After it was revealed over the weekend by Mike Cernovich that Susan Rice was the mysterious Obama official behind the "unmasking" of Trump associates, the details behind the extreme measures taken by the Obama administration, including what seems to be personal legal liability for Susan Rice and potentially others, continue to grow more and more disturbing.
This morning, the Daily Caller has provided new details, courtesy of former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova, suggesting that Rice specifically requested that the NSA provide her with "detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates."
“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.
“The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”
Meanwhile, Retired Colonel James Waurishuk, an NSC veteran and former deputy director for intelligence at the U.S. Central Command, said that the level of coordination required to pull off such a massive spying operation is staggering and would have required numerous personnel from the White House, NSA, CIA, National Security Council, etc.
“The surveillance initially is the responsibility of the National Security Agency,” Waurishuk said. “They have to abide by this guidance when one of the other agencies says, ‘we’re looking at this particular person which we would like to unmask.’”
“The lawyers and counsel at the NSA surely would be talking to the lawyers and members of counsel at CIA, or at the National Security Council or at the Director of National Intelligence or at the FBI,” he said. “It’s unbelievable of the level and degree of the administration to look for information on Donald Trump and his associates, his campaign team and his transition team. This is really, really serious stuff.”
In other words, it's growing increasingly unlikely that this operation was anything but a direct, targeted attempt of the Obama administration to utilize the full force of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to take down a political adversary.
As Michael Doran points out, if these alleged actions are proven to be accurate then several people within the Obama administration likely committed felonies.
Michael Doran, former NSC senior director, told TheDCNF Monday that “somebody blew a hole in the wall between national security secrets and partisan politics.” This “was a stream of information that was supposed to be hermetically sealed from politics and the Obama administration found a way to blow a hole in that wall.”
Doran charged that potential serious crimes were undertaken because “this is a leaking of signal intelligence.”
“That’s a felony,” he told TheDCNF. “And you can get 10 years for that. It is a tremendous abuse of the system. We’re not supposed to be monitoring American citizens. Bigger than the crime, is the breach of public trust.”
Waurishuk said he was most dismayed that “this is now using national intelligence assets and capabilities to spy on the elected, yet-to-be-seated president.”
“We’re looking at a potential constitutional crisis from the standpoint that we used an extremely strong capability that’s supposed to be used to safeguard and protect the country,” he said. “And we used it for political purposes by a sitting President. That takes on a new precedent.”
Of course, just because Obama used the NSA to try and take down Trump doesn't mean that those allegations that he used the IRS to take out Romney supporters in 2012 were true....Scandal-free administration...