Governor Phil Bryant: “I’m the campaign finance director for Donald Trump in Mississippi, so we raise money. I’ve talked to a number of very wealthy individuals that God has blessed that say I can’t give money to Donald Trump because the FBI will show up at my door.”
One of the more sad, albeit predictable, aspects to the politicization of American justice institutions is that there’s less and less shock associated with the dropping of pretenses. Many people on these pages and in the discussions across the internet warned several years ago that downstream from the weaponized government was going to be an end-point era where all trust was dissolved. We are essentially at that point now.
While both wings of the UniParty apparatus in DC played together in the creation of the post 9-11 surveillance state, it was the Obama administration who added the weaponization knob based on political ideology.
Weaponizing the DOJ and FBI via the Intelligence Community (2012 and beyond) was an outcropping of the previous weaponization of the IRS and regulatory system (2009 to 2012). When I discuss this issue with people, I like to draw attention to the Obama and Eric Holder continuum.
The National Security Division of the DOJ (DOJ-NSD) was created by Eric Holder specifically to function as a weaponized agency, using FARA (Foreign Agent Registration Act) as the tool for the surveillance and targeting. While the NSD system was being put into place (2009/2010), Main Justice requested the CD ROMs from the IRS containing the Schedule-Bs of every 501(c-4) political organization. The DOJ quickly settled the class action lawsuit brought by conservative groups.
With the spotlight on the Cincinnati office (Louis Lerner), Obama moved his Chief of Staff Jack Lew into position as Treasury Secretary. The DOJ under Eric Holder then moved away from using the IRS and began to using the NSA database (weaponized FISA-702 authority) in 2012.
Notice the dates first mentioned by FISA Presiding Justice Rosemary Collyer.
“Government reports that it is unable to provide a reliable estimate of non-compliant queries since 2012“… “No apparent reason to believe the November 2015 -April 2016 period coincided with an unusually high error rate.”
The November 2015 to April 2016 period was when the FBI was conducting electronic surveillance of the candidates in the GOP nomination process, “same identifiers over different date ranges.” It was also only stopped after an NSA compliance officer noted the extreme volume in the April ’16 “about queries”. If the American people had been made sufficiently aware of what the implications of this report were saying very loudly, the electorate would have realized the DOJ/FBI and Intelligence Community were conducting political surveillance on a scale that dwarfed Watergate.
85% of the searches conducted from 2012 were non-compliant. Think about the scale of database searches and the intents and purposes therein. By the time President Trump arrives as the GOP nominee in 2016, the surveillance was extensive, often used and no longer questioned by an entirely comfortable FBI and DOJ-NSD.
In the biggest of big pictures, THIS weaponized REALITY was the origin of what the DOJ/FBI then realized they needed to hide after President Trump unexpectedly won the 2016 election. Everything thereafter, all of it… even through to today, is downstream from that apoplectic triggering point within the system.
Even now, many people still do not grasp the implications and ramifications. The public awareness of FBI participation in the targeting is simply one of those reality points in the non-pretending comments by Phil Bryant.