[Wash Times] Private messages between President Trump’s former campaign adviser Roger Stone and an entity implicated in the Democratic National Committee hack may have been discovered by the U.S. government during the course of a broader probe targeting the Republican strategist’s personal communications, Mr. Stone alleged Wednesday.
Mr. Stone told The Washington Times on Wednesday that he believes his telephone and internet conversations were accessed by the U.S. government in accordance with a warrant issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a federal law that lets investigators eavesdrop on "agents of foreign power" and their activities.
The Smoking Gun reported first last week that Mr. Stone, 64, swapped private Twitter messages in 2016 with "Guccifer 2.0," a persona directly involved in last year’s historic DNC hack and widely believed to be a front deployed by Russian military intelligence. Mr. Stone later provided copies of those conversations to The Times, but defended the interactions as "completely innocuous."
Weighing in nearly a week later, Mr. Stone said in a statement Wednesday that The Smoking Gun article is "rife with information that could only be learned by surveillance of my domain and eavesdropping on my email, phone calls and texts."
"There is additional information in the story as well as in several of the spinoff stories that could only have been acquired by surveillance of my communications -- further evidence that a FISA warrant was approved to monitor my email and computerized data," Mr. Stone told The Times, adding that "someone inside the system" must have illegally provided details of the probe to The Smoking Gun.
[Disabled Vets] Veterans upset by a Florida VA facility’s tardy hanging of photos of President Donald Trump and VA Secretary David Shulkin, MD, took action Tuesday.
The facility was the West Palm Beach VA. The Congressman’s name that hung the photos was none other than double amputee and Army veteran Brian Mast (R-Fl).
Rep. Mast noticed the facility still lacked images of its leadership and took matters into his own hands. He found two proper photos of the President and Secretary and ensured they were hung in the proper place within the VA facility.
#1
FOX just announced the VA is preparing to publish a memo directing their facilities to (paraphrasing) 'present appropriate POTUS photo pending receipt of the official copy.'
The hanging of an official copy will not cure the 'not our president' attitude of flagrant disrespect.
[Breitbart] As President Donald Trump plans a slew of policies that could dismantle key parts of Barack Obama’s presidential legacy, the former president seems to be returning to his roots as a Saul Alinsky-style radical community organizer.
I was not aware there was a 'legacy' worth saving.
Save it? First they'd have to find it...
This time Obama and his associates’ objective is to stop Trump’s domestic and foreign policy agendas on virtually all fronts ‐ immigration reform, border security, the roll back of the controversial Obamacare system and more. According to some accounts, Obama and his associates may be seeking no less than Trump’s impeachment.
The strategies for disruption seem to include everything from nonprofit front-group activism and the filing of legal motions to support for protest movements targeting Trump and top administration officials.
This as Trump works to secure America’s porous borders, fix the faltering economy, replace Obama’s largely failed healthcare law, combat the scourge of radical Islamic terrorism, contend with the threat of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and address the issue of illegal immigration that was put on steroids during Obama’s two terms in office.
The latest sign of Obama’s fingerprints on Trump disruption plots comes from reports on Monday that former Obama administration staffers have formed a group to closely monitor the Trump administration.
[Bloomberg] Nonetheless, there may be reason to take the gist of Trump's tweet seriously. At least this is the upshot of the latest turn in the story. On Wednesday Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence panel, and that body's ranking Democrat, Adam Schiff announced they were seeking information on how the identities of American citizens picked up in eavesdropping on foreign targets were unmasked in more widely disseminated intelligence reports.
This is important because of the case of Michael Flynn, Trump's first national security adviser. He resigned after the Washington Post reported on his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergei Kislyak, that took place after Trump's victory but before his swearing in. At the time, the story was about how Flynn had not come clean about an element of those conversations, touching on sanctions just imposed on Russia.
But another big part of that story is how the intercepted communications of an incoming national security adviser found its way into the newspaper. Earlier this month, Obama's last director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said there were no Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants that he knew about targeting Trump or his campaign. This surely means that Flynn was caught on a wiretap of the Russian ambassador. Normally, the names of Americans "incidentally collected," to use the intelligence community's phrase, are redacted from reports that are sent out to senior government officials. Was Flynn's name redacted in this case? If not, were summaries or transcripts of his conversation widely distributed within the government? Which would have made it easier to leak.
That's what Nunes and Schiff want to know. In a March 15 letter to the heads of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency, they asked for the total number of times a U.S. person's identity was unmasked between June 2016 and January 2017. They also want to know the names of any U.S. persons unmasked in incidental collection who were affiliated or part of the Trump or Hillary Clinton campaigns in this same period, and who inside the executive branch asked for these names to be unmasked.
#1
Surveillance by any means is just another form of colloquial 'wiretapping'. The NSA has been doing it for at least a decade on all of us at one time or another.
#2
If the NSA is looking at my activities they'll be bored to tears. On the other hand, if they're following my internet wanderings, no doubt they have learnt useful things and met interesting people -- I certainly have. :-)
#5
Item (1): Clapper has been demonstrated to have lied in congressional testimony, so, there's a discount figure involved in his statements.
Item (2) Clapper said there were no "warrants that he knew about"; i.e. there could have easily been some, he just wasn't in on it ahead of time.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
03/16/2017 17:59 Comments ||
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[DefenseOne] Marcel Lettre served at the Pentagon under the last four secretaries of defense from 2009 to January 2017, most recently as undersecretary of defense for intelligence.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.