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FBI Director Comey Confirms Investigation Into Trump Campaign (reuters.com)
FBI Director James Comey confirmed during testimony before Congress Monday that the FBI is investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with a covert Russian campaign to interfere with the election. From a report on Reuters: Comey told a congressional hearing on Russian activities that the probe "includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts. Because it is an open, ongoing investigation and is classified, I cannot say more about what we are doing and whose conduct we are examining," Comey said. Earlier, the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Republican Representative Devin Nunes, told the same hearing that the panel had seen no evidence of collusion between Russia and Trump's 2016 campaign. Nunes also denied an unsubstantiated claim from Trump that there had been a wiretap on his Trump Tower in New York but said it was possible other surveillance was used against the Republican.
There is a big difference between "It didn't happen" and " Can't find any evidence that it happened."
Not to mention the tweet clearly delineated 'wire tapped' with Single Quotes which are equivalent to Air Quotes.
How about the prior news release that said that the NSA did ?
On Jan 20th 2017, the very day Trump was being sworn in, The New York Times, and other mainstream media outlets, claimed that the intelligence community had proof that the Russians worked with the Trump campaign to affect the election. They also claimed that this proof was obtained by wiretaps of Trump Tower. The NYT headline read: "Wiretapped Data Used In Inquiry Of Trump Aides - Examining Russian Ties". If the government did not wiretap Trump, then there is no evidence of Russian interference in the election.
http://www.hannity.com/articles/election-493995/new-york-times-confirmed-wiretaps-used-15618638/
I'd like to remind them as a low-UID Slashdot poster I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their investigatory bureaucracies.
Why are Democrats SO AFRAID of Russians? They are supposed to be primitive, desolate, obsolete, incapable of building a simple refrigerator...
"The man who interfered with the election is accusing Russia of interfering with the election?"
...and is reported by the US media, who also sought to influence the election.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Killing off the free press was always one of Trump's stated goals with his desire to open up libel laws in order to facilitate suing the press.
Freedom of the press was largely lost when two things happened - ownership became highly concentrated and the press lost a diversity of opinions and morphed into Fox News on the right and everything else on the left. Concentrated ownership contributed greatly to the polarization.
According to the FBI director, there is an investigation into whether "associates of Mr. Trump were in contact with Russian officials, and whether they colluded with them."
Now, you may say this is not "investigating Trump", but in government corruption investigations, the FBI always works their way from "associates" inward to the main guy. These are not people that anyone would trust not to "flip" on the boss if they're facing jail time.
The noose is tightening. You can tell from the panicked tweets.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah no... the content has no bearing on the debate. The ends do not justify the means in all but the smallest and most extreme examples. You might note that we have this thing called the 4th amendment for just such events. It says,
"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."
That makes the e-mail poison fruit. The fact that they we taken by a foreign power makes the whole event into a attack on our country. You are apologizing for the FSB attacking our core mission as a country for your own simplistic tribalism. That makes you a domestic enemy of the constitution.
A lot of the freedom of the press was lost when the press became the President's bitch.
It was a Republican administration that began aggressively limiting the ability of the WH press corps to ask inconvenient questions while happily using them to promote the Establishment's agenda. The press caved and they kept that subservience through subsequent administrations R and D. Untll Trump's egregious treatment of them made it intolerable.
If anything, we're finally seeing some independence from the press courtesy of Trump's effectively declaring war on them.
We actually do have a diversity of voices. We have left-wing outlets such as HuffPo and MSNBC, allegedly-left wing such as CNN, center except in the eyes of the faithful (to whom anything left of Fox is left-wing) such as NPR and BBC, right-wing (Fox) and we'll-make-up-what-whatever-fantasy-we-want such as Breitbart.
So you can choose to live in a comfortable little echo chamber or you can do the unthinkable and sample the obviously-wrong and slanted news from other viewpoints.
Hang on let me get this straight. The man who interfered with the election is accusing Russia of interfering with the election?
Only in America!
No, he's pretending to investigate the Trump campaign. I am sure his actions in the final weeks were clearly designed to ensure Trump's victory under the cover of being open and impartial. More than anything else, I believe this pushed the last undecideds into the Trump corner because it convinced them the email issue was never, ever going to go away and if Hillary was president, she was just going to resign in disgrace or be removed from office soon enough over it anyway and nobody wanted to watch Tim Kane become president by default. So given the help he gave the Trump campaign, I'm pretty sure that the final result of this investigation will be the shocking revelation that nobody in the Trump campaign did anything wrong.
We will reach the Nixonian "what did he know and when did he know it" at some point soon. Even the Republicans on the committee could only really gripe about leaks, which tells you even they know that this hearing is going to reach some damned dangerous ground. And don't imagine for a second that they'll sacrifice their political careers to keep a Republican President afloat.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
How is it a good move? For the Democrats, at worst this is a Republican Benghazi, an investigation that goes nowhere. That didn't exactly seem to harm the Republicans, and you still see their supporters harping on about it. But if it does turn out that there was collusion between Trump's campaign and the Russians, if that doesn't outright undermine Trump's presidency, it heavily damages his political capital (I'd argue, to some extent, that even the insinuations of involvement probably already area).
So, to put it simply, at worst the Dems come up with a fishing expedition that doesn't catch anything significant, and life goes on. But for a fishing expedition that is supposed to come back empty handed, it has already cost Trump's National Security Advisor his job and has forced Trump's Attorney General to recuse himself from anything to do with the FBI's investigation into Russian activities surrounding the election. That's 1.5 casualties thus far for a supposedly "FAKE NEWS" investigation. Thus we have the spectacle of the Director of the FBI telling Congress there's no evidence of any wiretapping of Trump by the Obama Administration, but that there is an active investigation by multiple branches into links between Russia and the Trump campaign. And it's not like Comney is breathlessly reporting vast conspiracies, he was very cautious and cagey in what he said, appearing neither dishonest or hyperbolic, but simply confirming, as much as he can, to an open hearing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I worked at a secure facility for several years and had a high clearance for over 20 years. While I can't get into specifics, I am aware of several cases of people taking classified documents home with them, putting classified mail on an unclassified server, copying classified documents onto an external drive, etc. In one particularly bad case a modem was connected to a terminal on the classified network.
In all cases it was determined that the violations were either unintentional or without criminal intent. Usually it was to work on the classified data/documents at home in order to get some critical work done. All were punished administratively with no charges filed. I was not privy to he punishment though I know that in one case where the person was terminated.
The only case I am aware of that went to prosecution was a system admin who installed a private web server which was serving softcore porn (nudes) to some friends. The NY Times learned about it. He was terminated, fined, and perhaps given a suspended sentence.
Based on this experience, I would say not taking criminal action against Hillary Clinton was in line with many other cases.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
"Suggesting collusion between Obama and the Brits to wiretap DJT holds about as much water."
The US and the UK are absolutely in cahoots spying on pretty much everyone (it's called the Five Eyes intelligence alliance) and they watch people indiscriminately, people not even remotely connected to "terror" (ie: Islam). They do target diplomats, industry leaders. The US tries not to be too invasive to it's own people...but the GCHQ is downright Orwellian and feeds the NSA info.
I miss the days when we had conspiracy theories instead of conspiracy facts. Remember Roswell? That was fun. ...make conspiracy theories great again!