By John Solomon and Sara Carter; Circa:
The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.
More than 5 percent, or one out of every 20 searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa.
The Obama administration self-disclosed the problems at a closed-door hearing Oct. 26 before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that set off alarm. Trump was elected less than two weeks later.
The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26, 2017.
The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.
Circa has reported that there was a three-fold increase in NSA data searches about Americans and a rise in the unmasking of U.S. person’s identities in intelligence reports after Obama loosened the privacy rules in 2011.
Officials like former National Security Adviser Susan Rice have argued their activities were legal under the so-called minimization rule changes Obama made, and that the intelligence agencies were strictly monitored to avoid abuses.
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New Susan Rice Findings Make Evident That The Spin Never Stopped in the Obama Administration
By Jon Harris; OpsLens:
Susan Rice’s track record of lies may be unparalleled, and we are just getting going…
Lo and behold, the person who unmasked the names of American citizens gathered in incidental surveillance of the Trump campaign was none other than “he served with honor and distinction” Susan Rice.
Logs show that Susan Rice requested the unmasking of the names and then had them distributed to just about everyone she could. Those at the top of the Obama administration all got the list.
This is just another spoke in the spinning wheel of the Obama administration as it was on its way out. The Democrats have jumped in with both feet to smear President Trump any way they can, and now with this revelation, it seems President Trump was, once again, right all along.
It is despicable to participate in the type of actions the outgoing administration took. The unmasking of these individuals had nothing to do with what is good for the country. It had nothing to do with the security of our election system. These extraordinary actions and then Obama relaxing the security of those names so they could be more widely distributed are pure partisan politics at their dirtiest.
I remember when the Benghazi incident happened and Susan Rice trotted out the bogus story of a video causing the attack, I was incensed. I was in Afghanistan as a security contractor during the time. That could have happened to me and my guys just as well. Would the State Department have left us hanging out to dry and then try to cover it up? Yep, they would and did when Balad, Iraq was overrun by ISIS. Again, the Obama State Department abandoned Americans and left our contractors to fend for themselves, telling the American people that all American contractors had been evacuated. I can say from a very personal standpoint, that story was a lie. Obama’s State Department was nowhere to be seen. We were still there, on our own, depending on our company to get us out—which they did.
So the story about Benghazi was proven false and what happened to Susan Rice? She got promoted and moved up the Obama chain to national security advisor. Then she became famous—or rather infamous—for saying deserter Bowe Bergdahl served with “honor and distinction” as a prisoner of war. Of course, we now know (and she knew at the time) that Bowe Bergdahl was a deserter.
As this firestorm gets going, the feeding frenzy will only increase. There is no telling where the rabbit hole will lead, but my money is deep inside the Obama/Clinton camps. They have shown that nothing is holding them back from trying to destroy the Trump presidency with their scorched earth tactics.
There are second- and third-level effects of these revelations as well. The facts are showing that this entire story of Trump corruption and collusion with the Russians is false. There is no smoking gun, no proof—only false rumors and innuendo. The attempts to destroy the Trump presidency may very well cause a backlash against those who are constantly publicizing the Democrat talking points, which are quickly being shown false and having been orchestrated by the Obama and Clinton teams. The Democrats who have tied their wagon to this falling star that was the Obama administration and later the failed Clinton campaign may very well find themselves running for cover.
