A new scandal is playing itself out in Washington, and it’s difficult to know where or what it will lead to, as accusations are flying and fingers have been pointed.
On Saturday, March 4, President Trump wrote a series of tweets that accused former President Obama of “wiretapping” his offices and/or associates working at Trump Tower in NYC and possibly other places as part of a coordinated effort to gather intelligence to be used against him both during his presidential campaign and throughout his term in office.
It’s well-known that Obama has “bunkered down” in an 8,200-square-foot mansion in Washington, D.C., rather than jetting off to some far-off destination to retire; therefore, this could be only the opening salvo in a now-public spat that may only grow more heated as time wears on.
So far, the facts in the case are not yet fully clear. A British journalist named Louise Mensch, writing for the political blog Heat Street, wrote in early November 2016 that her contacts in the intelligence community had told her that the Justice Department (DOJ) under Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch had sought a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to get information about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. Apparently, the first time this warrant was sought from the court in June of last year, it was denied, but upon a second request, it was granted.
Mensch’s report was apparently one of the sources of information for additional articles published on Breitbart News, the UK’s Guardian newspaper and in the New York Times. Some of these articles claimed up to six federal agencies were involved in the surveillance, including the DOJ, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Unit (FinCEN).
Fox News has featured segments about the president’s tweets and has had guests from the world of intelligence gathering on its shows to explain what the ramifications are. In the meantime, the social media universe and blogosphere has predictably enlarged the original reports and exaggerated claims to the point where many pundits are calling the acts desperately criminal on behalf of the Democrats.
As for the Democrats themselves, their original claims are that the Trump campaign had illicit contact with the Russian government, and so in their warped viewpoint, the surveillance — if it did take place — was justified.
But what news outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post omit or get wrong is the fact that even if the surveillance was justifiable in the beginning due to these concerns, the scope of the spying allegedly later expanded so that recordings or transcripts of what the Trump campaign and transition team were doing were passed on to Obama and officials from his administration — or “shadow government,” as his activist-funding organization is now known.
According to Mark Levin, host of the conservative radio program The Mark Levin Show, some of this information was then passed along to the media and has been the source of what the Trump administration has called “leaks” from its meetings both before and after the president’s inauguration.
Obama’s surrogates and spokespeople have been busy denying that Obama was behind any such surveillance. Ben Rhodes, the former foreign policy advisor to Obama who was responsible for much of the debacles of the Iranian Nuclear Deal in 2015 spouted some off-the-cuff language back at Trump for his tweets, saying, “no president can order a wiretap” and “[DOJ] restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like [Trump].”
Kevin Lewis, another spokesman for former President Obama, put the blame on the Justice Department, saying that “A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the DOJ. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.”
Of course, left unsaid is whether or not Obama ordered the DOJ to initiate the surveillance in the first place.
In the meantime, the Trump administration has been trying to back the president’s claims up without citing specific sources of his information; this could be because doing so — if they came from official intelligence channels — may compromise methods of data collection or the persons collecting such data, and this may well be illegal, if not highly improper.
There has been talk among Democrats of appointing a special prosecutor to look into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, but as Hugh Hewitt in the Washington Post has pointed out, Democrats would be wise to be careful what they wish for.
As Hewitt explains, special prosecutors since Archibald Cox in the Nixon administration have a history of expanding the scope of their investigations. Therefore, any prosecutor tasked with uncovering damning ties between Trump and Russia (claims of which so far have been denied, even by Democrat sympathizers such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper) could potentially go further and begin to reveal things that the Democrats would rather not have them uncover.
In the past, special prosecutors such as Kenneth Starr, who was originally asked to tackle the Whitewater affair, ended up investigating the Monica Lewinsky mess, much to the chagrin of ex-President Bill Clinton.
With a Russian hacking investigation, the scope of investigative research could end up including information collected from Hillary Clinton’s email servers, which could in turn open up cans of worms involving the Obama administration, foreign policy shenanigans, the Democrats’ own ties to Russia, etc.
In short, very quickly, the tables could be turned, and the Democrats might wish that they had never asked for an investigation to be initiated in the first place.
And yet, that’s just what Democratic Senators like Dianne Feinstein of California are now asking for. Claiming that they’re worried that the DOJ under Trump appointee Jeff Sessions would be compromised by its ties to the Trump White House, Congressional Democrats are insisting that a special prosecutor would be necessary for investigational independence.
This is despite the fact that Sessions has recused himself from participating in any potential criminal inquiry of Trump or his officials related to the 2016 presidential campaign.
If one reads between the lines of the articles about the case in the liberal media such as the New York Times, one can see that the writing is especially careful to accuse the president of making false claims while not offering any denials that the surveillance in fact took place.
If indeed it did, the whirlwind of dirt that this affair will kick up could end up being even bigger than Watergate, and could permanently taint the legacy of Barack Obama (and potentially even the Clintons, if an investigation goes far enough) in ways that the Democrats wouldn’t have anticipated mere weeks ago.
Whether Obama and his team have considered these eventualities is an open question, but certainly, the stakes of the game they are playing couldn’t get much bigger; if they did in fact order the surveillance, it would be the presidential equivalent of playing with matches.
It’s likely worthwhile for conservatives to insist that if a special prosecutor is appointed to look into any Trump-Russian connections that the scope of any and all investigations related to them be unlimited.
