John Schindler is no fan of the left. He is, however, a patriot who puts country over party and politics.
Schindler is a former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence office. His Twitter feed (twitter.com/...) is worth checking each day, and he regularly writes articles in the Observer, a New York-centric publication where up until recently tRump son-in-law Jared Kushner was publisher.
Schindler’s latest piece in the Observer is a beauty:
KremlinGate Just Put the White House
in a Precarious Place
observer.com/…
Schindler walks through the series of events that led up to Trump’s early Saturday morning Twitter tirade, claiming President “bad guy" Obama spied on him. The series of events were set in motion by Session’s recusal from the Russian probe, which “reportedly sent the president into paroxysms of rage,” after it became apparent that he lied under oath about meetings with Russian officials, including Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. “To make matters worse, it turns out that Sessions was but one of seven members of Trump’s inner circle who had hush-hush discussions with Moscow’s emissaries in 2016.
Kislyak is known in Western espionage circles to have a close relationship with Russia’s intelligence services, as many Kremlin diplomats do. Roughly one-third of the “diplomats” in any given Russian embassy are actually full-time spies masquerading as diplomats
That turns out to be important.
Let’s be perfectly clear here: The scenario painted by President Trump of his predecessor tasking the IC with wiretapping Trump Tower simply could not have happened without a far-reaching and highly illegal conspiracy involving the White House and several of our spy agencies, above all the National Security Agency. My friends still at NSA, where I served as the technical director of the Agency’s biggest operational division, have told me without exception that Trump’s accusation is wholly false, a kooky fantasy.
That said, given the now-known contacts between Team Trump and high-ranking Russians last year, it’s very plausible that NSA and other spy agencies intercepted Kremlin communications which might have incidentally involved associates of our current president. But neither Donald Trump nor his surrogates were being spied on as themselves. If they didn’t realize their shady Russian friends might be considered foreign intelligence targets by NSA and other Western intelligence services, that’s on them.
Ouch!
The article is much longer with much more detail. Please read it if you have time.
As Schindler concludes, KremlinGate isn’t going away.