ELECTION 2016

MANAFORT-TRUMP WIRETAPS: WORSE THAN WATERGATE!

Exclusive: Larry Klayman sounds alarm over surveillance by federal intel agencies

“This (Bush-Cheney) administration is the most secretive of our lifetime, even more secretive than the Nixon administration. They don’t believe the American people or Congress have any right to information.”

– Larry Klayman, chairman, Judicial Watch

This quote is taken from the first page of the book by former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean, entitled “Worse than Watergate,” published by Brown Little and Company in 2004, three years after the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. While Dean was referring to the secretive conduct of the George W. Bush administration, and my observation at the time as head of Judicial Watch, that its conduct in processing Freedom of Information Act records requests was even more secretive than the administration of former President Richard M. Nixon, Dean, a converted leftist who hated W. along with the rest of his anti-conservative ilk, chose to quote me because it also had been revealed that Bush had ordered illegal warrantless wiretaps of millions of American citizens post 9/11, under the pretext of uncovering future terrorists.

Indeed, after I ran for the U.S. Senate in Florida, and later went into private practice before cranking up my current watchdog group, Freedom Watch, I later brought suit for one of my clients, one Scott Tooley, who believed, with good reason, that he was being surveilled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and/or the National Security Agency (NSA) and/or Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Tooley had been the head of the IT department in the Capitol Hill office of Rep. Christopher Cox, R.-Calif., and shortly after September 11 had commented to a counter check-in clerk of Southwest Airlines at the airport, when Scott routinely was asked if he had any suggestions for the chairman of Southwest, that the airline needed to check its cargo holds more thoroughly, suggesting that terrorists could seek to smuggle an incendiary device into a passenger plane. In response, the Southwest clerk asked, “Why?” Scott’s response was “because there could be a bomb.” This was enough to trigger Scott apparently being put on a terrorist watch list, although the government would never acknowledge this.

Following what he intended to be a helpful statement to Southwest and in the public interest, Tooley believed that his phones were wiretapped and that he had listening devices planted in his home and car. Indeed, around this time a reporter for the New York Times, who had broken the story of the Bush administration’s widespread illegal warrantless wiretaps and surveillance on millions of American citizens without probable cause, told me that he thought it very likely if not certain that Scott Tooley was being surveilled.

While the suit I filed for Tooley was stymied by a federal judge who then was also the head of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court – as she apparently cut an under-the-table deal with the Bush administration to get rid of it as this newly revealed illegal surveillance reflected badly on the oversight authority of her court – let us fast-forward to the later Obama administration. 

That brings us to the new information that has just become public this week.

In addition to myriad illegal unmaskings of intelligence information gathered by the Obama intelligence agencies about contacts with Russia by persons in and around then presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, we have just learned that Obama and his hacks at the FBI, NSA and CIA, and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), run by former FBI Director James Comey, former NSA Director Keith Alexander, former CIA Director James Brennan and former DNI James Clapper, had either individually and/or in concert ordered and conducted wiretaps on the phones of then Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. The apparent leaked reason: Manafort was allegedly thought to be colluding with the Russians to prejudice and influence the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, whom Obama and his lackeys wanted to see elected president.

By so doing, Comey, Alexander, Brennan and/or Clapper, with President Obama’s obvious knowledge, complicity and at his likely direction, sought to spy on the inner workings of the Trump campaign and to indirectly wiretap presidential candidate Donald J. Trump himself. In addition, persons in and around Trump and Manafort, such as adviser and longtime confidant Roger Stone, who had likely recommended Manafort to Trump – Stone having been Manafort’s partner years earlier at the Republican lobbying and political advisory firm of Black, Manafort, Stone, Kelly, and later also Davis – would also be caught up in the wiretaps, not to mention others such as Gen. Mike Flynn. Stone, for one, had bragged about his contacts with WikiLeaks and forecast that it would soon be releasing information damaging to Hillary Clinton. He also had stated publicly that he been in contact with an alleged pro-Russian Romanian hacker codenamed Guccifer.

Thus, Obama, his FBI and/or intelligence agencies broke into the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, in a massively more invasive way than President Nixon’s henchmen had done in 1972 with a third-rate burglary at the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). 

What was the reason for this? 

It was clear that Obama and his henchmen, much like Nixon, wanted some “insurance,” even though at the time Hillary Clinton was leading by huge margins in the polls and was thought a shoo-in to win the presidency, much as was also true of Nixon’s presidential campaign against the hapless leftist George McGovern. 

In short, if things started to go south for Mrs. Clinton, the Obama and Clinton goons would have enough dirt on Trump to sink his possible victory.

This huge violation of the rule of law and constitutional rights was forecast by my client Dennis Montgomery, who had come forward to Comey’s FBI earlier during the Obama years with evidence of illegal surveillance. 

It is no coincidence that Comey buried this investigation, for which Montgomery and I have filed suit.

Yes, the actions of the Obama administration, furthered by the criminally minded FBI, NSA, CIA and DIA, run by the Deep State, committed acts of criminality far worse than Watergate, especially given the hugely enhanced spying technology of these agencies 44 years later.

Notwithstanding Freedom Watch’s lawsuit (see www.freedomwatchusa.org), Attorney General Jeff Sessions must now emerge from his “Cowardly Cave of Hibernation” and do his job or resign immediately! 

The criminals responsible of this “Super Watergate” must be brought to justice and thus prosecuted!

See Klayman interview on FBN: