- Paul Manafort - Former Trump campaign chair
CNN are reporting tonight that Paul Manafort the former campaign chairman for Donald Trump was under almost continuous FBI wiretap surveillance by the FBI from 2014 onwards, and that the FISA warrant was renewed in early 2017.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/18/politics/paul-manafort-government-wiretapped-fisa-russians/index.html
The New York Times was also reporting earlier tonight that special counsel Robert Mueller is about to indict Paul Manafort.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/us/politics/mueller-russia-investigation.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
Manafort had originally been placed under FBI surveillance back in 2014 at a time when he was running a consulting firm that was advising Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian puppet ruler of Ukraine who was subsequently driven out of the country by a popular uprising and is now living in exile in Russia.
Manafort was allegedly removed from the chairmanship of Trump’s election campaign in August 2016 precisely because there were fears that the downfall of Yanukovych would eventually expose Manafort’s own questionable financial relationships with the former regime in Ukraine. (This was actually documented in some detail in the controversial Steele dossier)
Manafort had already been the subject of not one but two FBI search warrants, one in May 2017 which related to a storage area located in Trump Tower NY where he had tried to conceal items of computer server equipment, and later in July another search warrant was executed at his home address in Washington DC.
A number of alternative news sites have been reporting on developments in this story in some detail for about the last three months. They provide some additional details which haven’t yet emerged in MSM sources.
The wiretap was said to be an SS7 exploit placed on Manafort’s own personal mobile phone. An SS7 (signalling system #7) exploit turns a mobile phone into a hot mic. The FBI weren’t just listening to all of Paul Manafort’s phone calls, they could allegedly activate the mic and record everything said within the near vicinity of the phone, even when it was supposedly turned off.
