Cyber Crime

Trump’s Twitter rant of Obama ‘wire tapping’ is falling apart (updated)

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The House Intelligence Committee had given the Justice Department until Monday to turn over any wiretapping applications, orders or warrants related to President Trump and his associates in their investigation of Trump’s Twitter rant that his campaign was “wire tapped” by President Obama.

The Justice Department, now run by Trump campaign booster Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, instead requested a delay in its response. Justice Dept. seeks more time after Congress requests proof of Trump wiretap:

The Justice Department on Monday asked for more time to respond to a request from the House Intelligence Committee to turn over any wiretapping applications, orders or warrants related to President Trump and his associates.

In a one-paragraph statement, spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said the Justice Department had called the top Democrats and Republicans on the committee “to ask for additional time to review the request in compliance with the governing legal authorities and to determine what if any responsive documents may exist.” The committee had set a deadline of Monday to turn over the information.

President Trump earlier this month asserted that President Barack Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower” just before Trump’s victory in the presidential election. He has not provided any evidence to support his claim. Obama and former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. have denied that such wiretapping took place, and U.S. officials told The Washington Post that FBI Director James B. Comey asked the Justice Department to issue a statement refuting it.

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AP covers the Carter Page connection

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I previously posted about this more in depth in Follow the money: Coincidence or conspiracy? The Carter Page connection.

The Associated Press “Big Story” by Julie Pace reports, Ex-Trump adviser Carter Page at center of Russia storm:

Last year, Moscow’s New Economic School invited Carter Page, a little-known former investment banker and foreign policy adviser to then-U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump. It wouldn’t be the last time Page would draw unexpected — and some say outsized — attention for his relationship to Trump, his entanglements in Russia and the murky nexus between the two.

Page, who left the campaign before the election, has emerged as a key figure in the controversy surrounding Trump associates’ connections to Russia. The New York Times has reported that Page is among the Trump associates whose potential contacts with Russia are being investigated by the FBI. Congressional committees probing Russia’s hacking during the election and Trump campaign ties have asked Page to preserve materials related to their investigations.

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Latest on the Trump-Putin campaign investigation

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The New York Times reported this morning that White House Officials Say Trump Isn’t Target of Any Investigation: “After first refusing to disavow Mr. Trump’s allegations [that President Obama wiretapped him], made in a series of Twitter posts, and instead calling for Congress to investigate them, the press secretary, Sean Spicer, told reporters, “There is no reason that we have to think the president is the target of any investigation whatsoever.”

But this afternoon the New York Times posted that ‘No Comment,’ Justice Dept. Says, Asked About a Trump Inquiry:

[T]he Justice Department on Thursday declined to confirm statements a day earlier from the White House that Mr. Trump was not the target of a counterintelligence investigation.

Officials also said the White House had not relied on any information from the Justice Department in offering a statement denying the existence of an investigation.

The White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, told reporters on Wednesday that “there is no reason to believe there is any type of investigation with respect to the Department of Justice” or “ that the president is the target of any investigation whatsoever.”

But a Justice Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that there was no indication that anyone at the Justice Department had given the White House that assurance.

Asked whether Mr. Trump was in fact the target of an investigation, the official offered a “no comment.”

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James B. Comey Jr., the F.B.I. director, asked the Justice Department after Mr. Trump’s posts to publicly refute the notion that Trump Tower or Mr. Trump had been wiretapped. But the Justice Department has declined to do so.

In other developments,  Martin Longman at the Political Animal blog connects the dots between longtime GOP ratfucker Roger Stone, British white nationalist Nigel Farange, and Julian Assange of Wikileaks. Did Nigel Farage Serve as Roger Stone’s Intermediary?

Yesterday, The Smoking Gun wrote up an extensive article on their contacts with Guccifer 2.0, the “online persona that U.S. officials say was created by Russian government officials to distribute and publicize material stolen during hacks of the DNC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Gmail accounts used by Clinton staffers like John Podesta, the campaign’s chairman.”

The main focus of their article was Roger Stone, however, who had significant online contacts with the Guccifer 2.0 persona, called him a hero, and defended him extensively against accusations that he wasn’t who or what he claimed to be. It’s a fascinating article, and it just became much more urgently interesting this morning after BuzzFeed News reported that they essentially busted Nigel Farage coming out of a meeting with Julian Assange today in Ecuador’s London embassy.

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Follow the money: Coincidence or conspiracy? The Carter Page connection

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Back in January, “Baghdad Sean” Spicer claimed that former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Cater Page “is an individual whom the President-elect does not know and was put on notice months ago by the campaign.”

Per usual, this was false. “In an interview with The Washington Post editorial board in March, Trump named “Carter Page, Ph.D.,” as one of the people he was considering for his foreign policy team.” Trump news conference: CNN’s Reality Check team vets the claims:

Carter Page founded an investment company, Global Energy Capital, and has worked as an investment banker in London and Moscow.

Page has denied the allegations that he met with sanctioned Russian officials, telling The Washington Post, “All of these accusations are just complete garbage.”

That was, until last week in an interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes. Carter Page: ‘I don’t deny’ meeting with Russian ambassador.

And now this complete reversal from “Baghdad Sean” Spicer’s false denial in January: Trump campaign approved adviser’s trip to Moscow:

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski approved foreign policy adviser Carter Page’s now-infamous trip to Moscow last summer on the condition that he would not be an official representative of the campaign, according to a former campaign adviser.

A few weeks before he traveled to Moscow to give a July 7 speech, Page asked J.D. Gordon, his supervisor on the campaign’s National Security Advisory Committee, for permission to make the trip, and Gordon strongly advised against it, Gordon, a retired naval officer, told POLITICO.

Page then emailed Lewandowski and spokeswoman Hope Hicks asking for formal approval, and was told by Lewandowski that he could make the trip, but not as an official representative of the campaign, the former campaign adviser said. The adviser spoke on the condition of anonymity because he has not been authorized to discuss internal campaign matters.

The trip is now a focus of congressional and FBI investigations into Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election.

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Trump tries to preemptively distract the media from the actual scandal that is just below the surface

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In case you have a life away from politics, you may have missed that the always insecure egomaniacal Twitter-troll-in-chief, Donald J. Trump — after media pundits, without justification, declared him “presidential” after his address to Congress on Tuesday — has returned to his old habit of early-morning Twitter rants this weekend.

This time, Trump’s Twitter rant is meant to distract the media with a bright shiny object from the actual scandal that is just below the surface of recent media reports on the Trump-Putin campaign connections. The intelligence agencies have been “following the money” and reviewing intercept surveillance, and they may be close to a bombshell story that is ready to break in the not-to-distant future.

This is a preemptive attempt by the Trump administration to get  out in front of the story and to gin up the conservative media entertainment complex with its comfort zone, Obama Derangement Syndrome.

Remember that Donald Trump emerged from the fever swamps of right-wing paranoia conspiracy theories — he was the head cheerleader of the Obama Birtherism conspiracy theory after all — when you consider his latest Twitter Rant.

The New York Times reports, Trump, Offering No Evidence, Says Obama Tapped His Phones:

President Trump on Saturday accused former President Barack Obama of tapping his phones at Trump Tower the month before the election, leveling the explosive allegation without offering any evidence.

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A spokesman for Mr. Obama said any suggestion that the former president had ordered such surveillance was “simply false.”

The Washington Post similalry reports, Trump accuses Obama of ‘Nixon/Watergate’ wiretap — but offers no evidence.

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