"Name The Person And The Crime"

At 7:45 in the video of Mark Halperin's Morning Meeting show embedded above, he poses a question to his co-host Sean Spicer, "Sean, name the person and the crime that Tulsi Gabbard says might have been committed leading to a Justice Department strike foice." Halperin concludes he can't come up with either, and Spicer is pretty vague in reply as well. In fact, it hasn't been well covered in this morning's news, but as of yesterday:

the Department of Justice announced the formation of a Strike Force to assess the evidence publicized by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and investigate potential next legal steps which might stem from DNI Gabbard’s disclosures.

This Department takes alleged weaponization of the intelligence community with the utmost seriousness.

My view, which I've been explaining over the past week or so, is that the details have been hiding in plain sight since 2016, and a key episode that nobody seems to think is important is the visit then-National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers paid to Trump within days of the November 2016 election to inform him that Trump Tower wasn't secure, that it was subject to electronic surveillance. According to Wikipedia,

The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for global intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, specializing in a discipline known as signals intelligence (SIGINT).

Rogers, in other words, knew who was bugging whom, and he knew someone was bugging Trump's transition office in Trump Tower who shouldn't have, so he told Trump, and as a result -- quite possibly after consulting Rogers and likely his own corporate security people -- Trump moved his transition office to his Bedminster facility. Intriguingly, I noted a key event in Devin Nunes's tenure as Chair of the House Intelligence Committe in yesterday's post:

In late March 2017, Nunes canceled a public hearing in which former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, former National Security Agency Director James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan were to testify, saying he wanted to hear FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers in a classified setting first. Democrats criticized Nunes's decision and said he was trying to protect the White House from damaging revelations.

Ranking Democrat Adam Schiff was apparently able to stop this classified meeting, and within weeks, Nunes was forced to recuse himself from the Russia probe entirely. Clearly what he would have asked Comey and Rogers would have been so explosive, the whole avenue of inquiry had to be closed off. My sense is that it had to have involved what Rogers knew of surveilance on the Trump transition, and that would also have included surveillance of calls that were alleged to have taken place between Michael Flynn and Sergey Kislyak that past December.

On one hand, as I've discussed here, Flynn now claims that any transcript of him discussing sanctions with Kislyak was fabricated, something I can't rule out. But a bigger question is how that surveillance was authorized, and I've been wondering if Devin Nunes had come a little too close to the answer in March 2017 and had to be taken off the scent. Let's move to a press release dated April 15, 2020 from Sen Chuck Grassley:

Despite multiple reports in 2017 warning that claims in an anti-Trump dossier were “false” and “part of a Russian disinformation campaign,” the FBI continued to rely on the Democrat-funded opposition research to spy on a Trump campaign aide. The once-classified details contained in footnotes of the Justice Department Inspector General’s postmortem of the FBI’s flawed spying operation were unmasked at the repeated urging of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).

. . . The dossier, compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele for political opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was hired by the Clinton campaign and Democratic party, was “central and essential” to the FBI’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) application to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. However, the IG report noted that the application contained numerous errors and omission. The newly-declassified footnotes show that the FBI was aware of significant problems with dossier’s sources while seeking or renewing the spying authority, yet they continued to push forward, failing to update the FISA court with the critical exculpatory information.

Although controversies at the time focused on Carter Page, the question inevitably arises of what other surveillance may have been authorized under the same FISA justification. This could include the surveillance of Michael Flynn, but much more important would be the surveillance on the rest of the Trump transition team. Exactly what was authorized and how has never been clear:

On September 19, 2017 CNN reported that the FBI wiretapped Paul Manafort before and after the presidential election, extending into early 2017, although the report did not make clear whether Manafort was monitored during his tenure with the Trump campaign from March through August 2016.

. . . On November 7, 2016, conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch reported in the right-leaning Heat Street, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had twice sought Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants in connection with its investigation of the myriad links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies. According to Mensch, the first request for a warrant which "named Trump" was denied in June 2016 and, a second, more "narrowly drawn" request was granted in October 2016. Mensch wrote that this warrant gave "counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of 'U.S. persons' in Donald Trump's campaign with ties to Russia", and to "look at the full content of emails and other related documents that may concern US persons". Mensch further claimed that the October warrant was granted in "connection with the investigation of suspected activity between the server [in Trump Tower] and two banks, SVB Bank and Alfa Bank", and that "it is thought in the intelligence community that the warrant covers any 'US person' connected to this investigation, and thus covers Donald Trump and at least three further men".

. . . On March 3, Breitbart News, a far-right website known to publish conspiracy theories, ran an article by Joel Pollak headlined "Mark Levin to Congress: Investigate Obama's 'Silent Coup' vs. Trump." On the previous day, right-wing radio personality Mark Levin alleged that Obama and his allies were conducting a "silent coup" against Trump, and asked: "How many phone calls of Donald Trump, if any, have been intercepted by the administration and recorded by the Obama administration?" . . . Citing Mensch's November article, Breitbart claimed the existence of a June FISA request "to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers", and of an October FISA warrant "focused on a computer server in Trump Tower".

Yet again, there's nothing especially new in the allegations Director Gabbard is making -- but efforts to substantiate or discredit them have been thwarted since they were first raised. Exactly who was surveilled, and under what authority? We just don't know.

But here's how I might try to answer the question Mark Halperin posed to Sean Spicer (whom Trump fired early in 2017 and who seems nice but generally obtuse): it appears that the discredited "pee dossier" was used to secure FISA warrants to surveil unknown members of the Trump transition team, including possibly Trump himself. If the Obama operatives knew the dossier was false, this could be a problem. Certainly the mere fact that Mike Rogers apparently went to Trump to warn him something hinky was afoot would indicate things weren't right.

Just what crime this would represent is now up to the DOJ "strike team". The names of likely persons would certainly include Comey, Clapper, Brennan and others, such as Sally Yates. Mark Halperin posed a good question, but Sean Spicer isn't the guy to answer it.