Without more context, it's hard to know what to make of this news article.
A. This could mean that all of a sudden career federal law enforcement and intelligence officers got really sloppy and have been asking for FISA warrants based on flimsy evidence and they're getting rejected by the FISC judges.
B. This could mean that the FISC judges all of a sudden decided to become MUCH more discriminating about what constitutes a valid warrant request.
C. This could mean that there's a massive uptick in Americans suspected of acting as foreign agents and the FBI/CIA/NSA is getting sloppy trying to keep up.
D. This could mean that there's a massive uptick in Americans suspected of acting as foreign agents and the FISC judges are more discriminating for fear of political repercussions.
E. This could mean "the deep state" has gotten emboldened and is spying on Trump/Russians on a larger scale because they're evil.
F. This could mean "the deep state" is spying on Trump/Russians on a larger scale because there is active, ongoing collusion taking place because Trump is being blackmailed and betraying America.
G. This could mean that the Trump Administration is desperately trying to spy on people and getting rejected by the courts.
Basically, without knowing the what the FISA warrant requests were for there's no way of knowing why they're getting rejected. Could be something, could be nothing. We may never know.
I'm not sure what your news diet consists of, but I can only assume by your statement that you were either in a coma during the 2016 season, or you've never used social media.
I've got a very small number of conservative friends on social media and I could still name at least a dozen fake news websites that were all over the place during that time period. One of them that really stood out to me and is still around is truthfeed.com, which was constantly peddling pro-trump/anti-hillary bullshit on a daily basis.
Fake News is a very real thing, and it's exactly what it sounds like; websites built to look like a new site, but filled with patently false or distorted stories and little to no transparency about who is running or financing the site. This is/was a real thing, and its dangerous because the average American is so mindnumbingly stupid they would believe this crap and share it online with their equally dumb friends. That's how we got nutjobs believing the Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile ring out of a goddamn pizza shop.
Then you have Donald Trump step in and start calling ALL news "fake news", thereby co-opting the phrase and completely destroying all meaning it once possessed. I have no idea whether he did that intentionally, or he just bumbled into it like most everything in his life, but the effect is the same, it's become a tactic to de-legitimize professional journalism in favor of bullshit hackery the same way that Fox News vilifies everyone else as "Mainstream Media" when they themselves are absolutely part of that very same media.
Not that I care, because I've never run for office, worked in government, nor conspired with foreign intelligence services, but sure no problem. Nice strawman though.
Knock yourself out. If there's any truth to Hillary being a satanic baby murderer, then the public has a right to know. If there's no truth to it, then she's got nothing to lose by cooperating with the investigation.
In exactly that same way, if there is ANY truth to Donald Trump being conspiring with foreign interests, then the public has every right to know the full unvarnished truth and to have confidence it is investigated to the fullest extent. If Trump is totally innocent, then that will be bourne out by the investigation and he has nothing to worry about because Mueller will exonerate him.
Well, that depends. IF there were actual, provable collusion, one would assume that was a pretty closely held secret in the Trump camp considering it's "light treason" aka espionage. It could very well be that the conclusive evidence of it consists of financial transactions, intelligence intercepts, foreign intelligence information, compelled witness testimony, or some combination of those or other things. The likelihood of any one player having all the pieces to reach a conclusion might be quite small. It could very well be that the Special Counsels office is the only group to pull all the pieces together so far, and they've been pretty airtight.
It's been over a year and they haven't found anything that says Trump colluded.
1. The investigation is still ongoing, so to say they haven't found anything is stupid. They haven't announced that they're bringing charges, which is a totally different thing.
2. The investigation involves classified information so the idea that you or I or anyone in the public sphere knows what the have and have not found is laughable at best.
3. Watergate took over 2 years, the Ken Starr investigation took like 6 years, some Mafia prosecutions took decades. The investigation will end when it's finished following all the evidence. The only thing the fact that it's been a year tells us is that there's a lot of evidence to deal with.
The Iranians were internally inspecting their own nuclear program BEFORE the deal. The difference is that, the Iran deal lets OUR inspectors monitor their work as well. Without the JCPOC we would have no idea what they were up to. It helps to have at least basic understanding of a subject before you go attacking people about it on the internet.
There is no "Obama-fueled nuclear arms race in the Middle East", it doesn't exist except in your head.
Before the deal, and before Obama there were countries in the Middle East who would have loved to get nuclear weapons. After the deal, there are still other countries in the Middle East who would love to have nukes, but Iran is demonstrably and verifiably NOT perusing nuclear weapons technology anymore. That is an improvement over the previous situation by far.
The guy who runs Fusion GPS testified under oath that the DNC neither directed him to hire Chris Steele/Orbis nor did Chris Steele/Orbis know the DNC paid for it initially.
The only thing that matter is whether the information is accurate. That is what investigations are for, to evaluate unfounded allegations, that's literally the point of the FBI/DOJ, it's why they exist.
This whole notion that because the dossier is "unverified" that we should dismiss it outright without question is fundamentally antithetical to our system of justice.
If it's all bogus and there's no merit to it, then let the investigation run its course and it won't find anything. There's no harm in that. But if there is some truth to it, the American people have a right to know if their President, his family, or his closest associates are at the very least targets for blackmail or at the very worst active participants in espionage. We have a right to know the truth. And since the President has steadfastly refused all demands to give a full financial disclosure or even release his personal tax returns, the American people have every right to be suspicious of him and the possibility that he is financially beholden to foreign interests. Additionally, since he has also refused to divest himself from his business interests, we have no idea whether he is currently open to manipulation on an ongoing basis. That is why we need an investigation into these issues. That is why there is currently a special counsel appointed to look into this matter. And that is why this whole stupid memo that was crafted with the express intention to undercut the investigation and cast a cloud over the DAG overseeing the OSC is such a disgusting display of partisanship.
I have never argued against releasing this stupid memo. I do however think it was dumb and pointless without the context of the actual warrant it references. Apparently the Carter Page FISA warrant request is 50 pages long according to members of the HPSCI. That's a whole lotta pages for a warrant if all it contains is "duh, chris steele said so" like Devin Nunes would have us believe.
This whole controversy is dumb and amounts to nothing. It's funny watching people lose their minds over it like it's some breathtaking revelation.
All we know for sure is that some aspect of the Steele Dossier is alluded to in the request for surveillance. That does not mean it was the only evidence cited. Nor does it mean that Carter Pages isn't involved in some shady stuff that totally deserves being spied on for. He was already implicated in another Russian spy ring in 2013, so you better believe it raised red flags at the FBI when he started working for Trump and traveling to Russia to deliver anti-american speeches.
The FBI had every reason to be surveilling him
This stupid memo is so obviously a hack job op-ed written by a guy who worked on the Trump transition team. People have every reason to be skeptical of it.
Geez, you're like 17 levels down the rabbit hole of conspiracy now.
So, you're saying that Hillary had the FBI wrapped around her finger so much that she could get them to let her slide on the email scandal but somehow also simultaneously let those same people try to sabotage her campaign by re-opening the investigation a week before election day?
Also, you do realize that the private email server that Hillary ran has been examined by numerous government investigators and found not to show any signs of having been compromised, right? The emails that were released during the campaign were completely different.
Go ahead and read up on the case of USA vs. Evgeny Buryakov, Igor Sporyshev, and Victor Podobnyy. Carter Page was being recruited by them in 2013 before they got busted for running a spy ring in the US.
Referred for criminal prosecution for lying to congress, lol
Christopher Steele has never testified before congress, the "referral for criminal prosecution" was the result of republicans and only republicans taking documents from the DOJ and then sending those same documents back to DOJ as supposed "evidence" of something nefarious.
The entire point of that silly referral was to "open an investigation" so that Chuck Grassley could point to and "ongoing open investigation" as reason not to release the Fusion GPS transcripts. The point was made moot when Sen. Feinstein released them herself.
You've got that backwards. Trump is a known cheapskate and Putin is the richest man on the planet. If anybody got paid, it was Trump, he's got a whole lot of debt he would love to make disappear, and Putin would love the idea of having financial leverage over a sitting president of the US. In fact,
he could easily ask for a lot of favors in exchange for that debt financing.
Only problem, you'd have to find a way to keep the money hidden, to keep prying eyes from looking too closely at Trumps financials.
Thank god Trump released his full financial disclosure and totally divested from his business before taking office... OH, WAIT!!!
Hillary's super secret alleged plan:
Step 1: Run for President against the shadiest celebrity "businessman" on earth
Step 2: Pay highly respected non-partisan research firm to continue opposition research they had already begun
Step 3: Randomly hope that highly respected research firm turns around and secretly hires a highly respected former spy to track down shady connections your shady opponent has in shady mafia-state
Step 4: Run boring run of the mill presidential campaign while your opponent miraculously manages to turn multiple career ending controversies into minimal blips in polling as a result of stupid morons being distracted by dozens of fake websites like truthfeed, zerohedge, and the gatewaypundit
Step 5: Secretly get your "deep state" operatives at the FBI to publicly announce they're re-opening an investigation into you mere days before the election
Step 6: Lose the election
Step 7: after losing the election hope that the guy who did the research goes out of his way to report his troubling findings on the shady behavior of your shady opponent and his shady associates and secretly hope the FBI opens an investigation.
Have you seen the actual FISA warrant? Do you know if they actually did that? Just because Devin Nunes put it in a memo doesn't make it true. Devin Nunes has also not viewed the underlying evidence, the only HPSCI people who've seen it are Gowdy and Schiff and their assistants. The fact of the matter is that neither you nor I nor the guy who wrote the memo have read the actual FISA warrant the DOJ/FBI used to surveil Carter Page. Any speculation about the contents of the warrant request is pointless actually seeing it.
So, following your train of logic, you're saying that Christopher Steele hated Donald Trump with a burning passion, and spent most of his adult life building a sterling reputation as a british spy specializing in Russia all for the eventual goal of hopefully being unknowingly hired in 2016 as a subcontractor to a firm doing opposition research on Donald J. Trump, the man he has hated his entire career?
I don't think that means what you think it means.
McCabe isn't saying that the Steele dossier is the sole source of evidence they used to apply for the warrant, but that without it they wouldn't have bothered. They could have had lots of other evidence, but the Steele dossier gave them a key piece to context to tie it all together. People who work for the FBI and CIA are not in the habit of speaking with allusions when testifying before congress. You can't ascribe more meaning to his statement other than specifically what he said.
It really comes down to the fact that we, as the public, just simply don't know the full story. We don't know what other evidence if any that the FBI used in their initial FISA application nor do we know what information they used in subsequent renewals. But we also don't know exactly what Andrew McCabe actually said in his closed door testimony, so Devin Nunes could be inaccurately paraphrasing McCabe here and we'd never know.
This is the exact kind of rabbit hole the FBI and DOJ and ranking members have been talking about as problems with releasing this stupid memo.
What kind of effect would it have if something this size entered the atmosphere? Is "big truck" size small enough to completely burn up? I'm sure composition has something to do with that, but still. What are we talking, neat light show, or nuclear size explosion?
I suppose this is a matter of semantics. In my mind, "directly" means something that can clearly be shown to have had a direct impact, i.e. casusation, regardless of how many steps physically removed it is from the actual act of switching vote counts.
I'd say the selectively releasing private information to discredit one side and influence public opinion most definitely counts as directly altering the outcome.
No, that's not the only thing that happened. The emission of the DNC emails is not nearly as concerning to me as the omission of the data stolen from the RNC.
Doesn't it bother you that, somewhere out there, that data is floating around, just waiting to be used as leverage to blackmail Trump or other senior officials at some later date? that scares the crap out of me to be honest. But, more importantly, it will cast a pall over every decision made by the new administration, we'll never truly know if the decisions they're making are their own, or the result of foreign manipulation.
Putin has our President-Elect wrapped around his finger, and that should be cause for serious concern.
Slashdot Mirror
So they faked the chat transcripts too?
What on earth are you talking about?
How about Zerohedge or the Gateway Pundit? Heard of them? You can't get much more fake than that.
Fox News blasted the Seth Rich conspiracy nonstop for months, the idea that they "don't do fake crap" is laughable.
Without more context, it's hard to know what to make of this news article.
A. This could mean that all of a sudden career federal law enforcement and intelligence officers got really sloppy and have been asking for FISA warrants based on flimsy evidence and they're getting rejected by the FISC judges.
B. This could mean that the FISC judges all of a sudden decided to become MUCH more discriminating about what constitutes a valid warrant request.
C. This could mean that there's a massive uptick in Americans suspected of acting as foreign agents and the FBI/CIA/NSA is getting sloppy trying to keep up.
D. This could mean that there's a massive uptick in Americans suspected of acting as foreign agents and the FISC judges are more discriminating for fear of political repercussions.
E. This could mean "the deep state" has gotten emboldened and is spying on Trump/Russians on a larger scale because they're evil.
F. This could mean "the deep state" is spying on Trump/Russians on a larger scale because there is active, ongoing collusion taking place because Trump is being blackmailed and betraying America.
G. This could mean that the Trump Administration is desperately trying to spy on people and getting rejected by the courts.
Basically, without knowing the what the FISA warrant requests were for there's no way of knowing why they're getting rejected. Could be something, could be nothing. We may never know.
I'm not sure what your news diet consists of, but I can only assume by your statement that you were either in a coma during the 2016 season, or you've never used social media.
I've got a very small number of conservative friends on social media and I could still name at least a dozen fake news websites that were all over the place during that time period. One of them that really stood out to me and is still around is truthfeed.com, which was constantly peddling pro-trump/anti-hillary bullshit on a daily basis.
Fake News is a very real thing, and it's exactly what it sounds like; websites built to look like a new site, but filled with patently false or distorted stories and little to no transparency about who is running or financing the site. This is/was a real thing, and its dangerous because the average American is so mindnumbingly stupid they would believe this crap and share it online with their equally dumb friends. That's how we got nutjobs believing the Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile ring out of a goddamn pizza shop.
Then you have Donald Trump step in and start calling ALL news "fake news", thereby co-opting the phrase and completely destroying all meaning it once possessed. I have no idea whether he did that intentionally, or he just bumbled into it like most everything in his life, but the effect is the same, it's become a tactic to de-legitimize professional journalism in favor of bullshit hackery the same way that Fox News vilifies everyone else as "Mainstream Media" when they themselves are absolutely part of that very same media.
Not that I care, because I've never run for office, worked in government, nor conspired with foreign intelligence services, but sure no problem. Nice strawman though.
Knock yourself out. If there's any truth to Hillary being a satanic baby murderer, then the public has a right to know. If there's no truth to it, then she's got nothing to lose by cooperating with the investigation. In exactly that same way, if there is ANY truth to Donald Trump being conspiring with foreign interests, then the public has every right to know the full unvarnished truth and to have confidence it is investigated to the fullest extent. If Trump is totally innocent, then that will be bourne out by the investigation and he has nothing to worry about because Mueller will exonerate him.
Well, that depends. IF there were actual, provable collusion, one would assume that was a pretty closely held secret in the Trump camp considering it's "light treason" aka espionage. It could very well be that the conclusive evidence of it consists of financial transactions, intelligence intercepts, foreign intelligence information, compelled witness testimony, or some combination of those or other things. The likelihood of any one player having all the pieces to reach a conclusion might be quite small. It could very well be that the Special Counsels office is the only group to pull all the pieces together so far, and they've been pretty airtight.
It's been over a year and they haven't found anything that says Trump colluded.
1. The investigation is still ongoing, so to say they haven't found anything is stupid. They haven't announced that they're bringing charges, which is a totally different thing.
2. The investigation involves classified information so the idea that you or I or anyone in the public sphere knows what the have and have not found is laughable at best.
3. Watergate took over 2 years, the Ken Starr investigation took like 6 years, some Mafia prosecutions took decades. The investigation will end when it's finished following all the evidence. The only thing the fact that it's been a year tells us is that there's a lot of evidence to deal with.
The Iranians were internally inspecting their own nuclear program BEFORE the deal. The difference is that, the Iran deal lets OUR inspectors monitor their work as well. Without the JCPOC we would have no idea what they were up to. It helps to have at least basic understanding of a subject before you go attacking people about it on the internet. There is no "Obama-fueled nuclear arms race in the Middle East", it doesn't exist except in your head. Before the deal, and before Obama there were countries in the Middle East who would have loved to get nuclear weapons. After the deal, there are still other countries in the Middle East who would love to have nukes, but Iran is demonstrably and verifiably NOT perusing nuclear weapons technology anymore. That is an improvement over the previous situation by far.
What does it matter who commissioned it?
The guy who runs Fusion GPS testified under oath that the DNC neither directed him to hire Chris Steele/Orbis nor did Chris Steele/Orbis know the DNC paid for it initially.
The only thing that matter is whether the information is accurate. That is what investigations are for, to evaluate unfounded allegations, that's literally the point of the FBI/DOJ, it's why they exist.
This whole notion that because the dossier is "unverified" that we should dismiss it outright without question is fundamentally antithetical to our system of justice.
If it's all bogus and there's no merit to it, then let the investigation run its course and it won't find anything. There's no harm in that. But if there is some truth to it, the American people have a right to know if their President, his family, or his closest associates are at the very least targets for blackmail or at the very worst active participants in espionage. We have a right to know the truth. And since the President has steadfastly refused all demands to give a full financial disclosure or even release his personal tax returns, the American people have every right to be suspicious of him and the possibility that he is financially beholden to foreign interests. Additionally, since he has also refused to divest himself from his business interests, we have no idea whether he is currently open to manipulation on an ongoing basis. That is why we need an investigation into these issues. That is why there is currently a special counsel appointed to look into this matter. And that is why this whole stupid memo that was crafted with the express intention to undercut the investigation and cast a cloud over the DAG overseeing the OSC is such a disgusting display of partisanship.
I have never argued against releasing this stupid memo. I do however think it was dumb and pointless without the context of the actual warrant it references. Apparently the Carter Page FISA warrant request is 50 pages long according to members of the HPSCI. That's a whole lotta pages for a warrant if all it contains is "duh, chris steele said so" like Devin Nunes would have us believe.
This whole controversy is dumb and amounts to nothing. It's funny watching people lose their minds over it like it's some breathtaking revelation.
All we know for sure is that some aspect of the Steele Dossier is alluded to in the request for surveillance. That does not mean it was the only evidence cited. Nor does it mean that Carter Pages isn't involved in some shady stuff that totally deserves being spied on for. He was already implicated in another Russian spy ring in 2013, so you better believe it raised red flags at the FBI when he started working for Trump and traveling to Russia to deliver anti-american speeches.
The FBI had every reason to be surveilling him
This stupid memo is so obviously a hack job op-ed written by a guy who worked on the Trump transition team. People have every reason to be skeptical of it.
Geez, you're like 17 levels down the rabbit hole of conspiracy now.
So, you're saying that Hillary had the FBI wrapped around her finger so much that she could get them to let her slide on the email scandal but somehow also simultaneously let those same people try to sabotage her campaign by re-opening the investigation a week before election day?
Also, you do realize that the private email server that Hillary ran has been examined by numerous government investigators and found not to show any signs of having been compromised, right? The emails that were released during the campaign were completely different.
Go ahead and read up on the case of USA vs. Evgeny Buryakov, Igor Sporyshev, and Victor Podobnyy. Carter Page was being recruited by them in 2013 before they got busted for running a spy ring in the US.
Referred for criminal prosecution for lying to congress, lol
Christopher Steele has never testified before congress, the "referral for criminal prosecution" was the result of republicans and only republicans taking documents from the DOJ and then sending those same documents back to DOJ as supposed "evidence" of something nefarious.
The entire point of that silly referral was to "open an investigation" so that Chuck Grassley could point to and "ongoing open investigation" as reason not to release the Fusion GPS transcripts. The point was made moot when Sen. Feinstein released them herself.
You've got that backwards. Trump is a known cheapskate and Putin is the richest man on the planet. If anybody got paid, it was Trump, he's got a whole lot of debt he would love to make disappear, and Putin would love the idea of having financial leverage over a sitting president of the US. In fact, he could easily ask for a lot of favors in exchange for that debt financing.
Only problem, you'd have to find a way to keep the money hidden, to keep prying eyes from looking too closely at Trumps financials.
Thank god Trump released his full financial disclosure and totally divested from his business before taking office... OH, WAIT!!!
And what a brilliant plan they had too!
Hillary's super secret alleged plan:
Step 1: Run for President against the shadiest celebrity "businessman" on earth
Step 2: Pay highly respected non-partisan research firm to continue opposition research they had already begun
Step 3: Randomly hope that highly respected research firm turns around and secretly hires a highly respected former spy to track down shady connections your shady opponent has in shady mafia-state
Step 4: Run boring run of the mill presidential campaign while your opponent miraculously manages to turn multiple career ending controversies into minimal blips in polling as a result of stupid morons being distracted by dozens of fake websites like truthfeed, zerohedge, and the gatewaypundit
Step 5: Secretly get your "deep state" operatives at the FBI to publicly announce they're re-opening an investigation into you mere days before the election
Step 6: Lose the election
Step 7: after losing the election hope that the guy who did the research goes out of his way to report his troubling findings on the shady behavior of your shady opponent and his shady associates and secretly hope the FBI opens an investigation.
Have you seen the actual FISA warrant? Do you know if they actually did that? Just because Devin Nunes put it in a memo doesn't make it true. Devin Nunes has also not viewed the underlying evidence, the only HPSCI people who've seen it are Gowdy and Schiff and their assistants. The fact of the matter is that neither you nor I nor the guy who wrote the memo have read the actual FISA warrant the DOJ/FBI used to surveil Carter Page. Any speculation about the contents of the warrant request is pointless actually seeing it.
So, following your train of logic, you're saying that Christopher Steele hated Donald Trump with a burning passion, and spent most of his adult life building a sterling reputation as a british spy specializing in Russia all for the eventual goal of hopefully being unknowingly hired in 2016 as a subcontractor to a firm doing opposition research on Donald J. Trump, the man he has hated his entire career?
Have you seen the warrant? Is the dossier the ONLY point of evidence used in the warrant? Is Nunes accurately quoting McCabe here?
I don't think that means what you think it means. McCabe isn't saying that the Steele dossier is the sole source of evidence they used to apply for the warrant, but that without it they wouldn't have bothered. They could have had lots of other evidence, but the Steele dossier gave them a key piece to context to tie it all together. People who work for the FBI and CIA are not in the habit of speaking with allusions when testifying before congress. You can't ascribe more meaning to his statement other than specifically what he said. It really comes down to the fact that we, as the public, just simply don't know the full story. We don't know what other evidence if any that the FBI used in their initial FISA application nor do we know what information they used in subsequent renewals. But we also don't know exactly what Andrew McCabe actually said in his closed door testimony, so Devin Nunes could be inaccurately paraphrasing McCabe here and we'd never know. This is the exact kind of rabbit hole the FBI and DOJ and ranking members have been talking about as problems with releasing this stupid memo.
What kind of effect would it have if something this size entered the atmosphere? Is "big truck" size small enough to completely burn up? I'm sure composition has something to do with that, but still. What are we talking, neat light show, or nuclear size explosion?
I suppose this is a matter of semantics. In my mind, "directly" means something that can clearly be shown to have had a direct impact, i.e. casusation, regardless of how many steps physically removed it is from the actual act of switching vote counts.
I'd say the selectively releasing private information to discredit one side and influence public opinion most definitely counts as directly altering the outcome.
No, that's not the only thing that happened. The emission of the DNC emails is not nearly as concerning to me as the omission of the data stolen from the RNC. Doesn't it bother you that, somewhere out there, that data is floating around, just waiting to be used as leverage to blackmail Trump or other senior officials at some later date? that scares the crap out of me to be honest. But, more importantly, it will cast a pall over every decision made by the new administration, we'll never truly know if the decisions they're making are their own, or the result of foreign manipulation. Putin has our President-Elect wrapped around his finger, and that should be cause for serious concern.