Matt Taibbi Calls Out Liberal Media For Pretending ‘Not to Know’ How Obama Was Conducting Political Surveillance

Matt Taibbi writes a lengthy column calling out his colleagues for abandoning all pretense of civil liberties in an effort to ‘resist’ President Trump.

Within the column Taibbi walks-through the ridiculous Russia collusion story and notes the necessary use of the media pretending not to know what took place within the Obama administration; including what continues today in the prosecution of Flynn.

MATT TAIBBI – […] ” After Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about mass data collection, a series of internal investigations began showing officials were breaking rules against spying on specific Americans via this NSA program. Searches were conducted too often and without proper justification, and the results were shared with too many people, including private contractors. By October, 2016, the FISA court was declaring that systematic overuse of so-called “702” searches were a “very serious fourth Amendment issue.”

In later court documents it came out that the FBI conducted 3.1 million such searches in 2017 alone. As the Brennan Center put it, “almost certainly… the total number of U.S. person queries run by the FBI each year is well into the millions.”

Anyone who bothers to look back will find hints at how this program might have been misused. In late 2015, Obama officials bragged to the Wall Street Journalthey’d made use of FISA surveillance involving “Jewish-American groups” as well as “U.S. lawmakers” in congress, all because they wanted to more effectively “counter” Israeli opposition to Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.  This is a long way from using surveillance to defuse terror plots or break up human trafficking rings.

I can understand not caring about the plight of Michael Flynn, but cases like this have turned erstwhile liberals – people who just a decade ago were marching in the streets over the civil liberties implications of Cheney’s War on Terror apparatus – into defenders of the spy state.  (READ MORE)