Appearing on Fox Business News on Monday, Judge Andrew Napolitano made the stunning revelation that the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had deep suspicions about President Obama’s illegal use of the nation’s intelligence resources. Napolitano said that Scalia told him privately that “he often thought that court was being surveilled” by the Obama White House.
Napolitano’s comments came in the context of Sen. Rand Paul’s assertion last week that the Obama administration may have also put him and another senator under improper surveillance. The judge said that he wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it turned out to be true.
“Think of this as a three-step process,” he said. “Surveillance, which is acquisition in a digital version of every keystroke on every computer, and every communication on every cell phone and landline phone; storage, which is the maintenance of the digital versions of these communications; and then unmasking, which is accessing this data and finding out the names of the people who are actually surveilled.
“It is beyond dispute that the NSA has access to, if it wants – it would be unlawful for them to do this, but they have it – every phone call of every person in the United States of America since 2005,” Napolitano continued.
He said that while there would be certain situations in which the Obama administration could legally spy on U.S. senators – such as when they were having conversations with foreign agents – Paul’s allegations would not be within the scope of the intelligence community’s legal permissions.
“They’re talking about them unmasking him while he’s having a conversation with his campaign manager when he’s running in the Republican primary in 2016,” he noted. “The use of intelligence data for political purposes is a felony. Unmasking is illegal if done for any reason other than national security.”
More than a month has passed since it was revealed that Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, unmasked several of Trump’s associates who popped up on incidental surveillance reports. Rice has not denied doing this, though she maintains that she did not do it for political purposes. Alas, she has thus far refused to testify under oath about the unmasking, and that leaves open the significant possibility that Rice – and the Obama administration as a whole – was using the intelligence community to further the fortunes of the Democratic Party. Just like they used the IRS to target Tea Party groups.
THIS is the story the media will not cover, and THAT’S why so many Americans are losing trust in the free press.
