OPINION:
Barack Obama, the president who rode a wave of promises for uber-transparency into eight years at the White House, has apparently been — well, not.
Lucy, I think you got some ’splainin’ to do.
Frankly put, the guy’s just been dinged by courts for letting his intel agencies conduct tons of illegal surveillance.
What’s more: the same source that chided Obama has given high kudos to President Donald Trump for upholding American citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights.
Specifically, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence just declassified a ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review — the FISA court that hears appeals about cases involving secret government monitoring of those on U.S. soil. And what that declassified document showed was that the Fourth Amendment rights of numerous American citizens were violated during the last year of Obama’s administration.
And even more specifically: the violations dealt with Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the part that mandates feds who are spying for justifiable reasons to take extra care to safeguard information on citizen information that’s inadvertently collected. These protections are aimed at upholding the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans, the ones that guarantee citizens will be secure in their persons and possessions and kept free of unreasonable and warrantless searches.
Apparently, Obama’s intel didn’t follow proper procedure.
Judge Rosemary Collyer, writing the opinion for the FISC, called the cavalier treatment with which Team Obama handled Section 702 data a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue.” Collyer also dinged Obama’s National Security Agency for an “institutional lack of candor,” and the FBI for passing along “raw FISA information” to even those agents and officials who didn’t need access.
Trump’s put a stop to such cavalier handling of intel — at least, according to the court.
Once again, it’s a case of Democrats talking the talk — paying lip service to something as crucial as the Fourth Amendment — but failing to walk the walk. And the media?
Well, all media eyes are turned toward Russia right now, looking for the latest bit of innuendo that might be spun as proof positive of a President Trump collusion with Vladimir Putin. No time left to look at the egregious constitutional offenses of the prior administration.
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