Wiretap: Obama's Legacy Just Got Dealt Its Final Blow

By ADAM CASALINO

Anybody paying attention to the news this past weekend is understandably exhausted. Normally the weekends are a welcome break for most people; the big issues are carried on the shoulders of Monday through Friday, giving us a respite for two short days.

But not these days.

It seems news from Washington flies out at a breakneck pace, with new revelations and stories coming too fast for the average, mortal viewer to keep track of. Even as someone who actually tries to keep informed, I have a hard time staying ahead of the curve.

Last week President Donald Trump addressed the Joint Session of Congress in a speech that was widely considered a success. Even his critics had positive things to say about it. In fact, anything negative that came out of that night had nothing to do with the POTUS, but a former campaign aide by the name of Dan Grilo. His career, of course, is over, but Trump came out looking great.

The best the liberals could do to combat the speech (aside from giving a bizarre rebuttal) was release a bogus story about Jeff Sessions speaking with a Russian ambassador, but even that 24-hour story was co-opted by the bombshell statement by President Trump that Obama was wiretapping his tower during the election.

News came fast and hard that suggested President Obama had ordered the wiretapping of Trump's communications during and after the election in order to discover possible Russian connections.

We know, of course, that Trump had no connections with Russia. How do we know? Because if there were anything legitimate to be found, Obama would have revealed long before he left office. If Trump were colluding with Russia to undermine our democracy, surely the sitting President of the United States would have had to act on it, right? That wouldn't have meant Hillary would then get the office, but at least Trump would have been brought to justice.

The fact that nothing credible has come out from the former White House or intelligence agencies strongly indicates that nothing happened between Russia or Trump's campaign, or that Russia was even involved in the Wikileaks email dump.

But, hang on, maybe Obama didn't violate the Fourth Amendment and tap Trump's phone calls. Maybe that is just a wild accusation on the part of President Trump.

Then where is all this evidence of Trump's connection with Russia coming from?

Do you see what I'm getting at, here? Trump, in a brilliant move, has trapped the left in their own scheme. By suggesting that President Obama illegally spied on his conversations, he is forcing the Democrats to either admit Obama broke the law (thus damning his legacy once and for all) or backing down on their obviously false accusations about Russia.

Until now, Democrats and their media have been pleased to create the impression that all kinds of wiretapping operations were conducted against the Trump campaign, uncovering many scandalous, possibly illegal connections. Only by reading those articles carefully does one discover the sources are highly speculative and the evidence is thin at best...

Whatever President Trump’s intentions were in using Twitter to touch off this firestorm, one of the immediate effects has been letting the gas out of all those speculative Trump stories. The Democratic media is now furiously working to prove all of its own previous coverage of the Trump-Russia allegations was little more than idle speculation, every bit as lacking in hard evidence as Trump’s accusation that Obama was tapping his phones. (via Breitbart)

Trump's got the liberal media by the balls. They can't stand on so-called "evidence" that Trump was working with Russia, without implicating that it was President Obama who got his hands dirty.

But if they do that, then they have to admit their accusations against the man were unfounded to begin with. So the liberal media is stuck with a big problem: either protect the man they had worshiped for eight years or destroy his credibility in continuing to attack Trump.

You see, the real problem is that Obama doesn't have the best track record when it comes to illegal spying. In 2013 we learned about the NSA's PRISM program that allowed intelligence agencies to gather data on just about everything you are doing.

According to the Post, the National Security Agency and FBI are “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading US Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.” The program is code-named PRISM, and was leaked to the newspaper by a “career intelligence offer” who said, “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.” (via Breitbart)

The program was created in 2007 (yes we always have reason to hate Bush), but instead of closing it down, President Obama expanded it.

Why is this so wrong? Because it is a violation of our Fourth Amendment rights, which are:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

"Papers and effects" means the things we own, including letters and communications. That extends to emails, text messages, images, video, etc., everything Obama's cronies were siphoning from the Internet. All without the oversight of the judicial system in the issuing of warrants.

What was all this spying for? Was it to combat terrorism? Obviously not, considering some of the recent terror attacks on U.S. soil had obvious clues on social media. Both the San Bernardino and Orlando killers used Facebook extensively. You mean to tell me the NSA couldn't find posts and data on those people about their allegiance to ISIS before they killed innocent people?

I'm sure they did, but under Obama, our deep state wasn't in the business of protecting America, but acquiring dirt on his political rivals. Obama used the IRS to bully Tea Party and conservative non-profits. We know that he ordered spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel. And even recently we discovered he tried to influence French elections.

When considering the depths Obama would go to secure his own power or have his way, it's not a big stretch to think he'd abuse his executive authority to spy on Donald Trump. The temptation to uncover a Russian connection would have been too overwhelming, for the man who strongly opposed Trump from the very beginning. Had President Obama discovered a smoking gun, the liberal media would have overlooked whatever steps he took to find it. If he found nothing, he was convinced his cronies in the deep state would have kept their mouths shut.

But clearly, someone didn't and let the dirty secret slip to the most dangerous man in American politics: President Trump. Now the House Intelligence Committee will be investigating the allegations in their larger case in Russian involvement during the election. Rest assured, if President Obama was breaking the law to spy on Trump, it will come to light.

Either way, President Trump has put a cap on this Russian hysteria, and once again, the Democrats are on the losing end.

Wiretap: Obama's Legacy Just Got Dealt Its Final Blow

Plans for World War III

Plans for World War III

The Susan Rice saga: Murky allegations and media reluctance

If the MSM could ignore 'golf and grandchildren' this should be no problem. After all, when you're fishing for Russians and unexpectedly catch Trumpsters who's fault is that?

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The Susan Rice situation is murky, but one thing that’s crystal clear is that she’s changing her story.

And that is raising a whole lot of questions about the tangled allegations that the Obama administration “unmasked” Donald Trump or his associates when they were picked up on foreign intercepts.

When Rice was asked about this by PBS’s Judy Woodruff a couple of weeks ago, the former national security adviser said she knew nothing about it and was just learning about it from news reports.

It never gets old. Head of the NSA... but learns everything from the news reports.

But in the wake of reports by Fox News and Bloomberg’s Eli Lake that Rice had done the unmasking, she broke her silence yesterday on MSNBC.

“It was not uncommon” to make these requests and “necessary” to do her job, Rice told Andrea Mitchell. She needed to know the names of the Americans picked up on the intercepts, but it’s “absolutely false” to say this was done “for political purposes.” 

So she’s now gone from professed ignorance to nothing improper.

In fairness to Rice, it may turn out that what she did was perfectly legal. But there are now a whole host of troubling questions.

Did she seek the identities of Trump folks solely for intelligence reasons, or did she have political motivations?

Who did she share the information with?

Did she leak any of the findings, or cause them to be leaked? Rice denied leaking anything to do with her successor, Michael Flynn, whose false denials about contacts with the Russian ambassador led President Trump to fire him. “I leaked nothing to nobody and never have and never would,” she said.

This brings us to the role of the media.

Since the allegations were minimized yesterday by the Washington Post and New York Times (with the Times depicting them as something bouncing around conservative media), some critics on the right say they are covering for Rice. ABC and NBC didn't cover them on Monday's evening newscasts, while the "CBS Evening News" quoted a former official as saying Rice did "nothing improper or political."

I’d suggest the situation is complicated. It looks to me that many news outlets were unable to confirm the allegations, which raises the dilemma of whether you publish something based on other outlets citing unnamed sources when your own reporters can’t verify it.

Of course, some of these same outlets have run with stories, also involving anonymous sources, about alleged collusion between Trump associates and Russia.

It’s fair to say they are more enthusiastic about that story.

But there’s a difference between not confirming publishing allegations and denigrating them, which is what some at CNN have been doing.

Anchor Don Lemon told viewers “we will not insult your intelligence” by suggesting the Trump team was spied on illegally, “nor will we aid and abet the people who are trying to misinform you, the American people, by creating a diversion.”

How does Lemon know it’s a diversion? Shouldn’t he want to know all the facts? It’s true that the latest story does not confirm Trump’s original charge that the previous administration targeted him for wiretapping, but that doesn’t mean other surveillance was properly handled.

CNN’s national security correspondent, Jim Sciutto, was equally condescending, saying the Bloomberg scoop on Rice was “largely ginned up, partly as a distraction from this larger investigation.”

Not only is Sciutto dismissing legitimate questions, he worked for the Obama State Department as a diplomat from 2011 to 2013. I think the better course would have been to recuse himself.

Right now the media are on two different planets: Those more interested in proving a Russia/Trump conspiracy and those more interested in proving an Obama surveillance conspiracy. Hard facts are hard to come by, but it would be nice if the same standards were applied to both parts of this bizarre story.

The Susan Rice saga: Murky allegations and media reluctance

Drexel professor wanted to 'vomit' after service member given courtesy seat on plane

Drexel University · Tuition

$51,030 USD (2016)

You may want to think twice before sending you kid here.

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An anti-white Drexel professor said he was disgusted a fellow traveler gave up their seat for a uniformed member of the military.

Then it was time for the rest of the Internet to register its disgust.

PROFESSOR UNDER FIRE FOR 'WHITE GENOCIDE' TWEET BLAMES 'VIOLENT RACISTS' FOR UPROAR

The Twitter backlash was swift for George Ciccariello, a visiting researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who had a bad taste in his mouth after witnessing a kind act.

“Some guy gave up his first class seat for a uniformed soldier. People are thanking him. I’m trying not to vomit or yell about Mosul,” Ciccariello tweeted on March 26.

DREXEL PROFESSOR DRAWS IRE AFTER POSTING 'WHITE GENOCIDE' TWEET ON CHRISTMAS

Conservative writer Ben Shapiro replied: “Because you’re a douchebag?”

After Ciccariello apparently blocked Washington Times columnist Madison Gesiotto, she wrote: “Maybe he’s busy vomiting.”

This isn’t the first time Ciccariello has drawn ire for his tweets.

In 2015 Ciccariello wrote “Abolish the White Race” and said Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof “put into practice what many white Americans already think.” In December 2016 he referred to two men in a viral video as “Racist Crackers.”

Ciccariello’s account, @ciccmaher, has its tweets protected; however, several of the more inflammatory messages have been archived.

The professor gave a statement to Fox 29, part of which reads: "Two days after U.S. airstrikes incinerated an estimated 200 civilians in the Iraqi city of Mosul, I sent a personal tweet in reaction to what I considered a smug and self-congratulatory gesture by a first-class passenger toward a uniformed soldier. Maybe predictably, my tweet has since been fed into and misrepresented by the outrage machine that is right-wing media. Needless to say, my personal views expressed off-campus have absolutely nothing to do with those of my employer, Drexel University."

I'm sure none of his leftist views spill out during his classes. 

Can you imagine his take on 911???

And we wonder why they come out of college the way they do. 

A university spokesman told the news station that the professor's comments "are his own opinion and do not represent the University’s views. Drexel is committed to and vigorously supports our ROTC students, student veterans and alumni who have served in the military. Our support for student veterans has helped us create an inclusive campus culture that honors service and Drexel’s deep connection to American military history."

Drexel professor wanted to 'vomit' after service member given courtesy seat on plane

Akbar procures 72 virgins the hard way

Indonesian man found dead inside giant python

An Indonesian farmer has been discovered inside the belly of a giant python after the swollen snake was caught near where the man vanished while harvesting his crops, an official said Wednesday.

The body of 25-year-old Akbar was found when local people cut open the seven meter (23 foot) python after it was found bloated and slithering awkwardly in the village of Salubiro, on the eastern island of Sulawesi on Monday.

"We were immediately suspicious that the snake had swallowed Akbar because around the site we found palm fruit, his harvesting tool, and a boot," said Junaidi, a senior village official, who like many Indonesians goes by only one name.

Worried relatives launched a search for Akbar after he failed to return home from a trip to the family's plantation on Sunday. 

Junaidi said the snake had swallowed the farmer whole, adding that it was the only such fatality recorded in the region.

The breed of snake, which regularly tops 20 feet, is commonly found in Indonesia and the Philippines.

While the serpents have been known to attack small animals, attempts to eat people are rare. 

In 2013, a security guard on the tourist island of Bali was killed by a python at a luxury beachfront hotel.

Akbar procures 72 virgins the hard way

Petition: Melania Trump should move into the WH continues to surge in popularity

Change.org petition:

“The U.S. taxpayer is paying an exorbitant amount of money to protect the First Lady in Trump Tower, located in New York City,” the petition reads. “As to help relieve the national debt, this expense yields no positive results for the nation and should be cut from being funded.”

Is this a joke or what? Want to talk extravagance?... Anyone remember Barry's dog living the life of the Rich & Famous? 

VIP: Very Important Pooch Bo gets a private helicopter and security detail to join First Family's summer vacation in Martha's Vineyard

VIP: Very Important Pooch Bo is escorted off the tarmac with his own personal retinue of secret service agents

Speaking of moving into the WH didn't Barry's mother-in-law do it on the QT at taxpayer expense? Why were they not clamoring to Change.org then to sign a petition?

https://pjmedia.com/blog/why-does-michelle-obamas-mother-live-at-the-white-house

 If they're so worried about the national debt and cost to the U.S. taxpayer where was that same concern when Barry singlehandedly piled on more national debt upon the shoulders of the U.S. taxpayer than all the other presidents combined?

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First lady Melania Trump presents awards at the International Women of Courage Award ceremony at the State Department in Washington, March 29, 2017. 

A Change.org petition about first lady Melania Trump continues to explode in popularity, attracting over 230,000 signatures and becoming the site’s most signed campaign this week. The petition calls for her to either move to the White House or personally pay for her New York City security expenses.

“The U.S. taxpayer is paying an exorbitant amount of money to protect the First Lady in Trump Tower, located in New York City,” the petition reads. “As to help relieve the national debt, this expense yields no positive results for the nation and should be cut from being funded.”

There are thousands of responses on the petition’s page, as commenters air grievance after grievance about what they believe to be a misuse of taxpayer dollars.

“Why should the U.S. taxpayer carry the burden for her security away from the [White House]?” one person asked on the site.

“This is money that could be going towards a better healthcare and education system,” another wrote. “This is money that should be invested in ALL of the American people.” 

Last month, the Secret Service requested $60 million in additional funding to protect the president and his family, according to a report in the Washington Post.

Some commenters on the site even encouraged Barron Trump, the president’s youngest son, to transfer to an elementary school in Washington, D.C. Soon after election day, Mr. Trump said Melania and Barron planned to make the move “very soon,” adding, “right after [Barron] finishes school.”

The petition seeks to reach 300,000 signatures total and, per the page’s description, will be delivered as a letter to Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Though liberal favorites, neither Sanders nor Warren is on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, which oversees the U.S. Secret Service budget. 

Doug Caruana, the creator of the petition, declined to comment. 

Despite the swell of online attention, the overall efficacy of Change.org petitions remains questionable. Hundreds of thousands of signatures bring heightened visibility to the petitioner’s cause, but Secret Service budget allocations are not subject to popular vote.

Petitions launched on the White House website have similarly murky results; the White House promises it will review a petition if it gathers 100,000 signatures in 30 days, but there’s no guarantee of any further action.

As a private citizen, before he formally entered politics, Donald Trump was fiercely critical of then-President Obama’s travel and expenses.

Petition: Melania Trump should move into the WH continues to surge in popularity

Bridgegate Scandal: Ex Christie Allies Bill Baroni and Bridget Kelly Get Prison

Where's the fairness in this? They're going to prison for causing a traffic jam? 

Holder got two border patrol agents killed and scores of Mexicans. 

He walks. 

Killary got four Americans killed in Benghazi and lied her ass off about her emails.

She walks.

Lerner and Koskinen both lied about targeting conservatives at the IRS and destroyed evidence to cover it up.

Both walked.

Want me to continue? Okay, try this one. How many Americans died at the hands of illegals because the fucking Democrats are importing future Democrats? 

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Former allies of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie were sentenced prison terms Wednesday for engineering lane closures at the George Washington Bridge as alleged retaliation against a Democratic mayor who didn't endorse the governor. 

Bill Baroni, who served as deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, will spend two years behind bars and must do 500 hours of community service. His conspirator Bridget Anne Kelly was sentenced to 18 months in prison, plus a year of probation. 

"I regret more than anything that I allowed myself to get caught up in this," Baroni told U.S. District Judge Susan Wigenton. "I failed." 

His defense lawyers argued for leniency, noting his longtime work as an FBI informant when he was a state lawmaker. 

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Lee Cortes responded that Baroni should have known better, and should have gone to authorities when he learned of the plot, but instead tried to cover it up. 

You know, like when Holder's henchman at the the DOJ blew the whistle on him when he allowed 2,000 guns to walk over to the Mexican cartels.

Baroni "corrupted his office to send a petty, vindictive political message," Cortes said. He called Baroni's behavior "out of the playbook of some dictator in a banana republic."

Do they grow bananas in Mexico? 

Before imposing the sentence, Wigenton told Baroni, "This is a sad day for the state of New Jersey, and in particular for you." 

Wonder if she gave the same rebuke to her husband. Wigenton is married to Kevin Wigenton, an attorney in private practice in Red Bank, New Jersey who has been censured by the NJ Supreme Court for misappropriating client funds.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/04/red_bank_lawyer_gets_censured.html

She added: "You have lived a life of service...that makes the offense that much more perplexing." 

Wednesday's courtroom appearances will bring a likely end to the more than three-year-old scandal known as Bridgegate, which brought down members of Christie's inner circle and damaged his attempt to run for president. Witnesses at a fall trial alleged Christie knew about the plan beforehand. But Christie was never charged, and he maintains that he knew nothing about it until after it broke as a news story. 

Kelly, author of the now-infamous email that said, "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee," and Baroni were seeking probation. 

They will have time to appeal their sentences. 

Bridgegate Scandal: Ex Christie Allies Bill Baroni and Bridget Kelly Get Prison

SMOKING GUN? Obama Defense Deputy Slips Up On Live TV - Reveals Spying On Trump Team And Leaking Of Intel | Zero Hedge

On a tip from Ed Kilbane

Obama Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Evelyn Farkas admits, "We wiretapped Trump, sent it to ‘The Hill’, then let it leak out"... and after dropping this bombshell all Democratic dog Mika Brzezinski could say is “A lot going on today?” That comment wouldn't fly had she been on Tucker Carlson! 

Barry’s going to claim he knew nothing preferring his minions fall on the sword avowing “it’s outrageous” just like he did with the IRS scandal he instigated or most certainly knew about it.

BTW…This blows Comey’s and Rogers testimony out of the water. Either they’re totally ignorant or just as no good as Clapper as Brennan!

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Video 336

Former Obama Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Evelyn Farkas, made some stunning admissions during an interview with MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski.

While discussing the mad scramble by the Obama administration to collect and preserve intelligence on alleged Russian election hacking before Obama left office, it appears that Farkas accidentally implicated the Obama White House in the surveillance of Trump's campaign staff:

The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would not longer have access to that intelligence.

Furthermore, Farkas effectively corroborated a New York Times article from early March which cited "Former American officials" as their anonymous source regarding efforts to leak this surveillance on the Trump team to Democrats across Washington DC.

I became very worried because not enough was coming out into the open and I knew that there was more. We have very good intelligence on Russia. So then I had talked to some of my former colleagues and I knew they were trying to also get information to the hill.

That's why you have the leaking.

In other words; the Obama administration was concerned about spoliation of evidence gathered through various "sources and methods" of surveillance, so a plan was hatched to leak this information to congress - also known as "The Hill."

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Possible conspiracy to frame Russia for the DNC server breach? 

On a related note, Evelyn Farkas is also a senior fellow at the vehemently anti-Russia Atlantic Council, along with Crowdstrike founder Dimitri Alperovitch. The Atlantic Council is funded by the US State Department, NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukranian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk. 

CrowdStrike, the Irvine, CA company partially funded by Google, was the only entity allowed to analyze the DNC servers in relation to claims of election hacking:

Notably, CrowdStrike has recently been discredited - and was forced to retract evidence used in a botched report on Russia hacking Ukranian military equipment.

To sum up: 

The White House surveilled the Trump campaign and then leaked information to anti-Trump allies in congress (also known as "The Hill").

The Russian hacking claim hinges on a CrowdStrike Report from Dimitri Alperovitch. 

Alperovitch was forced to retract statements in a report blaming Russia for hacking Ukrainian military equipment - a failed attempt to smear Putin.

Alperovitch, along with White House Leaker Evelyn Farkas and Ukrainian Oligarch Victor Pinchuk, are all senior fellows on the Atlantic Council - which is vehemently anti-Russia.

(As an aside - Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, sits on the board of a Ukrainian gas company reportedly owned by Pinchuk)

Is it a stretch to suggest that the CrowdStrike report on the DNC hack was fabricated to pin the DNC hack on Russia?

Let's not forget that Dr. Steve Pieczenik - former CIA spookmaster and expert on all things cloak and dagger, completely laid out what's going on: 

"We initiated a counter-coup through Julian Assange, who's been very brave and really quite formidable in his ability to come forth and provide all the necessary emails that we gave to him to undermine Hillary and Bill Clinton."

In other words, 'white hats' within US intelligence agencies passed the emails to Julian Assange in order to wrestle control of the USA out of the hands of the Clinton cabal of Neocon globalists.

Video 337

It's also quite likely that Seth Rich, the mysteriously murdered DNC computer expert, assisted this effort. Recall that Wikileaks, while they would not confirm Rich as a source, offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Rich's killer(s) - and then raised it to $130,000. Simply read between the lines during this Julian Assange interview.

At best, the Atlantic Council connections between a member of Obama's DoD who leaked surveillance intel to congress, an increasingly suspicious Crowdstrike report, and a Ukrainian oligarch are mere coincidence. At worst, we may be looking at massive treason committed against an incoming US President.

SMOKING GUN? Obama Defense Deputy Slips Up On Live TV - Reveals Spying On Trump Team And Leaking Of Intel | Zero Hedge

Jeb Bush: Trump is ‘a distraction in and of himself’

Reading the title of this article I was ready to rip Bush a new one. After all, this is the same guy who once said concerning illegals:

"They come here out of love."

Remember we're a party of elephants. For conservatives, that statement alone was an awakening tantamount to the Titanic's introduction to the iceberg. 

That said, what he says below makes a lot of sense. Conservatives are pulling for Trump to succeed.  Fuck Schwarzenegger, Rosie, Alec Baldwin, etc. Trump has got to stick to the business at hand.  You want to use Twitter to go over the head of the lying MSM? Fine. But RUN the country and don't get caught up in trivialities. 

One thing I disagree with Bush is the wiretapping. “He should stop saying things that aren’t true, that are distractions from the task at hand." Can't prove could be substituted for "aren't true".  We know they tapped James Rosen and Dennis Kucinich. Would Trump be a far stretch? As the story unwinds Trump was 'accidently' caught up in the incidental surveillance net. And Lynch was talking to Bill about golf and grandchildren. Surely a one-sided conversation since she dosesn't play golf and has no grandchildren.

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Jeb Bush says President Trump’s evidence-free claims are kneecapping his first 100 days in the White House.

“He should stop saying things that aren’t true, that are distractions from the task at hand,” Bush said in an interview that aired Sunday on Miami’s WFOR-TV. “He’s a distraction in and of himself. He’s got a lot of work to do, and some of these things — the wiretapping and all of this stuff — is a complete distraction that makes it harder to accomplish the things I know he wants to do.”

But Bush, who did not endorse Trump after losing to him in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, was surprisingly complimentary to the president on other issues. During the bruising campaign, Bush was a prominent critic of Trump — who in turn relentlessly mocked the former Florida governor.

“The president made some really good appointments,” Bush said, including Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Judge Neil Gorsuch, whom Trump nominated for the Supreme Court.

“These are all top-notch people,” Bush said.

And Trump has “acted decisively on some areas I think are important, particularly on the regulatory side,” Bush continued. “But he’s going to stymie his agenda by focusing on these tweets that distract people from doing the tough work.”

In Bush’s view, the president has still not made the transition from candidate to commander in chief.

“He hasn’t shifted to being president in the way that people are used to,” Bush said. “And I think that’s the problem.”

He added: “Our country is at a crossroads right now. I think we need sober, serious leadership. And it’s a huge opportunity for the president to win over a whole lot of people.”

According to the Miami Herald, the discussion with WFOR-TV was Bush’s first in-depth local interview since dropping his bid for the 2016 Republican nomination.

Bush also reflected on his resounding defeat in the GOP primary, saying Trump had the right message at the right time. In the early stages of the campaign, Bush was thought to be the frontrunner and had a well-funded super PAC.

“Reasoning, in this environment where people are angry, is hard, and I wasn’t capable of giving them a sense that there is a better path,” he said. “They wanted to have their anger remediated — more than a five-point plan … President Trump’s great skill was to understand that. He understood it better than any other candidate.”

Bush also said the 2016 campaign was a crash course in understanding the way news is consumed.

“It’s not necessarily ‘fake news,’” he said. “It’s that people customize their news to validate what they believe, and it makes them increasingly less tolerant of other people’s views that rely on another set of facts. That is dangerous for our democracy.

“I have so many stories of people that were just passionate about a particular view that they held, based on a set of facts that were inaccurate,” he continued. “And as a candidate, you can’t, like, say, ‘Hey, you’re wrong.’ There’s a point where that doesn’t help you win people over. But that’s where we are.”

And while Bush would not rule out running for office again, he also sounds content at his home in South Florida.

“I sleep at night at home more often than not, and I’ve got my life organized pretty nicely,” he said. “My church, my gym, my golf course. My office is less than a mile from my home, and it’s two stop signs away. You can’t beat that, man.”

Jeb Bush: Trump is ‘a distraction in and of himself’