Did Obama use the “Five Eyes” intelligence agreement to get Britain to spy on Trump?

Few people outside of the U.S. intelligence community and congressional intelligence committees are aware of a post-World War II intel-sharing agreement between the United States and four other nations.

Known as “Five Eyes,” intelligence services from the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia are bound by what is formally known as the UKUSA Agreement outlining joint cooperation in the gathering, processing and sharing of signals, military, and human intelligence (SIGINT, MILINT and HUMINT).

In recent years, reports based on leaked secret documents indicate that, in order to get around each country’s strict rule against domestic spying, the various intelligence services from each of the five countries spy on citizens of all the other countries. In November 2013, The Guardian reported:

The phone, internet and email records of U.K. citizens not suspected of any wrongdoing have been analysed and stored by America’s National Security Agency under a secret deal that was approved by British intelligence officials, according to documents from the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The following month, The Guardian reported that the Australian government’s spy agency had also offered to share information it had actually collected on its own citizens with the other Five Eyes members. In January 2014 the paper reported that the NSA had offered information on British citizens to the U.K.’s spy agency, and in June 2013 Reuters noted that Britain’s spy agency – the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the equivalent of the CIA, was tapping international communications cables, then sharing captured data with the NSA. (RELATED: McCain Challenges Trump To Prove Obama Wiretapped Him… Even Though There’s Clear Evidence He Did.)

In short, the relationship between Five Eyes intelligence agencies has been incestuous, to say the least, with each agency tapping the communications of each others’ citizens and then sharing it with that country’s intel services.

With that being said, did President Obama utilize the unique Five Eyes agreement to bypass U.S. intelligence agencies to illicitly gather information on then-GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump’s campaign? Judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News seems to think so.

As reported by Breitbart News, Napolitano, in a Tuesday appearance on the network’s morning show, “Fox & Friends,” said three sources have told Fox News that Obama sought the GCHQ’s assistance in transcribing intercepted conversations involving Trump, so there wouldn’t be a ‘paper trail’ leading back to him.

“[T]hree intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command. He didn’t use the NSA. He didn’t use the CIA. He didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use Department of Justice. He used GCHQ. What the heck is GCHQ? That’s the initials for the British spying agency. They have 24/7 access to the NSA database. So by simply having two people go to them saying, ‘President Obama needs transcripts of conversations involving candidate Trump, conversations involving president-elect Trump,’ he’s able to get it, and there’s no American fingerprints on this,” Napolitano said.

If true, it wouldn’t be the first time the Five Eyes agreement was used for self-serving and egregious purposes, quite obviously. (RELATED: Memo to McCain: Of course Trump Tower was under surveillance; what did Obama know and when did he know it should be your question.)

Allies share intelligence and that’s the way it ought to be; it’s a dangerous world, and no one intelligence agency can possibly monitor everything all at once. And besides, sometimes its helpful to get another country’s perspective on a certain topic or target.

But was this the purpose of the 71-year-old agreement? It’s hard to say; even after seven decades, there isn’t much known about its secret provisions. Privacy International says this is the extent of what is known about the agreement:

Under the agreement interception, collection, acquisition, analysis, and decryption is conducted by each of the State parties in their respective parts of the globe, and all intelligence information is shared by default. The agreement is wide in scope and establishes jointly-run operations centres where operatives from multiple intelligence agencies of the Five Eyes States work alongside each other. 

Further, tasks are divided between SIGINT agencies, ensuring that the Five Eyes alliance is far more than a set of principles of collaboration. The level of cooperation under the agreement is so complete that the national product is often indistinguishable.

So it’s entirely plausible the Obama White House tapped into this network to obtain information on a rival presidential campaign in a way that was not directly traceable back to the Oval Office.

Keep up with this, and other developing stories at Conservative.news.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.

Sources:

PrivacyInternational.org

Breitbart.com

TheGuardian.com

NaturalNews.com