News that the Obama administration wiretapped Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in 2016 and again in 2017 at times when he was in regular contact with then-candidate Donald Trump is worrying, says former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
Besides the fact the evidence now lends credence to Trump’s much-ridiculed statement that the Obama administration had wiretapped him, Huckabee says the circumstances should be alarming to every American.
“Why did they engage in that wiretap?” Huckabee asked during Fox News’ “Outnumbered” program. “This is frightening.
“If your government can just decide that it’s going to tap into your phones because you played a political role that somebody in the government didn’t want you to play, I’m sorry, that scares the bejeebies out of me,” Huckabee continued.
If the federal government wants to “get you,” Huckabee warned, they will find a way.
“It may not be that they end up getting you for what they went after, but there are enough statutes on the books,” Huckabee said. “There are a lot of people I’ve known personally who have been bankrupted, their reputations ruined. They ended up winning, but they were finished.”
“The federal government is using your tax dollars to come after you, and you have to use your own dollars to fight them off.”
It was in March when the president accused former President Obama of wiretapping him in the lead-up to the election.
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
The leaders of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee blasted the president for asserting that the Obama administration tapped his phones.
Former FBI Director James Comey, who later was fired by Trump and now is under investigation himself, told associates in March that Trump was “crazy” and “outside the realm of normal” for suggesting his predecessor used a secret hot mic to surveil him.
The former FBI chief said in a March 20 hearing before the House Intelligence Committee that the FBI had “no information” supporting Trump’s allegations.
Yet, under secret court orders, the government began surveilling Manafort during the election and continued to spy on the high-ranking campaign official into early this year, when Manafort was in communication with President Trump.
A court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorized the secret order after the FBI began investigating Manafort for his relationship with a group of Washington consulting firms who have ties to Ukraine’s former ruling party.
The former president of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych, was ousted in 2014 after Ukrainian authorities alleged he laundered millions of dollars out of the country. U.S. intelligence agencies then began probing U.S. firms, including the Podesta Group and Mercury LLC, that worked for the former Ukraine regime that neglected to register under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registrations Act.
Earlier this year, all three firms retroactively registered.
The FBI stopped surveilling Manafort for lack of evidence in 2016 then obtained a FISA warrant began wiretapping him again in 2017 to probe the relationship between Trump campaign officials and Russian operatives, sources told CNN.
Some of the intelligence collected of Manafort, who is now a key figure in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s alleged involvement in the election, prompted concerns that he enticed Russia to interfere with the presidential election, CNN claimed, citing unnamed sources.
Bearing a search warrant, federal agents picked the lock to the front door of Manafort’s home in Virginia and raided his home in July. They confiscated binders stuffed with documents and copied his computer files, looking for evidence that Manafort set up secret offshore bank accounts.
Prosecutors for Robert Mueller then told Manafort they planned to indict him, the New York Times reported.
The FBI finally stopped spying on Manafort when he and President Trump’s lawyers insisted it stop.
The new reports revealing the government’s surveillance of Manafort vindicates Trump’s allegations of the Obama administration abused its power to spy on the Trump campaign, Cheryl Chumley, author of “Police State USA: How Orwell’s Nightmare is Becoming Our Reality,” contended.
“After all, if Manafort – who was being secretly wiretapped – stood in Trump Tower, where he had an office, and spoke with Trump during the campaign season, wouldn’t those conversations be part and parcel of the feds’ audio collection?” Chumley wrote in an article for the Washington Times. “Manafort resigned from Trump’s campaign in August of 2016. But that’s not to say he never stood in Trump Tower and spoke with Trump in the months that followed.”
She said a whistleblower, “privy to the Manafort audio but not to the entire surveillance operation, may indeed interpret the taping as targeting of Trump Tower – or Trump. Voila – and there’s where Trump got his tip.”
“Not saying that’s where Trump got the idea his Tower was tapped. But it’s possible.”
The government could just as easily invade the average American’s privacy, as the FBI did Manafort’s, and transform America into a police state, Chumley warned.
“Regardless, there’s that whole other story that’s emerging as the elephant in the room — the secret court system in place in America that allows feds to place innocent Americans under surveillance and wiretap. They’re called FISA courts, for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows them to exist. But they could just as easily be called Gestapo Specials,” she explained. “These FISA court permissions-to-spy have to be OK’d by the Justice Department and the FBI’s top-ranked — meaning, Team Obama was certainly involved.”
