The gang leader of the Bloods goes to the police and tells them, “The Crips are planning to rob that bank.”
Should the police set up a watch on the bank? Do we suspect that there might be a reason that the leader of the Bloods is ratting out his rival gang the Crips? What do you think the police will actually do in this scenario?
I agree with them and with Horowitz. But I have actually paid attention to what they said which is that the officers should have updated the section on Steele as they went, rather than forgetting about it and simply appending “continuing cause”.
They were deficient in that regard and that was wrong of them.
The one agent was wrong for failing to report Page’s contacts with the CIA. I do not claim otherwise.
But, it is relatively clear that these failures were because of laziness. If you can find the part in the document where Hillary Clinton appears, waves a wand in the face of one of the agents, and convinces him to investigate a person out of political animosity, then go for it. But it’s not there. It really isn’t. “Deficient and wrong” is not synonymous with “malevolent”.
It is sometimes synonymous, yes. It’s unclear from the text how much he was faking. He could have been wholly falsifying, he could have been summarizing the overall message that he’d gotten from the CIA in a way that is frowned upon (i.e. modifying a quote).
There’s no obvious motive for a wholesale fabrication and, it should be pointed out, the principal concern with identifying Page’s status with the CIA was to ensure that they weren’t wasting time investigating a CIA agent, not because they were concerned about FISA. For their purposes if Page was a CIA agent, that would be a good thing. It would mean that they could just walk over to him and ask him what he knew. Boom, Bob’s your uncle. All this FISA crap and listening to Page’s pizza deliveries would become unnecessary.
The indication would seem to be that he determined that Page’s connection wasn’t worth noting, and it was easiest to just edit the CIA’s response to make that more clear in their response. It was an edit in the normal sense of the word - correcting text for clarity.
We can’t provide that kind of benefit of doubt in this instance because there was a pattern and practice of omitting exculpatory information from the warrant applications. It wasn’t a simple mistake. The FBI needed to hide this information to get the warrant and continue it’s renewal and that’s exactly what they did.
Comey, the former director of the FBI has acknowledged the problems with the FBI and the FISA process. Everyone now knows what the FBI did. Here’s the quote from the IG Report again. Carter Page was working with the CIA and they confirmed that with the FBI who hid that from the FISC.
I’m sure that they’ll give it but my sense is that they got lazy on the Steele section, as said, because they had sufficient continuing cause. That is just my sense, but I am not authoritative on that in any way.
That’s a technical no-no. In theory, the judge might have seen that Steele was crap, if his portion got updated with their findings, and the new material might not have been all that impressive.* But my sense is that they simply lost interest in the probable cause portion since they were past that. The new material was sufficient for continuing and that’s the criteria for continued monitoring.
Again, this may be the wrong analysis but my sense from my own life is that if you strap people with a process that they don’t feel serves a purpose, that they’ll give it lip service or bypass it altogether. I would not be surprised if you could solve this particular issue by simply modifying the re-up request to not include anything except what has been discovered in the monitoring period since the last application, rather than asking them to include old, historical notes on how things were started. Functionally, as said, that’s irrelevant. So long as everything was properly predicated at every stage, continuing is reasonable. You don’t stop the investigation when you’ve genuinely found bodies, regardless of what you discover about the initiating data.
But as said, I’m sure that they will apologize to Page. But I also doubt that they’ll mean it, because they know what’s under the black and that there’s a reason for those things to be black. And, similarly, I doubt that people will perform better to the current standards just because you have chastised them. “Try harderer” is rarely a solution. Determining why the people are doing bad and finding a way to improve the process so that they do better naturally is the real solution in nearly all cases. You have to work with human nature, not against it.
This is given for the sake of argument. We do not know what the new material was, for the most part.
I do not disagree with any of that. But that is also not, “Hillary Clinton made them do evil things, out of spite, through magical means.”
They did things that were opposed to what they were supposed to do in the FISA request and re-authorization system. There is an authoritarian argument that, that is completely unacceptable and wrong. That argument is undeniably true within its own viewpoint of the world.
As said in the previous post, I don’t think that viewpoint works as well, in practice, as working with rather than against human nature. If you are concerned about the FISA process, it is more useful to figure out why they were bad at the process and to use this as a case study rather than to view this as a vehicle for “shaming all them people”. They’ll apologize, but I doubt that much would change.
But, I’ll also note, that it is the Liberals who are most concerned with ensuring that FISA has guard rails a hundred feet tall.
Donald Trump can be quoted encouraging torture, which is pretty well the exact opposite of following FISA meticulously. You might want to consider the question why it is that the party which is less concerned about police abusing their power should suddenly be all up in arms on this one. Usually, they would be the ones offering the defense for this sort of matter.
Let’s say that the United States used to be Great and we want to be Great Again.
I would suggest that that point in time was after the Second World War, right? The 50s and early 60s?
When, do you believe, the UN was created? 2014?
Who lead the creation of it? Was it Zimbabwe?
Who lead the movement to make sure that torture was not a component of war, because it is cruel and unusual and that country has a foundational belief that it is not a valid method of establishing criminal activities and that you must always go through due process, citizen or not?
When was NATO established? Was that 2014?
A MAGAer has zero place to complain about FARA violations. If you want to Make America Great Again, I would say that there is only one point in time* where we decided that we didn’t give a crap about due process. At that same time, we were in a recession, at least in part brought about by spending a lot of money blowing up parts of Iraq for no obvious reason, using falsified information that the White House forced the CIA to manufacture.
I’m willing to buy that the 50s and 60s were when America was great. If you’re aware of some metric that points to greatness, at any level, during the Bush II presidency, then go for it. But even then, I am pretty sure that that’s not the time period that Trump is trying to reference when he says, “great again”.
I would suggest that if you want to be great again, doing the opposite of everything that we were doing at that point in time is a fucking stupid strategy.
I have no idea what time period Trump is referring to when he says “Make America Great Again” and clearly this episode isn’t making the country “great again”. The irony is that you have people cheering the “surveillance state” on no matter what tactic is used as long as it used against the “Orange Man”. This “Russia” nonsense is just as bad as the “weapons of mass destruction” nonsense. You think people would have learned a lesson, obviously they haven’t.
Currently I don’t have enough information to determine why…Does it really matter though? The reputation of the FBI has been badly damaged by those at the top.
If Busch, Clinton, Obama weren’t above falsifying information about people I don’t see why Trump would be any different, just look at the recent stuff about Afghanistan.
If Clinton had won the election, you probably wouldn’t see any of this brought to light.
Anyways, I’ve copied half the document out into the thread. Everyone is free to read the whole thing and determine whether I gave an unfair representation of it.