So when you say "legitimate targets" does that include all US politicians? Or only ones that you think are a threat to your interests? Perhaps we can speed up the argument and you outline what you think the illegitimate targets would be. Because that case sounded like clear cut abuse of the spying apparatus to me. Bearing in mind that people involved in obtaining the warrant ended up being charged with related crimes of falsifying documents.
He had multiple people go down around him that were actively working as Russian agents and then he had Kushner working to set up a secret communications channel out of the Russian embassy that was actively designed so that it couldn’t be intercepted by US intelligence.
When you do that kind of thing, no matter if you’re a politician or not, in fact ESPECIALLY if you’re a politician you should absolutely expect people to start asking questions and opening investigations.
We don’t need to pretend he was some normal candidate who had a couple of whacky ideas.
They bought this system in notionally to fight terrorists. It has in short order turned out that "terrorists" include someone who can be described as a relatively popular (!) Republican candidate. Are you contending that this is legitimate use of the foreign intelligence apparatus?
Most US presidents have dealings with foreign countries. The Biden family are famously involved in Ukraine (& others), Trump was all over the place including Russia. Obama was probably just domestic but the Bush family have a lot of interest in oil which is going to involve foreign contact and the Clintons are closely involved in US foreign policy. There'd be a case for spying on almost every president in the last 30 years!
Being popular has nothing to do with it, being a politician has nothing to do with it, what others may or may not have done has nothing to do with it.
There were a whole range of specific actions that occurred that resulted in an investigation as it should.
One of the FBI lawyers involved plead guilty to a felony false statement charge. They were literally making up pretexts to spy on the Trump campaign. I think the issue here is when you talk about "legitimate" you mean that you are happy enough to see the FISA system used as an internal political club. There is no way that it is being used legitimately, we're in the opening stages of a process where every single incoming US president is going to have their communications examined by the incumbent's administration. Or at least when the party in power changes.
There isn't anything special about Trump here. He turned out not to be doing anything suspicious, or they'd be going after him for it (or have gone after people in his campaign). Ergo, any clean candidate is probably suspicious enough to warrant surveillance.
Can you share it?
The fact he happened to suddenly become a politician doesn’t mean he is suddenly in the untouchable category only that the level of scrutiny goes way up.
That story is still in the process of being written but Trump absolutely deserves some level of investigation in a way that’s entirely consistent with US laws.
I’m still continuing to claim that there is no publicly available evidence to suggest the NSA is abusing its powers to go after illegitimate targets. If you have some please share it.