Obama says ‘rule of law is at risk’ after DOJ dropped Michael Flynn case

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Adam Shaw | Fox News


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Former President Barack Obama on Friday reacted to the Justice Department’s move to end its case against Michael Flynn by declaring that the “rule of law is at risk” -- as new details emerge about what the former president knew about the case against Flynn in the last days of his administration.

“The news over the last 24 hours I think has been somewhat downplayed — about the Justice Department dropping charges against Michael Flynn,” Obama said, according to Yahoo News, in a web talk with members of the Obama Alumni Association

“And the fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free," he reportedly said. "That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”

Yahoo News, in reporting the tape, noted that Obama incorrectly states the charges against Flynn, who was not charged with perjury. Instead, Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in the transition period between the Obama and Trump administrations. But Flynn’s supporters have long argued that the FBI set a perjury trap for Flynn.

The move this week by the DOJ came after the release of memos showing bureau officials debating at the time whether their purpose in interviewing Flynn was to get him to lie and prosecute him or get him to “admit to breaking the Logan Act” -- an obscure law that bars non-government officials from pretending to represent the U.S.

New details emerged also this week about what Obama himself knew at the time of the Flynn case. Obama warned the Trump administration against hiring Flynn and said he was “not a fan” of the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

According to declassified interview transcripts, Obama told then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and then-FBI Director James Comey in early 2017 that he had “learned of the information about Flynn” and his conversation with the Russian ambassador about sanctions

Obama "specified that he did not want any additional information on the matter, but was seeking information on whether the White House should be treating Flynn any differently, given the information."

At that point, the documents showed, "Yates had no idea what the president was talking about, but figured it out based on the conversation. Yates recalled Comey mentioning the Logan Act, but can't recall if he specified there was an 'investigation.' Comey did not talk about prosecution in the meeting."

The exhibit continues: "It was not clear to Yates from where the President first received the information. Yates did not recall Comey's response to the President's question about how to treat Flynn. She was so surprised by the information she was hearing that she was having a hard time processing it and listening to the conversation at the same time."

On Friday, Obama cited the Flynn case as a reason for why former officials needed to help his former Vice President Joe Biden beat Trump in November.

“So I am hoping that all of you feel the same sense of urgency that I do,” he said. “Whenever I campaign, I’ve always said, ‘Ah, this is the most important election.’ Especially obviously when I was on the ballot, that always feels like it's the most important election. This one — I’m not on the ballot — but I am pretty darn invested. We got to make this happen.”

Obama also reportedly cited the coronavirus pandemic as a reason to fight harder for Biden, blaming what he saw as a poor response on “tribal” trends stoked by Trump and his allies.

“What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy — that has become a stronger impulse in American life,” he said.

“And by the way, we’re seeing that internationally as well. It’s part of the reason why the response to this global crisis has been so anemic and spotty. It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalized in our government.”

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Gregg Re | Fox News


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President Obama was aware of the details of then-incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn's intercepted December 2016 phone calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, apparently surprising then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, according to documents released Thursday as exhibits to the government's motion to dismiss the Flynn case.

Obama's unexpectedly intimate knowledge of the details of Flynn's calls, which the FBI acknowledged at the time were not criminal or even improper, raised eyebrows because of his own history with Flynn -- and because top FBI officials secretly discussed whether their goal was to "get [Flynn] fired" when they interviewed him in the White House on January 24, 2017.

Obama personally had warned the Trump administration against hiring Flynn, and made clear he was "not a fan," according to multiple officials. Obama had fired Flynn as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014; Obama cited insubordination, while Flynn asserted he was pushed out for his aggressive stance on combating lslamic extremism.

On January 5, 2017, Yates attended an Oval Office meeting with then-FBI Director James Comey, then-Vice President Joe Biden, then-CIA Director John Brennan, and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, according to the newly declassified documents, including an FD-302 FBI witness report. They were discussing Russian election interference, along with national security adviser Susan Rice and other members of the national security council.

After the briefing, Obama asked Yates and Comey to "stay behind," and said he had "learned of the information about Flynn" and his conversation with Russia's ambassador about sanctions. Obama "specified that he did not want any additional information on the matter, but was seeking information on whether the White House should be treating Flynn any differently, given the information."

A previous memo from Rice stated that Biden also stayed behind after the main briefing had ended.

At that point, the documents showed, "Yates had no idea what the president was talking about, but figured it out based on the conversation. Yates recalled Comey mentioning the Logan Act, but can't recall if he specified there was an 'investigation.' Comey did not talk about prosecution in the meeting."

The exhibit continues: "It was not clear to Yates from where the President first received the information. Yates did not recall Comey's response to the President's question about how to treat Flynn. She was so surprised by the information she was hearing that she was having a hard time processing it and listening to the conversation at the same time."

Yates, who was fired by the Trump administration after taking the extraordinary step of refusing to defend its travel ban executive order in court, would later say that she was concerned Flynn would be vulnerable to blackmail because of his interactions with Russia.

The Logan Act, an obscure statute, has never been used successfully in a criminal prosecution; enacted in 1799 in an era before telephones, it was intended to prevent individuals from falsely claiming to represent the United States government abroad. In its motion to dismiss Flynn's case on Thursday, the DOJ noted that the law was an unserious dead letter.

Also released as an exhibit Thursday was a head-turning two-page document outlining why the FBI opened its counterintelligence probe into Flynn in August 2016. The FBI offered only three reasons: that Flynn was "cited as an adviser to the Trump team on foreign policy issues February 2016; he has ties to various state-affiliated entities of the Russian Federation, as reported by open-source information; and he traveled to Russia in December 2015, as reported by open-source information."

The "state-affiliated entities" line was an apparent reference to Flynn's paid appearance at a Moscow gala for Russian state TV network RT in 2015. Flynn also reportedly received thousands more in expenses covered by the network and in speech fees from other Russian firms, including some payments that he initially didn't disclose on ethics forms. The payments raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill, although Republicans pointed out that many other prominent officials, including Bill Clinton, have traveled to Russia for highly paid speaking engagements.
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Ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok approved opening a full-fledged national security probe on those apparently weak grounds, according to the FBI document, even though Flynn's speaking engagements in Russia were public knowledge. DOJ guidelines call for the FBI to open such counterintelligence probes only when there is a reasonable and articulable basis to believe that criminal activity has occurred or that a threat to national security may exist.

Strzok later would intervene and push to keep the Flynn probe open in January 2017, even after the FBI's Washington office signaled it wanted to close it because no "derogatory" information had been unearthed after consulting with other intelligence agencies in an exhaustive search.

On the recommendation of U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen, who served as an FBI agent for more than a decade, the Justice Department on Thursday moved to drop its case against Flynn. The stunning development came after internal memos were released raising serious questions about the nature of the investigation that led to Flynn’s late 2017 guilty plea of lying to the FBI as his legal fees mounted.

One of the documents was a top official's handwritten memo debating whether the FBI's "goal" was "to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired"; other materials showed efforts by Strzok to pursue Flynn on increasingly flimsy legal grounds.
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The FBI possessed word-for-word transcripts of Flynn's December 2016 conversations with Kislyak, and publicly admitted to reviewing those transcripts and clearing Flynn of any wrongdoing. The FBI's leak to The Washington Post that claimed the FBI cleared Flynn -- which was published just a day before the Flynn White House interview -- may have been an effort to lower his guard.

Both during and before the January 24, 2017 White House interview that led to Flynn's prosecution for one count of lying to the FBI, the bureau acknowledged having those full transcripts, raising the question of why agents would need to ask Flynn about what he said during the calls with Kislyak, except potentially as a pretext to obtain a false statements charge.

Flynn was accused specifically of giving equivocal and evasive answers to FBI agents in the White House during a casual interview concerning those phone calls, but no transcript of the conversation exists. Instead, after-the-fact FBI notes of the interview with Strzok and Joe Pientka were the primary evidence.

During the interview, Flynn told the agents "not really" when asked if he had sought to convince Kislyak not to escalate a brewing fight with the U.S. over sanctions imposed by the Obama administration, according to a FD-302 witness report prepared by the FBI. Flynn also demurred when asked if he had asked Russia to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution that condemned Israel’s settlements in the West Bank. The Obama administration abstained in that vote.

At various points, Flynn also suggested that such conversations might have happened or that he could not recall them if they did, according to the 302. The 302 indicated that Flynn apparently was aware his communications had been monitored, and at several points he thanked the FBI agents for reminding him of some of his conversations with Russian officials.

The FBI said Flynn had in fact discussed with Kislyak the need for Russia not to escalate the situation in response to sanctions just imposed by the Obama administration. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report stated that "Flynn requested that Russia not escalate the situation, not get into 'tit for tat,' and only respond to the sanctions in a reciprocal manner." Flynn did not discuss an effort to undo the Obama sanctions, contrary to some media reports.

Strzok later was removed from then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team when his anti-Trump text messages surfaced, and Pientka now has been under scrutiny for his role in various Trump probes.

Pientka has been scrubbed from the FBI website after Fox News asked the bureau about him, and Republican lawmakers (including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and GOP Reps. Jim Jordan and Mike Johnson) are seeking to question him. The FBI told Fox News last year that reporting Pientka's name was irresponsible and endangered his life for no journalistic purpose.

But, Fox News has previously determined that Pientka was also intimately involved in the probe of former Trump aide Carter Page, which the DOJ has since acknowledged was riddled with fundamental errors and premised on a discredited dossier that the bureau was told could be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

The FBI's recently released handwritten notes in advance of the Flynn interview -- which the FBI's former head of counterintelligence Bill Priestap wrote after a meeting with Comey and then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Fox News is told -- suggested that agents planned in the alternative to get Flynn "to admit to breaking the Logan Act" when he spoke to Kislyak during the presidential transition period.

"What is our goal?" one of the notes read. "Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?"

Another note read, "If we get him to admit to breaking the Logan Act, give facts to DOJ + have them decide." Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley called the document's implications "chilling."

Earlier Thursday, Brandon Van Grack, a top Justice Department prosecutor and former member of Mueller's team, withdrew from the Flynn case.

Van Grack also was withdrawing from other unrelated cases as well, raising questions about his future at the DOJ. No explanation was given for Van Grack's abrupt withdrawal from the Flynn case, which was recorded in a brief filing with the court on Thursday. An administration official told Fox News that Van Grack was still at the DOJ and has not resigned.

Van Grack's removal from the cases came just days after Fox News reported that the explosive, newly unsealed evidence documenting the FBI's efforts to target Flynn called into question whether Van Grack complied with a court order to produce favorable evidence to Flynn.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Edmund DeMarche | Fox News


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President Trump on Sunday intensified his criticism of former President Obama by tying him to the Michael Flynn investigation and blasting his predecessor's recent criticism aimed at his administration's coronavirus response.

Last week, Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department dismissed the case against Flynn, Trump's first national security adviser, which was seen as the key prosecution from Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

Trump, along with other Republicans, seized on the decision and framed it as an example of a Democrat-manufactured plot to remove him from office.

Trump retweeted Eli Lake, a columnist at Bloomberg, who said he has been reviewing the interview transcripts that were recently released in the collusion investigation. Lake wrote, “It’s now clear why every Republican on [Rep. Adam Schiff’s] committee in 2019 called for his resignation. He knew the closed door witnesses didn’t support his innuendo and fakery on Russia collusion.”
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Sidney Powell, one of Flynn’s lawyers, told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” that FBI agents did their best to hide their investigation and attempted to entrap Flynn. She mentioned a meeting on Jan. 5, 2017 at the White House that included Obama, then-FBI Director James Comey, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan.

Powell said the “whole thing was orchestrated and set up within the FBI, Clapper, Brennan and in the Oval Office meeting that day with President Obama,” she told Maria Bartiromo, the anchor.

Bartiromo asked Powell if she believed the scandal reached up to Obama, and Powell responded, “Absolutely.”

Trump later tweeted, “OBAMAGATE,” indicating that he believes that Obama worked to undermine his presidency.

Obama on Friday told supporters that with regards to Flynn's case, there “is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”

Obama’s criticism of the DOJ has been echoed by fellow Democrats, who have called out what they see as Trump’s influence over Barr. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the House Judiciary chairman, called the decision to drop the charges against Flynn “outrageous.”

“The evidence against General Flynn is overwhelming. He pleaded guilty to lying to investigators. And now a politicized and thoroughly corrupt Department of Justice is going to let the president’s crony simply walk away,” he said in a statement.

Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about two separate contacts he had with a former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Rep. Jim Jordan, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, told Fox News last week that Comey displayed “arrogance” and “ego” with the way he spoke about the Flynn case. The department said its continued prosecution of Flynn would “not serve the interests of justice.”

Trump said that Flynn was innocent and was targeted in an attempt to take down his presidency. He told reporters that he was unaware that the DOJ was going to drop its case.

“I felt it was going to happen just by watching and seeing, like everybody else does. He was an innocent man. He is a great gentleman. He was targeted by the Obama administration and he was targeted in order to try and take down a president,” he said.

Trump continued, “What they’ve done is a disgrace and I hope a big price is going to be paid. A big price should be paid. There’s never been anything like this in the history of our country. What they did, what the Obama administration did, is unprecedented. It’s never happened. Never happened. A thing like this has never happened.”

Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, told Fox News’ “The Next Revolution” Sunday that the FBI likely feared that Flynn would uncover illegitimacies surrounding the origin of the Russia probe.

"I think the best way to look at this is what the FBI and the Obama Administration wanted to do here was really audacious if you think about it in terms of the idea of trying to continue an investigation after a new president has come into power and is in a position to shut down the investigation -- when the president ultimately is the target of the investigation," McCarthy said.

Obama told 3,000 members of the Obama Alumni Association that the Trump administration was woefully inept in dealing with the coronavirus outbreak.

“It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalized in our government,” he said.

Trump has insisted that his administration was correct in banning flights from China early on in the outbreak, despite being condemned in some segments of the media.

Larry Kudlow, his national economic council director, told ABC News’ “This Week with George Stephanopolous” that he did not want to engage in a political back and forth with the former president, but said Trump has worked well in incorporating the private sector and parts of the government in the response.

“I don’t understand what President Obama is saying. It just sounds so darn political to me. Look, what we have done may not be 100 percent perfect. These things happen once every 100 years,” Kudlow said.

Fox News' Joshua Nelson and the Associated Press contributed to this report

[DemonGeminiX]

He's not President anymore. He could be charged with crimes.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

He's not President anymore. He should be charged with crimes.

:ftfy:

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By NY Post Editorial Board


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RussiaGate is now a complete dead letter — but ObamaGate is taking its place. Just how far did the then-president go to cripple his successor?

It’s now clear the Obama-Comey FBI and Justice Department never had anything more substantial than the laughable fiction of the Steele dossier to justify the “counterintelligence” investigation of the Trump campaign. Yet incessant leaks from that supposedly confidential probe wound up consuming the Trump administration’s first months in office — followed by the Bob Mueller-led special-counsel investigation that proved nearly the “total witch hunt” that President Trump dubbed it.

Information released as the Justice Department dropped its charges against Gen. Mike Flynn shows that President Barack Obama, in his final days in office, played a key role in fanning the flames of phony scandal. Fully briefed on the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation, he knew the FBI had come up with nothing despite months of work starting in July 2016.

Yet on Jan. 5, 2017, Obama told top officials who’d be staying on in the new administration to keep the crucial facts from Team Trump.

It happened at an Oval Office meeting with Vice President Joe Biden, intel chiefs John Brennan and Jim Clapper and National Security Adviser Susan Rice, as well as FBI Director Jim Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.

“From a national-security perspective,” Rice’s memo afterward put it, “President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”

This, even as then-President Obama also directed that as many people as possible across his administration be briefed on the (utterly unsubstantiated) allegations against Team Trump — and as Rice and others took unprecedented steps to “unmask” US citizens like Flynn whose conversations had been caught on federal wiretaps of foreigners.

Indeed, the Obama administration went on a full-scale leak offensive — handing The Washington Post, New York Times and others a nonstop torrent of “anonymous” allegations of Trumpite ties to Moscow. It suggested that the investigations were finding a ton of treasonous dirt on Team Trump — when in fact the investigators had come up dry.

Sadly, Comey’s FBI played along — sandbagging Flynn with the “friendly” interview that later became the pretext for the bogus charges dropped last week, as well as triggering the White House chaos that led to his ouster. This, when the FBI had already gone over the general with a fine-tooth comb, and concluded that, no, he’d done nothing like collude with the Russians.

Meanwhile, Comey himself gave Trump an intentionally misleading briefing on the Steele dossier. That was followed by leaks that suggested the dossier was the tip of an iceberg, rather than a pack of innuendo that hadn’t at all checked out under FBI scrutiny.

Pulitzer Prizes were won for blaring utter fiction; the Trump administration was kneecapped out of the gate. Innocents like Flynn were bankrupted along the way.

Say this about Obama: He knows how to play dirty.

[DemonGeminiX]

Looks like Obama should be arrested. Charge him with everything up to and including treason.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Ryan Saavedra - The Daily Wire


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Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell has declassified the list of former Obama administration officials who were allegedly involved in the “unmasking” of then-incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn.

ABC News first reported the news but initially said in the title that Grenell was in the process of trying to declassify the list of Obama officials.

A source with knowledge of the matter told The Daily Wire that the list has already been declassified and now it’s on Attorney General William Barr to release the list.

ABC News appeared to later update their report, which stated:


Grenell, who remains the U.S. ambassador to Germany along with being the acting DNI, visited the Justice Department last week and brought the list with him, according to the official.

His visit indicates his focus on an issue previously highlighted in 2017 by skeptics of the investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia, specifically allegations that former officials improperly unveiled Flynn’s identity from intercepts of his call with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Grenell’s visit came the same week that Attorney General William Barr moved to dismiss the criminal case against Flynn following his guilty plea for lying to the FBI about his conversations with Kislyak.

Fox News reported in 2017 that the disclosing of Flynn’s identity could be “a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison” because “rules state that if an American with Constitutional protections is collaterally caught in such surveillance, his or her identity must be protected.”

In an interview last week, Barr said that the charges against Flynn were dropped because the FBI, which was under the leadership of then-Director James Comey, were not conducting a legitimate law enforcement investigation.

“A crime cannot be established here because there was not, in our view, a legitimate investigation going on,” Barr said. “They did not have a basis for a counterintelligence investigation against Flynn at that stage, based on a perfectly legitimate and appropriate call he made as a member of the transition.”

When asked if the Obama administration set a trap for Flynn, Barr responded, “Yes. Essentially. They had started a counterintelligence investigation during the summer, as you know, related to the campaign. But in December, the team, the Crossfire Hurricane team, was closing that and determined they had found nothing to justify continuing with that investigation against Flynn.”

“On the very day they prepared the final papers, the seventh floor, that is the director’s office and the deputy director’s office up there, sent down word they should keep that open,” Barr continued. “So that they could try to go and question Flynn about this call he had with the Russian ambassador.”

“This is one particular episode, but we view it as part of a number of related acts. And we’re looking at the whole pattern of conduct,” Barr added. “I think a very important evidence here was that this was not a bona fide counterintelligence investigation – was that they were closing the investigation in December. They started that process. And on January 4th, they were closing it.”

Former President Barack Obama responded to the decision by Barr by saying that he was “worried” that Flynn had been cleared from the illegitimate investigation because the “rule of law is at risk.”

[Muddy]

So will we see this on the NBC evening news tonight?

[Teh One Who Knocks]

So will we see this on the NBC evening news tonight?

:rofl:

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Brooke Singman, David Spunt | Fox News


Top Obama administration officials purportedly requested to "unmask" the identity of Michael Flynn during the presidential transition period, according to a list of names from that controversial process made public on Wednesday.

The list was declassified in recent days by Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, and then sent to GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, who made the documents public. It features top figures including then-Vice President Joe Biden, then-FBI Director James Comey and intelligence chiefs John Brennan and James Clapper. It also included Obama's then-chief of staff, Denis McDonough.

"I declassified the enclosed document, which I am providing to you for your situational awareness," Grenell wrote to GOP senators in sending along the list.

Grenell’s letter was addressed to Sens. Grassley, R-Iowa, and Johnson, R-Wis., who had penned a letter to him and Attorney General Bill Barr regarding the declassification of files related to the unmasking process earlier in the day.

As Fox News previously reported, Grenell made the decision to declassify information about Obama administration officials who were involved in the “unmasking” of former national security adviser Flynn — whose calls with the former Russian ambassador during the presidential transition were picked up in surveillance and later leaked.

Grenell appeared to have delivered those files to the DOJ last week. The declassified list showed recipients who “may have received Lt. Gen Flynn’s identity in response to a request processed between 8 November 2016 and 31 January 2017 to unmask an identity that had been generically referred to in an NSA foreign intelligence report,” the document, obtained by Fox News, read.

“Each individual was an authorized recipient of the original report and the unmasking was approved through NSA’s standard process, which includes a review of the justification for the request,” the document said. “Only certain personnel are authorized to submit unmasking requests into the NSA system. In this case, 16 authorized individuals requested unmasking for [REDACTED] different NSA intelligence reports for select identified principals.” The document added: “While the principals are identified below, we cannot confirm hey saw the unmasked information. This response does not include any requests outside of the specified time-frame.”

The list revealed that then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power made unmasking requests seven times between Nov. 30, 2016 and Jan. 11, 2017. The list revealed that Clapper made three requests from Dec. 2, 2016 through Jan. 7, 2017; that Brennan made two requests, one on Dec. 14 and one on Dec. 15, 2016. Comey also made a request on Dec. 15, 2016. On Jan. 5, 2017, McDonough made one request, and on Jan. 12, 2017, then-Vice President Biden made one request.

The document comes just a day after Biden told ABC News’ “Good Morning America” that he knew “nothing about those moves to investigate Michael Flynn,” and called the topic a “diversion” from the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden was pressed again, and clarified: “I thought you asked me whether or not I had anything to do with him being prosecuted. I’m sorry. ... I was aware that there was—that they asked for an investigation, but that’s all I know about it, and I don’t think anything else.”

[PorkChopSandwiches]

Weird how we all knew this already

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Ryan Saavedra - The Daily Wire


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Two Senate committees are expanding their investigations into the Obama-era scandal that involved surveilling members of the Trump campaign, which Attorney General William Barr has said amounts to “spying,” saying that they have reason to believe that they are becoming increasingly concerned that the surveillance started before the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation.

Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson and Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley wrote a letter to Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell asking for the declassification of “additional information related to the unmasking of Americans around the time of the 2016 election, but also to expand the scope of our request to include information as early as January 2016.”

“Based on our investigation and recent press reports, we are increasingly concerned that the surveillance of U.S. persons affiliated with the Trump campaign began earlier than the opening of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation in late July 2016,” the letter continued. “It has become evident that the FBI, and possibly members of the U.S. Intelligence Community, were focused on U.S. persons affiliated with the Trump campaign in early 2016, if not even earlier.”

“Again, the best way to resolve these issues is to determine the truth, and to make clear to the American people what did and did not occur,” the letter concluded. “For these reasons, we respectfully request that you make available to us, as soon as possible, all information regarding the “unmasking” of U.S. persons affiliated with the Trump campaign requested by members of President Obama’s administration from January 2016 through January 2017.”
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The demand for more information comes after last week’s bombshell revelation that numerous Obama officials, including then-Vice President Joe Biden, unmasked then-incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Fox News reported:


The list was declassified in recent days by Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell and then sent to GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, who made the documents public. The roster features top-ranking figures including then-Vice President Joe Biden — a detail already being raised by the Trump campaign in the bare-knuckle 2020 presidential race where Biden is now the Democrats’ presumptive nominee.

The list also includes then-FBI Director James Comey, then-CIA Director John Brennan, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Obama’s then-chief of staff Denis McDonough.

Obama officials, including disgraced former FBI Director James Comey, thought that there was something wrong with Flynn’s phone calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Attorney General William Barr debunked that notion earlier this month, saying that Flynn made “a perfectly legitimate and appropriate call he made as a member of the transition.”

“Let me say that, at that point, he was the designated national security adviser for President-Elect Trump, and was part of the transition, which is recognized by the government and funded by the government as an important function to bring in a new administration,” Barr continued. “And it is very typical, very common for the national security team of the incoming president to communicate with foreign leaders.”

“And that call, there was nothing wrong with it whatever. In fact, it was laudable. He– and it was nothing inconsistent with the Obama administration’s policies,” Barr concluded on the matter. “And it was in U.S. interests. He was saying to the Russians, you know, ‘Don’t escalate.’ And they asked him if he remembered saying that, and he said he didn’t remember that.”