While being asked questions by the FBI, he provided (answered) and told them about his connections with Russians.
Do I have to go back over how “candor” is not exonerating?
It occurs to me that one thing that might be holding you up is the idea that someone would admit to being a foreign agent. One would never tell the CIA that, yes, I work with foreign intelligence officers. Yes, I am aware that they are foreign intelligence officers. Unless that person was trying to be helpful to the CIA and was genuinely on their side.
So, let’s point this out clearly:
It is not a crime to be a foreign agent. Foreign agent is a legal term not a crime.
It is a crime to lie to the FBI.
Cooperation with the FBI and CIA under questioning is how you stay out of jail. Cooperating and answering their questions honestly is not the same thing as “being part of the team”. Being part of the team would be something like, as example, actively passing information to them.
A person who only ever provides information, when run down, and only when asked questions that - if answered honestly - would not get you thrown into jail, is not a friendly. They are a person who is smart enough to know the law.
Page is a loonbat. But he’s also a PhD. Crazy but not stupid.
Eh PhD != not stupid. I’m sure everyone with one knows a few examples and is nodding their head here.
Are you ever going to state your answer to the question in your thread? Why do you think the FBI went after Page?
To be sure. As (again) it says in the video “being smart” and thinking that you’re going to buy yourself something by talking to the cops is a fool’s errand.
As it ended up, Page talked himself into having a wiretap issued against him. If he had pleaded the 5th, rather than admit to being a foreign agent, the FBI would only have had the Steele Dossier and that likely wouldn’t have been enough to establish probable cause.
And, I’ll note, there may well be a reason that the CIA likes Page.
Let’s say, for example, that they want to know where Russian Agent 2 is hiding out. They know that Page knows and can prove it. They go to Page and ask him, “Where is Agent 2 hiding?” Page will answer honestly because it’s more important to him to stay out of jail than to protect Agent 2 or just because Page enjoys the game of seeing just how much information he can dangle in front of the CIA to establish his “honesty” while wasting their time and thinking that he’s not giving anything away (when, in fact, he is).
To be sure, we might expect that just after Page tells them where Agent 2 is that he’ll send a signal to someone to warn Agent 2 to get moving. Agent 2 might still get away, because you used Page. But, minus him, you’d have no chance at all.
But, under certain circumstances, Page’s “candor” and urge to show off might be as valuable as a friendly source.
EasyPhil, think of it this way:
I ask Ravenman, “Are you a bastard?”
Ravenman replies back, “What? No. I resent the implication!”
I ask, “Was your mother married to your blood father?”
“Well…no.”
“Did they ever live together?”
“No…”
“Is it not the case that the man who raised you adopted you as his son.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“So, you’re a bastard.”
“I do not accept that characterization. I will answer no more questions. Harumph!”
So, now, likewise as I have said, Carter Page entirely and candidly admits by definition if not by “characterization” that he is a foreign agent.
- He knows that he associates with Russian agents. He has been told that they are Russian agents. He is aware that some of them have been convicted in a court of law, here in the United States of America, as being foreign Intelligence agents. He continues to associate with these people, despite that.
- He provides them with (non-classified) information that they ask him for. He does not do so under duress. They cannot convict him for lying to them. He does it, as far as we can tell, in an attempt to get business deals through them.
Do you disagree with any of that?
Who the fuck is Carter Page and why should I care?
Here’s a Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi with pertinent information:
So, an FBI attorney lied about Page’s actual history in order to obtain a FISA warrant that otherwise would likely not have been granted.
So, Nunes was correct, while Pelosi & Schiff were badly wrong.
Yipes.
Wow. Matt Taibbi doubles down on his bad take on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Whip di friggin’ ding dong.
You dispute his evidence, or his inferences from it?
Yes. His inferences are dogshit.
It is correct that the FBI relied, at least in half, on the Steele Dossier for their wiretap request on Page, initially. Their later requests appear to have had more to back them, as Steele’s work started to prove more flimsy than they had expected, but it’s unclear how much the new information added to the matter, since the new stuff is all redacted.
Horowitz refrains from making any comment on the quality of the information (which is generally his standard - he just reports what he found, without comment, other than to make recommendations for what steps to take to do things better). Even with the first FISA application, the idea that it half relies on Page’s own admissions and half on Steele comes not from Horowitz, but from documentation of letters and emails between the legal team and the agents, to determine whether they have enough to establish “probable cause”.
The closest we have to such an evaluation of the above redacted materials are:
If I recall correctly, in order for a FISA to be renewed, it needs to show that it is working and providing relevant information. So, for the judge to summarily approve would indicate that, that bar had been met. You cannot simply send the same application as before. Each renewal must include information that was discovered and that information must make it seem like the wiretap is providing value.
The second renewal application then starts…
Moving into the third renewal…
Remember, when you read articles, that they have to write about something concrete. They ignore all of the black space because they don’t know what it is and they aren’t allowed to speculate. But that will, necessarily, cause one to come to an unreasonable feeling about what the FBI was using to support their FISAs if you only read second-hand sources.
Steele was, yes, pivotal to getting the first FISA. But there’s a whole long section where Horowitz praises Steele from left to right, up and down, for pages and pages because that was genuinely the consensus on Steele, internally, at that point in time, based on his prior work for them. So saying, in retrospect, that that was somehow dishonest of them for the first FISA is bullshit if you actually read through and follow what’s going on in what order.
I don’t know how relevant Steele was for the renewals but I think there’s probably something behind all that black stuff and a reason why everyone forgot the little Steele blurb at the start of the renewal applications that they’d copy-pasted over.
I’ll also note that between cites of the report itself and cites of “a guy on Rolling Stone”, one of those is more authoritative. And, similarly, the person who is quite happy to freely copy and paste every line of the report over in support of every contention is generally going to be more authoritative. If you have to carefully groom the document for choice quotes, that’s a fair indication that you might not be being honest.
I’ll go back to what I said here because Trump’s attacks on Horowitz pretty much confirm what I feared. Horowitz, like Comey, was presented with a uniquely complex set of circumstances and tried to navigate the hyperpoliticized environment. He’s now being attacked for trying to stay neutral. He can’t win, because any mistake or misstatement, followed by clarification or retraction. will be viewed as evidence of a conspiracy. Trump and the Republicans are destroying democracy with conspiracy theories and misinformation.
Misinformation is easier to spread and believe than information, because it is almost always intended to be the opposite of fact; it is information that is craft brewed to be palatable according to human biases.
Based on what’s in the Rolling Stone article, this is a reasonably accurate description of Schiff’s response to the Nunes memo.
The “guy on Rolling Stone” is a contributing editor, who’s covered politics for for that magazine, and who cites the IG report in his article.
If you think he’s misrepresented the report, go ahead and present your evidence.
The IG is the IG.
It’s fair to say that I presented a fair amount of evidence on the question in my previous post which, to summarize, I would say points to the difference between “probable cause” and “continuing cause” (not a legal term, so far as I know, but descriptive). The one you need to open the wiretap and the other you need to keep it going.
If the local bank manager tells you that his friend Willard admitted to him that he murdered that girl, who has been in the news, and you open an investigation into Willard, discover a bunch of mutilated bodies in his basement, but then later determine that the local bank manager was a meth addict who was pissed off that Willard kept chucking his lawn mowings into his yard, and genuinely had zero basis to have made the accusation against Willard beyond pure luck, you still arrest Willard and take him to jail.
You can’t retroactively undo history. All that you can do is do your best at each stage with the information you have. And so the question is, “Was that a reasonable use of the information you had at that moment in time?” Is it reasonable to believe that a bank manager is a reliable witness? Is it reasonable to think that a “friend” might be granted information about possible criminal activities?
Here is all of the material related to the question of what was understood about Steele at the time they started to work with him:
They aren’t going to present any evidence, the tactic is to attempt to discredit the source. Comey the Former FBI director had to acknowledge the problems with the FISA after being confronted with his prior statements that were in direct contradiction of the IG Report findings.
My argument is that the FBI lied about Carter Page being an agent of a foreign government and I have yet to see any proof from anyone that shows that he was or is.
You posted a very long quote but it’s clear from the IG Report that Steele not only wasn’t credible, his work was commissioned by Fusion GPS on behalf of the Clinton political machine. The Dossier was opposition research which the FBI knew but didn’t tell the FISA court at any time for any of the renewals with the exception I believe of a foot note. It’s clear to everyone that the FBI lied to and misled the court even Comey acknowledges that. You know better than Comey? What’s your credentials?
Yeah, I’m clearly the one not presenting evidence. :dubious:
Where’s you evidence that Carter Page is an agent of a foreign government?