Tapping Trump?..."Though Trump asserted he had “just found out” about this surveillance, he appears to be referencing a series of reports that began with a piece by Louise Mensch in Heat Street back in November, which was later corroborated by articles published by The Guardian and the BBC in January. The reports may have come to Trump’s attention by way of a Breitbart story that ran on Friday, summarizing claims of a “Deep State” effort to undermine the Trump administration advanced by conservative talk radio host Mark Levin.
If it were true that President Obama had ordered the intelligence community to “tapp” Trump’s phones for political reasons, that would of course be a serious scandal—and crime—of Nixonian proportions. Yet there’s nothing in the published reports—vague though they are—to support such a dramatic allegation. Let’s try to sort out what we do know.
First, as one would hope Trump is aware, presidents are not supposed to personally order electronic surveillance of particular domestic targets, and the Obama camp has, unsurprisingly, issued a statement denying they did anything of the sort:
Neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.
Rather, the allegation made by various news sources is that, in connection with a multi-agency intelligence investigation of Russian interference with the presidential election, the FBI sought an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing them to monitor transactions between two Russian banks and four persons connected with the Trump campaign. The Guardian‘s report alleges that initial applications submitted over the summer, naming “four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials,” were rejected by the FISC. But according to the BBC, a narrower order naming only the Russian banks as direct targets was ultimately approved by the FISC in October. While the BBC report suggests that the surveillance was meant to ferret out “transfers of money,” the Mensch article asserts that a “warrant was granted to look at the full content of emails and other related documents that may concern US persons.”...
...None of this is really supported by the public record. First, the attribution of whatever monitoring occurred to the “Obama administration” insinuates a degree of involvement by the White House or its political appointees for which there is no evidence. “Eavesdrop” implies surveillance of telephone conversations, which do not appear to have been the focus of the FISC order. (As is now well known, the intelligence community did intercept telephone conversations between former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and the Russian ambassador—but as a result of routine collection on an acknowledged foreign agent, not surveillance targeting Flynn himself.) Neither is there any evidence that authorization was sought to collect on “the Trump campaign” per se; rather, the BBC’s report claims that the application ultimately rejected by the FISC focused on “four members of the Trump team.” Mensch’s original report asserts that Trump was “named” in the initial application, but is vague as to whether that means he was a named target of electronic surveillance. ...
https://www.justsecurity.org/38347/tapping-trump/
