James Clapper’s Non-Denial Denials, Revisited
by Andrew C. McCarthy
September 21, 2017 3:45 PM
@AndrewCMcCarthy
The former intelligence chief never actually refuted Obama
administration spying on Trump.
It would be peculiar if, as he now claims, James Clapper did not know
about the Obama administration’s monitoring of Paul Manafort. At the
time, which appears to have been the autumn of 2016, Clapper was Obama’s
national intelligence director. The (dubious) raison d’être of the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) — a post-9/11
layering of yet more bureaucracy atop bureaucratic sprawl — was to
ensure efficient information flow through the “community” of U.S.
intelligence agencies.
That said, it is a gross exaggeration to contend, as some are doing,
that new revelations about the surveillance of Manafort, the former
chairman of the Trump campaign, show that Clapper lied in a March 2017
interview by NBC’s Chuck Todd. Instead, what we now know proves what I
warned at the time of the interview: It was a mistake to construe
Clapper’s answers to Todd as a blanket denial of Obama spying on the
Trump campaign.
Carefully parsed, Clapper’s comments left open the possibility — which
some of us regarded as a high probability — that Manafort and other
Trump associates had been under Obama-administration surveillance.
Much is being made of Clapper’s assertion that “there was no such
wiretap activity mounted against the president, the president-elect at
the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign.” But what
commentators are omitting is a critical qualification that I highlighted
right after the interview (as did our Jim Geraghty and NBC News
itself). Clapper made clear that he could only speak, as NBC put it,
“for the part of the national security apparatus that he oversaw.”
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Why was that significant?
As I elaborated:
The director of national intelligence does not “oversee” the
entirety of the government’s national-security apparatus. By statute,
for example, the attorney general (who of course runs the Justice
Department) oversees the process of requesting and executing electronic
surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] (see
Title 50 U.S. Code, Sec. 1801 et seq.).
The surveillance of Manafort was conducted under FISA. It would have
been known to the Justice Department, which presents warrant
applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and to the
FBI, which conducts the investigations. But the surveillance operation
would be known to the national intelligence director only if the Justice
Department, the FBI, and whoever else was in the loop chose to share it
with him. Apparently, they did not — confirmation that the ODNI is the
excrescence many of us predicted it would be.
At the time of Clapper’s interview, the front-burner topic was whether
Trump himself had been monitored. The president had just alleged, in a
series of tweets, that his phone lines had been tapped at Trump Tower. I
assumed (as I’m sure Clapper did) that Clapper would have been informed
if Trump had been targeted for FISA surveillance when he was a
candidate or president-elect. But even if that is a safe assumption, it
does not mean that Clapper would have been alerted to every surveillance
of a Trump subordinate or associate.
What about Clapper’s denials of wiretapping against Trump’s campaign,
and at Trump Tower?
Well, let’s put aside for the moment the salient caveat that Clapper was
not responsible for (or apparently very well informed about) FISA
surveillance. As we also pointed out at the time:
The claims about wiretapping have never focused on the campaign qua
campaign. The claim has been that associates of Trump with varying
degrees of connection to the campaign and/or to a Trump Tower server
were targeted for surveillance and wiretapped.
The reporting indicated that the Obama Justice Department had received
authorization from the FISA court sometime in October 2016. By then,
Manafort’s brief stint as Trump campaign chairman had been over for
about two months. He may have remained an informal adviser to the
candidate (like his longtime associate Roger Stone), but Manafort was no
longer part of the campaign. Thus, Clapper’s answers to questions
framed in terms of the campaign did not cover relevant people who, at
the time of the surveillance, lacked formal ties to the campaign —
people such as Manafort and Stone.
As for monitoring at Trump Tower, Clapper took pains to say that there
had been none “to my knowledge.” Moreover, a question framed in terms of
monitoring that targeted Trump Tower would miss monitoring that
incidentally picked up communications at Trump Tower. Thus, as I wrote
back in March, the FISA surveillance :
...may not have targeted Trump Tower, but it still could have targeted
devices that moved through Trump Tower at least some of the time. For
example, Paul Manafort, a Trump associate whose communications were
reportedly intercepted by the government at some point, lived in Trump
Tower, and until August, he was chairman of the Trump campaign
headquartered in Trump Tower. If there were, say, FISA authorizations to
monitor his cell phone, they would likely have resulted in monitoring
at Trump Tower.
In addition, there have been at least some suggestions that former
national-security adviser Michael Flynn was at Trump Tower (where much
of the transition activity took place) when he made the phone calls and
wrote texts to Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. Undisputed reporting
indicates that the December call to Kislyak that ultimately led to
Flynn’s dismissal was intercepted and eavesdropped on by the FBI. I
strongly suspect that this is because the FBI, under FISA, was
monitoring the phone of Kislyak. So even if neither Flynn nor Trump
Tower was targeted for FISA surveillance, it may well be that some of
Flynn’s communications from Trump Tower were intercepted pursuant to
court-authorized FISA surveillance.
Clapper told Todd that he “certainly hope[d]” he would have been made
aware of any order authorizing Trump Tower surveillance; he reiterated,
however, that “I can’t speak for other authorized entities in the
government or a state or local entity.” Thus, I concluded:
Again, it has not been alleged that Trump Tower was a
court-authorized surveillance target, and it wouldn’t have needed to be
in order for communications to be intercepted there if persons who were
targeted by FISA orders frequented Trump Tower. And the fact that
Clapper cannot speak for other investigative entities underscores that,
while his position as national intelligence director was not
unimportant, it did not provide oversight authority over all FISA
surveillance.
If you scrutinized what Clapper actually said, you knew the media
were overplaying their hand.
The Clinton/Obama-friendly media went ballistic over President Trump’s
tweeted accusation that President Obama had wiretapped him. Not content
to refute that narrow allegation, the press tried to demolish a more
explosive (and more likely) possibility, namely that the Obama
administration had spied on Trump associates and campaign officials
during and after the campaign — and after the administration had bent
over backwards to insulate Hillary Clinton from prosecution.
That conclusion had been drawn by a number of us, attentively sifting
through the media’s own reporting. Democrats and their media allies
countered by inflating Clapper’s carefully qualified naysaying into a
full-blown denial. If you scrutinized what Clapper actually said, you
knew they were overplaying their hand. And now we know they were wrong.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451602/james-clapper-trump-surveillance-never-fully-denied
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451602/james-clapper-trump-surveillance-never-fully-denied
It
says here he had many quarters where growth exceeded at 3%. He didn’t!
That’s the whole point. He didn’t. Obama’s economic growth sometimes was
less than 2%. There’s no way Obama was in the three percents,
especially here, what does it say, “many quarters.” Anyway, the economy
is booming in a lot of sectors, and it’s one of the great unspokens and,
as such, unreferenced aspects that are positive of the Trump
administration.
MULVANEY:
Top 20% pay 95% of the taxes. If you break the income tax universe into
what we call quintiles, so equal sized 20% columns, the first two
columns, the first quintile and the lower quintile, don’t pay any taxes
at all. In fact, they net positive. We pay them when they file a tax
return. That middle quintile, which you might describe, some people do,
as middle class, pays an effective rate in the low single digits. And
all of the taxes are paid by folks in the top two quintiles, and that
last quintile pays almost fully, 95% I think, of the taxes.
