The Terrible Tapp

Awful Aural Acquisition,
or,
the Terrible Tapp

Saturday morning, the President published his declaration that he had “just found out” that “Obama had [his] ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory.”  About the same time, the New York Times was reporting that apparently someone in or closely associated with Trump’s organization had been under surveillance sometime during the campaign.  On Monday, in defense of the President’s weekend accusations, his press secretary offered the observation that “There's enough out there now that makes one wonder how some of this happened without the existence of surveillance.”

Where is “out there,” and exactly what is this sufficiency that makes the press secretary wonder? We are in a strange moment.  Clearly, there are intercepted communications whose content has not been made public even though the existence of these intercepts has caused and is causing political events to occur.  The fate of Gen. Flynn is a clear example, and who knows whether the actual or suspected existence of some similar record is behind Sec’y Sessions’ sudden partial recovery from amnesia concerning his conversations with Ambassador Kislyak?

We now know that a Russo-Ukrainian working for Paul Manafort while Manafort was Trump’s campaign manager was under surveillance as part of a U.S. counter-espionage effort.  Konstantin Kilimnik has claimed credit for getting the Platform Committee of the Republican National Convention to delete anti-Russian content from the hallowed party platform, and has said he was ordered to do it by Donald Trump himself.  The possibility, even the likelihood, that surveillance of Kilimnik resulted in the interception of communications that would compromise Manafort, if not Trump himself, is obvious.

Would surveillance of a Kilimnik necessarily have been limited to measures taken by the FBI, with communications interception only pursuant to a FISA warrant?  I think not.  Kilimnik’s communications with his foreign (presumably Russian) controller could have been intercepted by the FBI, the CIA or the NSA without any warrant.  They could also have been intercepted by any number of foreign agencies and then shared, most likely with the CIA. A foreign source could even have provided encrypted communications to a US agency which alone has the ability to decrypt them.

Of course, if there was a FISA warrant out for the interception of Kilimnik’s communications, it would have followed him into the Trump Tower and into Trump’s office or Trump’s bathroom. Even though the utterances of "US person" participants would have been subject to "minimization," a pre-minimization version would exist somewhere. And there is a world of non-FISA possibilities. Dutch Intelligence (acronym BVD) could have been planting nanomikes anywhere.  The Donald could have the BVD in his BVDs, for all we know.  Transcripts, in unmarked envelopes, could be landing in mailboxes all over D.C., northern Virginia and southwestern Maryland.

How many Kilimniks there were or are, and how close to Trump, are matters unknown at present (to the general public, anyway).  Does Trump know of a damning intercept, or does he merely suspect the existence of one?  Either way, the rationale for his “irrational” accusatory tweets is pretty obvious.

A deep, dark vein of mindless fear and loathing of Barack Obama runs through one half of the American psyche, and Donald Trump launched his political career by tapping into it.  Preposterous Birtherism was useful to Trump, and now he hopes to make use of a preposterous association between Tyrant Obama and his cruel and oppressive act of intercepting communications to deflect attention from the content of the intercepted communications.  (A survey of alt-right sources reveals that the myth of Obama's Surveillance State is already being ginned up.) That there will be no connection, or only the most attenuated of connections, between Obama and the wicked “tapp” will make no difference to Trump’s adherents.