posted March 10, 2017 11:13 AM            

That a secret recording had been made of this call was revealed to me by the Washington Times in 2015, a full two years after I left office.

The newspaper’s investigative reporters called me, saying they had obtained a tape of a sensitive telephone conversation that they wanted me to verify.

When I met them at a Chinese restaurant in Washington, they played back audio of a call I had taken in my D.C. congressional office four years earlier.

The call had been from Saif el-Islam Qaddafi, a high-ranking official in Libya’s government and a son of the country’s ruler, Moammar Qaddafi.

At the time I was leading efforts in the House to challenge the Obama administration’s war against Libya. The Qaddafi government reached out to me because its appeals to the White House and the State Department to forestall the escalating aggression had gone unanswered.

Before taking the call, I checked with the House’s general counsel to ensure that such a discussion by a member of Congress with a foreign power was permitted by law.

I was assured that under the Constitution a lawmaker had a fundamental duty to ask questions and gather information—activity expressly protected by the Article I clauses covering separation of powers and congressional speech and debate. I could and did ask questions of the younger Mr. Qaddafi.

On the Libyan end, the risk of the conversation was that whatever phone was used to call my office might serve as a homing beacon for a drone strike.

That possibility was minimized, I was told, by calling me on a cellphone that was used only once and then discarded.

Somehow, the Washington Times had gotten its hands on the surreptitious recording. I authenticated the conversation, and parts of it were published by the newspaper, which provided online links where readers could listen to me talking with Mr. Qaddafi.

The reporters did not say, nor did I ask, who had made the tape. But the paper’s stories referenced “secret audio recordings recovered from Tripoli.”

I have only my suspicions about their true provenance. The quality of the recordings was excellent on both ends of the call.

If sources had indeed discovered the tapes in Tripoli, there is no plausible explanation for how they would have chosen the Washington Times to carry the story. And which foreign intelligence service conceivably could have been interested in my phone call, had the technology to intercept it, and then wanted to leak it to the newspaper?

There’s a simpler explanation: I believe the tape was made by an American intelligence agency and then leaked to the Times for political reasons. If so, this episode represented a gross violation of the separation of powers.

Shortly after the Times story was published, I alerted congressional leaders to the breach and then let the matter rest, assuming that a series of routine Freedom of Information Act requests I had made in 2012 before leaving office would provide answers.

Five years later I am still waiting for FOIA responses from some of the intelligence agencies.

I cannot say with assurance that my Libya call was the only one intercepted.

I have never gone public with this story, but when I saw the derision with which President Trump’s claims were greeted—and notwithstanding our political differences—I felt I should share my experience.

When the president raised the question of wiretapping on his phones in Trump Tower, he was challenged to prove that such a thing could happen.

It happened to me.

posted March 10, 2017 01:04 PM            

Remember Watergate and I am not a crook?

posted March 10, 2017 08:37 PM            

quote:

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When the president raised the question of wiretapping on his phones in Trump Tower, he was challenged to prove that such a thing could happen.

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With him hiding out in the WH we may be in for a lonngggg wait.

Oh wait, it never happened or he would be front and center with facts, vids and confessions.

posted March 11, 2017 12:21 AM            

Did you somehow miss this NY Times story about the Trump campaign being wiretapped? A leak to the Times by someone in the intelligence agencies...and, by the way, a federal felony offense.

posted March 11, 2017 11:26 AM            

Now how about the firing of 4 dozen fed prosecutors the minute one got ready to investigate His Naked Hinieness

posted March 12, 2017 03:32 PM            

I don't recall far left loons screeching, howling, shrieking and gnashing their teeth when that happened.

I know this is big news to far left lunatics but, it's customary for an incoming Administration to ask for the resignations of US Attorneys...and other appointees of a previous administration. It's also not unusual for some of those people to be Reappointed.

posted March 12, 2017 03:46 PM            

http://www.mrc.org/biasalerts/nets-ignored-clinton-firing-93-us-attorneys-f ret-over-bushs-8-3142007

posted March 12, 2017 03:58 PM            

So it looks like you are right that its fairly common at least in recent history. Reagan did it too. I was out of the country for both their terms..

posted March 12, 2017 04:00 PM            

You just don't get it...do you?

Just something else to screech, whine and shriek about.

"Politico 2009: Obama to ‘Replace’ Bush U.S. Attorneys/Politico 2017: Trump to ‘Oust’ Obama Appointees
Warner Todd Huston
11 Mar 2017

With news flooding the media that President Donald Trump has requested the resignations of 46 U.S. attorneys appointed by Barack Obama, Politico’s coverage slapped Trump with a headline screaming that the president was about to unceremoniously “oust” Obama’s appointees.

Back in 2009, Politico had a much less sensational headline when reporting on all the Bush-era U.S. attorneys that Obama fired.

For its March 10 article on the Trump administration’s decision to ask for resignation letters from 46 Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys — an action fully within Trump’s legal right and one many other presidents also executed — Politico chose a headline that clearly cast Trump’s actions in a negative light.

Politico reporter Josh Gerstein’s piece reporting on the president’s move was sharply titled, “Trump team ousts Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys.”

Gerstein opened his coverage by insisting that the Trump administration’s action was “a seemingly abrupt move that surprised many.” And the writer went on to cast it as untoward and “politically fraught,” giving voice to several people critical of Trump’s move.

But Politico was not nearly as antagonistic about presidents replacing a past chief executive’s U.S. attorneys back in 2009 when Barack Obama did the same thing Trump just did.

In 2009, Politico’s article on Obama’s decision to begin firing Bush-era attorneys was blandly entitled, “Obama to replace U.S. Attorneys.” Noticeably missing was the negative “oust” thrown at Trump. Instead, a milder “replace” was used to describe Obama’s actions.

The 2009 article was also written as a straight news piece with no negative connotations, no finger wagging, and no voices of opposition. In fact, the closest Politico got to negativity in 2009 was to say that Obama’s order “began to resolve the questions” over whether Obama would fire Bush’s attorneys in light of the trouble Bush got into from the left when he fired some of Clinton’s appointees back in 2006.

Finally, to put an even finer point on the bias exhibited between the two articles, the writer of the 2009 piece was none other than Josh Gerstein, the same writer responsible for the attack on Trump’s resignation request today.

You can practically taste the bias here:

posted March 12, 2017 04:32 PM            

And isnt it about time you, who have been persecutional about Obama for 9 years now, stop moaning about other people doing similar? The fact is whoever gets elected a lot of people are unhappy and unwilling to accept it. You didn't; Goosey Gander...

And since i already agreed with you you csn stop repeating yourself as if i didn't now...

Wiretapping suspicious connections with a warrant is pretty unremarkable too.

posted March 12, 2017 04:57 PM            

This entire story is a "Nothing Burger". Just something else for lunatic leftists to vent their bilge, bile and stupidity over.

posted March 12, 2017 11:04 PM            

As liberals react in horror over Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to ask for the resignation of 46 Obama-appointed U.S. Attorneys, an inconvenient fact has also surfaced. Jeff Sessions himself was fired by a newly elected president in 1993 when Bill Clinton won his first term in office.

The Department of Justice announced on Friday that U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked for the resignation of 46 U.S. Attorneys who were appointed during President Barack Obama’s regime.

The Attorney General’s actions are not uncommon. Many past presidents and their AGs have asked for the resignations of U.S. attorneys they were tasked with overseeing. In 2006 George W. Bush was attacked by liberals for firing seven U.S. attorneys. He was hardly the first. Both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan fired a list of attorneys when they came to office. President Obama also cleaned house but at a slower pace, replacing many of the 94 U.S. attorneys one at a time instead of starting with a mass firing.

Despite the long list of past presidents who also fired U.S. attorneys, as they are legally allowed to do, CNN criticized the firing, reporting an unnamed source saying, “This could not have been handled any worse.”

Upon the announcement, liberals took to Twitter to complain about the Attorney General’s actions.

One liberal even tried to blame Sean Hannity for the AG’s actions.

But along with all the complaints, others noted that Sessions himself faced the exact same situation when President Bill Clinton entered the White House. After being appointed the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama by President Ronald Reagan and serving through President George H.W. Bush, Sessions was also fired by an incoming president in 1993.