John McCain: “We’ve Got a Serious Issue” if Obama Broke the Law

BUT HASN’T HE ALREADY DONE SO?

by Sharon Rondeau

(Mar. 13, 2017) — On Monday morning’s edition of “Fox & Friends” in an in-person interview with White House Senior Counselor Kellyanne Conway, the three co-anchors played a clip of Sen. John McCain stating on CNN that Trump should either retract his claim that former White House occupant Barack Hussein Obama ordered wiretapping of his office or present evidence to the American people supporting it.

Conway responded that Trump’s accusation, made on Twitter early on March 4, has become part of investigations to be conducted by the U.S. House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

The video clip of McCain depicts him stating that if Obama “violated the law,” presumably referring to the ordering of a wiretap on Trump Tower, “we’ve got a serious issue here.”

Fox Senior Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said last week that even had Obama issued an order for Trump Tower to be wiretapped, albeit “unconstitutional,” it is not “illegal.”

The FISA law governing surveillance of foreign agents, passed in 1978, enables the president to delegate to his attorney general the authority to approve any requests for warrants to wiretap individuals for national security reasons. During his interview last week, Napolitano stated that the law allows the president to order or approve a wiretap himself in consultation with the attorney general.

In his interview with Jake Tapper, McCain ignored the fact that an image posted by the White House on April 27, 2011 said to be a scan of a certified copy of Obama’s long-form birth certificate from Hawaii has been determined by a criminal investigation to be a “computer-generated forgery.” In a press conference given just after its publication that day, Obama stated that the image represented “additional information about the place of my birth,” thereby claiming the forgery as his own.

The forgery of a government document is a federal felony.

The investigation began in August 2011 under then-Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joseph Arpaio and concluded in December, two weeks before Arpaio left office following his reelection defeat on November 8. According to Arpaio, all evidence gathered was to be turned over to federal-level authorities and Congress.

In a radio interview on Friday with the lead investigator of the birth certificate probe, Mike Zullo, host Carl Gallups suggested that congressional hearings at which Zullo might testify could take place at some point. Intertwined with the birth certificate investigation was the discussion of the allegations of former NSA and CIA contractor Dennis Montgomery, who alleged that tens of millions of Americans have had their personal data harvested by government entities for years. Included in those named as victims were U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Donald Trump, Atty. Larry Klayman, 156 federal judges, and other prominent business people, according to Klayman, who began representing Montgomery in 2015.

The surveillance allegedly took place without a warrant.  In late 2015, Montgomery reportedly testified on video-tape to two FBI agents in a secured room for nearly three hours and provided 600 million records pertaining to his claims.

As McCain made his comments to CNN’s Jake Tapper, he quoted former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper as having told the 2013 Senate Intelligence Committee that wiretapping of average Americans was not taking place “wittingly.” However, in revelations made three months later by Edward Snowden to The Guardian, Clapper’s statement was proven untrue, and Clapper was later forced to admit that he provided the “least untruthful” response to Sen. Ron Wyden’s question.