Roughly a month ago, during the height of the mainstream media mania over Trump's alleged collusion with Russia, Judge Andrew Napolitano appeared on Fox and Friends with a startling new revelation, namely that President Obama circumvented U.S. law and employed a British intelligence agency to conduct surveillance of the Trump campaign. Despite Napolitano's assertion that the information had been confirmed by 3 separate sources, the Obama administration and foreign intelligence agencies issued immediate denials and the mainstream media was all too happy to trash the latest 'conspiracy theory' of their competitor network. Here's what he said:
“Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command. He didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use the Department of Justice. He used GCHQ.”
“What the heck is GCHQ? That’s the initials for the British spying agency. They have 24/7 access to the NSA database.”
“So by simply having two people go to them saying, ‘President Obama needs transcripts of conversations involving candidate Trump, conversations involving president-elect Trump,’ he’s able to get it, and there’s no American fingerprints on this."
.@Judgenap: Three intel sources have disclosed that Pres. Obama turned to British spies to get surveillance on Trump pic.twitter.com/IghCFm7qhO
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) March 14, 2017
Of course, Napolitano's efforts ultimately earned him a multi-day suspension from Fox News.
Now, some 30 days after Napolitano broke the story, CNN seems to have just confirmed it:
British and other European intelligence agencies intercepted communications between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials and other Russian individuals during the campaign and passed on those communications to their US counterparts, US congressional and law enforcement and US and European intelligence sources tell CNN.
The communications were captured during routine surveillance of Russian officials and other Russians known to western intelligence. British and European intelligence agencies, including GCHQ, the British intelligence agency responsible for communications surveillance, were not proactively targeting members of the Trump team but rather picked up these communications during what's known as "incidental collection," these sources tell CNN.
The European intelligence agencies detected multiple communications over several months between the Trump associates and Russian individuals -- and passed on that intelligence to the US. The US and Britain are part of the so-called "Five Eyes" agreement (along with Canada, Australia and New Zealand), which calls for open sharing among member nations of a broad range of intelligence.
Of course, we're quite certain that, as CNN notes, the intercepted communications were merely "incidental" and in no way requested by the Obama administration, but rather, were conveniently volunteered, unsolicited, by British intelligence. Moreover, we're sure that British intelligence also had very innocent reasons for "accidentally" happening upon the communication of Trump's advisors. That said, we do wonder whether they also happened upon any communications from the Hillary campaign...