By Nancy Thorner and Ed Ingold -
Why is it taking so long to determine whether anyone in the Trump camp conspired with the Russians to sabotage Hillary’s campaign? There is an active investigation by the FBI, and Congress has been holding hearings for months.
The answer is simple. The Democrats are prolonging the hearings in order to distract the public from more serious issues, like the failure of Obamacare, possible use of government surveillance for political reasons, nominated by the President. The Republicans seem to go along with this drama, possibly to keep their faces in the TV cameras. It is all a charade.
Logically, if not ethically, the investigation will continue indefinitely for one reason – it is impossible to prove a negative, i.e., there was no conspiracy. No matter how much information is collected, how many conversations or interviews are negative, there is always the possibility that one positive piece of information will be collected. All it takes is one, at least if it is independently corroborated, to secure an indictment. Should this occur, it would be leaked to the NYT long before a grand jury, or even Congress would know.
Parallel to this investigation is the fact that names on surveillance records involving the Trump campaign were deliberately unmasked and distributed to 16 agencies. It takes a special request, resulting in a paper trail, to unmask the names of any American citizen in these records. The burning questions are who ordered the unmasking, when did they do it, and for what reasons? It is legitimate to unmask names for national security reasons, but illegal if the reason is political, against your critics or opponents. The Democrats are determined to suppress this investigation, and for good reason. The finger points directly to Obama, and the scandal would exceed anything uncovered in Watergate.
The NSA collects millions of phone calls, but it would be a simple task to filter out specific people, such as the Trump campaign or members of Congress (e.g., Rand Paul). This gives plausible deniability that these individuals were specifically targeted, although the effect is the same. James Clapper, James Comes and others have chosen their answers very carefully, or couched them in secrecy. With any politician, official (or attorney) you must listen carefully to what they say, and even more carefully to what they do not say. The truth is somewhere in the latter.
Why, in the last few months of the Obama presidency, were these transcripts distributed to 16 agencies, rather than the typical one or two? A plausible reason is the more recipients, the more likely the data will be leaked to the press. Susan Rice, Valery Jarrett and President Obama have the answers.
