Obama's constitutional overreach... and Israel
What should happen to a President who spies on America's lawmakers and her allies? (Hang him by the Balls...)
January 4, 2016
Caroline Glick
Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.
It is far from clear why senior Obama administration officials told The Wall Street Journal that under President Barack Obama, the National Security Agency has been aggressively spying not only on Israeli officials but on US citizens and lawmakers who communicate with Israeli officials. Perhaps they were trying to make Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu look like a fool.
After all, the article concludes that the NSA intercepts of these communications “revealed one surprise."
“Mr. Netanyahu and some of his allies voiced confidence they could win enough votes” in Congress to scuttle Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
Ha ha. What dummies.
If their goal was simply to show that the White House has more leverage over Democratic lawmakers than the Israeli government does, then the article overshot the mark.
Beyond expressing the administration’s contempt for Netanyahu, the Journal’s article showed that Netanyahu isn’t the only one the administration sneers at.
It sneers at the American public and at members of Congress as well. And in so doing, it sneers at and deliberately breaks US law and tramples the US Constitution.
Under US law, American intelligence gathering agencies, including the NSA, are only permitted to spy on US citizens in order to protect US national security.
Under the US Constitution, the administration is arguably prohibited from spying on US lawmakers.
And yet, according to the Journal report, to advance its diplomatic opening to Iran, the administration has knowingly and deliberately spied on both law-abiding US citizens who posed no risk to US national security and on US lawmakers engaged in their lawful, constitutional duties.
As the criminal activity was characterized by the report, to protect Obama’s nuclear talks with the Iranians, Netanyahu was marked as a top intelligence target for the NSA. The NSA monitored all of his communications and all communications of his senior officials – most notably Ambassador Ron Dermer.
The report explains that the NSA’s “targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with US lawmakers and American-Jewish groups. That raised fears – an “Oh sh** moment, one senior US official said – that the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress.”
That “Oh sh** moment” didn’t make the administration pull back, or order the NSA to follow the law and destroy all communications between Israeli officials and US lawmakers. Rather the administration decided to suffice with winks and nods to make sure that the NSA understood that it should make law breaking an official policy and continue to share deliberately the communications it had mistakenly shared with the White House.
As the Journal report put it, “White House officials believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign [to convince Congress to scuttle Obama’s nuclear capitulation to Tehran]. They also recognized that asking for it was politically risky. So, wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold, officials said. “We didn’t say, ‘Do it,’ a senior US official said. ‘We didn’t say, “Don’t do it.”’” Cute. But probably illegal.
The picture painted by the Journal article is of an administration that made massive, continuous and deliberate use of intercepted conversations between lawmakers and private citizens with Israeli officials.
Consider the administration’s indignant fury when news broke on January 21 of last year that the Republican congressional leaders Sen. Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehnor had invited Netanyahu to address the joint Houses about the dangers of the Iran nuclear deal.
Obama and his advisers insisted that they were blindsided by the news. Yet, on Wednesday, the Journal published a report that strongly indicated that through its spying on lawmakers, the White House learned of the plan to invite Netanyahu to speak before Congress before Netanyahu found out about it.
The Journal reported that Boehner and McConnell met on January 8 and decided to invite Netanyahu to address a joint session. Recognizing the sensitivity of the issue, they told only their closest advisers about their plan. On January 9, Boehner called Dermer and raised the issue for the first time.
Since we now know that the NSA was monitoring all of Dermer’s communications – including his communications with US lawmakers – it appears to follow that NSA intercepted Boehner’s call to Dermer.
According to the Journal, the White House’s demand for intelligence on Israel was so intense that the NSA was transferring transcripts of intercepted calls within six hours of their interception.
Two weeks after Netanyahu’s March 4 address before the joint Houses of Congress, the Journal reported that the US was concerned about Israeli spying on the nuclear talks with Iran.
...
But in truth, the story wasn’t really about Israel. It was about an administration so contemptuous of US lawmakers and citizens that its senior officials have no compunction about admitting that they are breaking the law. They brazenly admit that they are undertaking unlawful spying operations against private citizens and lawmakers and in so doing conducting a massive abuse of presidential powers while trampling the spirit and arguably the letter of the US Constitution.
And they expect that no one will call them to task for it.
Obama's constitutional overreach... and Israel