From the memo
“Furthermore, Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.”
If true then the warrant was issued based centrally on the contents of the dossier.
…that isn’t what that sentence actually says though. Its written very carefully to imply this: but if the truth was that “the warrant was issued based centrally on the contents of the dossier” then that is what they would have said.
Can you take a guess why they didn’t say that, and instead used the phrasing that they did?
But the warrant was for Carter Page.
It is surely not your contention that the Republicans are doing all this out of a desire to see Mr. Page’s name cleared?
Wrong. Read Simpson’s testimony. He claims he doesn’t know if Steele paid for the info:
https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/3/9/3974a291-ddbe-4525-9ed1-22bab43c05ae/934A3562824CACA7BB4D915E97709D2F.simpson-transcript-redacted.pdf
From the dossier
Steele admitted that the Gubarev report was not verified in response to a lawsuit. I suspect he will say the same should any other lawsuits come up.
I’m not concerned in the least what you think.
Have you read the Steele dossier?
That would depend on how they asked the question and how McCabe responded. I don’t know the answer to that question.
Yes. Why do you ask?
It’s an appeal to authority.
And Aspenglow is NOT even an established authority. “I’ve worked with judges for twenty years” could mean that s/he is the courthouse janitor, for fuck’s sake.
Well now not so much. It seems that the Justice Department under Obama was weaponized in a way that would put John Mitchell, Richard Kleindienst, and Richard Nixon to shame. See Nunes memo (link to document).
…the very least you could do if you are going to provide a cite is to the quote the relevant part. I’m not reading 312 pages to find proof of your assertion. Can you back up your claim?
But if you are claiming Simpson didn’t know: then how do you know that Steele paid for the sources? The boss doesn’t know: but random person on the internet does? The guy you cited who “learned it” from somewhere knows more than Steeles “boss”, who was speaking under oath?
How are you defining “of substance?”
Cite for him admitting this.
I suspect you are wrong on what he has “admitted” and I suspect you are wrong on what he would say if other lawsuits come up.
I still don’t think you know what Steele was thinking.
Wrong. Here is how debates REALLY work:
Whenever a person engages in a debate, they are necessarily pursuing one or more of the following objectives:
Attempting to test their own mental logic. By exposing their reasoning to others they open themselves to learning about flaws in their reasoning.
Attempting to change the minds of their opponent or others, by demonstrating the flaws in their opponent’s argument.
Attempting to demonstrate their intelligence and wit to their audience, by trouncing their opponents and being generally awesome.
Attempting to troll people because they’re a pathetic worthless loser who has nothing good or valuable in either their lives or minds or souls.
This is Great Debates, so you’re not trolling. Thus you must be attempting one or more of the other three objectives. But this argument of yours: “You can’t prove the obviously true statement that the judges are interested in facts because you can’t interview those specific judges and I’m going to deny all possible facts and evidence and testimony and everything so you can’t make me concede, nyah nyah” - that’s a moronic piece of shit argument. It’s a garbage argument that nobody would ever be impressed or convinced by. Period.
Which means you fail at objectives 2 and 3. You convince nobody and you impress nobody.
And nobody who clings to such an idiotic demonstration of stupidity while blindly denying facts and evidence can possibly be interested in self-edification. So you fail at objective 1.
So this so-called argument is a completely ineffective argument and you have failed at this debate.
Well, not everybody does that. Me, John Mace, pretty much all. Mostly me.
Do you think you’re providing any new information in this 373-post thread? Hell, even the spin is the same. Kindly spare us the Fox News conspiracy theories. We’ve all heard it before.
Thank you for that. I’d meant to read it when I finished with the Simpson testimonies, but managed to get distracted by other things every time I thought about it.
It surely sharpens my view of things. Overall it comes across as fairly credible, given the inherent limitations of humint. (And I’m not talking about the sexual stuff; that would be at most mildly embarrassing to Trump. He’s been the Teflon man in that arena.) No wonder the Republicans are attacking Steele and his dossier at every turn.
The first, and most important, point is that it’s a pure blueprint for avenues of inquiry for Mueller’s team. The cyber crime memos are credible because a lot of this info was actually presented to an international conference having to do with overall Russian tactics regarding cyber. It wasn’t overly secret or sensitive information, but it’s not particularly useful in the investigation of Trump and cronies. It does have important intelligence use, though.
The RTV connection is interesting and credible. So is the large amount of info on the Russian modus operandi. As for personal communications within the Kremlin, I’m sure a lot of that will be unverifiable. And the covering of tracks from both sides of the ocean is worrying in that it will make Mueller’s job that much more difficult. Creativity can work wonders, though; we shall see… Page could be a lynchpin for Mueller.
So this is my new, sharpened view: Trump is scared shitless of the Mueller probe, as his top people probably are, as far as they know about it given their respective positions. The Republicans (primarily the leadership, who are able to keep most of the rest in line without having to reveal the true whys and wherefores) are complicit to their incarnadine necks. Their partisan-controlled ‘investigations’ are a joke. Only Mueller is capable of finding the truth.
Expect more attacks on the DOJ, FBI, and Mueller, and (if Emperor Orange can get away with it in any way) more firings. Expect continuing backpedaling on anything resembling Russian sanctions. And expect even more piles of disinformation, attempting to distract from and discredit Mueller’s findings in any way, coming from all over the right but especially from Trump & Co.
I just hope that Congress will come together to protect Mueller before the Resident Skunk can find some deniable rationale and mechanism for firing him. The odds are against it, though, given Republican duplicity. Maybe, just maybe, there will be enough ‘ethical’ Republicans to pull it off.
It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: this is a battle for the heart and soul of American democracy, and, baby, we’re losing.
It’s time for #YoMemoJokes! Implicitly addressed to Devin Nunes, of course.
Yo’ memo is so fake, Julian Assange sent it a DM.
Yo memo is so juvenile, Roy Moore tried to take it on a date.
Yo memo’s so fake it should’ve been named “Stormy’s Orgasm”
Yo memo bombed so hard, Hawaii put out another distress alert.
Yo Memo so full of crap it should have been removed in a little plastic bag.
Yo Memo’s so dull, even Mike Pence thinks it’s boring.
Yo memo so weak, it dodged the draft 5 times.
Yo memo so lame, even Wikileaks wouldn’t leak it.
Yo memo so bankrupt, it used to be a Trump casino.
Yo’ memo so fake, Sheriff Clarke pinning it on his Uniform!
Yo Memo’s such a letdown it’s a Star Wars prequel.
Yo’ memo is so vacuous, Jared Kushner tried to marry it.
Yo memo is so useless, its nickname is “Don Jr”
Yo memo is so poor, Paul Ryan tried to take away its healthcare.
Yo memo such a disaster Republicans sent it thoughts and prayers.
Yo memo so full of holes, we thought Dick Cheney took it hunting.
Yo memo is so weak Ivanka thought it was Jared.
Yo memo is so dumb it’s next on Hannity.
It is not an appeal to authority if someone has expertise. Aspenglow has stated in other threads the basis of his experience, unrelated to this topic. Poorly founded accusations of fallacies are poor debate tactics, anyway.
Her experience, pardon me.
Not only that but Aspenglow’s allegation is that “many elements of the dossier has been shown to be factually true. That is all the FISA judge cares about.”
What she alleges is that judges only care about facts. This is hardly a controversial opinion. One would think the baseline for a judge - especially one who is picked by a Supreme Court justice - would be that facts are, colloquial, “all they care about.” The Canadian Superior Courts Judges Association, for example on their page for The Role of the Judge, says the following:
That phrase they use, “trier of fact,” is in quotations because it’s a legal term.
(It should be noted that when issuing warrants judges use a different standard than “reasonable doubt” but that doesn’t change the role of the judge or whether they should look to facts to fulfill that role.)
So Aspenglow merely said that judges look at facts. Which they do. It’s kind of their thing.
If someone wants to say otherwise, they should have evidence.
Oh and speaking of that:
So Aspenglow said judges only care about facts. It looks like, counter to what the Nunes memo alleges, this judge was able to look at that particular fact.
So what?
Let’s say two competing businesses develop an intense rivalry and set out to destroy each other.
Business A hires a sleazy private investigator to dig up dirt on the guy that owns business B. This investigator uses all sorts of underhanded, even possibly illegal techniques in order to entrap the owner of business B into an extramarital affair so the evidence can be used as extortion material.
While carrying out this underhanded plot, Sleazy Investigator stumbles onto irrefutable proof that Business Owner B is running a drug smuggling operation. He notifies the police. The police are already aware of the drug smuggling ring, they have been working this case for a while. But they had never been able to link Business Owner B to the operation.
Until now. The investigator’s tip changes the course of their investigation. They conduct their own legal, aboveboard investigation in order to assemble the evidence needed to charge business owner B with drug smuggling.
Does the way in which the evidence behind the initial tip was obtained somehow give Business Owner B a pass on being a drug smuggler?
My answer is - of course not. Law enforcement is frequently tipped off by people with ulterior motives. They will even cultivate people with an axe to grind, (like disgruntled spouses) as sources.
The fact that there are people that are out to get you doesn’t give you a pass on your responsibility to obey the law. Or your culpability when you get caught.
I don’t think Trump knows this. He’ll learn it soon enough.
And I just want to mention (again!) that Page had been under the FBI radar for a while ever since some Russian spies under surveillance were taped discussing what a useful source of information he was.
I would certainly hope that our intelligence agencies would take action when it became publicly known that he was trying to insinuate himself into a Presidential campaign. I’d be concerned if they didn’t, even in the absence of a salacious dossier.
Given that half the FISC judges were appointed by Bushes and another 1 by Reagan, it would be interesting to know which judge it was that issued the warrant. Maybe adding the name in was just one too many Republicans to mention, alongside Rosenstein and Dana Boente.