The Iran Deal echo chamber is passing around suspect claims about being spied on. "Opponents of Iran Deal Hired Investigators to Dig Up Dirt on Obama Aide," is the New York Times headline.
On social media, the echo chamber is brimming with whiny victimhood. Its key members are throwing around accusations like, "thuggish".
Okay.
Meanwhile Iran Deal supporters spied on members of Congress. Here's how it spun the story.
But behind the scenes, the White House decided to keep certain allies under close watch, current and former U.S. officials said. Topping the list was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups. That raised fears—an “Oh-s— moment,” one senior U.S. official said—that the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress.
White House officials believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Netanyahu’s campaign. They also recognized that asking for it was politically risky. So, wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold, officials said. “We didn’t say, ‘Do it,’ ” a senior U.S. official said. “We didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”
We didn't say plausible deniability, but we didn't not say it.
It was 2015 and I was calling it Watergate. The revelations since then showed that Obama and his people made spying on their political opponents into a constant habit.
So spare us the sob stories about being investigated. Wake us up when Trump is intercepting Kerry's phone calls with foreign leaders.