Sen Shelby illegally obtained FBI files on his political enemies-seeking NSA Intercepts of others

[kpete]

Richard Shelby illegally obtained FBI files on his political enemies, and was seeking NSA intercepts of others. This is the Senator who leaked the fact that the NSA had intercepted bin Laden's satellite communications to Fox News' Carl Cameron. Kind of makes you wonder what political decisions at the Justice Department prevented Shelby from being prosecuted.



“Shelby hated Tenet,” said another former CIA station chief. “Shelby would come through town and ask for dirt about Tenet. He made no secret of that. He always said, ‘I’m going to get you a new director.’”

(Tenet) recounted how, in December 1996, shortly after President Bill Clinton nominated his national security advisor Anthony Lake to be CIA director, Shelby approached him after a committee briefing. (Tenet was then deputy director.)

“George, he drawled,” according to Tenet, “if you have any dirt on Tony Lake, I sure would like to have it.”


........ “National Security Agency officials told us that Shelby staffers had been asking whether there was derogatory information in their communications intercepts on Lake.”

..................

Shelby’s ability to obtain FBI files, which could be filled with uncorroborated allegations and rumors, he added, set a bad precedent.

“Using intelligence agencies to go after officials,” he said, “is not a good idea.”

more at:
http://public.cq.com/docs/hs/hsnews110-000002601117.html

[Solly Mack]

1. No doubt he felt entitled as a Senator

Seems to me quite a few Congress Critters feel entitled

[bullimiami]

2. this is what the fisa laws and courts were supposed to protect against.

you can bet your last penny that rove/bush/cheney have been spying for political gain since they got into office.

[NYVet]

14. This is not the first time that the FBI has been used for political means

Since it was formed, presidents and senators have used the FBI to get into about political opponents.

[The Backlash Cometh]

22. Yes, but now that we know, why isn't someone suing his ass, or why

isn't he being asked to step down?

[frazzled]

17. Yo: FISA stands for FOREIGN Intelligence surveillance act

Please understand the terms you use before you post.

[Lasher]

36. You should heed your own advice.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 required that the target of domestic surveillance be "a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power" and that the purpose of the surveillance is was "to obtain foreign intelligence information" and nothing more.

The word "Foreign" in the title of the act is a reference to authorized targets of surveillance, not to the law's jurisdiction. FISA directly resulted from investigations by Senate Committees into the legality of Nixon's domestic intelligence activities, and was specifically intended to prevent abuses such as those that were apparently committed by Senator Shelby.

[babylonsister]

3. There has to be something illegal about this. This man has no business

being a senator.

[ClassWarrior]

4. What's this about Brown-Nose Cameron and OBL?

NGU.

[EVDebs]

48. Fox Snooze's Cameron and the OBL leak by Shelby you mean ?

Investigators Concluded Shelby Leaked Message
Justice Dept. Declined To Prosecute Case

By Allan Lengel and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, August 5, 2004; Page A17

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40886-2004Aug4.html

"Cameron did not air the material. Moments after Shelby spoke with Cameron, he met with CNN reporter Dana Bash, and about half an hour after that, CNN broadcast the material, the sources said. CNN cited "two congressional sources" in its report."

Let's have the media ask Dana babe about this, eh ? What ARE CNN's 'ethics' ? Why did CNN have military PsyOps working in its newsrooom (just google up CNN and Psyops and see for yourself).

[BornagainDUer]

51. Way to follow up on this.

:thumbsup:

[TwilightGardener]

5. Shelby should be first in line before the Ethics Committee--not Vitter or Craig--

he shouldn't be a Senator--he clearly used his access to intelligence for political gain, and should resign.

[cali]

7. No kidding.

That's some serious stuff. What a nasty business this looks to be.

[eppur_se_muova]

19. Second that motion. nt

[proud patriot]

6. Naughty Naughty

:patriot:Annoy a republican Defend The Constitution:patriot:

[jgraz]

8. He wasn't the only one. Remember John Bolton's interest in NSA data?

Is it so improbable that the main focus of this NSA surveillance was not terrorism, but political opposition? Everything else in this administration has been politicized, why should this be any different?

A vast net of warrantless wiretaps would serve as a great cover for the real objectives: to use the government's intelligence gathering apparatus to further the Republican political agendas. Does that strike anyone as far-fetched?

It might also explain why so many establishment Dems are afraid to challenge this administration.

[loudsue]

9. THIS is the story the news networks need to run with!!!!

THIS is the reason that the NSA wiretapping has to stop, and why the dems AND the pervert party are doing the bidding of the white house...they're all being blackmailed and/or threatened.

[Divine Discontent]

10. DING DING DING~!!~!!

it's gotta stop! this is a great story to run and shove down the throats of those who barely pay attention - it will make them think - "well goodness, that's scary, using classified information to get at people you don't like!"


so freaking illegal! one of the senators like Kerry/Feingold/Boxer need to make a harsh announcement on this crime!

[Heywood J]

30. Oh, more than that.

What they should be doing is if they can't get him booted, they should place a hold (the same way Coburn is doing his) on anything that Shelby puts forward, sponsors, cosponsors, etc. and not let it ever see the light of day. I don't think it will take long before the message is made clear and he's then marginalized until his term runs out. Let him run on the platform of not being able to do anything for his constituents because he's under sanctions for illegal activities.

[Divine Discontent]

55. KICK! n/t

[JMDEM]

11. Among the general civil liberty issues, this is why wiretapping is a no-no

Political advantage by the wiretappers. You don't think every Dem and Repuke in the entire congress hasn't been wiretapped? Think again. Why are Dems such wussies? Why are all Republicans held in lock-step, even when it means their own political suicide? Duh.

And it goes beyond that. Let's say you are Mr. Fat Hog Republican, and there's some company out there who is sneaking up on your company with some new product. Just wiretap them and steal their trade secrets. Who is to know?

Not only is Democracy dead, so is free enterprise. The whole thing becomes a rigged game. The whole thing.

[Richard Steele]

12. Recommended without comment.

[Bitwit1234]

13. And why do you think bush wiretapped telephones

any body who thinks it was for national security is crazy.

[mod mom]

15. Is the link to Congressional Quarterly?

[kpete]

18. yes

and hello to you mod mom

[mod mom]

42. you are a wealth of knowledge kpete!

greatly appreciated by many here! :hi: back at ya!

[cspanlovr]

16. I'm sure they're not just tapping Congress, but their family and friends too.

It really explains alot of unexplainable behavior from Cons and Dems. The doctors, lawyers, financial advisor's and clergy, etc, etc, of everyone they know and care about. Its horrifying.

[Disturbed]

20. The FISA Court refused some requests from the Busholini

Regime. We will never know what those requests were for. Now, thanks to some of the Dems
in Congress, there are no restrictions on NSA or the Regime they work for. Amerika has officially become
a Fascist Police State. Habeous Corpus is dead.

[The Backlash Cometh]

21. I knew it! Shelby is the guy who went to the Middle East prior to 9/11

and came back saying that we had Obama on the run. I bet he sent a message that started this whole mess!

Big Brother traitor!

[Nostradammit]

34. Obama?

*ahem*

[Lasher]

37. Maybe that was after Shelby's trip to Chicago?

:shrug:

[The Backlash Cometh]

41. You bring up a good question.

Who were those people he was spying on, and what did he do with the information?

[The Backlash Cometh]

40. Oh, man. I'll self-flagellate myself for that one.

If my cheeks were any redder...

[bluerum]

43. Obama? Faux Snooze syndrome anyone?

[The Backlash Cometh]

47. I missed my nap yesterday.

[ck4829]

23. K&R

[awoke_in_2003]

24. "Sen. Richard C. Shelby, the Alabama Republican"

why am i not surprised?

[nealmhughes]

33. He crossed the aisle when he used DP money for his election!

He is a turncoat blabbermouth and his little puppy, Miss Jeff Sessions is a brain dead neonazi. Alabama has enough problems without two idiots in the Senate -- make that 9 idiots in Congress, DLCer Bud "Mr. Space" Cramer and the less than stellar Mr. Davis for whom I campaigned and the five Republics we have.
Yuck.
I do so wish that they could redraw state boundaries and make us here in the far north of the state part of Tennessee if for no other reason than to get rid of our delegation and the horrid regressive taxes on personal income and sales tax here while property is a pittance, especially big ag and forest land. I shan't even mention the atrocious Bourbon Constitution of 1901 which undid everything that the Reconstruction and first Constitution had done. This is the state where they passed an amendment in 1956 undoing the premise of a free public education a constitutional guarantee due to guess what? Three guesses and it starts with "Brown".
We have a Rapturist AG who took the stupid dildo law all the way to the USSC!
Evem of Riley gets to appoint an interim Senator before the next election, it could not be worse than him now. Well, I take that back, it could be Roy Moore, but the governor hates him with a passion. Maybe Riley will appoint himself, he misses Washington and then Jim Folsom can be governor and then hopefully the DP here get its butt in gear and run someone that can win against Sessions!

[Carrieyazel]

25. Oh, yes, Shelby, the traitor from 1994. Glad he's been a Repuke for 13 years.

[Swamp Rat]

26. Now we have the dirt on Shelby

k&r

[leveymg]

38. That's a keeper. ;-)

Love what you do.

[BornagainDUer]

52. Nice one SR! Now if we could slip that into newsclip, heeeee!

[Swamp Rat]

53. BartCop just published my other version:

www.bartcop.com (scroll down just a little bit)

Feel free to send the new logo to any and all websites, news blogs, chat rooms, comedy shows, et al... Please. :D

[BornagainDUer]

54. Bwaaah! That "wide stance" elephant is pure genius.

[Rex]

27. Our country has a government that sucks hard.

[Elidor]

28. Boxer is the acting chairperson of the Ethics Committee

For what it's worth, anyone wishing to bring this to her attention can do so here:

https://boxer.senate.gov/contact/email/policy.cfm

Unfortunately, Shelby can easily show that he's entitled to review such reports about presidential appointees. And it's certainly not illegal for him to contact the NSA, either. In the current atmosphere, he'd almost have to be raping children to get any attention from the ethics committee. I would hope that I'm wrong, and that other senators would want to take action - oh, I made a funny. Congress...take action...against a republican. Ha. Ha. Ha.

[Heywood J]

29. Then it's official they tapped domestic calls illegally.

“National Security Agency officials told us that Shelby staffers had been asking whether there was derogatory information in their communications intercepts on Lake.”

If they weren't tapping US-only calls on non-terrorists, where else would they get that kind of intercept? Lake isn't foreign and if he was nominated for Director, he isn't a terrorist. That's called an admission of guilt, that they not only broke the law by tapping at all, but they broke the so-called self-imposed restrictions they claimed to have set.

[Warren DeMontague]

31. Color me shocked. Shocked!

:eyes:

[kineneb]

32. why does this remind me of Nixon? or J. Edgar Hoover?

seems like there is nothing new... just reruns.

[lligrd]

35. Just As We Suspected

using the wiretapping against political enemies. Now, why is blackmailing Dems so far fetched?

[leveymg]

39. There's a lot here between the lines:

1) Shelby, after he switched parties, was collecting classified intercepts within NSA which he used successfully to block the nomination of Tony Lake, Clinton's first choice to replace CIA Director John Deutch, who was widely disliked by the CIA old guard and drummed out as CIA Director after only a year and a half in the job. Someone later revealed to CBS that Deutch had kept classified materials on his home laptop, and someone using his AOL account and the same computer had surfed porn sites. Who would know his surfing habits? -- both AOL and the NSA. See, http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2000/02/03/cia/index.html

Shelby clearly believed that elements within NSA were monitoring Clinton's CIA Directors. Any such intercepts of high government officials are supposed to be rigorously compartmentalized and immediately "minimized", which means destroyed. But, apparently that wasn't happening during the Clinton Administration.

Shelby wasn't the only one collecting intelligence against the Clinton Administration. Other parties had interest in the telphone conversations of Bill Clinton. Monika Lewinski testified to the Starr inquest that in March 1997 Clinton told her that a "foreign embassy" in Washington was tapping the line from her Watergate apartment.

Lewinski's handler, Linda Tripp, was also secretly taping her conversations with Monika. Tripp was the protege of Lucianne Goldberg, a long-time GOP political operative. Goldberg got her start as part of the stable of attractive women run by the notorious dirty-trickster, Maurice Chontier, a mobbed-up LA private detective, who had been Richard Nixon's bagman going back to the 1948 election. Illegal wiretaps and "honey traps" are an inherent part of political spying:

AP 9/25/98 "The House Judiciary Committee agreed Friday to release audio tapes that Linda Tripp made of her conversations with Monica Lewinsky, as Republicans and Democrats vied for political position in advance of next month's vote on a formal impeachment inquiry. In a daylong session behind closed doors, the panel also agreed over objections of some Democrats to make public thousands of pages of still-secret documents that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr gathered as part of his eight-month sex- and-cover-up probe relating to President Clinton's affair with Ms. Lewinsky. The panel deliberated as Clinton, struggling to quell talk of impeachment, accused Republicans of placing ``partisanship over progress, politics over people.'' The White House complained again about the ``lack of fairness and bipartisanship'' in the committee's proceedings. ``The decision to publicly release ... secret grand jury material ... violates the American people's sense of decency and fair play,''."

2) Shelby then turned on Tenet. The Senator had willing sources for dirt on Clinton officials within several intelligence agencies.

3) Shelby wasn't the only GOP Committee head who had an interest in the private electronic communications of Democrats. In 2004, Orin Hatch unexpectedly announced that he would resign as Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This happened in the wake of a little-publicized scandal involving two of his aides who had tapped into the restricted e-mail system used by Democratic members and staff of the Commitee. Hatch's aides then funneled the take from this wiretap -- which included documents laying out Democratic strategies to Bush's block judicial appointments -- to unnamed Republican political operatives. One would not be surprised if Karl Rove was on the routing list for those memos.

Hatch's staff then leaked details of the resulting Senate investigation to Robert Novak. This forced Hatch's resignation as Chairman of the Committee. See, Daily Kos: ANNALS OF GOP SPYING: The Senate e-mail Hack & Leak. There is a persistent MO to these GOP dirty-tricks. See,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/3/9/112130/2397

Of course, these incidents of GOP wiretapping are just traces of a much larger illegal domestic intelligence-gathering operation run by contractors, such as MZM, with deep ties to the GOP that's been operating under cover of the so-called War On Terrorism. See, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/3/23/8418/64300

[Jackpine Radical]

44. You people are missing the Big Picture.

Remember that it is in the National Interest for Republicans to stay in power and not hand over the Gubbamint to the traitor Liberals. (And if you don't understand that Liberals are traitors, you will be given a full scholarship to Bill O'Reilly's Political Re-Education Camp). Therefore, any use of intelligence information to defeat a Liberal is de facto in the National Interest. As for the notion of "bad intelligence," it doesn't matter if the information you use to defeat a liberal is accurate, or if it's disinformation or merely misinformation. If it works, it is by definition "good intelligence."

[Rosa Luxemburg]

45. Then, Shelby should be arrested and flung into jail!

this is what the GOP have been doing and they used to complain about the USSR!

[yardwork]

46. This is one reason why domestic spying is not ok.

I hear, "If the government has to listen to my phone conversations to keep me safe from terrorists, that's ok with me!" Or, "As long as you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."

In a pig's eye. The government is spying on us for profit and dirty tricks, not national security.

[EVDebs]

49. Kpete, what do you think about post #48 and the 9-11 leak by Shelby ?

[Sam Ervin jret]

50. The question STILL REMAINS. HAS THIS DEM. CONGRESS used this last "pushed" through FISA Aug. vote to

get LEGAL wire taps going so we can use them in a court of law to prosecute these SOBs? I have asked this on this forum before and I ask it again. The only way the Dems could have passed that law in Aug. with any kind of brains was to use it themselves to legally get information on their fellow government officials ( and their families), most especially the Bush, Chaney, Rove, Rice, etc......extended family of neo-con man. The question is did they? Would they have the brains to. Would they have the where with all to?

Do we dare to dream that they did do?

[Richard Steele]

56. Kick