Trump on Wiretapping

While it's unlikely that Trump's claim that Obama ordered a wiretap on the Trump team in the Trump Tower before or after the election, there may be something to the claim that the US Government was listening in to conversations by Trump people in the tower while Obama was still President.

Former National Security Adviser Flynn had to resign because of intercepted telephone conversations while Trump was President-elect, according to the Washington Post.  So, somebody, for some reason, was listening to Flynn's phone calls while he was working on the team of President-elect Trump.

It seems most likely that the National Security Agency listens in on all calls involving Russian diplomats, although if both ends of the calls are entirely with the United States, then the FBI might be listening, rather than NSA.  I'm not sure who has the lead in this case.  The niceties of whether the call was listened to because it involved the Russians rather than Trump officials may be lost on Trump, who considers any listening in on his teams' conversations a violation of privacy, i.e., a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

The NSA probably routinely picks up many phone calls involving Americans in its huge net of intercepted phone calls.  It had no qualms about intercepting Angela Merkel's phone calls in Germany.  However, all such conversations involving American citizens inside the US are supposed to be highly protected because of the Fourth Amendment.  In this case, these phone calls involving a American citizen, Flynn, were leaked to the press, a violation of the laws dealing with classified information as well as the Fourth Amendment.

It's not surprising that Trump is mad.  He is wrong that Obama ordered a wiretap, but he is correct that his people were tapped by the US Government while Obama was still  President, albeit under procedures that had been in place for years.

A more relevant question might be whether Obama had any knowledge of the leaks about Flynn and looked the other way.  Was this leak really done by somebody in the "deep state" devoted to Hillary Clinton as Obama's successor?  If so, was the Obama administration culpable by looking the other way while such leaks were going on?  The leak was a violation of law, but like the misdeeds of the bankers in 2008, no one is being investigated because of the leak.  

Brooks on Immigration

In his Friday NYT column, David Brooks opines that although automation can replace white people, it cannot replace Hispanics.  The establishment says whites being displaced by automation, not immigration,but we need more hispanic immigrants because they are irreplaceable by machines.  Brooks highlights housing as an area where we need more immigrant laborers.  One possibility he ignores is using more modular housing construction in assembly line factories lending themselves to automation.  NYT columnist David Leonhardt, like Brooks, also believes Hispanic jobs are not responsible for middle class decline.  People think manual labor jobs cannot be automated.  Because immigrants often work illegally, they frequently work for very low, slave wages that eliminate any incentive to automate their jobs.   Therefore, the high tech community has not worked on automating them, with some exceptions, such as driving a car or truck.  Truck drivers may be a threatened species in a few years.  If farm hands become much more expensive, we may see automated fruit and vegetable crop picking begin to be replaced like corn and wheat harvesting.  

Elliott Abrams and the Jewish Lobby

The media claimed that Elliott Abrams was the leading candidate for Deputy Secretary of State, that Tillerson wanted him badly, but then it reported that Trump vetoed Abrams for the job.  I think this whole Elliott Abrams episode was made up by a bunch of Jews who are desperate to get more Jews into the Trump administration.  Abrams was a good candidate because he is a Jewish Republican with foreign policy experience at high levels.  Tillerson may have said he wanted Abrams, but if so, he hardly knew him.  There is no reporting on their having a long relationship.  Influential Jews in State, and in Washington more generally, worked the levers of power to pressure Tillerson to ask for Abrams.

The Jewish-owned New York Times was pressed into this political service and complied with articles about Abrams’ great qualifications and his imminent appointment to the job.  On February 6, the Times ran an article by Gardiner Harris and David Sanger (probably Jewish), “Elliott Abrams, Neoconservative Who Rejected Trump May Serve Him.”   

Then, when Abrams did not get the job, the NYT still praised him, but said in the article, “Trump Overrules Tillerson, Rejecting Elliott Abrams for Deputy Secretary of State,” that the main objection to Abrams was that he had written a highly critical article about Trump in the Weekly Standard, run by the Jewish William Kristol, “When You Can't Stand Your Candidate.”  Interestingly this article deals at length with Abrams’ time working as a staffer for Senator Scoop Jackson, along with another Jackson staffer, Jewish Republican wildman Richard Perle.  Jackson is most famous for the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment, responsible for getting thousands of Jews out of the old Soviet Union.  According to Wikipedia, it was responsible for allowing about 500,000 Jews to emigrate from the old Soviet bloc to the United States and about one million to Israel.

On February 19, the NYT ran a follow-up article, “Trump, an Outsider Demanding Loyalty, Struggles to Fill Top Posts,” that still praised Abrams and still advocated for more Jews in the Trump administration.  The article quotes Richard Haass, a Jewish Republican who is the head of the Council on Foreign Relations, on how hard it will be for Trump to get people to work in his administration.  He said Trump had “ruled out much of an entire generation of Republican public policy types,” but the article added that Haass’ name had been floated for a position.  The article ends with a plea from Abrams encouraging “everybody to go into the government if offered an appropriate position.”  I take this to be a plea mainly to Jews who might not approve of Trump to join his administration if possible.  

Russians Did Not Nominate Trump

The American establishment, particularly the media, has pushed the idea that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump.  Clearly the Russians hacked the DNC, but whether this had any effect on the election is unclear.  Interestingly, no one has claimed that the hackers falsified any of the emails. They published what they found; they did not make up derogatory emails.  It is les clear whether the Russians were involved in fake news.  The fake news seems to have come from all over, from all types of people all over the world.  

It looks like Trump won the Republican nomination on his own without help from the Russians or any other outside influence.  The Russians did not defeat Jeb Bush or John Kasich, darlings of the establishment.  It’s hard for the Democrats and the establishment to prove that he did not win the general election because of the same things that won him the primary.  

The Russian connection to the hacking has made the Democrats and the establishment hate the Russians.  This is a relatively new animosity, since Obama spent much of his administration trying to make nice with the Russians.  Because of the election, Democrats now think Russia is the world’s boogeyman, and are trying to foment conflict with Russia.  Democrats have become the new warmongers.  

Because the Trump administration has not gone along with the Democrats’ warmongering, the Democrats, the establishment, and the media have tried to portray Trump’s openness to Russia as treasonous.  The intelligence community has supported the establishment by leaking anything connecting Trump to Russia, regardless of classification or Fourth Amendment privacy concerns about wiretapping Americans.  The intelligence community has always had strong links to the establishment, and at the moment it looks like the intelligence types are more loyal to the establishment than to the President.  

When I was in the Foreign Service I wanted to be part of the establishment.  I probably did not make it in part because of my Southern roots.  (And maybe I wasn’t smart and smooth enough.)  At one time Southerners like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Woodrow Wilson were the core of the establishment.  But the establishment has moved north to New York and west to San Francisco.  Hillary, the former first lady of Arkansas, expressed the establishment view when she spoke of the “basket of deplorables,” which probably includes me.     

The establishment wants to blame the Russians for Hillary’s defeat, when in fact it was their contempt for at least half of America that was the real cause.  The Democrats have become a party that hates the great men who created it, that has turned its back on American history in order to appeal to new generations of descendants of slaves and immigrants who have no attachment to the history that made America the leader of the free world for a few decades.