President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department regularly surveilled retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn’s financial records and transactions beginning in December 2015 and well into 2017, before, during and after when he served at the White House as President Donald Trump’s National Security Director, a former senior Treasury Department official, and veteran of the intelligence community, told the Star Newspapers.
“I started seeing things that were not correct, so I did my own little investigation, because I wanted to make sure what I was seeing was correct” she said. “You never want to draw attention to something if there is not anything there.”
The whistleblower said she only saw metadata, that is names and dates when the general’s financial records were accessed. “I never saw what they saw.”
By March 2016, the whistleblower said she and a colleague, who was detailed to Treasury from the intelligence community, became convinced that the surveillance of Flynn was not tied to legitimate criminal or national security concerns, but was straight-up political surveillance among other illegal activity occurring at Treasury.
“When I showed it to her, what she said, ‘Oh, sh%t!’ and I knew right then and there that I was right – this was some shady stuff,” the whistleblower said.
“It wasn’t just him,” the whistleblower said. “They were targeting other U.S. citizens, as well.”
Only two names are listed in the whistleblower’s official paperwork, so the others must remain sealed, she said. The second name is Paul J. Manafort Jr., the one-time chairman of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The other names include: Members of Congress, the most senior staffers on the 2016 Trump campaign and members of Trump’s family, she said.
“Another thing they would do is take targeted names from a certain database – I cannot name, but you can guess – and they were going over to an unclassified database and they were running those names in the unclassified database,” she said.
This ruse was to get around using classified resources to surveil Americans, she said. Once the Treasury personnel had enough information about someone they were targeting from the black box, they would go to the white box for faster and more informed search.
It was routine for these searches that had no criminal nor national security predicate, merely a political predicate, she said.
Complaint filed with Treasury Inspector General
In March 2017, she filed a formal whistleblower complaint with Acting Treasury Inspector General Richard K. Delmar, who continues in that office today, she said. Beyond Delmar acknowledging receipt of the complaint, the inspector general never followed up on the matter.
This formal complaint was a follow-up to an August 2016 notification to Delmar that did not meet the full requirements of formal complaint, but it provided Delmar with the details of Treasury’s surveillance of Flynn, she said.
The whistleblower filed a subsequent complaint with the Office of Special Counsel May 2017, which is the permanent office established to work with whistleblowers and is not related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
This surveillance program was run out of Treasury’s Office of Intelligence Analysis, which was then under the leadership of S. Leslie Ireland. Ireland came to OIA in 2010 after a long tenure at the Central Intelligence Agency and a one-year stint as Obama’s daily in-person intelligence briefer.
The whistleblower said Treasury should never have been part of the unmasking of Flynn, because its surveillance operation was off-the-books. That is to say, the Justice Department never gave the required approval to the Treasury program, and so there were no guidelines, approvals nor reports that would be associated with a DOJ-sanctioned domestic surveillance operation.
“Accessing this information without approved and signed attorney general guidelines would violate U.S. persons constitutional rights and civil liberties,” she said.
“IC agencies have to adhere to Executive Order 12333, or as it is known in the community: E.O. 12-Triple-Three. Just because OIA does not have signed guidelines does not give them the power or right to operate as they want, if you want information on a U.S. person then work with the FBI on a Title III, if it is a U.S. person involved with a foreign entity then follow the correct process for a FISA, but without signed AG guidelines you cannot even get started,” she said. Title III refers to the FBI authority to electronically surveil Americans.
Top Obama Treasury officials among those who unmasked Flynn
Because the intercepts from Flynn’s Dec. 29, 2016 phone call with the Russian ambassador Sergei were captured by an entity other than Treasury, Patrick Conlon, the OIA director, who succeeded Ireland, was on the list of 37 Obama administration officials who either requested that Flynn’s name be unmasked or were shown the unmasked surveillance product.
Conlon accessed the Flynn file Dec. 14, 2016.
There must have been some kind of meeting that day. These are all of the other Treasury Department officials looking at Flynn that day: Secretary Jacob Lew, Acting Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis A. Daniel “Danny” McGlynn, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Michael Neufeld, Deputy Secretary Sarah Raskin, Under Secretary Nathan Sheets and Acting Under Secretary Adam Szubin.
Lew is the only one who made the list again, this time Jan. 12, 2017 – and if his deputy’s name sounds familiar, Raskin is the wife of Rep. Jamin B. “Jamie” Raskin (D.-Md.), one of the House Prosecutors, who argued for the removal of Trump after his impeachment. The congressman’s wife was also an Obama-appointed Federal Reserve governor.
– – –
Neil W. McCabe is a Washington-based national political reporter for The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. In addition to the Star Newspapers, he has covered the White House, Capitol Hill and national politics for One America News, Breitbart, Human Events and Townhall. Before coming to Washington, he was a staff reporter for Boston’s Catholic paper, The Pilot, and the editor of two Boston-area community papers, The Somerville News and The Alewife. McCabe is a public affairs NCO in the Army Reserve and he deployed for 15 months to Iraq as a combat historian.
Democrats – the party of government.
So if this possibly took place does this mean very vocal backers with giving campaign donations in supporting Trump could’ve been victimized targets and I’ll I know a place,ain’t nobody cryin,ain’t nobody worried,ain’t no smiling faces,I’ll take you there!! It’s leading right back to being active on Facebook and Google and I was stripped,ripped and gripped without any HANES BRIEFED UNDERWEAR! I was abused,misused with being BLINDED BY THE LIGHT,RAPPED UP LIKE A DOUCHEBAG INTO THUGGED RUNNERS IN THE NIGHT! It makes perfect sense! Making AMERICA GREAT AGAIN TORTURED ME! MY ASS IS STILL ON FIRE! I’ve got advanced cyber security issues! Best Buy knew me on first name basis in losing two tablets and five handsets since March 2018 ! I can absolutely prove an assembled internet hit squad 2 3 4 & 5 dogged me! I’m still getting killed with fraudulent emails,texts,messages,Robo calling and have a pile of CASE numbers across the board with every Federal Agency you can list! I called Ephilin Zembolist Jr’s boys with the FBI in r Cincinnati,Ohio one night as well as local police! It was more of a BURDEN THAN I COULD BEAR!
You have to be exceptionally stupid to fall for the bull crap in this story.
“Because the intercepts from Flynn’s Dec. 29, 2016 phone call ”
“Conlon accessed the Flynn file Dec. 14, 2016.”
Unless you believe in time machines, the treausry department’s unmasking requests had nothing to do with Flynn’s felonius call to the Russian ambassador. Almost certainly related to Flynn’s work with the turkish government that he admitted wrong doing in Febuary or january of 2017. And no, the trwasury departments investigative arm does not need any approvals or any invovlement from the attorney general. Congress chose to make certain financial crimes the purview of the treasury department. Those investigations are their business.
Reading comprehension: “Obama’s Treasury Department regularly surveilled retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn’s financial records and transactions beginning in December 2015” “Because the intercepts from Flynn’s Dec. 29, 2016 phone call with the Russian ambassador Sergei were captured by AN ENTITY OTHER THAN Treasury, Patrick Conlon, … was on the list of 37 Obama administration officials who either requested that Flynn’s name be unmasked or were shown the unmasked surveillance product.” “Conlon accessed the Flynn file (begun in December 2015) Dec. 14, 2016.” The reported incidents are out of sequence in the article, but there is no timeline conflict.
[…] According to a former senior Treasury Department official, Obama’s Treasury Department ‘regularly surveilled’ Flynn’s financial records and transactions beginning in December 2015 and well into 2017. […]
This is reminiscent of the scandal involving IRS official Lois Lerner.
[…] You can read the entire article here. […]
[…] An exclusive report at the Ohio Star claims that a whistleblower has come out who claims the crooked Obama Administration regularly spied on General Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former Campaign Manager Paul Manafort and the Trump family: […]
[…] The Treasury Department spied on Flynn, Manafort, and the Trump family, says a whistleblower. For a long time I have suspected much surveillance is hidden out of some small office in the basement of IRS. I cannot remember the crumb that pointed me in that direction (might be back somewhere in the archives here), but once I looked at it, I realized all of your tax info is already there, so they don’t need a warrant, or official inter-agency request to get it. I assumed the IRS would routinely surveil banking activity looking for scofflaws, so they can just grab all of anyone’s financial transactions without the requests looking unusual, and probably easily do cross references in some master database. Also, most people getting surveilled would assume it was FBI or some known law enforcement/intelligence operation, so they might file FOIAs with those agencies. Nobody is seeing elite CIA-level spookdom and thinking of a secret cabal hidden within an agency of bean-counters, leading them to filing a FOIA with the IRS for illegal surveillance launched on them. I never thought to take it up a level to Treasury, but that is possible. Secret Service could have a whole plethora of regular law-enforcement-like assets which maybe this thing hijacks, and then deploys on whatever it wants, and again ti wouldn’t need all the paperwork an inter-agency relationship might entail. Plus, if you have a radical upstart Presidential candidate, and need to get surveillance inside his circle, what better way to do it than to insert your people into Secret Service and piggyback in on his protective detail. Treasury is an interesting mix of intel databases, law-enforcement assets, and political access for espionage. […]
All I know is that I made a donation to the Trump 2016 campaign that cost me $15,000. I never had any doubt that I was targeted by the IRS.
Settle down everyone. If the Trump treasury department believed there was anything there, they would have acted upon it long ago. It’s no wonder why Russia was so easily able to dupe people. The emotions get engaged early, the brain? Usually not.
The treasury department confirm they got the whistleblower complaint, read the article.
Thank you to Neil McCabe and the Star News Network of which the Ohio Star is a part. It appears that you have the scoop on the Treasury Dept whistleblower story. If you the reader are not forwarding the weekly Ohio Star email to all of your friends and family who care, asking them to subscribe, then you are simply not doing your part!
[…] during Barack Obama’s presidency, beginning in December 2015 and continuing well into 2017, Star Newspapers reported, citing claims by a […]
This is deeply shocking. I can’t believe it’s not front page news. Who is this whistleblower and why haven’t we heard more?
She cannot be named so as not to be abused by others that might want to go after her when this comes out.
That wouldn’t serve the narrative of the globalist cabal now, would it?
They told us Russia hacked the DNC but for over 3 years sat on evidence that no one did, or at least there was no evidence anyone did, let alone the Russians.
Read the transcripts from the house Russia investigation. Shawn Henry’s testimony affirms my assertions here.
https://intelligence.house.gov/russiainvestigation/
Probably false. President Obama had no staff go to prison or even charged with crime
The whistleblower filed the complaint in 2017. You need to read the article and it will make sense.
[…] The Ohio Star: EXCLUSIVE: The Treasury Department Spied on Flynn, Manafort, and the Trump Family, Says Whistleblowe… […]
“Accessing this information without approved and signed attorney general guidelines would protect U.S. persons constitutional rights and civil liberties,”” makes no sense whatsoever. This looks like a badly scrambled quote, or one that needs a lot of context to make sense of it, or is missing the critical NOT.
The word “protect” is gone; it now reads as “violate”.
[…] EXCLUSIVE: The Treasury Department Spied on Flynn, Manafort, and the Trump Family, Says Whistleblowe… […]
Its called a criminal investigation and is still going on . they all need to be in jail
[…] Via the Ohio Star: […]
[…] Via the Ohio Star: […]
[…] Via the Ohio Star: […]
Well, I’m horrified. THANKS to Neil McCabe for bringing genuine and surprising news to me, no matter how ugly, disgusting, or outrageous.
Thank you, thank you.
[…] Via the Ohio Star: […]