Keith Pickering has an excellent DIARY on the Rec list on why Trump’s phone tapping claims are such an important story, and connecting some dots very nicely. But there’s another dot we can connect on that line.
On her show last night, Rachel brought up a dot that I hadn’t even seen in the puzzle before. She asked a very simple question, “How did we end up with transcripts of the Mike Flynn phone calls to the Russian ambassador”? It is both legal, and standard practice for US intelligence agents to monitor foreign nationals, so they do. But there’s a loophole there. It’s legal to monitor a foreign national’s phone calls, but still illegal to monitor a US citizen. If they’re following protocol, they were required to hang up and disconnect their phone surveillance the moment they identified an American citizen on the line. So, how did we end up with a transcript of their conversation?
Here’s how. They could keep on listening in and taping merrily away if they already had a FISA warrant out on Mike Flynn. With that warrant, all bets are off. So, if they ended up with a transcript of Flynn’s call(s) to the ambassador, then it’s a de facto admission that there was already a FISA warrant on Flynn before the phone calls took place, otherwise they would have had to disconnect the call once they identified Flynn.
How long have they had a warrant for Flynn? How much more have they collected before the phone calls tipped their hands? And who else is wandering around out there with a warrant taped to their backs? We have no way of knowing, but the way things are going down with this Klown Kar circus, we might be finding out more soon.
And one more thing to consider. For the most part, the Trump campaign hierarchy are not seasoned political operatives, they’re rank outsiders. They have personal agendas that they will be loathe to risk. Think the knowledge that someone like Flynn apparently had a warrant already on him may be giving them a twitchy feeling between their shoulder blades? Almost makes you wonder what a knock on the front door from a couple of FBI agents might uncover right out of the gate? This is getting interesting.