So did you actually try to learn something by reading the article I posted, written by an ex-CIA serviceman, or was it indeed too long for you to hold your concentration, as I feared?

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Probably will happen eventually, especially after the Obama admin was strongly criticized by the FISC for not adhering to FISA rules, and especially continuing to do so after being warned of same back in 2011. The rules look strong on paper, but we don't know what is being done in practice. Here's what the ACLU had to say:
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The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself and safeguard American’s privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.
“I think what this emphasizes is the shocking lack of oversight of these programs,” said Neema Singh Guliani, the ACLU’s legislative counsel in Washington.
“You have these problems going on for years that only come to the attention of the court late in the game and then it takes additional years to change its practices.
“I think it does call into question all those defenses that we kept hearing, that we always have a robust oversight structure and we have culture of adherence to privacy standards,” she added. “And the headline now is they actually haven’t been in compliacne for years and the FISA court itself says in its opinion is that the NSA suffers from a culture of a lack of candor.”

https://www.circa.com/story/2017/05/23/politics/obama-intel-agency-secretly-conducted-illegal-searches-on-americans-for-years

I'm not seeing the article you posted, but I have learned that you can't do anything other than regurgitate dem talking points.

Did you read the Timeline article that BK posted. It lays out a pretty damning rundown of what happened and why. Including the failed attempt to get a FISA warrant on Page before the Steele dossier. Have you read where it's come out that the Clinton campaign was feeding information to Steele? You seem to be putting a lot of faith into a document/person/process that is so irreconcilably tainted that anything that it says that is correct, would only be by coincidence.

that's called "knowledge". It's based on "research".

Here it is again for you...

http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...ost=6555484#p6555484

Yes, I've read the article linked above. It - like Nunes' memo - contains many biases and omissions and begins to get rather tabloid-like when comparing the length of Clinton's testimony to the FBI with Angelina Jolie's. It downplays the roles of Page and Popadopulous in the campaign and asserts with no proof things like "the Trump campaign did not know about Carter Page's links/trips to Russia" which is patently false. Sessions even lied about his knowledge of Page's 2016 trip.

But I will say this (again): any illegal behavior by Clinton, or members of the DOJ and FBI should be investigated and prosecuted. I have always maintained that Clinton is a lying POS and she should not have got away with what she did with the emails.

But that does not absolve or vindicate Trump and his team for anything they were doing illegally with the Russians, whether it was colluding over Russia's actions to influence the election, or offering quid pro quo's over sanction relief that may have been related to "dirt" the Russians have on Trump - be it money laundering or anything else.

And if the FISA court initially refused a warrant to spy on Page, it demonstrates they had a high bar for granting that privilege to the FBI. Which means that when they did grant the warrant, they had credible reasons to do so.

Let me know when you have read the article I posted for you, again.

Another insightful shot from the cheap seats. You two are like peas in a pod.

I guess I was mistaken, news of the IG's investigation was breaking at the same time this memo came up. They could have asked the inspector general about this without this memo. Once again if he did not trust the DOJ IG, there are tons of ways to actually handle this.

And you called the timeline article "tabloid-like" That ex-CIA opinion piece was garbage. All it said was, none of this is confirmed, but if you look at it in this really cool ex-spook way, you can make it sound like a grand conspiracy.

"Perhaps more intriguing, the most explosive charge in the Steele document was the claim that Trump hired prostitutes to defile a bed slept in by former President Obama. " :-0

I mean seriously? That the most intriguing/explosive charge? National Enquirer level garbage right there.

"There is a saying among spy handlers, “vet the source first before attempting to vet the source’s information.”"

Ok, lets vet Steele. It's now well known that he is anti-Trump, bigly. Getting paid by more anti-Trump folks who are looking for anti-Trump news. So he profits more by giving them more salacious, explosive nonsense. A lot of this surrounds the supposed recruitment of Page by the Russians, but lets see, would the Russians be interested in recruiting a former British spy? Spoon feeding him stories that will make him money? Hmmmm.

And we are supposed to believe that Russia, at the highest levels, even up to Putin are trying to "cultivate" Trump, but Steele somehow has access to a number of highly placed, well informed Russians, that are going to risk everything (one guy was even killed), to work against Putin and for Clinton?

If Russia wanted to disrupt the US, it has succeeded. It delivered this unconfirmed, salacious, dossier via Steele, and the #notmypresident folks like you are trying to obliterate democracy with it.

...except much of it has now been confirmed and corroborated, but you can keep calling it what you want that fits your narrative.

Let's see how this all goes down and revisit this thread in 6 or 12 months.

eta: by the way, when he describes that part of the dossier as "explosive" he was not ascribing a sense of truth to them, rather he was describing how they were on their face. A bit like when Comey described them as salacious and unverified, everyone thought he was saying untrue. But people seem to struggle with the meaning of words, including you.

Really? How do you define "much?"

Read the link I posted above.

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You keep saying that, and I can find plenty of headlines that say it, then don't back it up in their story. Could you point to a source that goes through some of these items that have been proven over time? Here is one of the more recent looks at the dossier, from a source you should be happy with; it says the opposite of what you keep writing:
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https://www.vox.com/...dossier-russia-trump

I read it. It doesn't show what you claim. There are 17 points or accusations made in the dossier, right? It's something like that anyway. How many have been "confirmed and corroborated" (your words)?

much
məCH/
determiner & pronoun

1. 
   1.
   a large amount.
   "I did not get much sleep"
   synonyms:a lot of, a great/good deal of, a great/large amount of, plenty of, ample, copious, abundant, plentiful, considerable; More
   
   
   
   • 
     
     
   
   

adverb

1. 
   1.
   to a great extent; a great deal.
   "did it hurt much?"
   synonyms:greatly, to a great extent/degree, a great deal, a lot, considerably, appreciably
   "it didn't hurt much"
   

Barack Obama and Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit were in this up to their eyeballs, that much is clear. For evidence one need only refer to today's news of yet more texts from the adulterous FBI couple, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, in which they discussed the need to come up with a briefing paper and talking points for then-FBI Director James Comey's talk with Mr. Obama, who they stated "wants to know everything we're doing."

As for the dowager empress of Chappaqua, she did everything she did everything she could to cheat her way to the White House, including co-opting many prominent members of the media, as The Intercept and Wikileaks show. The list of media members willing to jump into the sack with Felonia -- which they demonstrated by actively participating in dinners, cocktail receptions and other private, invitation-only off-the-record ("off the record" strongly indicates they were on board with Hillary's effort) events put on by the Clinton campaign and Madame von Pantsuit herself included:

Cecilia Vega, David Muir, Diane Sawyer, Jon Karl and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News; John Heilemann and Mark Halperin of Bloomberg; Norah O’Donnell and Vicki Gordon of CBS News; Brianna Keilar, David Chalian, Gloria Borger, Jeff Zeleny, John Berman, Kate Bouldan, Mark Preston and Sam Feist of CNN; Savannah Guthrie of NBC; and Alex Wagner, Beth Fouhy, Phil Grifin and Rachel Racusen of MSNBC. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was listed as TBD.

There were five staffers from the New York Times – Amy Chozik, Gail Collins, Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman and Pat Healey, as well as Alyssa Mastramonoco of Vice, Jon Allen of Vox, Mike Allen of Axios, and Glenn Thrush of Politico, who was later found to have submitted stories to the Clinton campaign for approval.

A similar group attended a dinner the night before at John Podesta’s house. Podesta, then Clinton’s campaign manager, now writes a column for the Washington Post.

Attendees at the Podesta dinner included Liz Kreutz of ABC, Julie Pace, Ken Thomas and Lisa Lerer of the Associated Press; Jennifer Epstein of Bloomberg, April Ryan of the American Urban Radio Network, Rudy Cramer of Buzzfeed, Mike Memoli and Evan Handler of the Los Angeles Times, Alex Seitz-Wald of MSNBC, Mark Murray of NBC, Anita Kumar of McClatchey, Amy Chozik and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, Tamara Keith of NPR and Annie Karni and Gabe Debenedetti of Politico.

It's redolent of the 2007/2008 effort on the part of all those Journolist media types to ensure Barack Obama was elected president.

At any rate, here's a small bit of comfort for all those folks wishing Felonia was in the White House instead of that New York real estate developer: ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Ah yes, there’s the old BK. Straight off the deep end. Welcome back.

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Proud member of the MSF (Maple Syrup Mafia)

He's Going stir crazy, won't go out in snow.

Somebody needs to put out a missing person report for Kay.

It’s sad really. I think this story had already been basically debunked by the time Kahuna posted about it.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

What story has been "debunked?"

Eh, there's traitors:



And then there's the FBI:



It's obvious there was a whitewash of what went on, and that senior leaders at both the FBI and DOJ did what they could to tilt the election toward Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit. Only a credulous fool would believe that the Obamanauts -- possibly including Number 1 (said in a sinister SPECTRE voice ;-) himself -- weren't interfering in the election process and doing everything they could to tilt the election von Pantsuit's way and then -- WHEN SHE STILL LOST -- do whatever it took to de-legitimize the incoming new presidential administration and Donny Two Scoops as the new Number 1 (equally sinister SPECTRE voice).

The release of the Senate memo confirms the contents of the original "GOP memo" (love the word salad there) -- including that the Steele smear document was almost the sole basis (that, and a Yahoo News article, the sole source of which was also Christopher Steele) of the FISA warrants and that the FISA warrant applicants (who should all be fired and maybe even prosecuted) worked hard to NOT inform the FISC that the document was the result of opposition research paid for by Felonia and her campaign. An offhand remark in the application that the document may have had a "political origin" and that a "US person" (Hillary Clinton) helped provide it, isn't the same as coming out and informing the FISC that the evidence in support of the warrant was a smear document paid for by von Pantsuit.

As well, we know -- just from the texts traded between the adulterous FBI duo that were released yesterday -- that the Obamanauts had a high level of interest in -- and asked for "everything" -- on the Russian meddling investigation.

Great. Glad to see they were on the case. So when James Comey briefed Barack Obama about the meddling, did he tell the President about the Two Scoops campaign portion of that same investigation, the part that began in July 2016? When was the President first told about the Two Scoops investigation by the FBI? When was he first told about the Steele dossier?

As I said: the President and his former Secretary of State and hoped-for successor in the White House were in it up to their ears.

Man... over a period of 4 months, the FBI proved incapable of recovering all of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page's texts -- or so they told us -- and told two different Senate committees that as well as the DOJ Inspector General they were unable to comply. Yet, the DOJ IG was able to find those same missing texts in less than 3 days.

We were told -- almost frantically -- by a lot of folks who should have known better (including James Comey and various Democratic members in the House and Senate) that the release of the Nunes memo would compromise "sources and methods" and "endanger national security." And yet, we're now told that the memo is a big nothing burger of no value whatsoever. So which is it?

I'm amazed at the lack of curiosity about what our government was up to regarding the 2016 election, one in which it appeared to takes sides and actively employed agencies of the same government to ensure its favored candidate won. The same people who, a generation or two ago, would have been foaming-at-the-mouth furious at the government for even appearing to be so fatally corrupted are now the ones leading the hallelujah chorus in praise of it? Talk about bizarro world.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Not to mention the fact that now it has been brought out that the Clinton campaign was also feeding Steele dirt for the dossier through long time Clinton friend Syndey Blumenthal...

    The IG report could be explosive on the Clinton investigation front, and maybe permanently mark the Obama legacy. OTOH, I don't think Comey has been shown as yet to be anything but incompetent, and eager to keep FBI business inside. Even less that has looked bad for Mueller (I know, there's the whole basis of investigation attack going on), and I still think he may wrangle something like collusion, but figure he will be able to make obstruction stick to Trump himself, mostly because he has Trump there to help him. ;)

They call him "Sid Vicious" for a reason. He and Cody Shearer were Felonia's two-man super-spy intelligence organization, apparently (and they helped her inadvertently wreck Libya, mostly because Blumenthal and his buddies had business interests there they hoped to profit handsomely on). And it looks like Steele eagerly lapped up every rumor that Blumenthal was probably feeding him, and then he included it in the dossiers.

What's funny is, the now-mostly-unredacted Grassley/Graham criminal referral of Steele to the Justice Department is probably more more damning (of the DOJ) than that Nunes memo was. So, how heavily did the FISA application rely on the Steele smear document? This heavily:



From this, we can see that "the bulk of the application was dossier material." There was no other so-called Hidden Evidence That We Just Don't Know About Yet (because if there were, it would have already been leaked by Adam Schiff and his staff, in true Schiff-for-Brains fashion ;-). It was the dossier and the Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff -- who used... Christopher Steele as his source.



“The application appears to contain no additional information corroborating the dossier allegations against Mr. Page.” In other words, they seem to have treated the dossier as evidence, not as a lead.That's a big difference.

Steele also was fired by the FBI not long after all this, for blabbing to the media about the fact of his work with the FBI (probably in an effort to market himself), so in the end he proved to be injudicious as well as unreliable -- and also "desperate to ensure Trump not win the election" (DOJ senior official Bruce Ohr -- whose wife Nellie was working for Fusion GPS -- may have reported this confession by Steele to the DOJ and the FBI, yet this evidence of bias wasn't likely disclosed to the FISA judges considering the application). Basically, Steele's supposedly well-sourced dossier was used by the FBI to convince the FISA court it should approve a warrant to spy on an American citizen (Carter Page) and, by extension, that citizen's work with the Two Scoops campaign and then the Two Scoops presidential transition organization itself.

Like I've said: the fish always rots from the head. So, the questions to ask -- just as it was asked during Watergate (and I remember it vividly) are: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" These questions regard both the FBI/Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit investigation as well as the FBI/Donny Two Scoops/Russian meddling investigation. I mean, seeing as how many of the same players over at DOJ/FBI were involved in both events.

That's for starters. We also need to see the original FISA application as well as the subsequent renewal applications. They can redact any sources and methods, of course, which should be easy to do, since the only sources appear to be a bought-and-paid-for opposition research dossier and a Yahoo News article.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Except the FBI and the FISA court believed that enough of Steele's sources and information were credible to grant the warrant. Steele was likely "desperate" for Trump not to be president not because he's had a life-long hatred of Republican politics (and a love of Clinton), but rather because of the information he had on Trump. If he believed - rightly or wrongly - that Putin had leverage over Trump, it is reasonable for him not to want Trump to become president. Think about it for a moment outside your echo chamber.

Which ones were credible?

Here's the more likely scenario, Occam's Razor-like:

The spying-on-Trump thing is worse than we even imagine, and once it was clear Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit had lost and it would inevitably come out, the Two Scoops/Russia collusion talking point was created as a distraction. She needed the "LOOK, A SQUIRREL!" hype to steer attention away from her own wrongdoing, first with the emails and then with her involvement in the Two Scoops spying caper.

President Obama needed it, as well, because if the FBI and DOJ were forced to delve deeply into the von Pantsuit email scandal it would have dragged him into it all, given he knew about her private server and was sending her emails to it, using his own alias, right? We now know -- KNOW -- he was lying about just when he learned of her private, unauthorized email server. So what else has he lied about regarding both the emails and the Two Scoops/Russian meddling thing?

Back to Steele and his dossier (and he never even went to Russia to collect his intel, apparently): Here's one thing I really remember from law school and my criminal law classes and moot court stuff: When any lawyer -- civil or criminal -- is drafting up a motion (or, in this case, a FISA surveillance application) he includes only his strongest arguments and proofs and omits his weak word salad-type chaff, such as this Steele dossier, for example.

The fact the Steele dossier was included at all indicates there wasn't any Stronger-Yet-Hidden Evidence We Just Don't Know About Yet That Was Collected By Retired British Master Spies. Because if there had been stronger evidence to present to the FISA court, they would never have bothered including the weak-sauce Steele smear document at all, especially when you consider its problematic partisan origins. In other words, you come with your good stuff, not this Steele dreckola.

But they knew they'd get their warrant, mostly because: of the 34,000 applications submitted to the FISC since 1979 only 12 have ever been turned down. That's a hell of a success rate on the part of the Feds. They must really be super-competent, near-genius-like Eliot Ness G-Men, all of them, to be that good in front of the FISA court judges.

Truth is, there is no other "evidence" but the Steele dossier and a weakly, thinly (almost anorexia-like) sourced article by Michael Isikoff over at Yahoo News. Who used the Steele stuff to create his article that was cited by the FBI in its FISA application as corroborating the Steele document. That's some #MagicalThinking right there. ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."