With the mainstream media mocking what they describe as President Trump’s delusional claim that former President Obama ordered Trump Tower’s phones to be tapped, I thought it would only be fair to invite readers to look at the other side. In a 12-minute video, Mark Levin, a lawyer who was a chief of staff for Attorney General Edwin Meese during the Reagan administration, has laid out what appears to be overwhelming evidence that backs up Trump’s wiretapping claims. Newt Gingrich offers his take here. Matthew Vadum’s article, Obama’s Wiretaps?, in FrontPage magazine, makes for very disturbing reading. Vadum doesn’t pull any punches:
Now the outlines of a Watergate-like conspiracy are emerging in which a sitting Democrat president apparently used the apparatus of the state to spy on a Republican presidential candidate. Watergate differed in that President Nixon didn’t get involved in the plot against the Democratic National Committee until later as an accomplice after the fact. Here Obama likely masterminded, or oversaw someone like the diabolical Benghazi cover-up artist Ben Rhodes, masterminding the whole thing…
Obama used the IRS to target conservative and Tea Party nonprofits, along with Catholic, Jewish, and pro-Israel organizations. He brazenly lied about it, too. His Justice Department surreptitiously obtained telephone records for more than 100 reporters. He did nothing while Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius repeatedly violated the Hatch Act, an anti-corruption statute.
And if anyone still has doubts, I’d invite them to ask James Rosen and Angela Merkel about former President Obama’s spying. By the way, former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes’ claim that “No President can order a wiretap” is factually incorrect.
Those who think President Trump is concealing his connections with Russia need to check out this article, which pours cold water on that claim.
I’ve also been following mainstream media coverage of another issue that has been in the news lately: Sthe links between crime and immigration in Sweden. Regarding the statistics, I’d invite readers to have a look at these two articles: What Is the Truth about Crime and Immigration in Sweden? and The Truth about Sweden. What does it feel to be a woman in today’s Sweden? Katie Holmes answers that question in two hard-hitting articles in the Daily Mail: Where females fear to tread and The Swedish town where migrant gangs have killed multiculturalism stone dead and laugh at laws they despise and defy.
The mainstream media has ridiculed claims of a link between sexual assault crimes and immigration from Arabic-speaking countries. After reading the four articles linked to in the preceding paragraph, I’m more convinced than ever that the MSM is merely trying to obfuscate the truth – and in so doing, betraying its purpose, which is to report the truth without fear or favor.
So, what do readers think? Who’s crazy: the media or President Trump – or both?
And then (you seem to have forgotten), I asked for a statutory citation for this legal claim of yours. I’m still waiting.
Yes. Why you assert these things as if you knew what you were talking about when you’re just repeating stuff you’ve read or heard on right wing media.
This is irrelevant to the case at hand. The case at hand as I see it:
1. Trump tweets that “(sick) guy” Obama wiretapped Trump Tower.
2. The entire pro-Trump camp goes bananas over all sorts of extraneous (extraneous in the sense that that was not what Trump directly claimed) cases of wiretapping that can be somehow related to Obama in a bad way.
Mark Levin says in the video CIA and FBI were investigating the Russian connections that Trump campaign members were suspected of. Should these not have been investigated? Illegal wiretapping certainly should be investigated, you seem to agree, but none of the evidence even hints that Trump Tower was wiretapped. Instead, Mark Levin inadvertently makes the case that when a court order was needed, it was obtained.
So there, nothing illegal as far as the current evidence goes. And Trump is a wuss.
Nicely argued, Erik.
I’m going to assume this has already been posted, but most of the people who might have posted it are on my ignore list.
On January 20, the front page of the New York Times had a headline, “Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Associates.”
After the notorious tweet about wiretapping, the online headline was changed to, “Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry Into Trump Associates.” Miraculously, the print edition still exists.
Again, the leaking of these intercepts is a felony, and doing it for political purposes is exactly the kind of thing that led to Nixon’s Impeachment.
If we add the failure of the intelligence community to figure out who the leaker was to the incompetence shown in allowing cyberweapons to disperse into the wild, we have agencies in disarray.
Yes. Except that the leak was published when Trump had already been elected. Let’s suppose, without evidence, that Obama did it for political purposes. What political purposes could they be?
Let’s grant that the leak is felony, but Obama’s political purposes must have been nothing short of preventing Trump get elected, so it should have been published before the elections, no?
As to the incumbent president, does it show no political motivation to accuse the predecessor in wiretapping Trump Tower? Without evidence, Trump is simply emitting hot air, very unbecoming for a president. As a minimum, he’s being libelous. But if the accusation is true, then my wild guess is that the reasons for the wiretapping were NOT political, given the circumstances of the leak.
There are a billion good reasons to investigate Trump any time. Roughly four or five billion. A guy who says “(Not paying taxes) makes me smart” has pretty much nixoned himself, if we were living in a rational world.
I don’t know. What purpose is there for the democrats to keep it alive? Why is it still being talked about?
I don’t suppose Obama did it. I suppose the surveillance was done on the Russians for legitimate purposes.
The felony arises when someone in the intelligence community ignores the finding that no laws were broken and selectively leaks the fact of the surveillance. That’s the political equivalent of a quote mine.
What is the purpose of quote mines?
One other thing. The leak did occur before the election.
One week before the election, Hillary publicly asked about Trump’s ties to the Russians.
So the leak was definitely intended to influence the election. And how did the information get to Hillary?
Okay, this is published by Fox News. Anyone think it’s not accurate?
petrushka,
True or not, it’s full of details that can be verified. If Trump told similar stories, there would be enough details to entertain the plausibility. But as far as details go for Trump, they are always either meagre or false. And don’t even get me started of his general paranoid egomaniac perspective that colors everything he says.
As things are, nobody supports Trump in this “worse than Watergate” case, including his own press secretary.
I’ll note that it is consistent with NSA or CIA monitoring the Libyan, and Kucinich being picked up as a consequence.
Trump’s claim, by contrast, is that he (or his organization) was the target.
Trump makes dramatic claims in order to put the spotlight on issues.
You can say he’s lying, and perhaps he is. Anyone remember You can keep your doctor? Presidents lie all the time.
The question is not whether Trump lied about being targeted for wiretapping. Everyone is wiretapped all the time. At least to the extent that your browses are examined by algorithms, and flagged if suspicious. If you talk to a foreign official, your call is routinely recorded. You don’t have to be targeted. The foreign officials are targeted.
Because these in place wiretaps are so pervasive, there are some serious limitations on what can be done with the info. That is where the targeting comes in. Someone broke the law and quote mined the results of a Russian intercept, and leaked just enough for a willing press to distort the importance of the calls.
If this is allowed to stand, you are giving the intelligence community, or factions within it, carte blanch to intimidate any politician or any individual of their choice.
If Trump or any of his associates broke the law, there are legal procedures to prosecute this. It would have been easy to do last October. Or December, or January. The fact that it wasn’t done suggests to me that there was nothing to prosecute, and Comey and Clapper are being truthful.
You mean except for this week?
They’ve made public statements that Trump, et al, have committed crimes?
Isn’t Clapper the one who testified under oath that NSA wasn’t monitoring every kind of communication?
Yes, it is. Libel is a crime.
Defamation is not a crime. You can be sued, but it is not a crime.
Good luck collecting on this one. Good luck even proving your case.
Explain how the fuck Hillary knew about Russian contacts a week before the election.
Not saying that Obama was involved directly, but someone was.
This is political theater. the only known felony that we are certain of at this point is the leak to the press of the phone calls. It is not possible that the press learned of these unless a crime was committed.
Same for Trump. He is just emitting hot air. Very thin skin that dude has. Meanwhile, Obama is all cool, diplomatic as supposed to.
This should be obvious. Trump was happily neenering that Putin said nice things about him all along. Essentially, he was saying, “Investigate my Russian connections! Please do!” In fact, Putin was just playing him (and he didn’t really say anything nice about Trump, if you know Russian). At the same time, Russian hackers against Hillary were a topic, Pizzagate and stuff like that.
It’s all connected. A political theater as you say. We both know how it goes. If a gun is on the stage, it is inevitably fired. And there are no winners, just actors. Trump is playing his role well, if we consider it a clown’s role. As a president, he is not doing so well.
Hasn’t Comey suggested that allegations against Obama should be dropped for lack of basis?
(I guess I really don’t know what you’re saying here.)
You are not responding to the question of crimes committed. The thread is not really about politics or policy or hot air or clownery. It is about whether crimes were committed.
Now unless something has come up very recently, Neither Trump, nor any of his associates have been accused of a crime. More broadly, two high level spooks have said rather definitively that there is no evidence that any crimes were committed.
And yet, Hillary seemed to know about the phone calls before the election, and the New York Times seems to have seen transcripts of phone calls, or at least have been assured that transcripts exist.
The disclosure of such transcripts — even the disclosure of the existence of the intercepts — would be a felony. So unless magic was involved, someone in the intelligence committed a felony and did so to advance a political cause.
Right. I didn’t respond to that, because I didn’t understand what you were asking or why. I was commenting on your claim that Comey is being truthful by noting that he seems to think that there’s not actually any case against Obama.
Also, I disagree with your claim that this thread is not about politics or policy or hot air or clownery. I take it the OP is specifically about whether Obama is guilty of some crime. Comey says he’s not, and you say Comey is truthful. But I take it you are not posting in agreement with him.
Thus, I have not understood you.
False. It’s about Trump, and he says in his own distinctive way, “Wrong! Wrong!”
This thread is about Trump’s tweetery. That’s the core of the whole play. Remember, his own press secretary is NOT on his side.
I would not expect any legal case against Obama. It seems obvious to me that Trump knows how to play the media. he says something that is inaccurate,and the media refutes it by reporting on what Trump wants reported.
Since the crime here was not talking to Russians, and the actual (known) crime was committed by someone who dislikes Trump, the Russian narrative will fade away. It is not useful to the democrats any more.
What we have now is the spectacle of progressives defending the CIA. Remember waterboarding? Or Extreme rendition? MK Ultra? Overthrowing the Iranian government and installing the Shah? Generally fucking with governments all over the world. Infiltrating the French elections?
People outside the United States remember.
Journalists tend to be liberal, sure, because they’re typically educated. It’s not so much liberal bias as conservatives want a bunch of bullshit to be true. Global Warming is a hoax, supply side economics creates jobs, etc.
from josh marshall:
“Nonsense Debt. A year ago I discussed the concept of “nonsense debt” as a key element in Donald Trump’s rise to power. You can read my full argument in the linked article. But the gist is that Republicans spent years since 2008 (actually before but especially since 2008) stoking their base with increasingly fantastical and ridiculous claims. Obamacare has death panels. Christians are a persecuted minority majority in the United States. We’ll build a fifty foot wall and make Mexico pay for it. This hokum drove huge levels of party enthusiasm and outrage which paid massive electoral dividends. But it also made the GOP ripe for takeover by an antic huckster like Donald Trump. To take just one small but illustrative example, back in February 2016 when Trump told Chris Cuomo that he probably gets audited so much because he’s a “strong Christian”, Republicans weren’t in much position to take him to task for this ridiculous answer since they’d spent years preaching to their base that just that kind of thing happens all the time.
This nonsense debt also altered the composition of Congress and especially the House Republican caucus. In each successive election of the Obama era, Republicans have bred for more and more extreme Representatives, more and more fed on nonsense debt. To put it more concretely, they have been reared not only on nonsense debt but never exposed to the realities of governing. As one of my colleagues put it, “if you think of it in evolutionary terms, the GOP has self-selected for hair on fire, apocalyptic conservatives for the last 10 years (maybe longer) — actual policy knowledge is not a priority. Nor is legislative acumen.” That reality is now colliding head on with the need to fulfill a campaign promise in a way that doesn’t upend tens of millions of people’s lives or lose Republicans their majority in 2018.”
“We’ve got to stop being the Party of Stupid” -bobby jindal, who promptly lost all support.
The remarkable thing is that — unpopular as Trump is — the democrats are significantly more unpopular. By a dozen points or so, according to a recent USA Today poll.
Your post is a good example of why the Democrats have lost 1200 elected positions in the last decade. Want to know how they managed it? Want to turn it around?
I find that remarkable myself.
Yes. What would you suggest?
So now it’s suddenly not about criminal facts anymore, but about popularity. Not even about whether the popularity is well deserved and serves the country well, but just plain popularity.
Yes, tweetery, Trump and media is a winning combination. I can agree with that. Except that it only meant Trump winning the presidency, everybody else loses.
I would suggest going back in a time machine and deleting the word deplorables from the campaigh record.
Or doing the next best thing. Deleting the thought from the democrat playbook. Stop calling your traditional core voters yahoos.
Take a long hard look at the polls. Not the cooked up ones that make you feel good, but the ones that disturb you. Consider this. Trump is still a bit net negative, but his policies are popular. They are dragging his image up the side of the cliff that he was pushed over.
You are not going to win by ridiculing him or his policies. Your best shot is to figure out why they are popular and craft your version.
So your final argument, when all else fails, is “Trump won.” This has to do with what, exactly?
Winning is not the topic. I’m not American, so I wouldn’t care even if it were.
And, seriously, hardly anyone ridicules Trump. He is objectively ridiculous, that’s all.
“You are not going to win by ridiculing him or his policies. Your best shot is to figure out why they are popular and craft your version.”
but they weren’t popular. He won because some slaveholding states demanded a rigged system tilted in their favor 200 years ago, and today those states are where the yokels live. You objectively can’t say he won due to popularity. And his approval rating is currently 44.3% the lowest at this point in a presidency of my lifetime.
“Erik March 10, 2017 at 9:58 pm
petrushka: The remarkable thing is that — unpopular as Trump is — the democrats are significantly more unpopular.”
nope.
“2. Party affiliation among voters: 1992-2016
Overall, 48% of all registered voters identify as Democrats or lean Democratic compared with 44% who identify as Republican or lean toward the GOP.”
The republicans haven’t elected a new president by winning the popular vote since GHWB in 1988. That’s why they have to do the gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc. Young voters, who lean democrat, vote at half the numbers as the elderly, who lean GOP. They simply aren’t ‘much more popular’.
AhmedKiaan,
Petrushka also said this, “Take a long hard look at the polls. Not the cooked up ones that make you feel good, but the ones that disturb you.”
So, when you cite polls that are on your side, you are not citing the right polls. Those polls are cooked up to make you feel good, according to petrushka.
Thanks. I suppose it is a good lesson to learn that we are not likely to convince people of views they disagree with by ridiculing them (though I must say it’s a bit strange coming from you). But it’s a difficult lesson to learn, no? I mean, certainly it’s not a lesson that you or I live by, but how many people at this site have learned it in total, do you think?
And why restrict ourselves to this site? What percentage of the total number of participants on websites or media commenting areas, generally follow your advice? Do you find that Republicans don’t ridicule so much? Is it because they didn’t use the word “deplorable” in the last election? Is that the test?
I have to admit that I may not be as enlightened on this matter as others. I mean, why is it so hard not to ridicule incidences of idiocy? Just consider this:–
https://www.google.com/amp/io9.gizmodo.com/trump-supporters-get-mad-because-they-think-the-man-in-1793159888/amp
What I’m saying is—how can you not?
That might be good advice if the only goal is to win and take power. It’s not principled, though. How about coming up with a consistent set of values and a description of policies that will achieve those? Better yet, how about recognizing that the overbearing power of the federal government is a significant problem?
Damnit, I’m agreeing with Erik again.
I know, patrick. Your buddy Rand Paul says the Trump health care plan doesn’t knock enough people off Medicaid. That objectively ridiculous bastard doesn’t realize that any subsidy at all for the poor is a bad thing. Why should the very rich get only an average $197K in tax reductions? How is that OK?! X>{
What better way to call attention to the dangers of executive orders than to show what can be done when someone you don’t like wields them? Even better object lesson: the person you don’t like is popular, and the policies even more popular.
I really don’t care much who is in power. It will always be someone who is corrupt. What I care about is the institutions that limit power, and which make the exercise of power cumbersome.
I am sad that the press only seems to get worked up about corruption when someone they don’t like gets elected.
This is like Hollywood giving an Oscar to “Spotlight” when they are the biggest child abusers around.
Hear, hear. Trump is a great lesson in why the power itself is the problem. It appears the left will try to make it about anything but that, because they expect to take it back.
“Good intentions will always be pleaded for any assumption of power. The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.”
— Daniel Webster
Instead of reading Daniel Webster(!), you two might want to read some Baumol.
And “the left” makes me laugh whenever you use it, patrick. Remember, the America Trumpsters like you are longing for is the America of Eisenhower–the one that built the interstate highways.
Those bastards!
Baumol seems not to understand the marketplace.
The price of something, including labor, is not based on intrinsic value, but on what people are willing to pay and on what sellers are able to obtain.
It seems the worse than Watergate Obama wiretapping does not include Obama or wiretapping.
It doesn’t “seem” that way at all. You haven’t actually read him, have you, petrushka?
“The left! The left!”
As I thought. But if you can’t read Baumol, you could at least take a look at some reviews of his book (which is now over 50 years old). I mean, if you’re going to be Patrick’s surrogate, you’re probably going to need to have a better idea of what you’re talking about than he does.
Anyhow, in his review (in American Academy of Political and Social Science) of Baumol’s classic book on welfare economics Carl Landauer has written:
As many economists besides Baumol have repeatedly pointed out, it’s not enough for a change that those who benefit COULD compensate the losers (supposing that’s the case–which is itself controversial). They’d actually have to DO SO for any alleged Pareto-optimality to occur.
Ah, what’s the difference? Obviously, the evil “left” hates our Freedom!
Corporate power good,government power bad
Hollywood sexually abuses children?