I never said that incidental surveillance wasn't legal. Are we totally miscommunicating here?
I said that when a U.S. citizen is caught up in surveillance of a foreigner...then that citizen's name is MASKED in the transcripts because there was no FISA warrant to allow for that person to be spied on.
The insinuation that Nunes is making is that the spy agencies were used to spy on Trump through DELIBERATE Incidental capture and the names were unmasked and then disseminated to all 16 agency's in RAW form (which was NEVER done before except when Pres. Obama made a rule change in the last 2 weeks of his Presidency).
That is the whole point that is being made.
There seems to be the appearance that deliberate things were done to spy on Trump.
Being surveilled with no apparent reason (no national security issues involved in the taped conversations and no Russian connections in them either), names unmasked, and then President Obama changing a long-standing rule designed to protect U.S. citizens literally as he was walking out of the White House.
Either I'm just not communicating this well enough or you just aren't wanting to hear it.
IF this turns out to be what happened...then yes, it's a very, very big deal. It would indicate that a sitting President's spy agency's were used to gather intel on an opposing political party.
Has that been done before in history? Yeah.
Is it something that should be going on? Hell no.
And President Obama did it very recently when he used the spy agency's to intercept communications between Congressmen and Senators talking to Benjamin Netanyahu about the Iraq Nuclear Deal he pushed through. That was reported by the Wall Street Journal at the end of February. But of course CNN and the ilk didn't report on that.
That was just plain WRONG.
But Pres. Obama never let that stop him. Remember when he had reporters from the AP spied on and also had reporter James Rosen of Fox News surveilled by the spy agency's (they were reading his emails)
Hell, that was REALLY going after the Free Press. But they love Obama so much that they briefly reported it and then Obama had them all over to a White House dinner and all was forgiven.
So I would say that looking at the Obama Administration's history of spying...it won't come as a big surprise.
I hope that it turns out to just have been operatives doing this on Obama's behalf WITHOUT his knowledge.
Because if he was involved (and that changing of the rules for raw data sure does implicate him), then this will be on the level beyond Watergate. And it will be a horrible ending for the first black President.
Our country doesn't need that.
We need to be getting tax reform done, getting ISIS destroyed, getting trade deals fixed and moving the economy forward.
But it looks like Democrats just won't accept that Hillary lost the election and are determined to push their Russian agenda.
As I said a month ago...this is backfiring on them horribly.
You won't hear that on CNN. But the more things keep getting investigated, the more that the Obama administration is looking bad.
The exact opposite of what Democrats THOUGHT was going to happen.