The former Republican presidential candidate and Senator, Rand Paul believes he has been “swept up” and “unmasked” in a massive surveillance program that ran under the jurisdiction of former president Barack Obama and was authorized by former National Security Advisor, Susan Rice. Paul, an outspoken defender of civil liberties, says he has received reports that the Obama administration actively pursued intelligence from the NSA on members of Congress and himself, and that they were in the process of asking for information on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The Senator told Fox News’ Hannity, “It’s mind boggling. We’ve been hearing for months now from different sources that the Obama administration was spying on presidential candidates other than Trump, and that it may be politically motivated.”
Senator Paul went on to say that he does not have the evidence, that he hasn’t seen the evidence, but that he has requested it. He has asked the White House, and both intelligence committees (FBI and NSA) to cooperate with his efforts to discover the truth of the wiretapping scandal, and he has strongly encouraged all three entities to initiate investigations of their own.
According to Paul, there are eight members of Congress with special knowledge and expertise on the topic of spying who get information that few other politicians have access to. He wants these eight Congressmen to collaborate with him as he works to get to the bottom of the question of whether or not the Obama administration used security intelligence gathering techniques to collect intel on political opponents, not for national security reasons but for reasons of political ambition alone.
Paul went on to explain that if any of these eight members of Congress with special access to information about spying had ever received any information about Senator Paul, they would have received a “Gates Notification.” He has asked them to tell him whether or not they have received any such notification regarding an intelligence event called “Unmasking.”
Unmasking is a relatively new term in intelligence with a dark history behind it. After verifiability false evidence of a terrorist threat, stemming from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during Bush W’s first term, lead to provisions of the Patriot Act which allowed for the mass surveillance of Americans, Unmasking was a second step needed to identify an individual.
What happens is, an intelligence agency scoops up massive amounts of data from millions of Americans. Then if they see any data that they are interested in, they can ask for the person who generated that data to be “Unmasked.” This is precisely what Susan Rice admitted to doing on national television to General Mike Flynn, and then later tried to deny it. She said that she had obtained data that was connected to people in the Trump presidential campaign and that she asked for those persons to be “Unmasked” so that the details of their data could be understood unambiguously.
Rand Paul is saying he has reason to believe that he and every other candidate for President may have been spied on in this way- just as Trump has been for purely political reasons. Senator Paul is just the latest major player to take an interest in the scandal that exploded a few weeks ago when Donald Trump used his personal Twitter account to publicly accuse Barack Obama of spying on him and his team during the election.
Shortly after Trump’s tweeted accusation against Obama, WikiLeaks released a massive document called Vault 7 which all but verified everything he had claimed. More than that, it verified over a decade’s worth of the suspicions of conspiratorial thinkers. The Vault 7 document showed that not only were the most common suspected government invasions of the privacy of Americans likely to have occurred, but that the CIA was capable of much more.
The document showed capabilities and initiatives that take legality and the rights of citizens as extremely low priority concerns. But possibly the most startling of the Vault 7 revelations have been the fact that the technology the CIA and other intel agencies possess is far more advanced than even some late night dramas would suggest.
Today, while little has been proven, the amount of evidence that shows the Intel agencies and the Obama administration should be investigated is immense. Few people now believe that the intel agencies do not spy on everyone and fewer still can brazenly resist the argument that partisan government parties are using the power of the spying apparatus to forward their own private political ambitions.
~ American Liberty Report
