While Yale professors are suddenly discovering the frightful prospects of fascism in the two-month-old Trump Presidency...

....they are oblivious to how Obama "weaponized" the White House over the prior eight years.

Americans have a right to be concerned.

//Things begin to get a little frightening when we learn that this inadvertent collection of Trump staff conversations was followed up with transcriptions of those conversations and the disclosure (or unmasking) of the persons involved in the conversation. These transcripts would be considered raw intelligence reports.

When I was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, I was routinely involved in briefings as a member of the “Gang of Eight”—both parties’ leaders in the House and Senate and on the intelligence committees. I cannot recall how many times I asked to see raw intelligence reporting and was refused because that stuff is just not made available to policy makers.

But according to Mr. Nunes, such information made its way to the Obama White House before Inauguration Day. Few if any people working in the White House would ever need to see raw intelligence. Like intelligence committee members, they are typically consumers of intelligence products, not raw intelligence.

The raw transcripts of masked persons—or unmasked persons, or U.S. persons who can be easily identified—making their way to the White House is very likely unprecedented. One can only imagine who, at that point, might be reading these reports. Valerie Jarrett? Susan Rice? Ben Rhodes? The president himself? We don’t know, and the people who do aren’t talking at the moment.

Then we have the testimony earlier this week from FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers. Mr. Comey said there was no basis to support the tweet from President Trump that his “wires” had been tapped by Barack Obama. What he didn’t say—and wasn’t asked—was whether information was collected on Trump staff by other means. Mr. Trump was a little inarticulate in the context of Twitter’s 140-character limit, but it seems he got the general picture right.

Then there’s Mr. Comey’s testimony that the FBI had been investigating Trump staff for eight months. It almost certainly included surveillance; an investigation without surveillance would approach farcical.

Adm. Rogers told the House Intelligence Committee that there are strict controls in place for masking and unmasking the identities of people caught up in the inadvertent collection of information and the distribution of this kind of material. It now appears he either misled the committee or doesn’t know what’s happening inside his own agency. If Mr. Nunes is right, the rules either weren’t followed or were much less stringent than Adm. Rogers let on.

Last, and rather damningly, I believe that Mr. Comey and Adm. Rogers would have to have known that raw transcripts of captured conversations that included members of the Trump team were at the White House. It is inconceivable that people in those positions of power would not know. While this may not be criminal, it is at least a cause for them to be fired.


My greatest concern—the one that keeps me awake at night—is that the awesome powers of our intelligence community might have been corrupted for political purposes. While we’re not witnessing broad, Stasi-style surveillance of citizens, it’s clear there have been serious errors of judgment and action among our otherwise professional intelligence community. This is truly scary. We have to learn the entire truth before anyone, in or out of Congress, can again have confidence in our intelligence community.//

So, basically, Trump was right...

...again.

Maybe he wasn't "wiretapped" but his team was subjected to "electronic surveillance" and the product of that "electronic surveillance", which has NO INTELLIGENCE VALUE AND NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA, was WIDELY DISSEMINATED AMONG THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY.

Why?

If there was no intelligence value, why?

It is a mystery, I guess.

It undoubtedly has nothing at all to do with the reason why the IRS audited conservatives.

But, hey, everybody!!!

Russians!!! Let's go to war!!!

Optics.

The decision of Pelosi, Sanders, Ellison, and Wasserman-Schultz to disrespect a Gold Star widow is unfortunate, particularly after unleashing the Khan Family to attack Trump and then retreating to the "You can't say that about the family of a hero" when Trump responded. In this case, however, Ms. Owens said not a word and the focus was on the heroic sacrifice of her husband.

What won't be surprising is that we will not see days worth of dwelling on the pathetic performance of these leaders.

//But the moment of the night came when Trump singled out Carryn Owens, the recently widowed wife of Special Officer Ryan Owens, a Navy SEAL killed during a raid in Yemen. There are still questions to be answered about the operation itself, some of which Owens’ father is demanding and deserves, but as the gallery stood and applauded for Carryn Owens, she broke out in tears and gratitude, at times looking up and mouthing words. The ovation lasted over two minutes. During the ovation, several Democrats were caught on camera remaining in their seats, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ellison and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Perhaps they felt the scene was exploitative, as several news personalities pointed out on Twitter, which is fine, but this was the party that rolled out Gold Star family members Khizr Muazzam Khan and Ghazala Khan during the Democrat National Convention and paraded them around cable news for a week in response to Trump’s flippant comments. Maybe, just maybe, both families, Khan and Owens are deserving of ovations. If the reason Democrats can’t rise and applaud the widow of a fallen service member, or victims of violent crime, or American companies based in the heartland of the country is fear of a backlash from their base, maybe the base they are catering to is the problem.//