President Trump’s accusations that Barack Obama “wire tapped” the phones at Trump Tower last year — at the height of the presidential election — is altogether consistent with Obama’s history, according to Wikileaks.
The organization today pointed readers a list of examples that it published in early 2016 detailing all the times Obama’s administration spied on friends and foes alike.
Wikileaks published “highly classified documents showing that the US National Security Agency bugged a private climate change strategy meeting; between UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.”
According to Wikileaks, Obama’s administration, and specifically the National Security Agency, also:
- singled out the Chief of Staff of UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for long term interception targetting his Swiss phone;
- singled out the Director of the Rules Division of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Johann Human, and targetted his Swiss phone for long term interception;
- stole sensitive Italian diplomatic cables detailing how Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to help patch up his relationship with US President Barack Obama, who was refusing to talk to Netanyahu;
- intercepted top EU and Japanese trade ministers discussing their secret strategy and red lines to stop the US “extort[ing]” them at the WTO Doha arounds (the talks subsequently collapsed);
- explicitly targeted five other top EU economic officials for long term interception, including their French, Austrian and Belgium phone numbers;
- explicitly targeted the phones of Italy’s ambassador to NATO and other top Italian officials for long term interception;
- and intercepted details of a critical private meeting between then French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Merkel and Berlusconi, where the latter was told the Italian banking system was ready to “pop like a cork”.
“Back in 2010 we revealed that the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had ordered her diplomats to steal the UN leadership’s biometric data and other information,” Wikileaks editor Julian Assange said last year.
“The US government has signed agreements with the UN that it will not engage in such conduct. It will be interesting to see the UN’s reaction, because if the United Nations Secretary General, whose communications and person have legal inviolability, can be repeatedly attacked without consequence then everyone is at risk.”
Does that now include then presidential candidate Donald Trump?
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