One month ago, Judge Napolitano said on Fox and Friends that three intelligence sources told him that former president Obama used British spies to get surveillance on Trump.
“Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command. He didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use the Department of Justice. He used GCHQ.”
“What the heck is GCHQ? That’s the initials for the British spying agency. They have 24/7 access to the NSA database.”
“So by simply having two people go to them saying, ‘President Obama needs transcripts of conversations involving candidate Trump, conversations involving president-elect Trump,’ he’s able to get it, and there’s no American fingerprints on this.”
Two days later in a Foxnews.com opinion piece, the Judge wrote
Sources have told me that the British foreign surveillance service, the Government Communications Headquarters, known as GCHQ, most likely provided Obama with transcripts of Trump’s calls. The NSA has given GCHQ full 24/7 access to its computers, so GCHQ — a foreign intelligence agency that, like the NSA, operates outside our constitutional norms — has the digital versions of all electronic communications made in America in 2016, including Trump’s. So by bypassing all American intelligence services, Obama would have had access to what he wanted with no Obama administration fingerprints.
Thanks in part to an outburst by FNC’s Shepard Smith, who whined that it was fake news, the Judge was taken off the air for a few days. But when he came back, the judge said he stood by his story and so does his sources, but he did not attack the people who slammed his story.
Thursday night CNN confirmed much of the Judge’s story, while the report says the collection of data was incidental as opposed to a direct wiretap the rest of the CNN report follows along the Judge Nap narrative.
According to CNN, the British “and other European intelligence agencies intercepted communications between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials and other Russian individuals during the campaign and passed on those communications to their US counterparts, US congressional and law enforcement and US and European intelligence sources tell CNN.”
As the Judge said the information Including phone transcripts, flowed from overseas to the Obama administration. One of the intelligence agencies mentioned was GCHQ, the British intelligence agency identified by Judge Napolitano.
The communications were captured during routine surveillance of Russian officials and other Russians known to western intelligence. British and European intelligence agencies, including GCHQ, the British intelligence agency responsible for communications surveillance, were not proactively targeting members of the Trump team but rather picked up these communications during what’s known as “incidental collection,” these sources tell CNN.The European intelligence agencies detected multiple communications over several months between the Trump associates and Russian individuals — and passed on that intelligence to the US. The US and Britain are part of the so-called “Five Eyes” agreement (along with Canada, Australia and New Zealand), which calls for open sharing among member nations of a broad range of intelligence.The communications are likely to be scrutinized as part of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russia’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.“If foreign intelligence agencies share information with US intelligence, and it’s relevant to the investigation, then of course the intelligence committee will look at it,” a source close to the Senate investigation told CNN.