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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
25 May 2019

"President Trump might be openly hostile to the mainstream media, but it was the Obama administration that was engaged in a widespread effort to thwart the media. Which do you think is more harmful to a free press?

The full extent of Obama’s actions against the press are only now coming to light.

The Columbia Journalism Review reports on a newly released government document showing that the Obama Justice Department engaged in a far more sweeping effort to spy on the Associated Press than previously believed.

“In 2013, the Justice Department launched a brazen attack on press freedom,” the CJR notes, “issuing sweeping subpoenas for the phone records of The Associated Press and several of its reporters and editors as part of a leak investigation. At the time, the subpoenas were widely seen as a massive intrusion into newsgathering operations. Last month, we learned that they told only part of the story.”

The spying came in the wake of the AP’s reporting on a thwarted Yemen-based bomb plot, which contained classified information about the CIA operation. Months later, the AP learned that the DOJ had vacuumed up two-months of phone records on 21 different lines trying to find the leaker.

Unprecedented Intrusion

Upon learning this, the AP blasted the Obama Justice Department. AP’s President and CEO Gary Pruitt said the records collected could “reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

Turns out, Pruitt should have been even more outraged. The new report, obtained by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, finds that the DOJ actually collected records on 30 phones.

The report shows that DOJ attorneys at one point considered subpoenaing records of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and ABC News and “strongly suggests that the attorneys went so far as to obtain ‘telephone numbers and other contact information’ for reporters and editors at those organizations who had worked on articles about the Yemen bomb plot.”

(more @) http://issuesinsights.com/2019/05/25/report-obamas-spying-on-the-press
-was-far-more-extensive-than-previously-thought/


Columbia Journalism Review … Wow! Not exactly your bastion of Conservative political bias. And yet with all the crimes Obama was committing against the press, the majority of the press never for one minute stopped kissing his ass. They were all too eager and willing to forfeit their Constitutional protections and cede their dwindling journalistic integrity to try to advance their delusional libtard ideology. How pathetic and sickening.

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
The full extent of Obama’s actions against the press are only now coming to light.

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Whistleblower Exposes Details Of Obama’s “The Hammer” Super-Secret & Illegal DOMESTIC Surveillance Program

Inventor and software designer Dennis Montgomery, a CIA/DOD/DHS/NSA/FBI contractor-turned-whistleblower, alerted FBI Director James Comey’s office in 2015 that President Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan and Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had turned the super-surveillance system that Montgomery designed for foreign surveillance, known as THE HAMMER, into a domestic surveillance system.

Montgomery became alarmed when Obama and his intelligence chiefs Brennan and Clapper turned the super-surveillance system against the American people.

Montgomery asserts that Obama, Brennan, and Clapper used THE HAMMER in a diabolically intrusive manner in order to spy on the American people and collect massive amounts of surveillance data for “leverage” and “blackmail.”

THE HAMMER was only to be used for foreign surveillance, not to be weaponized for domestic surveillance against the American people, according to Montgomery and to U.S. military sources.

According to those U.S. military sources, Montgomery’s surveillance technology not only saved American lives as America’s “War on Terror” broadened, but also featured built-in safeguards to prevent the system from ever being used for domestic surveillance.

“Multiple echelons” of government, including the FISA court, had to sign off on each and every foreign surveillance operation conducted with the use of THE HAMMER, those sources say.

Montgomery claims that Brennan and Clapper used the super-surveillance system Montgomery designed to spy on Article III federal judges, including the onetime head of the FISA court Judge Reggie Walton, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice of U.S. Supreme Court John Roberts.

Montgomery’s revelations about his super-surveillance system THE HAMMER call into question Chief Justice Robert’s strange and inexplicable 2012 decision that stood in direct opposition to his own stated legal argument. At the eleventh hour, Roberts flipped and supported the individual mandate for President Obama’s highly unpopular Affordable Care Act.

Montgomery, who is constrained by non-disclosure agreements, has spoken about the system but has not publicly identified the system by name. The secretly-recorded “Whistleblower Tapes” identify the name of the system as “THE HAMMER,” as we first reported in our March 17, 2017 exclusive exposé. The March 2017 WikiLeaks CIA Vault 7 document dump confirms the name of the system as THE HAMMER (HAMR).

Military sources, we can now report exclusively, confirm the existence of the super-surveillance system known as THE HAMMER. Those sources caution that the super-surveillance system was only to be used for foreign surveillance.
Comey Knew

In August 2015, Montgomery turned over to FBI General Counsel James Baker, who represented the office of FBI Director Comey, physical evidence, in the form of 47 computer hard drives containing 600 million pages of documents.

Montgomery maintains that the data on the hard drives prove the existence of THE HAMMER and prove that Brennan and Clapper engaged in illegal domestic surveillance, despite the existence of safeguards that were already in place.

In August 19, 2015, Montgomery turned over the hard drives under two immunity agreements struck with the U.S. Department of Justice. The 600 million pages of documents stored on those hard drives, when stacked one upon another, would measure a stunning thirty miles high, says Montgomery.

The FBI provided Montgomery with a detailed receipt for the 47 hard drives, including handwritten descriptions of each and every hard drive.

FBI Director Jim Comey took Montgomery’s evidence and buried it.

Montgomery’s claim that Obama, Brennan, and Clapper illegally spied on millions of Americans is by itself explosive.

Montgomery’s identification, by name, of one particular U.S. citizen that Montgomery insists was under constant surveillance “for years” by Obama, Brennan, and Clapper via THE HAMMER has led Obama’s inner circle to take desperate measures.

The name of that U.S. citizen targeted by THE HAMMER is Donald J. Trump.

Whistleblower Tapes: Trump Wiretapped “A Zillion Times” By ‘The Hammer,’ Brennan’s and Clapper’s Secret Computer System – The American Report

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At the tail end of a rare open session of the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 12, 2013, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked National Intelligence Director James Clapper whether intelligence officials collect data on Americans.

Clapper responded "No, sir," and, "Not wittingly."

In the following months, a series of news stories fueled by leaks from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that wasn’t the case. Reports showed the government was collecting and storing bulk metadata of American phone records, and had methods for capturing a vast amount of email and Internet data as well.

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The NSA intentionally and routinely intercepted communications of American citizens in violation of the Constitution.

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