Pat Buchanan Quotes
While President Obama may not have ordered any surveillance of Trump or his advisors, the real question is whether he or Attorney General Loretta Lynch were aware of or approved of any surveillance of Trump and his staff during the campaign.
Buchanan, Patrick J. "Did the Deep State Spy on Trump?" Creators Syndicate, 7 Mar. 2017.
When he became a candidate, he modified this position and stated that he would abolish both agencies spying on Americans activities but not necessarily abolish all the functions of the agency.
He was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The NSA had hacked into the servers of these firms and others that were located out of the country. (They would need to have a warrant if inside the country.) The companies had never known it until Edward Snowden made this practice public. The result was, the public was learning that there was no privacy in any of their e-mail, social media activity, exchange of photos or videos or anything else. The companies feared that this would then harm their business, and that the techniques NSA used to hack there servers would then be discovered and used by others to steal identities, credit cards and do such other damage to customers. Even if the particular hacking methods were not leaked to the bad guys, they, knowing that the servers were vulnerable, would be encouraged to work to figure it out.
See {635177} for the event that triggered the statement.
The NSA had been publicly exposed (by the Edward Snowden leaks) as collecting data on virtually every American’s phone and on-line conversation, and criticism was rampant.
to enhance its ability to conduct surveillance
the name of the judge or senator XXKEYSTORE is an NSA Secret Database. This quotation is very important because after Snowden had stolen some secret files to disclose the CIA practices to the Congress and public, many of the NSA and other government officials stated that Snowden was a very low level person. They accused him of aggrandizing his role and importance to the agency. The also claimed that NSA only captures meta data, not the data content of the documents or messages they intercept. Snowden’s quote casts suspicion on the first and belies the second. If Snowden were such a low level employee, why did he have access to the data base that stores the content of the e-mail (and attachments) of the Congress and many other public officials. For the second, if only meta data was captured and stored, how could Snowden see the e-mails which he then disclosed to the press.
He was explaining his reasons for resigning in 2005 from the number two position in the Justice Department. The George W. Bush administration had implemented a program of secret wiretapping and surveillance of American citizens in America which required the authorization of the Justice Department which had determined that the program as it was being implemented violated the law. The Attorney General was ill in the hospital but had told Comey that he would not sign the authorization. The White House then pressured Comey to sign and he refused, and in a similar replay of the Watergate “Saturday Night Massacre”, the number three man at Justice would have been ordered to sign. His resignation convinced President Bush to alter the program to take account of the Justice Department objections.
Patrick Joseph Buchanan is an American paleoconservative political commentator, columnist, politician and broadcaster. Buchanan was an assistant and special consultant to U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN's Crossfire. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996. He ran on the Reform Party ticket in the 2000 presidential election.
