I have no idea if your President is using the government or the FISA process to spy on journalists. They seem to think so, which suggests he is not. But TDS makes you do strange things. So, some Freedom Press groups filed an FOIA request to prove it and look at what they found?
In one memo, dated March 19, [Eric] Holder says FISA applications against journalists must be approved by the attorney general and deputy attorney general prior to being brought before a FISA court.
Yeah, we can spy on journalists we even have a process for it. And they used it. The Obama administration spied on journalists and everyone else including the Trump campaign. So, who could be surprised to find that the sketchy process established to approve surveillance on Americans (connected to potentially dangerous foreign interests, of course) would be abused?
No one.
Again, there is no evidence the Trump Administration has done anything like that. But Democrats assume that since they do it (and Obama did it, and it was glorious), Republicans must as well. But it’s not okay.
Reason.com posits the likelihood that the Trump Administration is spying on journalists based on a demand for “the phone and email records of New York Times reporter Ali Watkins in an attempt to find out whether her source, a former Senate aide, had leaked classified information.”
That’s a stretch.
James Wolfe, who had a three-year relationship with the Ali Watkins (while married to someone else), texted 81 photos of an 82 page unredacted FISA application to Watkins. The “the plumbers at the DoJ” were just following the leak.
They didn’t go to the FISA court and ask to put surveillance up on Watkins. This was out in the open, not at all partisan and illegitimate. There were breadcrumbs to follow — eighty-one texts of unredacted FISA applications sent to Watkins’ phone number.
Would it not be a dereliction of duty for the FBI not to pursue that lead in either direction? What other national security or other classified information might Wolfe have shared with Watkins, and with whom might she have shared those?
Turns out, Wolfe was a wolf with his access to intel.
Wolfe was never charged specifically with leaking any classified information, even though prosecutors alleged he had used his several decades in the highly sensitive position to “cultivate relationships with multiple young, female reporters, who were attempting to gain information.”
Wolfe leveraged his access to intelligence to gain “access” to young women, and there was no #MeToo lynching. Probably because Wolfe was leaking information to the press, they thought would compromise Trump. It turned to be the opposite. It compromised the FBI, which is why we hear very little about Wolfe and more about Watkins, but not nearly enough about the leaked FISA application.
And that was the impetus for free press advocacy groups to file a freedom of Information request. The one that got them memos from Obama’s AG Eric Holder in which he notes that sure, you can use FISA to spy on journalists. Which they did.
And to the best of our knowledge, Trump did not.
