what was going on and he felt a duty to let the incoming president know. Rogers was the only hero among the high-ranking officials in the Obama administration during the Spygate operation.
Rich is a conservative, syndicated opinion writer and owner of MAGA-Chat.com. He writes about politics, culture, liberty, and faith.
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