Less than 24 hours after CNN reported that Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manfort has been under surveillance by the FBI since 2014, Manafort has fired back by calling on the Department of Justice to release all transcripts of his tapped phone calls so that the American public “can come to the same conclusion as the DOJ — there is nothing there.”
The Duran reported that CNN’s admission that Trump was indeed wiretapped, hides a much bigger scandal than the convenient distraction (“Russiagate”) that is being peddled around.
The big question is whether the true scandal of the 2016 election, the fact that during the election Obama’s Justice Department and the US intelligence community undertook surveillance of the campaign team of Hillary Clinton’s Republican opponent, will ever be publicly admitted in the US.
The fact that we now have revelations of surveillance of Paul Manafort and Carter Page during the election, and admissions that following the election the surveillance was further extended to include still more members of Trump’s campaign team, under the fact that this surveillance was carried out on either false (the meeting with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi) or flimsy (the Trump Dossier) pretexts, and that no senior official of the US government or member of the Congress, and no part of the establishment media, seem at all concerned, provides the answer to that question.
Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is calling on the Justice Department to release transcripts of any intercepted communications he may have had with foreigners.
Manafort, a longtime Republican political consultant, also called on the Justice Department’s inspector general to investigate the leak of details of secret surveillance warrants obtained by U.S. investigators.
“Mr. Manafort requests that the Department of Justice release any intercepts involving him and any non-Americans so interested parties can come to the same conclusion as the DOJ — there is nothing there,” Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said in a statement.
Jason Maloni goes on to demand that the DOJ launch an immediate investigation into who continues to commit federal felonies with reckless abandon by leaking details of confidential FISA warrants to the media.
Maloni noted in his statement that whether or not Manafort committed a crime (and he has not been charged with any crime as of present day) the leak of information about FISA warrants is a federal crime.
“If true, it is a felony to reveal the existence of a FISA warrant, regardless of the fact that no charges ever emerged.”
Maloni called on the Justice Department’s watchdog to “immediately” open an investigation into the leak and to “examine the motivations behind the previous Administration’s effort to surveil a political opponent.”
Screenshot of statement below:
Paul Manafort’s lawyer statement asks DOJ Inspector General to investigate the classified FISA warrant leak and… pic.twitter.com/rI1jMfP5oA
— Sara A. Carter (@SaraCarterDC) September 19, 2017
Zerohedge reports…
Of course, this was all triggered by CNN’s ‘bombshell’ story last night which revealed that Manafort has been under an ongoing wiretap, approved by the FISA courts, going back to 2014 and tied to his consulting arrangements with Ukraine’s former ruling party.
That said, the interesting part of CNN’s story came via the revelation that “surveillance [of Manafort] was discontinued at some point last year for lack of evidence” but was then restarted with a “new FISA warrant that extended at least into early this year”…all of which sounds an awful lot like the Obama administration using FISA courts to spy on a political opponent.
All of which has led many people to question throughout the day whether the Obama administration, as Trump suggested back in March, did intentionally spy on his campaign using FISA warrants.
Certainly these two tweets from CNN’s Jake Tapper would seem to be somewhat contradictory:
Tapper’s initial reaction from March 2017 to Trump’s claim that the Obama administration wiretapped his campaign…
POTUS makes wild accusation w/zero evidence
WH searches for evidence & cant find any
WH tells Congress to find evidence/no further comment
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) March 5, 2017
Jake Tapper’s follow-up tweet from last night, after CNN broke the Manafort surveillance story…
US government wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman – CNNPolitics https://t.co/BY8MACKfV9
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) September 18, 2017
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