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As a legal matter, this seems straightforward. The FBI’s gotten too loose with sharing Americans’ data in violation of its own “minimization” rules and you’d better believe Jim Comey will be asked about it the next time he testifies before Congress. If he testifies before Congress. As a political matter, it’s more complicated. Why did agents access the info and, in some cases, share it with people who weren’t supposed to see it? Were they spying on Americans for reasons unrelated to national security or were they scrambling to foil what they thought were imminent terror attacks? If the latter...

..."What this Reuters and Washington Post story actually does is prove the Obama Administration was spying on the Trump campaign. That’s the explosive angle to the story. It’s not the nothingburger report that Jared or anyone else was trying to set up communication lines that matters – the real story is Reuters and the Washington Post proving that Obama was spying on conversations about setting up those lines of communication.

New revelations have surfaced that the Obama administration abused intelligence during the election by launching a massive domestic-spy campaign that included snooping on Trump officials. The irony is mind-boggling: Targeting political opposition is long a technique of police states like Russia, which Team Obama has loudly condemned for allegedly using its own intelligence agencies to hack into our election. The revelations, as well as testimony this week from former Obama intel officials, show the extent to which the Obama administration politicized and weaponized intelligence against Americans. Thanks to Circa News, we now know the National Security Agency under President Barack...

Obama intel agency secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for years

The FBI has illegally shared raw intelligence about Americans with unauthorized third parties and violated other constitutional privacy protections, according to newly declassified documents that undercut the bureau’s public assurances about how carefully it handles warrantless spy data to avoid abuses or leaks. In his final congressional testimony before he was fired by President Trump this month, then-FBI Director James Comey unequivocally told lawmakers his agency used sensitive espionage data gathered about Americans without a warrant only when it was “lawfully collected, carefully overseen and checked.” Once-top secret U.S. intelligence community memos reviewed by Circa tell a different story, citing...

The NSA intentionally and routinely intercepted communications of American citizens in violation of the Constitution. During the Obama years, the National Security Agency intentionally and routinely intercepted and reviewed communications of American citizens in violation of the Constitution and of court-ordered guidelines implemented pursuant to federal law. The unlawful surveillance appears to have been a massive abuse of the government’s foreign-intelligence-collection authority, carried out for the purpose of monitoring the communications of Americans in the United States. While aware that it was going on for an extensive period of time, the administration failed to disclose its unlawful surveillance of Americans...

Well, this is interesting. Last week, a report circulated which indicated “the Obama administration conducted more than 35,000 searches on NSA intercepts seeking information about Americans during the divisive 2016 election year.” Obviously, the biggest fish caught in the “incidental surveillance” net was President Donald Trump. The former administration has been claiming that Trump was never targeted, he was just surveilled due to associations with others.

The plight of the unredacted: Calling on Judicial Watch: Detailed research is needed on how NSA intelligence with the unredacted names of thousands of US citizens during the 2016 election campaign may have been put to use. Follow-up is needed to see what happened to thousands of citizens whose names were distributed throughout government agencies under the orders of the President Barack Hussein Obama administration—in effect giving them the power of harassment.

The National Security Agency vacuumed up more than 151 million records about Americans’ phone calls last year via a new system that Congress created to end the agency’s once-secret program that collected domestic calling records in bulk, a report disclosed Tuesday. The National Security Agency took in the 151 million records despite obtaining court orders to use the system on only 42 terrorism suspects in 2016, along with a few left over from late 2015, the report said. According to the report, the National Security Agency distributed 3,914 reports last year containing information about Americans gathered via the warrantless surveillance...

The U.S. National Security Agency collected more than 151 million records of Americans' phone calls last year, even after Congress limited its ability to collect bulk phone records, according to an annual report issued on Tuesday by the top U.S. intelligence officer. The report said the names of 1,934 "U.S. persons" were "unmasked" last year in response to specific requests, compared with 2,232 in 2015, but it did not identify who requested the names or on what grounds. The report from the office of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was the first measure of the effects of the 2015...

During his final year in office, President Barack Obama's team significantly expanded efforts to search National Security Agency intercepts for information about Americans, distributing thousands of intelligence reports across government with the unredacted names of U.S. residents during the midst of a divisive 2016 presidential election. In all, government officials conducted 30,355 searches in 2016 seeking information about Americans in NSA intercept metadata, which include telephone numbers and email addresses. The government in 2016 also scoured the actual contents of NSA intercepted calls and emails for 5,288 Americans, an increase of 13 percent over the prior year and a massive...

During his final year in office, President Obama's team significantly expanded efforts to search National Security Agency intercepts for information about Americans, distributing thousands of intelligence reports across government with the unredacted names of U.S. residents during the midst of a divisive 2016 presidential election. 2 of 26 The data, made available this week by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, provides the clearest evidence to date of how information accidentally collected by the NSA overseas about Americans was subsequently searched and disseminated after President Obama loosened privacy protections to make such sharing easier in 2011 in the...

After leaving the presidency, Barack Obama has been spotted using his favorite iPad to take photos of his wife while on a David Geffen-owned megayacht in Tahiti. But this may be no ordinary iPad. A government watchdog speculates that he may have taken the Top Secret version out of the Oval Office, a big no-no.

This list includes Dennis Kucinich and investigative journalists. In 2011, Dennis Kucinich was still a Democratic congressman from Ohio. But he was not walking in lockstep with President Obama — at least not on Libya. True to his anti-war leanings, Kucinich was a staunch opponent of Obama’s unauthorized war against the Qaddafi regime. Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446843/barack-obama-spying-journalists-dennis-kucinich-sharyl-attkisson-donald-trump-campaign-transition

You can find many timelines that follow allegations of Russia tampering in the U.S. election and alleged involvement of Trump officials. But I couldn’t find any comprehensive timelines cross-referencing Obama-era surveillance of whistleblowers, journalists and other U.S. citizens with Russia surveillance allegations. So I built one. Please note: temporal proximity of events doesn’t necessarily imply a connection.

(Skip) And, in fairness to Trump, his administration has not...yet come close to doing what President Obama's administration did in making the act of reporting itself criminal behavior in a case that started in 2009 under the Espionage Act of 1917. At the heart of the case is James Rosen, chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, publishing information about North Korea that he received from a State Department employee. In obtaining a subpoena to access Rosen's phone and computer records, the Justice Department labeled him "an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator." It also described him as a flight risk. (Skip) The...

<p>Federal prosecutors secretly obtained records of telephone calls from more than 20 telephone lines belonging to The Associated Press and its journalists over a two-month period, in an apparent investigation of a leak of sensitive information about a terrorist plot in Yemen.</p>

President Barack Obama was dragged into the trans-Atlantic spying row after it was claimed he personally authorised the monitoring of Angela Merkel’s phone three years ago. The president allegedly allowed US intelligence to listen to calls from the German Chancellor’s mobile phone after he was briefed on the operation by Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency (NSA), in 2010.

The Main Stream Media and other enemies of the current President are challenging the proposition that President Obama wire tapped President Donald Trump during the 2016 Presidential race. President Trump started this discussion with his tweets over the weekend. In his first tweet President Trump tweeted: Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism! Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

With the Trump administration claiming Trump Tower may have been wiretapped and a spokesman for Obama denying he was involved in such a thing, some are recalling the targeting of Fox News reporter James Rosen by the Obama Department of Justice. Rosen appeared on Fox News today to discuss his experience. “I have to clarify that I was not wiretapped, my parents were not wiretapped, which is where you place a listening device on someone’s telephone line and you listen to their conversations,” Rosen said. He continued, “What happened to me was that the Attorney General, Eric Holder, under Barack...