Sy Hersh - Is Trump's Justice Department Pursuing Obama?

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Cabinet members of the Trump administration understand that loyalty to the president is a requirement for keeping one’s job. So Todd Blanche, a former New York federal prosecutor who represented Trump in three cases while in private practice, found himself trying to explain away the Comey indictment on May 3 on NBC’s Meet the Press. Moderator Kristen Welker asked Blanche: “How does that image of seashells amount to a serious threat against the president’s life?”

Blanche, after some blathering, got to the truth. “Rest assured that it’s just not the Instagram post that leads somebody to get indicted,” he said. As we have repeatedly seen in recent months, the most pressing issue for Trump is payback. I have been told that the president remains convinced that Obama, working through John Brennan, a former CIA station chief who was first brought into the Obama White House as a homeland security assistant and became CIA director in 2013, sought to find ways after the election to delegitimize Trump after he prevented Hillary Clinton from succeeding Obama. I soon was hearing accounts of alleged Brennan-inspired operations to find a way, using active National Security Agency contractors, to monitor and intercept telephone calls coming in and out of Trump’s temporary executive offices at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan during the transition. One such group of contractors was detected by members of an NYC police unit working with the Secret Service. There was a confrontation, with guns raised by Secret Service agents, in the account I was told, and it took a few days in the city jail on Rikers Island before the contractors were released. At that point, the head of the NSA Admiral Michael Rogers was doomed, so I was told. He and a key deputy were fired by Trump a few months into his presidency,

I followed the story at the time, and I’m still following it, but trying to determine if there was a last-minute Brennan-led operation—as Trump and others inside clearly believe—to collect enough dirt to keep the president-elect from office in early 2017 may never be resolved. I am told that Brennan is under investigation for his actions against then President-elect Trump by a Justice Department prosecution team headquartered in Florida. He was interviewed, and he may soon be charged with perjury.

What will happen if Obama—another Trump target—is determined to have had knowledge of or to have ordered the alleged off-the-books Brennan-led operations against Trump. At this highly politicized moment, it’s impossible to predict.

I asked a source who is well informed, with access to foreign intelligence, about the Trump administration’s ongoing inquiry, what he thinks of Obama’s role and that of a few of his most senior aides who officially sought access to NSA voice intercepts in the weeks before Trump was to take the oath of office. Could all of this amount to a plot against the incoming president?

He said he had seen, amid the records and documents he’d studied, no evidence of a “substantiated criminal conspiracy by Obama officials to fabricate the Russia investigation or to prevent Trump from assuming office.” He added, however, that “There is ample material here for serious criticism of how the FBI and Department of Justice handled a politically explosive counterintelligence matter in the aftermath of a presidential campaign.”

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