I’d just like to know if anyone who cares about this matter and has followed it to any extent is not completely shocked by the high-level low-ball brinkmanship being practiced behind the political scenes in our country lately?
I would hate to see this never ending mess drive out the very few (maybe) honest people that remain. That is what the Orange Mother Fucker wants.
It’s a pile of poorly composed partisan fictional bullshit with no facts or evidence to back it up.
Absolutely, I’m shocked.
Shocked that Mitch McConnell is willing to piss on the Constitution in order to ram his hateful legislative agenda through.
Shocked that Paul Ryan can stand up, without a backbone.
Shocked that Devin Nunes sold his soul for the honor of being Trump’s errand boy.
It’s Trump. We expected him to act that way.
Anyone who knows anything about Donald Trump and the way he’s operated his life and his businesses for the last 40 years isn’t even slightly shocked that this is happening.
But keep supporting that chucklefuck.
Not shocked or surprised at all. Just disgusted.
“The fish rots from the head down.” - old saying
I just meant the stuff we don’t normally find out about.
Alrighty, then! Might the old cliche “it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better” also be appropriate?"
You know - in Animal House Spirit of “Thank you sir, may I have another!” 
It is going to get worse before it gets better.
And as someone else, I believe on this board, said; We’re going to have to make new laws against doing things that no one ever did in the past because of decorum and decency.
Unfortunately, we’re only seeing one side of the argument. Nunes does appear to allege that the Yahoo article was supposed to corroborate the dossier but he never actually comes out and says that. In fact, Schiff calls this line a deliberate mischaracterization of why the article was included and someone with experience said it is “much more likely” that the application included the Yahoo article for other reasons. Secondly, it is not clear when the FBI became aware that Steele was the source behind the Yahoo article since he (Steele) didn’t admit this until 2017 so you can’t say the FBI knew in 2016 what it was based on.
The NYT article (here) does a pretty good job of showing the “creativity” of Nunes’ memo.
I’m certainly not going to take anything in the memo at face value until both sides get a chance to tell their story.
Am I shocked that there’s behind-the-scenes brinkmanship that we don’t know about, which somehow manages to be both high-level and lowball?
I’m not sure “shocked” is the right word. Mildly confused, maybe?
This is so wrong it just leaves me stunned.
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The FISA warrant was the third renewal of a warrant that had been in effect since October 19, 2016. Carter Page was identified as a Russian operative in 2013.
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There were multiple sources of information used to obtain the FISA warrant, not just the Steele dossier. Because those sources are classified, they can’t be revealed without compromising national security. Some of us care about that.
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The original FISA warrant was not used to spy on a member of a political campaign during an election year. Carter Page left the Trump campaign on September 26, 2016.
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The document was funded by Fusion GPS, by a law firm affiliated by the Clinton campaign. Nothing of this was hidden from view. There is nothing illegal about it. I’m not sure what “cutouts” you’re talking about. You seem to be misusing the term.
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It doesn’t matter where the facts came from. The facts are the facts, and there is no evidence that what is contained in the Steele dossier is false. If you have factual information to the contrary, meaning it doesn’t come from Fox “News,” you need to show that.
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“Salacious” and “unverified” does not mean untrue.
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The FBI is actually biased against criminals. That would include Carter Page.
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You’d need to show a cite beyond “Fox “News” told me so” that Steele “kept leaking information to the media, causing the FBI to reject him as a source. But after he was dismissed, Bruce Ohr kept feeding the information to the FBI through his wife, who worked with Fusion GPS. Ohr has already been demoted for this.” I’ve seen no evidence for any of this.
Steele did provide copies of his dossier to John McCain, Mother Jones and Buzz Feed. Buzz Feed published the dossier in full on January 10, 2017, after the election was over.
After Trump won the election, Christopher Steele talked to associate DAG Bruce Ohr about his discovery of Trump’s connections to Russia. According to Simpson’s testimony, he and Steele were concerned “that the Russian government had mounted a massive attack on the American election system and that…Donald Trump or his associates might have been involved.” Some of us happen to think this is an important factor in explaining Steele’s choices. Don’t you? Being privvy to such information might tend to bias a lot of us against Trump.
How could the FBI reject Steele as a source? The FBI had no official relationship with him to “terminate.” Do you think this invalidates his research? Can’t you tell this is just garbage innuendo? Stop maligning this man. He is a well-regarded, distinguished member in his field. He was the top Russian spy for M1-6 for nearly 2 decades. How many excellent reputations must your side smear and destroy in your quest to protect the criminal in the Oval Office? Christopher Steele. James Comey. Andrew McCabe. Peter Stzok. Rod Rosenstein. Christopher Wray. Sally Yates. Dana Boente. Preet Brahara. Robert Mueller. For fuck’s sake. Is it really that all these people became corrupt overnight? Or maybe it’s just one guy, ruining a lot of reputations in his quest to protect himself from criminal prosecution?
Where is your evidence that Bruce Ohr was demoted for feeding information to the FBI through his wife? More innuendo.
How do you know any of this? As you stated, these are “allegations.” That’s not the same thing as evidence or proof. Or do you have some?
I’m so old I can remember when liberals thought that the FISA court was dangerous if there was no oversight for it, and when it wasn’t being politicized for partisan gain. I’m old enough to remember the dangerous warrantless wiretapping days of the Bush administration.
Now we have actual evidence of how the FISA court can be politicized at the expense of our national security, revealing important classified information in the process that damages our sources and methods, all to provide an unscrupulous excuse for a corrupt criminal occupant of the Oval Office in his efforts to stop an investigation into his ties to a foreign government hostile to our very values and way of life, and the answer from the alt-right Trumpian universe is to think that’s just fine as frog’s hair, so long as their guy can further his authoritarian goals to become the Putin of the West.
Question for you: If Devin Nunes was sooooooooo worried about the “defects” in the FISA Court warrant renewal, why didn’t he take his concerns to the FISA Court judge directly and ask him to explain/remedy them? That’s the usual, customary way of dealing with such concerns. Or is the judge part of the conspiracy, too? And remember, Nunes didn’t even fucking read the underlying classified information that supported the FISA warrant renewal.
I understand fear of the unknown can lead to distraught, even irrational reactions. But what exactly are you afraid of here? Don’t you recognize the simple fact that it is routinely common for high level Federal officials to have contacts and interactions with foreign actors of all sorts? Both overtly and covertly, completely legitimately?
And just to repeat something often overlooked; Devin Nunes has never seen the information used to obtain the FISA warrant. Only two people in the House Intelligence committee have seen it, Trey Gowdy and Adam Schiff, as well as the rest of the Gang of Eight. Nunes is on the Gang of Eight but for some reason had Gowdy view the information instead of doing it himself.
Yup. Recognize that completely. This ain’t that, and if you don’t understand it, I recommend you spend some time studying the historical relationship between the USSR/Russia and the United States, as well as a better understanding of Putin, his goals and the lengths to which he will go to achieve them.
LOL, that was the last point I raised in my lengthy post above. Probably should have put it first.
Guys, you’re wasting your time. They’re NEVER going to believe that Russia interfered, or even OFFERED to interfere for Trump. Ever. Putin and 14 Russian high officials to be named later could go on international TV and confess to having given the Trump campaign information and intelligence about every single opponent in the 2016 election, primary or general, and they will deny they ever heard it.
Makes it interesting when they absolutely deny it at first and then admit, yeah we talked to them, yeah we met with them.
trump and his cronies where not taking some sort of diplomatic meetings.
And so on and so forth.