Revealed: One Of The Last Things Obama Did Before Leaving Office Could Explain Everything
Shortly before former President Barack Obama left office, he changed the rules about how one of America’s top spy agencies could share its most sensitive data, vastly increasing the numbers of people who had access to the information.
The change has implications not only for the investigation into leaks coming out of President Donald Trump’s White House, but also whether the information gathered when Trump Tower was under surveillance prior to last year’s election has been shared.
On Jan. 12, the Obama administration allowed communications intercepted anywhere by the National Security Agency to be shared with all members of the American intelligence community.
“The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws,” the New York Times reported in January, adding, “The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data.”
In an interview with The Atlantic, Susan Hennessey of the Brookings Institute implied that the rules were changed with arrival of the Trump administration in mind.
“I think the bottom line is that it’s comforting to a large national-security community that these are procedures that are signed off by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and not by the DNI and attorney general that will ultimately be confirmed under the Trump Administration,” she said.
Some noted at the time that the potential for abuse was increased.
“The fact that they’re relaxing these privacy-protective rules just as Trump is taking the reins of the surveillance state is inexplicable to me,” says Nate Cardozo, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The changes they’re making today are widening the aperture for abuse to happen just as abuses are becoming more likely.”
“It used to be that if NSA itself saw the evidence of a crime, they could give a tip to the FBI, and the FBI would engage in parallel construction,” said Cardozo. “Now FBI will be able to get into the raw data themselves and do what they will with it.”
The result was capsulized in a remark attributed to a U.S. intelligence official who spoke to the website Circa and whose comments were shared by The Daily Caller.
“We have people spouting off who don’t know the difference between FISA surveillance and a wiretap or a counterintelligence probe versus a special prosecutor criminal case, and it has hurts our ability to get to the truth and has wrongly created the impression that intelligence officials have a political agenda,” the official said.
As reported by Breitbart last Friday, the order to increase information sharing was part of a chain of events that led to media leaks of sensitive information from the Trump White House. The order also came shortly before news media accounts of a multi-agency investigation into possible connections between Trump campaign officials and Russia.
Breitbart’s Joel B. Pollak summed up the chain of events this way: “In summary: the Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media,” he wrote.
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Source: Western Journalism