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03/07/2017 by The Doctor Of Common Sense

Good News! ESPN Is Struggling And Big Layoffs Coming Because They Are To Damn Liberal

Curt schilling fired for not want men in women’s restrooms

As sports cable network ESPN continues to bleed cash, another round of layoffs is about to hit that will reportedly take out some well-known reporters and on-air faces.

Reports say that ESPN management is being tasked with cutting “tens of millions” of dollars of staff salary from its payroll, meaning that on-air personalities are on the chopping block, according to Sports Illustrated.

“Today’s fans consume content in many different ways, and we are in a continuous process of adapting to change and improving what we do. Inevitably, that has consequences for how we utilize our talent,” ESPN said in a statement. “We are confident that ESPN will continue to have a roster of talent that is unequaled in sports.”

The network is reportedly set to buyout some contracts, and fire writers and behind the camera staffers. The slashing of staff will likely be completed by June, insiders say.

The news of the massive cuts comes on the heels of reports that ESPN is losing millions per year.

Once a sports powerhouse, ESPN has gone from must-see-TV for millions of sports fans to a financial boondoggle for owner Disney with the network losing up to 10,000 subscribers a day, reports said last month.

“A floundering ESPN, with rising costs and declining viewership, continued to sink Disney’s DIS, +0.24% financial results during its fiscal first quarter,” MarketWatch.com reported.

With ESPN dragging on the company, Disney’s revenue fell 3 percent, and its profits sank 14 percent, the financial site reported.

As to ESPN itself, the network lost subscribers, found its average viewership crater, and experienced falling advertising rates even as its programming costs climbed. And this fall from grace continued even after Disney insisted that ESPN had reached its bottom after the previous quarter came to an end.

ESPN’s crashing revenue coincides with its increasingly leftward political content, a drift so blatant that the network’s ombudsman felt pressured to address the network’s political content.

Last November, ESPN’s Jim Brady presented evidence that even inside its executive boardroom complaints from viewers have resonated that sports cable network ESPN has become far too liberal.

03/05/2017 by The Doctor Of Common Sense

FBI Director James Comey Is In Bed With The Clinton’s

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A review of FBI Director James Comey’s professional history and relationships shows that the Obama cabinet leader — now under fire for his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton — is deeply entrenched in the big-money cronyism culture of Washington, D.C. His personal and professional relationships — all undisclosed as he announced the Bureau would not prosecute Clinton — reinforce bipartisan concerns that he may have politicized the criminal probe.

These concerns focus on millions of dollars that Comey accepted from a Clinton Foundation defense contractor, Comey’s former membership on a Clinton Foundation corporate partner’s board, and his surprising financial relationship with his brother Peter Comey, who works at the law firm that does the Clinton Foundation’s taxes.

Lockheed Martin

When President Obama nominated Comey to become FBI director in 2013, Comey promised the United States Senate that he would recuse himself on all cases involving former employers.

But Comey earned $6 million in one year alone from Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin became a Clinton Foundation donor that very year.

Comey served as deputy attorney general under John Ashcroft for two years of the Bush administration. When he left the Bush administration, he went directly to Lockheed Martin and became vice president, acting as a general counsel.

How much money did James Comey make from Lockheed Martin in his last year with the company, which he left in 2010? More than $6 million in compensation.

Lockheed Martin is a Clinton Foundation donor. The company admitted to becoming a Clinton Global Initiative member in 2010.

According to records, Lockheed Martin is also a member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, which paid Bill Clinton $250,000 to deliver a speech in 2010.

In 2010, Lockheed Martin won 17 approvals for private contracts from the Hillary Clinton State Department.

HSBC Holdings

In 2013, Comey became a board member, a director, and a Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee member of the London bank HSBC Holdings.

“Mr. Comey’s appointment will be for an initial three-year term which, subject to re-election by shareholders, will expire at the conclusion of the 2016 Annual General Meeting,” according to HSBC company records.

HSBC Holdings and its various philanthropic branches routinely partner with the Clinton Foundation. For instance, HSBC Holdings has partnered with Deutsche Bank through the Clinton Foundation to “retrofit 1,500 to 2,500 housing units, primarily in the low- to moderate-income sector” in “New York City.”

“Retrofitting” refers to a Green initiative to conserve energy in commercial housing units. Clinton Foundation records show that the Foundation projected “$1 billion in financing” for this Green initiative to conserve people’s energy in low-income housing units.

Who Is Peter Comey?

When our source called the Chinatown offices of D.C. law firm DLA Piper and asked for “Peter Comey,” a receptionist immediately put him through to Comey’s direct line. But Peter Comey is not featured on the DLA Piper website.

Peter Comey serves as “Senior Director of Real Estate Operations for the Americas” for DLA Piper. James Comey was not questioned about his relationship with Peter Comey in his confirmation hearing.

DLA Piper is the firm that performed the independent audit of the Clinton Foundation in November during Clinton-World’s first big push to put the email scandal behind them. DLA Piper’s employees taken as a whole represent a major Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign donation bloc and Clinton Foundation donation base.

DLA Piper ranks #5 on Hillary Clinton’s all-time career Top Contributors list, just ahead of Goldman Sachs.

And here is another thing: Peter Comey has a mortgage on his house that is owned by his brother James Comey, the FBI director.

Peter Comey’s financial records, obtained by Breitbart News, show that he bought a $950,000 house in Vienna, Virginia, in June 2008. He needed a $712,500 mortgage from First Savings Mortgage Corporation.

But on January 31, 2011, James Comey and his wife stepped in to become Private Party lenders. They granted a mortgage on the house for $711,000. Financial records suggest that Peter Comey took out two such mortgages from his brother that day.

This financial relationship between the Comey brothers began prior to James Comey’s nomination to become director of the FBI.

DLA Piper did not answer Breitbart News’ question as to whether James Comey and Peter Comey spoke at any point about this mortgage or anything else during the Clinton email investigation.

Peter Comey Re-Designed the FBI Building

FBI Director James Comey grew up in the New Jersey suburbs with his brother Peter. Both Comeys were briefly taken captive in 1977 by the “Ramsey rapist,” but the boys managed to escape through a window in their home, and neither boy was harmed.

James Comey became a prosecutor who worked on the Gambino crime family case. He went on to the Bush administration, a handful of private sector jobs, and then the Obama administration in 2013.

Peter Comey, meanwhile, went into construction.

After getting an MBA in real estate and urban development from George Washington University in 1998, Peter Comey became an executive at a company that re-designed George Washington University between 2004 and 2007 while his brother was in town working for the Bush administration.

In January 2009, at the beginning of the Obama administration, Peter Comey became “a real estate and construction consultant” for Procon Consulting.

Procon Consulting’s client list includes “FBI Headquarters Washington, DC.”

So what did Procon Consulting do for FBI Headquarters? Quite a bit, apparently. According to the firm’s records:

Procon provided strategic project management for the consolidation of over 11,000 FBI personnel into one, high security, facility.

Since 1972 the Federal Bureau of Investigation has had its headquarters in a purpose built 2.1 million square foot building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Having become functionally obsolete and in need of major repairs, GSA and the FBI were considering ways to meet the space needs required to maintain the Bureau’s mission and consolidate over 11,000 personnel.

Procon assisted GSA in assessing the FBI’s space needs and options for fulfilling those needs. Services provided included project management related to site evaluations, budgeting, due diligence, and the development of procurement and funding strategies.

Those “funding strategies” included talking to “stakeholders”: “Worked with stakeholders and key leadership to identify strategic objectives, goals and long range plans for capital and real estate projects.”

Procon Consulting obtained its contract for FBI Headquarters prior to James Comey’s nomination to serve as director of the FBI.

In June 2011, Peter Comey left Procon Consulting to become “Senior Director of Real Estate Operations for the Americas” for DLA Piper.

Peter Comey has generated some controversy in that role. According to Law360 in May 2013 (the same month that James Comey was confirmed as someone being considered by Obama to become FBI director):

Two real estate services businesses filed a $10 million suit against the law firm Monday alleging it stiffed them on as much as $760,000 of work done at DLA Piper’s Chicago office and improperly gave proprietary information to a competitor.

….

The plaintiffs take particular aim at Peter Comey, DLA Piper’s senior director of real estate operations. Leasecorp and SpaceLogik include several emails in the complaint that are purportedly from DLA Piper senior real estate partners Jay Epstein and Rich Klawiter and are sharply critical of Comey’s handling of the matter. In one email, Epstein wrote that “it’s an embarrassment for the firm to be treating someone who we are working with like this.”

In another email allegedly from Klawiter on Feb. 20, the DLA Piper partner informed Leasecorp President Michael Walker, a principal for both plaintiffs, that Comey had sent him and Epstein an email claiming that the real estate services firms were behind on their contractual obligations.

“I just received an email from Peter (Jay was also a recipient) that is so inflammatory I can’t even send it or you’ll hit the roof,” Klawiter said in the email, according to the complaint. “This is not going to end well.”

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/10/exposed-fbi-director-james-comeys-clinton-foundation-connection/

03/05/2017 by The Doctor Of Common Sense

Fraud James Comey Tells Justice Dept. to Reject Trump’s Wiretapping Claim

James Comey and Hillary Clinton Work For the Same People

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.

Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment. Sarah Isgur Flores, the spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.

Mr. Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump’s truthfulness. The confrontation between the two is the most serious consequence of Mr. Trump’s weekend Twitter outburst, and it underscores the dangers of what the president and his aides have unleashed by accusing the former president of a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump’s young administration.

The White House showed no indication that it would back down from Mr. Trump’s claims. On Sunday, the president demanded a congressional inquiry into whether Mr. Obama had abused the power of federal law enforcement agencies before the 2016 presidential election. In a statement from his spokesman, Mr. Trump called “reports” about the wiretapping “very troubling” and said Congress should examine them as part of its investigations into Russia’s meddling in the election.

In addition to being concerned about potential attacks on the bureau’s credibility, senior F.B.I. officials are said to be worried that the notion of a court-approved wiretap will raise the public’s expectations that the federal authorities have significant evidence implicating the Trump campaign in colluding with Russia’s efforts to disrupt the presidential election.

Mr. Comey has not been dealing directly with Attorney General Jeff Sessions on the matter, as Mr. Sessions announced on Thursday that he would recuse himself from any investigation of Russia’s efforts to influence the election. It had been revealed on Wednesday that Mr. Sessions had misled Congress about his meetings with the Russian ambassador during the campaign.

Mr. Comey’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering is certain to invite contrasts to his actions last year, when he spoke publicly about the Hillary Clinton email case and disregarded Justice Department entreaties not to.

It is not clear why Mr. Comey did not issue a statement himself. He is the most senior law enforcement official who was kept on the job as the Obama administration gave way to the Trump administration. And while the Justice Department applies for intelligence-gathering warrants, the F.B.I. keeps its own records and is in a position to know whether Mr. Trump’s claims are true. While intelligence officials do not normally discuss the existence or nonexistence of surveillance warrants, no law prevents Mr. Comey from issuing the statement.

In his demand for a congressional inquiry, the president, through his press secretary, Sean Spicer, issued a statement on Sunday that said, “President Donald J. Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016.”

Mr. Spicer, who repeated the entire statement in a series of Twitter posts, added that “neither the White House nor the president will comment further until such oversight is conducted.”

A spokesman for Mr. Obama and his former aides have called the accusation by Mr. Trump completely false, saying that Mr. Obama never ordered any wiretapping of a United States citizen.

“A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” Kevin Lewis, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, said in a statement on Saturday.

Mr. Trump’s demand for a congressional investigation appears to be based, at least in part, on unproven claims by Breitbart News and conservative talk radio hosts that secret warrants were issued authorizing the tapping of the phones of Mr. Trump and his aides at Trump Tower in New York.

In a series of Twitter posts on Saturday, the president seemed to be convinced that those claims were true. In one post, Mr. Trump said, “I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!”

On Sunday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy White House press secretary, said the president was determined to find out what had really happened, calling it potentially the “greatest abuse of power” that the country had seen.

“Look, I think he’s going off of information that he’s seen that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential,” Ms. Sanders said on ABC’s “This Week.” “And if it is, this is the greatest overreach and the greatest abuse of power that I think we have ever seen and a huge attack on democracy itself. And the American people have a right to know if this took place.”

The claims about wiretapping appear similar in some ways to the unfounded voter fraud charges that Mr. Trump made during his first days in the Oval Office. Just after Inauguration Day, he reiterated in a series of Twitter posts his belief that millions of voters had cast ballots illegally — claims that also appeared to be based on conspiracy theories from right-wing websites.

As with his demand for a wiretapping inquiry, Mr. Trump called for a “major investigation” into voter fraud, saying on Twitter that “depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!” No investigation has been started.

Senior law enforcement and intelligence officials who worked in the Obama administration have said that there were no secret intelligence warrants regarding Mr. Trump. Asked whether such a warrant existed, James R. Clapper Jr., a former director of national intelligence, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “Not to my knowledge, no.”

“There was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time, as a candidate or against his campaign,” Mr. Clapper added.

Mr. Trump’s demands for a congressional investigation were initially met with skepticism by lawmakers, including Republicans. Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said he was “not sure what it is that he is talking about.”

“I’m not sure what the genesis of that statement was,” Mr. Rubio said.

Pressed to elaborate on “Meet the Press,” Mr. Rubio said, “I’m not going to be a part of a witch hunt, but I’m also not going to be a part of a cover-up”

03/05/2017 by The Doctor Of Common Sense

Twitter’s New Anti-Harassment Attempt: Flags SOB’s Before they are Reported!

Twitter announced new anti-harassment measures on Wednesday, the latest in a series of features the platform has added in recent months in response to heated criticism of the ease with which rampant abuse festers in the social platform’s depths. With the help of algorithms, the company has begun finding and taking action against people who harass fellow users, even if harassers haven’t been the subject of specific abuse reports.

This proactive step could relieve users who’ve been targeted for abuse of some of the need to file individual reports for every threatening tweet they get. In a blog post, Twitter’s vice president of engineering, Ed Ho, wrote that the company’s software will flag likely harassers—users that regularly tweet at accounts that don’t follow them back, for instance—and block those users’ tweets from being seen by anyone but their own followers for a set period of time. “We aim to only act on accounts when we’re confident, based on our algorithms, that their behavior is abusive,” Ho wrote, promising that the company will regularly update and improve the new feature as it learns what works.

Twitter is also rolling out a tool that lets users filter out notifications from certain kinds of accounts more likely to be trolls, such as ones that don’t have a photo or verified contact information. Another change will give people using the “mute” feature the ability to keep themselves from seeing certain words, phrases, or conversations for a limited time period—a welcome option for someone who’s at the center of an angry tweetstorm about penguins, say, but wants to resume seeing penguin tweets after the storm has passed.

It wasn’t until November 2016 that Twitter expanded its mute function to allow users to mute certain words and phrases (as they can on Facebook and Instagram), one of its most effective strategies in the fight against targeted harassment. Last month, Twitter unveiled a few other anti-abuse features: automatic collapsing of tweets that are likely to be abusive or “low-quality” in conversations; the ability to report harassment from a user who has blocked you; better monitoring of users who jump from one suspended account to a newly created account to continue their abuse; and the end of users getting notifications when someone replied to a conversation started by someone they’d blocked.

The new initiative to wield machine-learning against repeat harassers is the most interesting development in the platform’s struggle to address the problem that’s driving many cultural leaders and prolific tweeters, like writer Lindy West, to close their Twitter accounts altogether. The idea that lines of code may someday take over the soul-draining job of internet moderators is a popular one these days. Jigsaw, a tech company owned by Alphabet, released a public API last week called Perspective. The Ringer reports that Perspective claims to use artificial intelligence to flag “toxic” comments online by running them against a database of old comments, which have already been deemed toxic by human beings, from sources including Wikipedia and the New York Times.

If Twitter can calibrate its program properly, preemptive flagging may be the boost its existing moderators need to address harassment faster and more effectively—though it’s likely to raise concerns among people concerned about free-speech implications. Blanket muting and restrictive notification filters are blunt instruments that can block out the good stuff with the bad. Targeting repeat, committed offenders is harder to do, but, by monitoring problem users before they can amplify their abuse, Twitter’s new approach is way more likely to punish harassers instead of restricting the Twitter experience of their victims.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2017/03/02/twitter_s_proactive_new_anti_harassment_effort_will_flag_users_as_potentially.html

03/05/2017 by The Doctor Of Common Sense

San Francisco Chickens out from FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force !

San Francisco has taken its defiance of the feds to a new level, ending its cooperation with the FBI in an anti-terror initiative begun after 9/11 – a move crtitics say could get innocent people killed.

Critics say the sanctuary city by the bay’s latest decision to forego cooperation with Washington, by dropping out of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, could put lives at risk. The JTTF has been credited with foiling 93 Islamist terrorist attacks and plots against the U.S. since 2001, including 12 this year, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation. There are another 1,000 investigations into suspected terror activity nationwide.

These staggering statistics make the recent decision by the San Francisco police department to end the city’s partnership with the JTTF, at the behest of local activist groups that alleged Arabs and Muslims are wrongly targeted by the FBI and will be more so under the Trump administration, all the more concerning, said retired federal law enforcement officials.

“There is less chance of uncovering networks, plots, missing pieces of a puzzle, without cities participating in the JTTF.”

– Claude Arnold, former ICE investigator

“In my opinion, the decision by the mayor and the police chief to withdraw the San Francisco Police Department from the JTTF is really narrow-minded,” said Mark Rossini, a retired FBI special agent, and founding executive of the National Counterterrorism Center, who served as a representative to the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. “Politics aside, and the mayor and leaders of San Francisco have their right to their opinion, political opinion and beliefs. But when you’re working in law enforcement, law enforcement should know no politics.”

The FBI leads the 104 Joint Terrorism Task Force units across the country, but the majority of intelligence about crime and terror comes from local sources, said Claude Arnold, a former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations, who worked in California.

“There is less chance of uncovering networks, plots, missing pieces of a puzzle, without cities participating in the JTTF,” Arnold said.

San Francisco police have dozens of undercover agents and contacts in immigrant communities helpful to federal law enforcement investigations. Conversely, two San Francisco police are federally deputized for the JTTF, and as a result have access to classified intelligence.

“Information must flow both ways in these cases,” Rossini said. “By San Francisco pulling out, you’re losing that vital link of data that the FBI and the other federal agencies and the Department of Justice will need in order to complete its cases and investigate them thoroughly.”

If San Francisco’s withdrawal from the JTTF is permanent, it could impact the safety of Americans throughout the nation, said Lauren Anderson, a former FBI agent who led the international terrorism program of the FBI’s New York JTTF, and now runs LCAnderson International Consulting.

“In virtually every terrorist prevention or incident, local law enforcement was the first point of interaction,” Anderson said.

The 2010 Times Square would-be bomber Faisal Shahzad is an example.

“Two street vendors noticed a vehicle with smoke and told New York Police Department officers. Because NYPD was physically present on the JTTF, the information was shared immediately and members of the JTTF were at the scene in minutes,” Anderson said.

The JTTF has prevented a number of terrorist attacks, many which crossed state lines, said David Inserra of the Heritage Foundation.

In July 2012 in Alabama, Ulugbek Kodirov was sentenced to 15 years in prison for plotting to kill President Barack Obama. In November 2012, Rezwan Ferdaus was sentenced to 17 years in prison for planning to bomb the Pentagon. In March 2015, Raees Alam Qazi and Sheheryar Alam Qazi were sentenced in Florida for a scheme to use a weapon of mass destruction in New York City.

Whether the San Francisco police department will renegotiate the JTTF memorandum of understanding or simply refuse to participate, isn’t clear. A police department spokesperson would only say the agreement has expired and is under review.

Local activists critical of the JTTF cheered the decision by the newly appointed San Francisco police chief, on the job for just a week before pulling the plug on the partnership.

“This issue is really about the need for local police officers to comply with state and local laws and policies even when they are working with the FBI JTTF,” Crew said.

Neither Crew, nor his many allies in San Francisco, are apprehensive area residents may be in danger because of a lack of representation on the JTTF.

“I’m not the least bit concerned,” Crew said.

San Francisco police work with the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, a government program focusing on criminal and terrorist activity, Crew said. He also maintains there is no reason police cannot work with the FBI on pressing terrorism-related investigations as long as they don’t violate California law.

But Rossini and other former federal law enforcement said they worry the conflict may prevent vital leads from surfacing.

“Last time I checked, we’re all part of the 50 states….So let us continue to work together when it comes to the law, when it comes to law enforcement,” Rossini said. “You want to do politics another day.”

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/03/03/san-franciscos-withdrawal-from-national-terror-intelligence-network-hikes-risks-officials-say.html

03/04/2017 by The Doctor Of Common Sense

Donald Trump’s claims Obama wire-tapped his phones at Trump Tower before the election

Obama administration denies Towergate: Insiders blast Donald Trump’s claims Obama wire-tapped his phones at Trump Tower before the election in ‘Nixon/Watergate’ style scandal

Trump has accused Obama of wire tapping his phones at Trump Tower on Twitter
The president tweeted that Obama had been spying on him in October
He claims the phones in Trump Tower were ‘tapped’ before his election victory
But Obama’s spokesman, Kevin Lewis, said those claims were ‘simply false’
Lewis released a statement Saturday saying ‘neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen’
Ben Rhodes, the former policy advisor for Obama, also blasted Trump’s claims
He responded to Trump in a tweet that said ‘no president can order a wiretap’
A former senior intelligence official said ‘it’s highly unlikely there was a wiretap’
According to official, wiretap can’t be directed at US facility, without probable cause the phone lines were being used by agents of a foreign power

The Obama administration has strongly denied President Donald Trump’s claims that Barack Obama wire-tapped his phones at Trump Tower before the election.

Obama’s spokesman Kevin Lewis released a statement Saturday afternoon refuting Trump’s wire-tapping claims.

‘A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,’ Lewis wrote.

‘As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.’

Lewis’ statement comes shortly after Trump fired off a flurry of tweets early Saturday morning claiming that the former president had been spying on him in October, a month before his election victory.

‘Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!’

McCarthyism, which the president used in his first tweet, is the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence.

Trump started tweeting shortly after 3.30am ET and posed the question: ‘Is it legal for a sitting President to be ‘wire tapping’ a race for president prior to an election?’

In another tweet Trump said it was a ‘new low’ for the former president, compared it to ‘Nixon/Watergate’ and calling Obama a ‘bad (or sick) guy’.

Ben Rhodes, the former policy advisor for Obama, also blasted Trump’s accusations on Twitter: ‘No President can order a wiretap. Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you.’

Rhodes shot back at another Trump tweet saying: ‘Dear Pundits who lauded his speech. Is it still ‘presidential’ to call your dignified predecessor ‘Bad (or sick) guy!’

But Ben Rhodes, the former policy advisor for Obama, blasted Trump’s accusations on Twitter: ‘No President can order a wiretap. Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you’

Trump also linked Obama to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s meetings last year with Russia’s US ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.

‘The first meeting Jeff Sessions had with the Russian Amb was set up by the Obama Administration under education program for 100 Ambs,’ he tweeted.

Trump’s team has sought to push back over its connections to Russian officials by pointing out instances of Democrats meeting with Kislyak.

But a former senior intelligence official told The Washington Post that ‘it’s highly unlikely there was a wiretap’.

‘It seems unthinkable. If that were the case by some chance, that means that a federal judge would have found that there was either probable cause that he had committed a crime or was an agent of a foreign power,’ the official said.

According to the official, a wiretap cannot be directed at a US facility, without finding probable cause that the phone lines or internet addresses were being used by agents of a foreign power.

‘You can’t just go around and tap buildings,’ the official told the Post.

Another former senior US official, who worked under the Obama administration, told CNN there was no such investigation of Trump, nor were his phones tapped.

‘This did not happen. It is false. Wrong,’ the former official said.

The official echoed that of others saying Obama could not have ordered this and adding that it would have been taken to a judge by investigators, but investigators never did that.

The president, who is currently vacationing at his private Mar-a-Lago estate, did not provide any additional evidence to back up his claims.

A spokesperson for Obama did not immediately reply to a request for comment from DailyMail.com.

Trump seemed to be referring to a Thursday evening radio show hosted by Mark Levin that claimed Obama executed a ‘silent coup’ of Trump via ‘police state’ tactics, according to far-right Breitbart News.

Through a timeline, Levin suggested the former president should be the target of congressional investigation.

Trump tweeted that the former president had been spying on him in October, a month before his election victory

The president, who is currently vacationing at his private Mar-a-Lago estate (pictured), did not provide any additional evidence to back up his claims. Obama has not responded to the accusations

During the summer last year, the Obama administration filed a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Trump and several advisers but the request was denied, according to Heat Street former editor, Louise Mensch.

Just a day before the 2016 election, Mensch reported that ‘sources with links to the counter-intelligence community’ confirmed that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) had granted a FISA court warrant in October to monitor activities in Trump tower.

On Wednesday, a New York Times report said White House officials took efforts in the closing days of the Obama administration to analyze and spread information about Russian election interference, driven by a concern that the material might get buried by Trump.

Intelligence agencies rushed to analyze raw intelligence material about Russia connections, going over months-old material as the extent and possible motives of what the agencies say is Russian election hacking emerged.

Officials made efforts to ask specific questions at intelligence briefings as a way to get the information into the record and be archived for examination later.

In January, American law enforcement and intelligence agencies examined intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of Trump, according to the Times.

The FBI led the investigations, aided by the National Security Agency, and the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit.

Trump also linked Obama to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s meetings last year with Russia’s US ambassador

KEEPING AN EYE ON RUSSIA

1. In June 2016, the Obama administration filed a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Trump and several advisers but the request was denied, according to Heat Street former editor, Louise Mensch.

2. In October, the Obama administration submitted a new FISA request, which focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russia, according to Heat Street.

4. In January 2017, Christopher Steele was named as ex-MI6 agent behind ‘fake’ Trump sex dossier. None of the allegations were verified and some were proven false. Also in January, the Obama administration expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.

5. In January 2017, American law enforcement and intelligence agencies examined intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of Trump, according to the Times.

6. The Times also reported in January that White House officials took efforts in the closing days of the Obama administration to analyze and spread information about Russian election interference, driven by a concern that the material might get buried by Trump.

7. A month later, ex- National Security Adviser Mike Flynn was forced to resign from his position following reports that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his contacts with Russia.

8. Also in February, phone records and intercepted calls showed that members of Trump’s campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, the Times reported.

9. In March, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions removed himself from all investigations involving the presidential campaign in a stunning turnaround to save his job on Thursday afternoon. It was revealed that he didn’t tell Congress about his meetings with the Russian ambassador to the US. He then announced he was recusing himself from all investigations connected to the presidential election.

Investigators found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, the officials said.

One official said intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House.

As the news spread about Trump’s allegations, many government officials took to social media to respond.

South Carolina Sen Lindsey Graham, spoke on Trump’s accusations at a Town Hall on Saturday.

‘I am very worried that our president is suggesting that the former president has done something illegally,’ Graham told his audience.

‘I would be very worried if in fact the Obama administration was able to obtain a warrant lawfully about Trump campaign activity with foreign governments.

In other words, the he Obama administration would have only been able to lawfully obtain a warrant for a wire tap, if a judge found probably cause that Trump was engaging in criminal activity.

Democrats have also responded to Trump’s claims, including House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who Trump recently demanded by investigated after she said she hadn’t met the current Russian ambassador, only to be revealed to have met him in a 2010 photo.

Pelosi hit back at Trump’s demands of an ‘immediate’ investigation by tweeting: ‘The Deflector-in-Chief is at it again. An investigation by an independent commission is the only answer.’

Others have also responded to Trump’s claims, including Ted Lieu, a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives, representing California’s 33rd congressional district

Nancy Pelosi, who Trump recently demanded by investigated after she said she hadn’t met the current Russian ambassador, also responded to Trump’s claims

Former Vermont Gov Howard Dean also tweeted shortly after Trump’s accusation made headlines

The Trump administration has come under increasing pressure over its connections to Russian officials.

Earlier this week, Sessions recused himself from any investigations involving the presidential election after it was revealed he twice met with Kislyak during the campaign.

When Trump was asked if he knew Sessions had met Kislyak before the election, he said: ‘I wasn’t aware at all.’

The president’s extraordinary intervention came as Sessions faced a firestorm over whether he lied to the Senate during confirmation hearings by failing to disclose his two meetings last summer.

But the president also said he has ‘total’ confidence in his attorney general and does not think he should recuse himself from Justice Department investigations involving Russia.

‘I don’t think so,’ he told reporters asking about recusal on Thursday as he visited the USS Gerard R. Ford in Newport News, Virginia.

Despite saying he did not know of the meetings with Kislyak, he stood by Sessions as he took fire from Democrats for failing to disclose the conversations during his confirmation hearing.

Asked if Sessions told a Senate panel the truth about the communications, Trump gave only a half-hearted endorsement, however.

‘I think he probably did,’ Trump said.

A White House spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to DailyMail.com’s request for comment.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4281150/Trump-accuses-Barack-Obama-wire-tapping-phones.html

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