Rope A Dope

This morning I watched former National Intelligence Director James Clapper on NBC's Meet the Press.  He denied President Donald Trump's (heretofore unsupported) claim that the Obama administration had wiretapped Trump Tower before his inauguration.   He said this:  "I can deny" the existence of a court order allowing the FBI to tap Trump Tower under FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).    

How does this business of wiretapping occur?  There are two routes.

First, if some nefarious criminal behavior is suspected the government must approach a judge with probable cause that a wiretap will uncover necessary evidence that a wiretap-eligible offense has, or is, occurring.   

Alternatively, if there is probable cause that an individual is a spy or agent of a foreign power or a suspected terrorist a FISA court judge must issue the order.  If the target is an American citizen the attorney general has to give the OK.  

The bottom line is wiretapping is complicated and cannot occur at the whim of a sitting president.  Given these substantial hurdles one has to wonder what is going thru Trump’s head or what evidence he has to support the drama surrounding such serious claims.  

What was unsaid by Clapper is interesting in that his comments did not rule out the possibility of Trump's communications - or those of his aides - being sucked-up by other surveillance operations.  

Consider this.  Was there an unrelated surveillance program that collected data sourced in Trump Tower as part of an investigation targeting someone else?  Suppose there are other foreign targets that the FISA court has already approved for surveillance; and Trump-related web browsing and telephone traffic was incidentally collected as a consequence.  Might information collected by the casting of a net at a target who coincidentally was chattering with someone in the Trump organization be fair game?  Watching this develop is worth the time.  If you consider the fact that President Trump has access to more data than me or anybody reading this post there might actually be something to this.  Consider the possibility of preemptive tweeting.

And all of this drama has upped my purchase of popcorn and red wine.  The entertainment value is priceless.  Classic rope-a-dope.