You mean other than the embarrassment that our government is now run by memos and counter memos?
One other thing I don’t get is this notion that the national security could be harmed by release of classified info in the memo. What might that be?
It turned out the memo was released to Fox News first. What a way to really establish credibility there, Devin and your fellow flying monkeys.
Republican partisans will be bellowing: “SEEEE! We KNEW it! They bugged our campaign based on Hillary’s EEEEEVIL dossier!”
People with multiple brain cells will be saying: “What the fuck? So this dossier provided justification for the warrant, along with a myriad of things that the Republicans are letting us see. What was all the fuss about?”
How stupid do they think we are? So Nunes sees that the Steele dossier was part of the warrant renewal request, and he thinks that if he makes it look like that was the only thing it was based on, we’ll be outraged.
The memo even flat out states in item 5 that the investigation was initiated by the FBI investigation of Papadopolous.
That’s not what it says. (“an … investigation”, not “the investigation”)
McCabe testified that that there would have been no FISA warrant in the absence of the dossier and it appears that Steele had personal as well as professional reasons to “find” dirt on Trump or his associates. No big news here but it confirms, if true, that the FBI misled the FISC to obtain the warrant. That alone is pretty scary since we are talking about surveillance based on nothing more than rumor.
I thing our president said it best when he ordered that burger with nothing.
I’m interested in why F-P isn’t talking about it, tho. Go ahead, F-P: tell us who was “the opposition” who paid to start up what became the Steele dossier?
I don’t know how significant the first part is, because it’s not like the dossier was completely worthless just because it was done for partisan reasons, just that it wasn’t worth as much as if it had been done for non-partisan reasons.
And I don’t see the second point at all. It’s not clear why Steele was desperate to block Trump’s election, and it could be for the very reason that he believed he was a Russian agent, in which case it wouldn’t be bias or “personal … reasons”.
Cite? :dubious:
The very memo we are talking about disputes this fact: x.com
It’s patently clear Republicans love their party more than their country or democracy. How shameful.
Your point was stupid and I don’t address every stupid point people make, only some of them.
Besides for the fact that the opposition who paid for the Steele research were exclusively Democrats, as Steele wasn’t brought in until after it became a Democratic project (and it would appear that your awkward wording “… who paid to start up what became …” was carefully designed to obscure this) it makes no difference which political opponents paid for it. What counts is whether the FBI, in pushing for the application, misled the judge about this for political reasons.
I can’t see how this memo shines any light on alleged political bias at the FBI. Do you think it does?
What does this even mean? As I understand it the legal bar for a FISA warrant is probable cause. That’s a fairly low bar, and I don’t see where you’re getting the idea that disclosing a hypothetical political bias behind a source would make any legal or ethical difference, unless the source was so obviously biased that no reasonable investigator would take them seriously. Do you honestly think that’s the case here?
The memo clearly states that Steele was being paid by Fusion and desparate that Trump not get elected.
Did she delete that tweet? I get a page not found error
Well, so what? I quoted Trump campaign spokesmen who said in September that Carter Page had nothing to do with the Trump campaign, never did, never will.
It’s pretty hard to argue that the FBI is politically targeting the Trump campaign by looking at a guy who was fired a month before.
I don’t think probable cause is such a low bar that it doesn’t make any difference “unless the source was so obviously biased that no reasonable investigator would take them seriously”.
[I recall when Manafort was raided and many people here were chortling over the fact that if there was a warrant for that then there must have been some pretty solid evidence against him, because after all you need probable cause. I don’t recall anyone saying then “hey it might just be unverified thirdhand reports from biased sources because after all all you need is probable cause”.]
I think the first part is significant if the FISC was not made aware of this fact. Opening a counter-intelligence operation based on oppo research is troubling.
You make a good point about the second point that I had not considered.