It’s outrageous! Epidemic Obama-era crimes continue to be revealed, as this segment from Fox’s Sean Hannity show demonstrates. One of the worst abuses of power of the Obama administration was the spying on and revealing of Americans’ names by our country’s intelligence agencies in an “unmasking” effort that made our country neither safer nor more secure.
Indeed, as The Hill’s Sara Carter and John Solomon tell Hannity, the motivation for this spying was purely political, and in many cases, it was blatantly illegal, setting up a question of whether officials such as former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and ex-President Obama himself need to be prosecuted for their offenses.
This patent disregard for the laws put in place regarding intelligence-gathering — especially Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — bring into focus government overreach that should disturb any U.S. citizen who wonders where their hard-earned tax dollars go. Although Section 702 is one of the parts of the law that helps our national security apparatus catch terrorists and organized criminals, the specifics of what is and isn’t proper for the government to collect, store and distribute need to be parsed further than they already have been in the name of maintaining civil liberties.
There’s also a big question mark over whether ex-officials such as Clapper and Brennan (and especially Obama) still have access to data that’s been collected on people such as President Trump and his team that could be used to smear them. It’s quite possible that Obama holdovers in the intelligence community might be able to feed such incriminating data to leakers, who could use it to embarrass our current commander-in-chief or even try to impeach him. It’s not a question of whether this data exists — it likely does; it’s just a question of who has access to it and whether it can be tapped into.
This whole brouhaha should be a reminder to Americans that if government is given the power to surveil citizens or officials in any way, it’s virtually guaranteed that such capabilities will be abused. Watch as Hannity gets the facts in this disturbing story.
