06/21/2021 / By JD Heyes
Towards the end of Donald Trump’s term, it became transparently evident that despite the fact that he was president, the massive federal bureaucracy he supposedly controlled as head of the Executive Branch was pretty much uncontrollable.
After decades of growth and self-empowerment, “the bureaucracy” has become a fourth branch of government, operating independently and, often, in contravention to current White House administrations.
That was certainly the case with Trump; even after four years, he could not get the entire package of evidence that he was spied on by Barack Obama and that his 2016 campaign was set up to take a fall under the guise of a phony “Russian collusion” allegation released — even after replacing his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions.
The most corrupt agency involved in the set-up of Trump was, of course, the FBI; under then-Director James Comey and then-President Obama, the agency was empowered even further to become an entity into and of itself, as proven by the fact that no one except a low-level bureau lawyer was ever held accountable for all of the illegal things the agency did to spy on Trump.
And speaking of illegal FBI spying, the agency engaged in far more of it against Trump’s supporters as well.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation knowingly violated the Constitution to track down potential ‘racially motivated violent extremists.’ But the FBI didn’t conduct its unconstitutional dragnet following the January 6th Capitol riots, it actually started its probe in November — in the midst of a contested election.
A newly declassified report shows that the FBI pursued extremists in November that would fit the profile of future Capitol rioters by tapping into a National Security Agency database that trawls and records Americans’ communications.
“The FBI’s requests for access to masses of electronic communications harvested by the National Security Agency (NSA) is revealed in a newly declassified report from the United States’ secret surveillance court,” the Daily Mail reported in recent days, revealing that, of course, the FBI didn’t act alone.
“It shows the FBI has continued to perform warrantless searches through the NSA’s most sensitive databases for routine criminal investigations, despite being told by a federal judge in 2018 and 2019 that such a use was an unconstitutional breach of privacy,” the outlet added.
The declassified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) report goes on to lay out what the legal procedure is for spying on an American citizen on U.S. soil. Under Section 702 of the law, the NSA is the lead agency for making such targeting decisions, and the decision has to be based on legitimate evidence that said U.S. citizen is acting on behalf of a foreign government against our country.
In other words, political opposition to the prevailing political ideology (big government leftism, in this case) doesn’t count as a good reason to spy on American citizens.
So, in short, the FBI is routinely and extensively accessing the NSA’s massive information database to conduct routine (and fabricated) investigations within the country, a practice the agency knows is unconstitutional as well as big-time illegal.
And officials obviously don’t/didn’t care. Why? Because they are never held accountable.
House impeachment manager during Trump’s second impeachment, Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands), gave away a glimpse of this advance FBI knowledge during the second day of Trump’s trial.
“The day before the rioters stormed the Congress, an FBI office in Virginia also issued an explicit warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and, quote, war, according to internal reports,” she said.
“Leading up to the event there were hundreds, hundreds of posts online showing that his supporters took this as a call to arms to attack the Capitol,” she further noted. “There were detailed posts of plans to attack online. Law enforcement warned that these posts were real threats and even made arrests days leading up to the attack.”
Those revelations alone should have been tip-offs that even Trump’s FBI was rogue.
The FBI needs to go away, permanently; the agency serves the deep-state bureaucracy, not the citizens of our country.
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Tagged Under: Constitution, FBI, fisa, Illegal, NSA, Orwellian, police state, privacy, rogue, Section 702, spying, surveillance, Trump administration, Trump campaign, unconstitutional, warrant
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