No. The consensus is exactly the opposite of that.
I mean, that might make some sense? If so, it’s a very minor omission. More to the point, it’s one that the FISA court judges clearly did not care about - they all saw “this was paid for by <person not named who opposed Trump>” and decided, “Eh, that’s good enough”. Do you think their judgment here was flawed?
Yes. I am confident that it does.
I endorse this line of argument.
I suspect that you’re thinking of the FBI like it appears on TV, where they just click some buttons on a computer and it tells them the truth about almost any question in an instant.
Surprise! There’s no magical way to know that a guy who came to you who says that he was hired by an investigative firm, that was hired by a lawyer, to investigate Donald Trump, was hired by Hillary Clinton. How would the FBI “know” that this person was hired (indirectly) by Clinton? They would need to question people around Steele, around Simpson, around the lawyer, and hope to find some crime that would allow them to subpoena or issue a warrant against the lawyer, in order to be able to get a look at his documents and financials in order to ascertain anything, at a minimum. You’re talking years worth of work, to ensure that a guy who came in to report a possible crime is actually who he says he is and that your hunch about who hired him is confirmably correct.
Why do that? What would be the value? Is there some common practice of reporting false crimes to the FBI that’s regularly undertaken by professional investigative businesses? The only possible excuse to investigate such a question would be if there was reason to believe that this report was part of an attempt to commit a crime. But where do you get to that from this?
From a legal standpoint, you could probably argue that just saying, “It’s probably financed by the candidate’s opponent”, is an unjustifiable overreach, since you’ll really have no factual idea on the matter. At best you might say that the person who reported the crime stated that he believed that he was working for the candidate’s opponent.
Let me also note that there’s very little need to question the veracity of the Steele Memos on that basis that they came from the candidate’s opponent. There may be other reasons, but that’s not really one of them.
Again, this is a paid, professional investigator. If you tell me that a Private Detective has just reported a crime, my first instinct is not, “Oh my god, he must be part of some conspiracy to mislead me into prosecuting an innocent man!” :dubious:
Even adding in that he’s working for someone who is paying him to find bad stuff about a target individual, that still doesn’t lead any rational mind to the conclusion that we’re looking at some elaborate scheme to manipulate and abuse the services of the FBI.
Granted, this is the only discussion in the world where no matter how you cut it there was an elaborate conspiracy so argument by “conspiracies aren’t real, yo” isn’t by default a winning argument.
But Hillary Clinton is not a superspy. She may be a corrupt politician and she may be really good at covering her tracks, but that’s the worst we can say of her, and that’s just supposition. From a factual standpoint, she’s a person who’s been investigated by dozens of people with major axes to grind over the course of decades and that’s never revealed a single thing about her worth calling a crime. From everything we can tell in the public sphere, she’s most law abiding person in all of history if you consider how hard people have tried to find a crime she’s committed and come up short. Or, yeah, she’s really good at hiding her tracks.
But even in that worst case, presuming that she laid an elaborate conspiracy out against her opponent to screw him over years down the line when, a) she was expected to win so hurting the Trump presidency wasn’t really a point of concern, b) public release of that information during the campaign would be more useful, c) there are severe criminal ramifications from running such a scheme, if she’s caught manipulating the FBI, and d) there’s no reason to believe that either Simpson nor Steele are such Clinton loyalists that they would go along with such a scheme and, again, risk the criminal repercussions of making a false report to the FBI to try and get an innocent man arrested.
Where, on the other hand, using illicit means to recruit and manipulate the political process of the US by an enemy state that is under sanctions and has a long history of knowledge and expertise in doing just that sort of thing…that’s not as far fetched.
Nor is it very far fetched that Donald Trump - a man whose businesses have been fined for money laundering, prosecuted for fraud, who is known to have contacts in the Italian and Russian mafias, does business with a variety of known money launderers, and has a couple of serial pedophiles among his closest pals…and that’s all information that anyone could have googled up about the man in 2015, when no one cared about the man’s politics one way or the other - no, it’s not very far fetched at all to believe that he would do the sorts of things being discussed in the Steele Dossier.
And, of course, the FBI already had a bunch of information about Manafort and Page. It’s also seems likely, given how annoyed Preet Bharara was, that they may have also already had Trump and/or Cohen under investigation for other crimes.
On the whole, there’s just really nothing implausible about the Steele Report. That the guy who reported it may have happened to be receiving money, three times removed, from Hillary Clinton doesn’t factor in unless you envision the woman as the real world Keyser Söze. Hell, even Vladimir Putin isn’t that. He’s been getting himself deeper and deeper into sanction territory through all of the shenanigans that he’s played and otherwise doesn’t have much to show for it beyond being able to laugh about how hard he’s trolled the US. Woopteedoo.
And, as said, Putin is using real spies, who are all full of loyalty and patriotism for their country and President. He actually is a superspy. And we caught him.
Making some presumption that Clinton was able to do better than Putin, using third party operatives that have their own lives and other clients, and all just to screw trump in that 1 in 100 chance that he wins against her…that’s just ridiculous.
The Steele Report is gossip. We can assume that he said to his sources, “Tell me if you hear anything negative about Donald Trump.” And so, yes, we can imagine that one of his sources might make something up.
But he doesn’t have just one source. He has multiple sources and the overall image that they put forward is reasonably consistent. Donald Trump and his people don’t turn into wildly different people depending on the source. The places that they say that Carter Page and others went, and the people they talked to, all seem to check out except (maybe) Cohen’s trip to Prague.
As of yet, we have no reason to think that Trump is into watersports. That part, based on what has gotten out about his sex life, hasn’t matched up with anything we’ve been told.
But he is friends with four pedophiles, we have good clean Texan teens telling us that he walked in on them when they were naked at Miss Teen USA and stood around to ogle them for a bit. We know that someone in Russia was sending prostitutes to his hotel room (as testified to by Trump’s bodyguard). So if Putin sent some 13-15 year old prostitutes to Trump, back in the 90s, who looked like Traci Lords or Elizabeth Ann Roberts did when they were that age, do we think that he would turn them away? Honestly?
Is it conceivable that Steele’s assertion that Putin has video of Trump doing something sexual that he can blackmail him with? You look up photos of young Traci Lords and you tell me.
Both prostitute and pedophile start with a P.
If anyone’s opponent brought a false case against them, obviously that would be wrong.
What we have here is someone’s opponent bringing a TRUE case against them.
Who the hell else is going to bring a case about someone - his best friend?
All that matters is, true or false. Not who.
So the less funded a private investigator is, the more likely he’s going to provide accurate information? Got it.
Even though you’ve been told, repeatedly, that “the above” is not how it works? It still makes the omission material?
That’s very odd.
TRUE case? List things in the dossier that have been confirmed to be true.
The truth of the of the statements in the dossier is irrelevant. It’s raw intelligence, all that matters is whether this information was gathered from actual sources. Can you point to any part of it that was fabricated by the author?
Are you denying that there was any truth in the dossier?
I SUSPECT the dossier is completely fabricated. I have no investigative ability though. The mutimillion dollar over a year long Mueller investigation hasn’t reported any confirmation. As far as I know, nothing in it has been confirmed (please correct me if I am wrong). The little manuever where the FISA application cited a news article on the leaked dossier to support the dossier looks particularly suspect:
https://www.vox.com/2018/2/2/1695758...f-declassified
“The Carter Page FISA application also cited extensively a September 23, 2016, Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, which focuses on Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow. This article does not corroborate the Steele dossier because it is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News. The Page FISA application incorrectly assesses that Steele did not directly provide information to Yahoo News.”
I haven’t seen an update in the last few months, but as of January, the allegations fell into three buckets:Verified, Not Proven, and Disproved. The “Disproved” bucket, I believe, is still empty.
So you’re left with “Verified” and “Not Proven”.
And the Nunes memo claims about the Isikoff article? Yeah, moreNunes bullshit.
You think Carter Page was not actually in Russia in July 2016?
So what if Page went to Russia? The verified claims in the article above show nothing nefarious on the part of Trump and team. Show me something nefarious claimed in the dossier that has been verified. And I think the argument against the Nunes memo isn’t convincing. The article had multiple sources, so yeah one can debate it forever.
Look at those goalposts fly!! You asked for a cite that anything in the dossier has been verified and SingleMalt provided one. Can you at least acknowledge that cite? Thank him/her? Jeez.
And, since the truth/falsehood of the dossier has nothing to do with whether the FISA warrant would have been issued, since it would have been issued without the dossier at all, so what? Are you hijacking your own thread into a discussion of the dossier because you now agree that there was nothing materially omitted from the FISA application?
You started this thread asking questions to which you have already concluded the answers. I don’t know why anyone is participating in this thread at this point, there is no possibility of anything swaying you from your pre-conceived notions. Nothing will ever convince you.
Also, there is no “deep state”. There are, however, many people who are sane and are patriots who love this country trying to prevent unimaginable damage being caused to our reputation and our future. This is not a conspiracy. This is the time for all good men (and women) to come to the aid of their country. You can tell this by the fact that many of the people accused of being part of this deep state are life long Republicans.
You said the dossier was “completely fabricated.” Are you changing your position to, “Yeah, some parts are true, but I just don’t want to believe other parts?” Sure sounds like it.
Precisely. The article had multiple sources, and thus could be used to backstop the claims in the Steele dossier. This obviates the Nunes claim that the logic was circular, i.e. that the Steele dossier was supported by the Isikoff article, but that the Isikoff article was wholly derived from the Steele dossier. It wasn’t. Isikoff had multiple sources.
Nunes and the Putin Republicans (heh, band name!) are not what I would call honest here, nor, for that matter, accurate.
I should have said “I suspect the claims of nefarious activity by Trump and team in the dossier are completely fabricated”. I considered this thread done when I wrote “the general consensus…” in a previous post. Others keep asking me questions, and I am responding. I am not trying to hijack my own thread.
Did you ever acknowledge that you were completely wrong in your version of the general consensus? The group here came to the opposite conclusion.