077 Special Report: Wiretapping Trump - A Look at FISA Warrants
In this episode, I examine the legal implications for the Obama administration if the allegations are true that it used a FISA warrant for electronic surveillance of President Trump and his associates.
Resources
Adam Gingrich Periscope The Deepstate War is On
Donald Trump - God's Wrecking Ball
Lawnewz article on FISA
We're talking about life as a child of God and all things related to His Kingdom.
Thanks for joining us.
If you're a new listener to the show, you can find articles and books and other resources on my website www.prangmedic.com.
Now let's jump into this week's show.
Hey everybody, how are you doing?
This is Prangmatic, and I have another update for you.
Wasn't planning on doing another one so soon, but it's been an interesting 24 hours.
I have taken a crash course in court law.
I've been doing a lot of research.
Because I think we've got some interesting things coming down the road here in the next month or two.
And I would like to get you guys prepared so that you understand the legal issues affecting our country and the leadership of it right now.
And debunk some of the things that have been going on in the mainstream media.
I gotta give a shout out to Adam Gingrich.
My buddy from Twitter and Periscope had an amazing Periscope last night where he talked about the deep state and wiretapping of President Trump and how that all came about.
Adam is well connected, has a lot of sources.
Gave some really good insights, so thanks to Adam for doing his research.
I'll give a little bit of review about what he said last night, but I've learned a lot more since then.
So, interesting tweets this morning by Sean Spicer, who's the press secretary on Twitter.
I'm going to read them to you.
He had a series of four tweets that are very, very important, and this tells us a lot about what's going on.
So Sean Spicer, this is on his Twitter timeline, tweeted out four tweets.
Reports concerning potentially politically motivated investigations immediately ahead of the 2016 election are very troubling.
That's tweet number one.
Tweet number two is, President Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the Congressional Intelligence Committee exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016.
That's tweet number three.
Tweet number four is, neither the White House nor the president will comment further until such oversight is conducted.
We're probably not going to be hearing anything more from the White House on that issue.
They're done talking about it.
They want the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate and find out what's going on.
They're already investigating.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has been investigating the Russian involvement in the election and whether President Trump has had any relationships with Russia that are Illicit or whatever.
So that investigation is ongoing.
They're requesting that this be added to the ongoing investigation.
So that's where that is at.
Now, yesterday morning, President Trump tweets out, I'll bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October just prior to the election.
How low has he gone to tap my phones during the sacred election process?
You can take one of two viewpoints on what President Trump is trying to do with these tweets.
Some people think he is reckless and careless and thoughtless with his Twitter account.
People, you know, complaining someone should be monitoring it, someone else should be doing it.
Look, here's the thing.
You have to understand this about the President.
He's well advised.
He's got very smart people advising him.
I would imagine most of the stuff he puts on Twitter, he is getting legal advice from his attorneys before he does it.
If the president tweets out something that is classified, he can be impeached.
You can't give out classified information publicly.
So, I suspect that he is being well coached on what is going on on Twitter.
Why does he do it?
This is this whole thing of President Trump being on Twitter, it is psyops.
It is psychological warfare.
If you do not understand that, you're going to be frustrated or angry or confused about why he's using Twitter.
It's psychological warfare.
He has to counter a large group of people that are trying to stop what he's doing, including the mainstream media and a lot of people in the deep state.
He is using Twitter as a weapon of psychological warfare.
The thing about psychological warfare is we tend to think of that as a weapon that is used to manipulate and control and it's an evil thing.
It doesn't have to be.
Every president uses psychological warfare.
We call it warfare, but what it is really is, it's leadership.
When I go on Facebook and I do a video like this, I'm trying to influence people who are having a public conversation.
I'm trying to shape narrative, shape the culture.
In a sense, when I do a video, I'm using psychological warfare.
When you present opinions, ideas, facts, bias, lies, in a public platform, that is called psychological warfare.
Okay.
It is using information to accomplish an objective, a strategic objective.
And that is what President Trump is doing with Twitter.
He and Sean Spicer and all the people on Twitter, the mainstream media, they're all trying to shape the public narrative by the things they put out on social media.
People, you look at his Twitter feed and think, that is a mess.
What is he doing?
Everything he puts on Twitter is strategic.
This is a game, a very strategic game of chess.
Now, let's get back to the wiretapping.
Here's something that you should think about.
When President Trump got on Twitter yesterday morning and tweeted out the wiretapping tweets, it wasn't like General Flynn called him at 3 o'clock in the morning and said, hey Don, did you know that you were wiretapped?
This is not new information.
This is old information.
This is old news.
They have known this for a long time.
This stuff has been reported on in the New York Times and the Washington Post and other mainstream news outlets.
They've been reporting on this.
They've been leaking some of this information.
It's been going on for months.
The first thing we need to understand is that the wiretapping thing is not new news.
It is something that Donald Trump decided it was strategically time to bring it up now.
It's strategically time because President Trump, Steve Bannon, and his team, they're trying to accomplish objectives.
This tweet was not random.
This was not random.
The strategic goal of these tweets is to put the opposition on notice.
They're letting them know, now we are going to play hardball.
We wanted to use a military metaphor for what's going on.
What has been happening up until now is small arms fire.
Lots of handguns, small arms fire being exchanged, nothing really big.
The tweets that the president put out yesterday amount to picking up the M60 machine gun and using the machine gun or maybe a rocket propelled grenade, RPG, larger weapons.
Not the howitzer and not the nuclear weapons, but larger weapons are now being used.
Okay, this will help us understand where we're at in the process.
This is a process we're going to watch play out over the next couple of years.
It is going to be a long, involved process.
So, what is going on?
President Trump accused President Obama of having him under electronic surveillance.
So the first thing we need to do, we need to find out, is did that actually happen?
Is it true?
Well, of course it's true!
He wouldn't tweet it out if it wasn't true, but let me tell you how we know that it's true.
We know that we know that it's true.
You don't just say, well Trump said it, therefore it has to be true.
You have to go and do some research and find out if it's true.
So there's a lot of confusion.
Did he do it illegally?
Did he have a warrant?
What is that whole process?
So right now I'm going to break down that whole process and explain to you how the process happened, what the liabilities are for both parties involved.
And I'm going to give you a lot of in-depth legal information.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've done a lot of research.
So just bear with me for the next 15 minutes and I'll try to unpack all of this.
In the spring of last year...
Some cyber security experts were doing some random experiments and they accidentally found communications between a server that was registered to Donald Trump and a bank in Russia.
They just found this by accident.
They didn't know exactly what was going on.
They thought, well, this is strange.
They didn't even know if it was legitimate.
They just saw that there was a server In a bank in Russia that was pinging a server that was registered to Donald Trump, to his Trump Tower in Fifth Avenue.
So these researchers are like, oh, that's really interesting.
So they watched it through the spring and the summer to find out what was going on, and they never really were able to determine what that activity was all about.
But they started talking about it on Reddit and some other channels, and it popped up on the radar of the intelligence community.
Sometime before last June, probably March or April, possibly May, It's likely.
We don't know this for sure.
It's likely that President Obama or someone in his administration, whether that was the Attorney General, FBI Director, we don't know.
But it's likely they tried to get a warrant.
To do surveillance on Donald Trump.
And somebody somewhere said, no, we can't do it.
We're not going to get the warrant.
The reason you say that is they had to go to extreme measures to get the warrant.
The first measure is you go to a federal court, you provide evidence of probable cause to a judge, you get a warrant and they authorize the electronic surveillance.
From public records, there's quite a few news articles out there.
There's a good one that I found on Heat Street that talks about the process that President Obama's Justice Department used to get A warrant to do electronic surveillance on Donald Trump.
It happened.
It's been happening.
It may still be going on.
In June, Loretta Lynch, who is the Attorney General, or James Comey, who is head of the FBI.
So, FBI is under the Department of Justice.
FBI is Police and Investigators.
FBI investigates, gather evidence, they gather the evidence of criminal activity, they hand it over to the Department of Justice.
So the Department of Justice is the attorneys to go and prosecute.
Whether it was Comey or Loretta Lynch doesn't really matter.
Somebody who was working in the Obama administration went to the FISA court to get a warrant for surveillance.
FISA.
Okay, so Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
F-I-S-A.
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
It's a special court that is set up and it has a very, very specific purpose.
FISA court is not like federal courts.
It is a special court comprised of special judges who are picked by the head justice of the Supreme Court.
And these justices in the FISA court Allow for surveillance and intelligence gathering specific to foreign threats to national security.
Non-U.S.
citizens involved in immediate terrorist acts or acts of war that pose an immediate impending danger to national security.
That is the only reason why you go to FISA to get a warrant is if you have reason to believe that there are foreign nationals who pose an immediate threat to national security.
This is important because if this goes to court, this is what they're going to be looking at to see if the Obama administration violated federal law.
There's a very specific purpose for FISA, and here's something to think about.
In the FISA court, you don't have to show the typical probable cause and present some evidence of why you want this warrant.
Of the 35,000 requests for warrants through the FISA court over the years, only 12 of them have been denied.
Almost always, You're going to get what you request when you go to FISA because there is a low bar for suspicion and there is a high suspicion of probability that there's an immediate threat to national security.
That is why 99% of the time when the Department of Justice or FBI requests a warrant on a FISA court, it's granted.
So that's the background of the FISA court.
And in June of last year, when the Obama administration, whether it was FBI or Department of Justice, we don't know, when they went and requested a FISA warrant for surveillance on Donald Trump, it was rejected.
In October, they went back with another FISA request.
And they changed the wording of the request and they left out Donald Trump from the mention in the Pfizer request.
All right.
Trump was mentioned in the first But not in the second one.
And this is probably why it was denied in June.
Because FISA covers foreign citizens, not U.S.
citizens.
If they wanted to get surveillance on a U.S.
citizen, they would go to a regular federal court and get a warrant.
And the FISA court knows that.
They took Trump out of the request for the warrant in October and it was approved.
Now, let me give you some more details about the warrant that was requested in October that was approved.
They specifically cited in the Pfizer request individuals who were associated with Donald Trump.
They were suspicious of them having connections with Russia and they specified two banks.
SV Bank and and Russia's Alpha Bank.
The Russian Alpha Bank is the one that was pinging Donald Trump's server in Trump Tower.
Okay, so they took the intelligence that they had on Trump's server that was collected by these cyber security people and they said, there's a server in Trump Tower that's being pinged by communicating with A bank in Russia.
They probably went to FISA court and said, we suspect there's some kind of illegal, weird money laundering thing.
We don't know what's going on.
We need to find that out.
That was their basis for, probably the basis for, getting the warrant.
To look at Trump's server in Trump Tower.
And that was approved.
Now, at least since October, FBI and Department of Justice have been crawling all over Donald Trump's private server at Trump Tower.
There's a good suspicion that they have his phone calls.
We don't know that for sure, but it's likely they have his phone calls.
Emails, bank transactions, his business.
Think about this.
A lot of people have been screaming that Trump hasn't released his taxes.
Right?
He's got to be crooked.
There's something wrong.
He won't release his taxes.
And he has told people, look, I'm being audited.
I'm not going to release my taxes while I'm being audited.
Because when you're being audited, you don't actually know what the bottom line is going to look like.
You have to remember this.
The Obama administration IRS, the one that was going after all these conservative organizations and harassing them, they have Trump's tax form.
I suspect if there was something sketchy about Trump's taxes, we wouldn't know about it.
It would be on Twitter, it would be on CNN, it would be in the New York Times.
Here's something to consider.
The FBI and the Department of Justice, probably the NSA, have been crawling all through Trump's private life, his business life, his bank dealings, all this stuff.
They have been surveilling his cabinet.
They've had his friends and people under surveillance.
And, you know, they come forward and say, look, we haven't found anything.
We can't really see anything inappropriate with Putin.
We can't really see anything with his taxes.
If he was taking those flights down to Epstein's Island, the flight logs would have shown up.
There's all these accusations that Trump has been doing things that are sketchy, illegal, unethical, immoral.
He's been under surveillance.
They really haven't found anything substantial.
Which is what I was talking about in the last video.
You know this whole thing about impeachment?
That people have been screaming that Trump be impeached ever since before he was inaugurated?
Well, here's the thing about impeachment.
You have to actually violate a couple of laws to be impeached.
That's kind of how it works.
You can't just impeach somebody because you don't like them.
Otherwise, every president would have been impeached.
We should take comfort in knowing that in the first four months since he was elected, the intelligence community has been crawling all over him looking for dirt and they haven't found anything.
So that's something to think about.
From this point forward, I think Trump now has the upper hand.
And I'm going to continue with the FISA warrant because there's a lot more to talk about.
I want to talk about the liability, the legal liability, that President Obama is facing by doing this.
President Obama Did not issue a public statement.
He issued a statement through a friend, a representative.
The nuts and bolts of his statement was, it has been President Obama's policy not to get involved in issues that concern his Justice Department.
Whatever the Justice Department does is up to them.
He does not interfere with the Justice Department.
What he's saying in that statement is he's not denying that President Trump and his associates were under surveillance.
He is now saying that whatever Loretta Lynch and the Justice Department did or James Comey at the FBI, whatever they did, it's on them.
It's not on him.
He is absolving himself of responsibility.
He is using a classical tactic of plausible deniability.
He's going to say, I had no knowledge.
I didn't know what was going on.
It's all on the Justice Department.
They did whatever they wanted to do and I didn't know about it.
Whether you want to believe that or not is up to you.
Where does that leave us now?
Well, let's go back to the FISA and look at the liability.
Whether it's going to end up on Comey or Loretta Lynch or President Obama remains to be seen, but there is a lot of liability.
And let me explain where the liability comes in.
FISA court is specifically used for obtaining a warrant to do surveillance on foreign nationals, not U.S.
citizens, where there is an immediate, imminent threat of terrorism or acts of war or some damage that is a threat to national security.
Now ask yourself, does the activities of Donald Trump and his associates meet the criteria for a warrant in the FISA court?
When I look at what FISA court is set up to do, I look at that and say, that seems like an inappropriate use of the FISA court.
That seems like it should have been something handled at the federal court level, not FISA.
If they wanted to do surveillance on Trump, they should have went to a federal court.
And they didn't because they knew it was going to get turned down.
All right.
So they went to FISA.
They did a little end around, but I think it's going to come back to bite them, because if you're an attorney and you're looking at this, and I'm reading from legal websites, there's a really good article on lawnews.com, L-A-W-N-E-W-Z dot com, and the article is titled,
Yes, there could be serious legal problems if Obama admin involved in illegal surveillance.
You go in there and look for that article.
This attorney lays out all the requirements of the FISA court, what it's about, how you obtain a warrant, and then he goes through the legal.
I'm going to explain to you what this guy and some other law experts have said on this issue.
So the first thing is the question of Did the Obama administration have a legitimate reason to go to the FISA court?
If they didn't, that is a potential violation of federal law, and that could be prosecuted.
In any investigation, when you are gathering information, when you are doing surveillance on someone under a warrant, Any information that you get during an investigation has to fall into one of two categories.
Either it is information that is relevant to the case, or it's information that is not relevant to the case, to the investigation.
Where it's relevant to the investigation, the information is noted, recorded, and saved for prosecution.
The information that is not relevant to the case has to be ignored, destroyed, thrown out, Many times, like in movies, when you see people who are doing surveillance, they'll take off the headsets, they'll shut off the recorder.
That's because they're at a point in a conversation where things are going on that are not relevant to the investigation.
That information cannot be recorded, stored, or used.
It's irrelevant.
So, they have to take the information they gather and sort that into relevant and non-relevant.
Okay, one of the complaints that is probably going to come out of this investigation, when this goes to the Senate Intelligence Committee for investigation, when it was found out that there was no immediate threat to national security, terrorism, acts of war, anything of that nature, most of the information they got, maybe all of it, is going to be deemed irrelevant.
And it needs to be destroyed.
You cannot surveil people and store information that is irrelevant to the subject of the investigation.
That is actually a very significant part of the law.
So that's something to think about.
Here is where it gets really ugly.
Any information that is relevant to the investigation for a FISA warrant.
For a FISA warrant.
Now we're talking about Here's the whole thing.
A FISA warrant and investigation is different from a typical warrant that you're going to exercise from a federal court.
Under FISA, you are looking at potential, you're looking at foreign citizens who are engaged in espionage, terrorism, acts of war, something that is immediate threat to national security.
That means all of the information gathered in the investigation is classified.
It's all classified.
It cannot be disseminated.
It cannot be spread to newspapers.
It cannot be leaked to anyone because it's all classified.
Because the information that was coming out during this investigation of Trump was being leaked to the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN.
It was being leaked by the intelligence community.
That is a violation of FISA law.
That is prosecutable.
Those are felonies.
This is the liability that the Obama administration has now.
Based on what they've been doing.
When you request the FISA warrant in the FISA court, you have to provide an affidavit.
An affidavit is a sworn statement that outlines the specific material factors involved in the case.
You have to specify what you're looking for, what you suspect, who's involved, those sorts of things.
They didn't put in Donald Trump in the request, in the affidavit.
Trump was left out of it.
That is omitting a material fact that is relevant and very important.
There are going to be doing surveillance on the server at Trump Tower, and they omitted that from the affidavit.
That's kind of a big deal.
That is omission, and it's intentionally misleading the FISA Court.
Any intent to mislead or lie to judicial officers, judges, is a felony.
The potential legal liabilities in this whole wiretapping thing are starting to add up.
If they deceived the court in the affidavit when they requested the warrant, if they had no basis to do a FISA request in the first place, if they took the information that they gathered and disseminated it to the media, all of that stuff is illegal.
It's all prosecutable and it's probably all at the felony level.
This is what's going on.
This is why Sean Spicer and Donald Trump, they have put this all out there and they're now letting the mainstream media and you and I and the intelligence community know they have screwed up.
They've screwed up big time.
And they are going to have to consult their attorneys now and find out where they stand legally.
Here's something to think about.
A lot of people were upset when President Trump kept James Comey on as director of FBI.
There was an ongoing investigation.
Many ongoing investigations.
Comey is at the center of these investigations.
We don't really know a whole lot about Comey, but his knowledge of the case, Comey's understanding of what's been going on with the Department of Justice, with the FISA, with the wiretapping, all this stuff, Comey's insights and direction on that is going to be critical for President Trump.
So that's why Comey had to stay on as FBI Director.
That is kind of where we're at right now.
The President and Sean Spicer have said they're saying nothing more about this until the Senate Intelligence Committee has a chance to look into the surveillance and find out what was done.
And here's where this is going to happen.
As Adam pointed out on the Periscope last night, this is all going to go to Congress.
There won't be any prosecution.
There's going to be congressional investigations.
So you're going to see Trey Gowdy.
We're going to start seeing lots and lots of interesting committee investigations going on over the next few months.
Now, let me tell you about a dream that I had.
I wrote about this.
It's on my blog.
If you look at the blog post, Donald Trump, God's Wrecking Ball, that blog post is about a dream I had where Donald Trump Came upon a massive stash of secret information.
It was a lot of information on government employees and people in business.
And it was information that proved they were corrupt and that they were doing things illegally.
And Trump took all this information and disseminated it into the community.
And in the dream, I took some of that information and I gave it to people in my sphere of influence.
We are in the middle of an intelligence war.
There is a soft coup that is trying to be pulled off by the deep state.
They are trying to get Trump out of office.
It's a soft coup.
It's not a military coup.
It's a soft coup where they're trying to use intelligence to take him down.
President Trump is fighting back.
He is fighting back against the deep state and people who want him out of office.
We are in an intelligence war.
And the reason why I'm giving you this information about the FISA court is because we need to understand what we need to pray about.
Okay?
We need to pray that the people in the Justice Department and the FBI and the courts and Congress will see what is going on.
Now, if you are not already familiar with who your senators and congressmen are, find out who they are.
And contact them.
Call them.
Send them an email.
I use Twitter.
I'm on Twitter all day long bugging people in Congress.
Sometimes my own, but sometimes other people.
I find out who the people are in the key committees and I tweet to them.
Hey, would you look into this?
Hey, would you check this out?
Hey, you're on this committee.
You guys should be investigating this.
I'm going to their Twitter and I'm bugging them to do this stuff.
That is what we do as citizens.
If you care about your government, if you care about where the country's going, get involved.
Start talking to these people and tell them.
Most politicians do it as in their own best interest, and they all want to get reelected.
And the thing that really motivates politicians is voters.
If voters, if they start to get hundreds or thousands of voters, We need to be praying, obviously.
them, they want this addressed, they want this investigated, they don't like the way that this is turning out, that starts to motivate them to go in a different direction.
We can steer Congress by communicating with them and telling them what we expect them to do.
We need to be praying, obviously.
We need to pray that President Trump and his cabinet will have an understanding of God's heart for this whole situation.
They need to understand what God's trying to accomplish.
They need to understand His strategies.
They need to understand what tactics they should use and which ones they shouldn't use.
We need to be praying about this.
That they would have those whispers from the Holy Spirit.
That there would be angels around the White House to keep them protected from the darkness and the evil spirits, the principalities and powers that are running this deep state.
Those are the kind of things we need to be praying about.
You can also go on my Twitter timeline and look at the people that I'm tweeting to and look at the things I'm tweeting to them.
I tweeted out to Paul Ryan yesterday.
About the repeal and replace Obamacare bill.
Because Rand Paul posted a video from the House yesterday where they were working on the Obamacare repeal and replacement bill and they would not let Rand Paul go into the office and look at it.
They kept him out.
They would not let him go in and look at it.
And he's kind of irate because he believes that the new bill is going to be Obamacare lite.
That is going to have a lot of the same problems with the original Obamacare bill.
And Rand Paul is concerned about that.
So I tweeted out to Paul Ryan, Hey, if you're so happy with the way the Obamacare repeal and replace bill is going, why don't you let Rand Paul have a look at it?
Those are the kind of things I do.
Paul Ryan is up for election next year.
And there is a Trump primary coming.
Whoever is not on board the Trump train in Congress is probably going to get voted out.
And look, here's how politicians work.
If they feel like they have a chance of getting taken out in a primary, that is going to get their attention.
If we support the president, we need to hold these people accountable and go to them and say, look, get behind the president and stop being a rhino.
Stop being an obstructionist.
We're trying to move the country forward and you're not helping.
If you think Trump is scary, if you think Trump is a monster, or if you think Trump can't be trusted, listen to the speech he gave at the Joint Session of Congress last week.
Just go on YouTube.
Just listen to it.
And make your decisions based on what you're seeing and hearing for yourself, not on what the mainstream media is telling you.
If you listen to what CNN and MSNBC and all the other outlets say about Trump, you're going to think he's Hitler.
I want to listen to what people say for myself and evaluate it.
And here's another thing.
Everything that he said in those speeches, make notes and look at what's happening now.
He's keeping all of his promises.
He's doing exactly what he said he was going to do.
First president in history who's going to do everything he said he was going to do.
It's going to be an interesting year.
We have some battles.
We have some challenges.
The president is trying to move the country in a new direction and a lot of people in government do not want to go in that direction.
There's a deep state war.
There's an intelligence war going on.
We need to keep informed.
I will continue to give you updates as I get them.
I'll continue to do my homework.
I love your support.
You guys are amazing.
I am gonna get back to work and go get some coffee.
Well, folks, that is our show for today.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Thanks for dropping by.
If you're new to the podcast and you haven't been to my website, you might drop by and check out the articles I have there.
If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can contact me at admin at prayingmedic.com.