OH DEAR, DID SOMEONE JUST SLIP SOMETHING ABOUT THE OBAMA CROWD? – AT 11:45 A.M. ET:   Maybe President Trump wasn't so far wrong when he claimed he'd been surveilled.  From Fox: 

A former top Obama administration official has acknowledged efforts by her colleagues to gather intelligence on Trump team ties to Russia before Donald Trump took office and to conceal the sources of that intelligence from the incoming administration.

Evelyn Farkas, deputy assistant secretary of defense under Obama, made the disclosure while on the air with MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski.

“I was urging my former colleagues, and frankly speaking the people on the Hill, it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration,” Farkas, who is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said.

“Because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior [Obama] people who left, so it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy ... that the Trump folks – if they found out how we knew what we knew about their ... the Trump staff dealing with Russians – that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence.”

COMMENT:  This all needs to be unraveled.  Clearly, the Trump people had contact with Russian officials, but that is routine for a transition team.  And, clearly, the Obama administration had information, gathered secretly, on the transition team's actions.  Who got that information?  How was it used?  Whose names came up?

I'm not sure Congress can truly investigate these items, considering the poisonous atmosphere in Washington.   Maybe a "Challenger"- type commission is called for, the kind of commission that probed the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger during the Reagan administration.

March 29,  2017