What Did James Baker Do with Secret Government Surveillance Information?

WITH EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY FROM OBAMA BIRTH-CERTIFICATE INVESTIGATOR MIKE ZULLO

by Sharon Rondeau

(Apr. 16, 2019) — In the opening pages of the transcript from a second closed-door congressional session about the Russia “collusion” investigation commenced by the FBI on the Trump campaign, former FBI General Counsel James Baker told the four congressmen present, all Republicans, that during the first session he had not remembered an event associated with “surveillance,” about which he had been grilled by questioners from both political parties at the time.

On October 3, 2018, Baker was asked to describe the process by which the FBI and Justice Department apply for surveillance warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which comprises 11 federal judges from various jurisdictions.  With more than 20 years in government service, Baker led the DOJ’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR) for 11 years and testified that during that time, he reviewed “10,000 FISA applications” (p. 121) and considered himself a subject-matter expert.

The OIPR eventually was melded into the DOJ’s National Security Division (NSD).

Baker’s second day of questioning, October 18, 2018, commenced without the customary preamble and as a continuation of the initial interview, which ended after Baker told congressional investigators that a group of high-ranking DOJ and FBI officials discussed the possibilities of “wearing a wire” to record President Trump’s conversations in the Oval Office; invoking the 25th Amendment to oust him from office; demanding that a Special Counsel be hired to probe Trump for “obstruction,” and launching additional “investigations” after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey (pp. 131-132 of Part 1 transcript).

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH4) began the second session with, “So, when we left off a few weeks ago, we were talking about a meeting you had with Andy McCabe and Lisa Page shortly after the meeting they had with Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein where Mr. Rosenstein indicated he was looking at the possibility of recording the President of the United States. Tell me when that meeting that you had with — when was the meeting you had again with Ms.Page and Mr.McCabe?”

In response, Baker said that since the first session, he recalled an event wherein an outside attorney requested to meet with either “the Director” or him regarding information he said one of his clients possessed “in the form of electronic media” alleging “unlawful surveillance” on the part of the government.

Initially, Jordan thanked Baker perfunctorily for the recollection, then redirected him back to the discussion about McCabe and Page.  Before Baker could proceed, however, an attorney for the Republican side of the House Judiciary Committee and House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform, Mr. Breitenbach, interjected.  “With regard to Mr. Klayman coming to visit you, was it with regard at all to surveillance concerns that he had concerning the general fact pattern that we are here to discuss today?” Breitenbach asked.

Baker replied, “Well, it had to do with surveillance. It had to do with an allegation about unlawful surveillance, but it was — I believe it was different from any fact pattern that we talked about last time here.”

“Unlawful surveillance of whom?” Breitenbach asked (p. 5).

“Of Americans, including government officials…” Baker responded.

After deferring to an unnamed attorney from the FBI’s Office of General Counsel and receiving no objection, Baker further elucidated, “…his client was an individual named Dennis Montgomery, who I believe, to the best of my recollection, he said that he had been a U.S. Government contractor and, in the course of that work, had come across evidence of unlawful surveillance by the government of Americans — and including government officials — and wanted to give that information to the Bureau, which eventually did take place.”

When asked when he met with Klayman, Baker responded, “To the best of my recollection, it’s in the late summer, early fall 2016.”

As The Post & Email has reported since 2015, according to Obama birth certificate lead investigator Mike Zullo, former NSA/CIA contractor and software developer Dennis Montgomery approached the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) in late 2013 alleging he had evidence of government surveillance and the breaching of bank accounts belonging to more than 150,000 Maricopa County residents. Concerned that his constituents were affected, then-Sheriff Joseph Arpaio met with Montgomery and shortly thereafter hired him as a confidential informant.

According to Zullo, Montgomery worked for Arpaio for approximately a year to organize millions of data records which he said showed that government entities had harvested not only banking passwords and information, but also the personal communications of federal judges, to include two justices of the U.S. Supreme Court; the communications of Zullo and Arpaio as well as attorneys representing Arpaio; Donald Trump and his business associates; Judge G. Murray Snow, who presided over a civil suit against Arpaio in 2015; and Klayman, who came to represent Montgomery through Zullo.

Identity theft was also alleged to have occurred in Maricopa County.

On March 20, 2017, Dr. Jerome Corsi reported, “Obama’s NSA Illegally Spied on Sheriff Arpaio’s Prosecution” with an editor’s note which reads, “The below story draws clear, significant parallels to the electronic surveillance of Donald Trump during the Obama administration.“

Just weeks before, Trump had tweeted that he “just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped in Trump Tower just before the victory.  Nothing found.  This is McCarthyism!” to much derision and cries of “no evidence” from the mainstream press.

Before Montgomery approached the FBI in August 2015 with the data, Zullo reported in a number of interviews, he and Klayman arranged for Montgomery to visit the chambers of U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth, then the chief judge of the FISC. Montgomery reportedly told Lamberth of the alleged unlawful government surveillance without Klayman present, as Klayman was not cleared to receive classified information.

Montgomery had been hesitant to approach the FBI as a result of the 2006 raid on his home which a federal judge later ruled violated his Fourth Amendment rights. However, according to Zullo, Montgomery in 2015 testified on two occasions to the FBI, once on a promise of testimonial immunity by the Justice Department and the second after he was provided with production immunity, a fact confirmed by documentation Montgomery provided to this publication Tuesday morning.

A March 2017 text message exchanged between then-Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok and FBI counsel to the Deputy Director Lisa Page acknowledges their knowledge of Montgomery’s allegations while appearing to discredit it.

Because the FBI never took action on the information Montgomery provided, in 2017 Klayman filed a civil suit naming the FBI, NSA, CIA, Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan and Barack Obama, et al, as defendants. The case was assigned to Judge Richard J. Leon, who had ruled in Klayman’s favor in a suit he brought in 2013 against the NSA for collecting the communications of what appeared to be virtually all Americans through such programs as PRISM and Project Dragnet, exposed by former government contractor Edward Snowden.

Then of Circa News, investigative reporters Sara A. Carter and John Solomon published an interview with Montgomery on June 6, 2017, speculating at the time that his case alleging widespread and deep government surveillance of American citizens could eclipse “the Russia collusion story.”  Two days later, both appeared on “Hannity” to discuss the interview and Montgomery’s claims.

Carter and Solomon’s interview of Montgomery followed a May 23, 2017 Circa article reporting that “The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.”

In March 2018, Leon granted the defendants’ Motion to Dismiss in Montgomery v. Comey, stating, in part, that “Plaintiffs have not made the requisite showing that a constitutional violation actually occurred here. Plaintiffs accordingly cannot show that it would be in the public interest to grant an injunction to prevent the alleged unconstitutional surveillance they allege has occurred.”

In summarizing the case Leon wrote, in part:

———————-

The data Montgomery has said he possesses reportedly covers the time period between 2001 and 2010, when he ceased working with the federal government.

In a video produced on January 4, 2017, Klayman said that then-CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper collected the communications of “156 judges,” including U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts.  “These agencies have committed far greater crimes than the Russian government is alleged to have done,” Klayman said.  “…To focus solely on the Russians…is very suspect, given that John Brennan of the CIA is leading the charge to try to discredit and delegitimize the presidency of Donald Trump.”

Klayman’s assessment was proven correct after Brennan became a national-security commentator at MSNBC, which platform he used to accuse Trump of “treason,” incompetency and other actions worthy of removal from office.

In a number of radio shows, “Freedom Friday” host Carl Gallups and Zullo have discussed some of the information Montgomery produced while working for the MCSO, an effort Zullo was appointed to supervise.  Zullo verified that some of Montgomery’s records showed apparent CIA breaches of computer systems used by the State of Hawaii, including those at the Hawaii Department of Health (HDOH), where Barack Obama’s alleged “long-form” birth certificate allegedly resides.

In 2011, the absence of a detailed birth certificate for Obama became an election issue, at least for then-businessman Donald Trump, who repeatedly called on the White House to release the document which would presumably reveal more information as to the circumstances of Obama’s birth than the “short-form” image posted in June 2008.

Ridiculed and vilified by the media, Trump pressed forward on the issue for several months until on April 27, 2011, the White House released what it said was a scan of a certified copy of Obama’s long-form birth certificate from the health department containing the alleged signature of his mother, the delivery doctor, the registrar at the time, occupations and residences of his parents and their birthplaces.

Within hours, computer analysts declared the image highly questionable, pointing to anomalies in the typefaces and apparent construction.  Within days and weeks, some had gone on the record to say that it was undoubtedly a forgery.

Those findings eventually spurred the opening of a 5+-year investigation led by Zullo as head of the MCSO’s ancillary “Cold Case Posse.”

In a lengthy affidavit provided to Klayman in a civil suit against then Alabama Secretary of State Beth Chapman over her alleged failure to that presidential candidates in the 2012 election, Zullo described the “long-form” birth certificate image as containing “multiple errors and anomalies, many of them serious.”  By then, Zullo’s probe had already declared in a formal press conference that probable cause existed to believe the long-form birth certificate image to be a “computer-generated forgery.”

A second presser on July 17, 2012 revealed that the standard of probable cause had been surpassed given new evidence the posse pursued.

Other unreconciled aspects of Obama’s life narrative include mainstream-media reports stating unequivocally that he was born in Kenya, or alternatively, Indonesia, or that he went with his mother to live in Indonesia at age 2 rather than at age 5, as his commonly-told life narrative states. Following the completion of his investigation in December 2016, Zullo said on Gallups’s show that he is certain Obama was never in Hawaii before the age of five and hence could not have been born there.

Moreover, last August, Zullo revealed that two experienced U.S. intelligence agents informed him that “it’s been an open secret” in Washington, DC that Obama was not born in the United States, bringing into sharp focus the many questions Americans raised prior to Obama’s 2008 presidential election and thereafter as to his constitutional eligibility to serve.

Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution requires the president and commander-in-chief to be a “natural born Citizen.” Although not defined by the Founders during the Constitutional Convention, historical references made by members of Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court indicate there was “no doubt” that a child born in the United States to parents who were both U.S. citizens is a “natural born Citizen.”

Others have argued that a child born outside the country to U.S.-citizen parents or to one U.S.-citizen parent can be considered “natural born” and that children born in the United States to parents residing in the country illegally are also “natural born Citizens.”

Last summer, Obama said, “Three years ago, I visited Kenya as the first sitting American president to come from Kenya,” a statement glossed over by the American media.

A request Monday night for clarification from Klayman as to the time he spoke to Baker about Montgomery’s claims received no response as of press time.  As to Baker’s testimony about Montgomery’s information, Zullo told The Post & Email exclusively, “Baker knows that the FBI deep-sixxed it.  They don’t want Montgomery to surface because it brings up illegal spying going back to 2001.”

When we asked Zullo if he believes Baker was present during Montgomery’s 2015 testimony, he responded, “James Baker knows all of it.  Immunity has to come from the DOJ, and he had to give a report to the DOJ in order to get the immunity.”

In the past, Zullo has opined that in regard to the long-form birth certificate, “all roads are going to lead to John Brennan.”