Nobody had even considered the idea that the Trump campaign was spied on until an infamous tweet that Trump sent out on March 4th, 2017: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” (RELATED: After Trump Sounded the Alarm About Wiretapping, Obama Makes First Public Appearance).
It sounded crazy at the time, but it wouldn’t be for long. While Trump Tower wasn’t literally wiretapped, the Trump team was monitored, and some of that surveillance did occur within Trump Tower. In mid-December after the election, United Arab Emirates crown prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan met with three transition team members in Trump Tower: Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, and chief strategist Stephen Bannon.
The meeting was surveiled, but because of surveillance law, the names of Americans picked up in foreign surveillance must be redacted. So what did Susan Rice do? Unmask the names, and then play dumb when Devin Nunes discovered what she did.
Then came the revelations that both Carter Page and Paul Manafort were wiretapped – including periods in which they were in contact with President Donald Trump. Are we to believe that Trump wasn’t picked up on that surveillance?
In total, the Obama administration spied on at least seven Trump associates: Steve Bannon, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and George Papadopoulos.
According to BizPacReview:
Sharyl Attkisson said the Obama administration’s apparent weaponization of the FBI and CIA to rig the election for Hillary Clinton is disturbing because it “implies widespread misuse of America’s intelligence and law enforcement apparatus.”
Attkisson also slammed the reckless “unmasking” of Trump aides illegally surveilled by the Obama FBI, and named the top four Obama officials who did most of the unmasking:
- James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence.
- Samantha Power, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
- Susan Rice, former national security adviser.
- Sally Yates, former deputy attorney general.
Not coincidentally, these former Obama administration aides were among the most publicly critical of Trump, and were engaging in unmaskings to leak information to the press with the aim of embarrassing his campaign.
And all of these surveillance abuses don’t include the physical spying that was going on.
Making the Robert Mueller investigation seem all the more suspicious are new revelations by former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo, who said the Mueller team showed no interest when he told them he suspected there were two spies embedded inside the campaign. “I gave [that info] to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Mueller investigators when I sat with them…and they didn’t seem the least bit interested,” Caputo recounted. “They didn’t even take notes.”
And this is just the spying uncovered so far! If Republicans had the resources of their own Special Counsel, who knows what they’d uncover.
Is the Obama spying scandal worse than we previously thought? Share your thoughts with us below!