Mark Levin: Trump Not the First Victim of Obama Police State Tactics

By Nate Madden

If Donald Trump’s team was indeed the victim of politically-motivated surveillance and leaks by the Obama administration, it may not have been the first, says Levin.

“This whole Democrat ruse, media ruse has been used to conduct domestic surveillance,” said Levin of the Left’s pervasive, unsupported Russia-Trump conspiracy theories. “And it was done before; it was done widely before in the Iran deal.”

Levin was referring to a Tablet Magazine story written by Lee Smith that examined whether or not Donald Trump was the first domestic political opponent targeted by Obama’s alleged spy-game:

In a December 29, 2015 article, The Wall Street Journal described how the Obama administration had conducted surveillance on Israeli officials to understand how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, like Ambassador Ron Dermer, intended to fight the Iran Deal. The Journal reported that the targeting “also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.

Despite this reporting, it seemed inconceivable at the time that—given myriad legal, ethical, political, and historical concerns, as well as strict National Security Agency protocols that protect the identity of American names caught in intercepts—the Obama White House would have actually spied on American citizens. In a December 31, 2016, Tablet article on the controversy, “Why the White House Wanted Congress to Think It Was Being Spied on By the NSA,” I argued that the Obama administration had merely used the appearance of spying on American lawmakers to corner opponents of the Iran Deal. Spying on U.S. citizens would be a clear abuse of the foreign-intelligence surveillance system. It would be a felony offense to leak the names of U.S. citizens to the press.

The story goes on to discuss the possible workings of the Obama White House’s spying on pro-Israel activists during the Iran deal.

“The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans engaged in perfectly legitimate political activism — activism, due to the nature of the issue, that naturally involved conversations with foreigners,” a pro-Israel activist told the outlet. “We began to notice the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our own paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.”

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