{"id":30799,"date":"2017-05-12T14:23:45","date_gmt":"2017-05-12T18:23:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=30799"},"modified":"2017-05-12T14:23:45","modified_gmt":"2017-05-12T18:23:45","slug":"while-the-media-is-distracting-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=30799","title":{"rendered":"While The Media Is Distracting Us…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fred Fleitz posted an article at Breitbart<\/a> today about the surveillance of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.<\/p>\n

The article reports:<\/p>\n

Fleitz (Fred Fleitz, Senior Vice President<\/a> for Policy and Programs at the Center for Security Policy<\/a>), who has strongly criticized<\/a> Rice\u2019s story about why she \u201cunmasked\u201d the identities of people connected to Donald Trump\u2019s presidential campaign<\/a> who were caught in foreign surveillance operations, said there were two ways this surveillance took place.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cOne, apparently, were formal FISA requests to have information collected against certain members of the Trump team,\u201d he said. \u201cThis has not been confirmed, but it\u2019s been leaked so often to the New York Times<\/a> <\/em>and the Washington Post<\/a>, <\/em>probably by Obama people, I think that happened.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe second way was to go through intelligence that was not targeting the Russians or Trump to find references to Trump officials, and have those names unmasked. That way, they could say, \u2018Hey, we weren\u2019t targeting the Trump people, we were just going through intelligence that happened to mention them. We wanted to know the context of the report,\u2019\u201d he continued.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, it\u2019s okay for a senior official to ask for the name of a U.S. person to understand an intelligence report. It\u2019s uncommon. I\u2019ve been involved with it, with a senior policymaker. But to ask that the names of the members of a campaign from another party be unmasked \u2013 that may not be illegal, but it is highly unethical,\u201d said Fleitz.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIf Rice gave the reason for that unmasking to be something that it really wasn\u2019t, like if she really was doing it for political reasons, she could be in legal jeopardy,\u201d he said.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The article points out that at one point during John Bolton<\/a>‘s career,\u00a0 Fred Fleitz, as his chief of staff, had asked for the unmasking of the names of ten Americans<\/a>. During the confirmation hearings for John Bolton as the U.N. Ambassador, the Democrats accused him of violating the privacy of American citizens. Somehow, they are not as concerned when Democrats do the unmasking for political purposes.<\/p>\n

The article concludes:<\/p>\n

Fleitz previewed his upcoming Fox News piece about the widely-reported intelligence analysis prepared in January that claimed \u201cnot only did the Russians try to intervene in the election, but they did so to help Trump win.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWell, Director of National Intelligence<\/a> Clapper revealed this week this was not the intelligence community\u2019s view, of all 17 agencies,\u201d said Fleitz. \u201cThat was known. It was just 3 agencies. We now know the analysts who wrote this were handpicked. How were they handpicked? How did the hyper-partisan director of the CIA<\/a>, John Brennan, how did he handpick the CIA<\/a> analysts who wrote this assessment?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think this assessment is accurate. I don\u2019t think the Russians intervened to help Trump. Read my piece at FoxOpinion.com<\/a>. This has to be added to the investigation of interference in the election \u2013 interference by our intelligence agencies.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

There was a crime committed here. It had to do with unmasking civilians and leaking information to the press. However, as long as the press can keep us off target, those who committed those crimes will go unpunished..<\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fred Fleitz posted an article at Breitbart today about the surveillance of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. The article reports: Fleitz (Fred Fleitz, Senior Vice President for Policy and Programs at the Center for Security Policy), who has … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3357,8558,8367,68],"class_list":["post-30799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-donald-trump","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-the-washington-post","tag-united-states-department-of-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30799"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30800,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30799\/revisions\/30800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}