"The F.B.I.’s surveillance of [John] Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose."

"What is more surprising, and ultimately more unsettling, is the degree to which the surveillance turns out to have been intertwined with electoral politics. At the time of the John Sinclair rally, there was talk that Lennon would join a national concert tour aimed at encouraging young people to get involved in politics — and at defeating President Nixon, who was running for re-election. There were plans to end the tour with a huge rally at the Republican National Convention. The F.B.I.’s timing is noteworthy. Lennon had been involved in high-profile antiwar activities going back to 1969, but the bureau did not formally open its investigation until January 1972 — the year of Nixon’s re-election campaign. In March, just as the presidential campaign was heating up, the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to renew Lennon’s visa, and began deportation proceedings. Nixon was re-elected in November, and a month later, the F.B.I. closed its investigation. If Lennon was considering actively opposing Nixon’s re-election, the spying and the threat of deportation had their intended effect. In May, he announced that he would not be part of any protest activities at the Republican National Convention, and he did not actively participate in the presidential campaign. After revelations about the many domestic SPYING abuses of the 1960’s and 1970’s — including the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. — new restrictions were put in place. But these protections are being eroded today, with the president’s claim of sweeping new authority to pursue the war on terror...."

From "While Nixon Campaigned, the F.B.I. Watched John Lennon," published in The New York Times in 2006. I wanted to reach outside of the Trump Era for something to help people think about William Barr's statement, yesterday, that the FBI spied on Donald Trump's campaign in 2016.

Here's the Wikipedia article on the John Sinclair rally. Lots of video of the event on YouTube.

The rally took place in December 1971, under President Nixon, who was facing reelection in 1972. The NYT piece, which uses the term "domestic spying" as a matter of course, was published during the Bush administration, when there was a high level of vigilance about domestic surveillance. The alleged surveillance of the Donald Trump campaign took place under President Obama, who, obviously, deserves the same degree of scrutiny as any other President.

ADDED: Also from the NYT in 2006, there's "F.B.I. Struggling to Reinvent Itself to Fight Terror":

Five years after the Sept. 11 attacks spurred a new mission, F.B.I. culture still respects door-kicking investigators more than deskbound analysts sifting through tidbits of data. The uneasy transition into a spy organization has prompted criticism from those who believe that the bureau cannot competently gather domestic intelligence, and others, including some insiders, who fear that it can....

[I]f making arrests is no longer the top priority, many agents fear that an ill-defined quest for domestic intelligence is likely to lead to political trouble, as the hunt for Communists in the 1960’s led to surveillance on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon. Michael Rolince, a veteran F.B.I. counterterrorism official who retired last year, said the attorney general’s investigative guidelines, first imposed as a reform in 1976, “are absolutely necessary to keep F.B.I. agents out of trouble.”....

Mr. Mudd said he knew that concern about civil liberties was “in the DNA” at the F.B.I., and he recently read a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, whose long tenure as director was marred by abuses, to recall the dangers of uncontrolled domestic spying. Still, he said, “I do bristle a bit at people saying, ‘You want to just go back to the 60’s and 70’s.’ ”...

ALSO: Now, I'm looking at today's New York Times and see a gigantic set of articles on the surveillance of private citizens. There are at least 12 articles collected under the heading "The Privacy Project," introduced like this:

Companies and governments are gaining new powers to follow people across the internet and around the world, and even to peer into their genomes. The benefits of such advances have been apparent for years; the costs — in anonymity, even autonomy — are now becoming clearer. The boundaries of privacy are in dispute, and its future is in doubt. Citizens, politicians and business leaders are asking if societies are making the wisest tradeoffs. The Times is embarking on this months long project to explore the technology and where it’s taking us, and to convene debate about how it can best help realize human potential.

The collected articles are not new. They include "The Domestic Spying Trap," an editorial from 2003:

The Central Intelligence Agency's supporters in Congress recently made a quiet effort to give it broad new powers to engage in domestic spying....

Intelligence gathering has long been divided between the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose jurisdiction is domestic, and the C.I.A., which operates overseas. The C.I.A. charter, a federal statute, prohibits it from engaging in ''law enforcement'' and ''internal security functions'' -- and from exercising subpoena power. But at the direction of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the C.I.A. engaged in illegal spying against domestic targets, including antiwar protesters.

The F.B.I. engaged in its own abuses by spying on antiwar groups and civil rights leaders, but it now operates under guidelines governing its agents' actions. Because its goal is to collect evidence that can be used in court, it has an interest in following the law.... 

"Black Lives Matter — really! In my hometown, Chicago, they are being extirpated at an alarming rate."

"The discourse about race, violence, and the value of human life has been held hostage to partisanship — Black Lives Matter vs. Blue Lives Matter. We can do better than that. The election is over. And, the body count mounts. I'm interested now in SOLUTIONS and, frankly, I don't give a damn where they come from. Obama ignored this catastrophe unfolding in his adopted home town for nearly a decade. At the moment, I'm inclined to #GiveTrumpAChance to 'fix it.' Anybody with a better idea? Speak now."

Writes Glenn Loury, linking to "Chicago tops 700 homicides — with a month to go in violent 2016."

A great ad for Hillary Clinton is a horrible admission of the reality...

... that a lot of people would like to just be able to vote for Obama again. Close your eyes, hold your knows,* think a happy song — here, he'll sing it for you...



... and you can believe if you want to believe: You're not really voting for Hillary Clinton. You're voting for Obama.

_______________________

* I assure you I intended to write "hold your nose." I only saw the mistake after I published. I'm leaving the mistake though, because sometimes a mistake is delightful. I wish I could imagine a mistake that could get us out of the jam we're in with this election. Leaping into dreadful uncertainty, hold your knows!

"Only amid the most bizarre, most tawdry, most addictive election campaign in memory could the real story of 2016 be so effectively obliterated..."

"... namely, that with just four months left in the Obama presidency, its two central pillars are collapsing before our eyes: domestically, its radical reform of American health care, aka Obamacare; and abroad, its radical reorientation of American foreign policy — disengagement marked by diplomacy and multilateralism."

So begins a Charles Krauthammer column titled "Barack Obama’s stillborn legacy: At home and abroad, the President's agenda is in tatters."

"So, how did President Obama do on the job? Was he a good president?"

"If you have an answer in your head – either yes or no – it proves you don’t know how to make decisions. No judgement can be made about Obama’s performance because there is nothing to which it can be compared. No one else in a parallel universe was president at the same time, doing different things and getting different results."

Writes Scott Adams, discussing the question "What exactly is the risk of a Trump presidency?"

Donald Trump "doesn’t like invidious comparisons but he’s cool with being called an authoritarian," writes Maureen Dowd...

... paraphrasing her own question to Trump. He answered: 

"We need strength in this country... We have weak leadership. Hillary is pathetically weak. She got us into Libya and she got us into Benghazi and she’s probably got 40 eggheads sitting around a table telling her what to do, and then she was sleeping when the phone call came in from the ambassador begging for help. You know, the 3 a.m. phone call?"

Trump also told Dowd that "Hillary is the one disrupting my rallies. It’s more Hillary than Sanders, I found out," and...

He said he would soon unleash the moniker that he thought would diminish Hillary, the way “Little Marco” and “Lyin’ Ted” torched his Republican rivals; “I want to get rid of the leftovers first.”

Other shots taken:

About Elizabeth Warren: "I think it’s wonderful because the Indians can now partake in the future of the country. She’s got about as much Indian blood as I have. Her whole life was based on a fraud. She got into Harvard and all that because she said she was a minority."

About Mitt Romney: "He’s a jealous fool and not a bright person.... He’s good looking. Other than that, he’s got nothing."

About Obama: "Obama, who is African-American, has done nothing for African Americans." (That came in response to a question from Dowd which she paraphrases as asking "if he realized that, in riling up angry whites, he has pulled the scab off racism.")

"Is Obama taking Hillary out?"

Monica Crowley's conspiracy theory is seeming more and more plausible, no?

[Hillary] tried to get her dirty tricks consigliere, Sidney Blumenthal, a top position in the State Department, which Mr. Obama pointedly denied. So she hired him anyway through the Clinton Foundation. Through Mr. Blumenthal, she was fed all kinds of intelligence on global hotpots such as Libya, much of it inaccurate, as she circumvented traditional government communication chains via her private email server. 

She didn't trust Obama, the theory goes, and Obama didn't trust her.

In a recently disclosed email, Mrs. Clinton complained that she heard “on the radio” that there was a “Cabinet meeting” that morning and wondered if she could attend. The secretary of state — fourth in line to the presidency — was frozen out, so she set up her own fiefdom.

Obama wants someone he can trust in charge of preserving his legacy, and that would be Joe Biden, Crowley says.

So here’s the likely plan: Mr. Biden will announce that he is running for president (the reported dying wish of his late son, Beau). After a respectable amount of time, Mr. Obama will announce that while he admires all of the Democratic candidates, Mr. Biden has earned his particular loyalty. Following his presidential endorsement, Mr. Obama will then support Mr. Biden with the full weight of the White House, including the sophisticated technical infrastructure his campaigns used to win in 2008 and 2012. For years, Mrs. Clinton has begged Mr. Obama to turn it over to her, and he refused. He’s been saving it for someone else. Mr. Obama will also use his considerable influence with black and Latino voters to support Mr. Biden, which may be enough to help him significantly....

Crowley connects her theory to the recent, weird New York Times story that "two inspectors general from [Obama's] administration recommended that the Justice Department open a 'criminal' inquiry into [Hillary's] handling of classified material." There's reason to think that the leak came from "Mr. Obama’s own consigliere, Valerie Jarrett."

The Times walked back some of the details, but the damage was done. If Mr. Obama did not want a DOJ criminal investigation of Mrs. Clinton to go forward, he would not have let it go this far. He wants the investigation, wants her nailed, wants her out. And he’s doing it, slowly, steadily.

So says Monica Crowley, who should not be confused with that other Crowley, Candy Crowley, the woman who threw the last election (according to another conspiracy theory).

"Chuck Todd's out there... saying 'Obama nourishes me.' What are you doing? Breast-feeding?"

"What in the world, Obama nourishes him?  Yes, F. Chuck Todd says Obama nourishes him.  Whatever this relationship is, it's deeper than ideological."

Said Rush Limbaugh today, predicting that the media will work to build Obama's legacy: "It's gonna be fabricated, made up, and the media is going to do everything they can to write it, defend it, protect it, and prolong it.  If that means destroying the next Republican president, they'll do it without batting an eye... Even if it's a new Democrat president, even if the new president's a Democrat and tries to unravel some of Obama, I guarantee you, the loyalty here is to Obama, not so much the Democrat Party, although that loyalty is indisputable as well."