The House intelligence committee just issued seven subpoenas regarding the wiretapping investigation and the Russian election meddling — and the names at the top of three of them are very bad news for former President Barack Obama.
Included in the subpoenas is a “who’s who” of top Obama administration officials caught up in the Trump Tower wiretapping scandal: Susan Rice, Obama’s National Security Advisor; Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations; and John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director.
These subpoenas for the National Security Agency, the FBI and the CIA seek information about requests that government officials made to unmask the identities of U.S. individuals named in classified intelligence reports.
Michael Flynn and Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser and Trump’s personal lawyer, were also included, as well as a number of businesses.
The subpoenas were announced Wednesday as the special counsel overseeing the government’s investigation into Russia’s election tampering. The fact that nearly half are directed at Obama loyalists could be bad news for the former president.
It means information is being sought on the NSA’s illegal wiretapping of American citizens, which included Trump and his campaign during the 2016 election.
Obama has repeatedly denied being involved in the illegal spying on Americans.
Critics remain unconvinced, however.
“The Obama administration’s illegal spying may have been worse than Watergate,” according to USA Today.
The NSA is legally prohibited from engaging in domestic spying. However, according to USA Today this law was “ignored wholesale under the Obama administration, and to many Republicans, it is no coincidence that intelligence leaks damaged Democrats’ political opponents in the 2016 election.”
The big story is the "unmasking and surveillance" of people that took place during the Obama Administration.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 1, 2017
“The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community,” journalists John Solomon and Sara Carter reported last week for Circa.
If these subpoenas uncover a direct link between Obama and illegal domestic wiretapping, it could mean jail time for everyone involved.
Even the former president himself.
The Horn editorial team and The Associated Press contributed to this article