Oh, so now you are claiming to be a news source more credible than the Associated Press?
Got it.
Memo looks like a nothing burger... Read it here
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Oh, so now you are claiming to be a news source more credible than the Associated Press?
Got it.
there is a limit there, of how many freebies you get and I have reached it.
same with the new York times.
I know all this runs contrary to the claim that I only read or watch fox, sorry about that.
so just paste it. if more is coming out about the dossier that the fbi tried to hide, then fine, let's see it.
Perhaps i am having a compression problem. What are you saying?
Justice Dept. told court of source’s political influence in request to wiretap ex-Trump campaign aide, officials say
The court that approved surveillance of a former campaign adviser to President Trump was aware that some of the information underpinning the warrant request was paid for by a political entity, although the application did not specifically name the Democratic National Committee or the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
A now-declassified Republican memo alleged that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was duped into approving the wiretap request by a politicized FBI and Justice Department. The memo was written by House Intelligence Committee Republicans and alleged a “troubling breakdown of legal processes” flowing from the government’s wiretapping of former Trump aide Carter Page.
But its central allegation — that the government failed to disclose a source’s political bias — is baseless, the officials said.
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[Release of disputed GOP memo on FBI surveillance unleashes waves of recrimination]
The Justice Department made “ample disclosure of relevant, material facts” to the court that revealed “the research was being paid for by a political entity,” said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
“No thinking person who read any of these applications would come to any other conclusion but that” the work was being undertaken “at the behest of people with a partisan aim and that it was being done in opposition to Trump,” the official said.
Former senior Justice Department officials who handled applications for wiretap warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) say that such applications typically include dozens of pages and undergo rigorous vetting.
“We didn’t put in every fact, but we put in enough facts to allow the court to judge bias and motive and credibility of the sourcing,” said Matthew G. Olsen, former deputy assistant attorney general for national security who oversaw the Justice Department’s FISA program from 2006 to 2009.
The Republican memo, he said, “is unconvincing and one-sided. It raises more questions than it answers.”
If the FISA application to surveil Page referred to funding by political opponents “or included similar references that revealed a motivation against then-
candidate Trump, even if they did not name the DNC . . . then the FISA applications would be fine,” said David Kris, a FISA expert who led the Justice Department’s National Security Division from 2009 to 2011.
[Why the Nunes memo takes aim at a Justice Dept. official specializing in gangs and drugs]
The memo left other national security experts underwhelmed.
2:00
Key takeaways from the Nunes memo
President Trump approved the release of a controversial and classified congressional memo on Feb. 2. Here are some of its main claims.(Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
“My basic reaction was, that’s what this was all about?” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “I was expecting something that was actually damning,” Vladeck said. “I think the only thing that has been damned was this whole controversy.”
Robert S. Litt, former general counsel to the director of national intelligence and a surveillance law expert, said, “I don’t find any of the allegations hugely problematic, in part because of the lack of context.”
Republican lawmakers characterized the memo as a public service.
“I have an obligation to the American people when we see FISA abuse . . . [that] American citizens that are represented before this court have to be protected,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-
Calif.), who led efforts to release the memo, said on Fox News. “It’s not a place we wanted to go, but it’s where we had to go.”
Nunes said that the Page wiretap was “outrageous” and that it was based on “salacious information paid for by a political campaign.”
At issue was an application for surveillance on Page obtained in October 2016 under the Obama administration and renewed three times, including by senior Justice Department officials in the Trump administration. To secure the warrant, the government had to persuade a federal judge there was probable cause to believe that Page was acting as an “agent of a foreign power” and engaged in criminal conduct.
The memo argues that an “essential” part of the warrant application was a dossier outlining alleged ties between Trump and Russia, a document compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who coordinated the research paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign. But the memo failed to state how significant a role it played in the application, Litt said.
“If somebody submitted a FISA application that was based entirely on the dossier and left out information that was significant to assessing the credibility of the person who gave you the information, and that information about credibility would have made a difference to the court, I would think that’s significant,” he said.
“If the dossier was one small factor in a much larger mosaic of information going back four years indicating this man was an agent of a foreign power,” then it would be less significant, he said.
The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), said, “Only very select parts of what Christopher Steele reported related to Carter Page were included within the application, and some of those things were already subject to corroboration.”
A potentially damaging allegation is that the FISA application, which was based in part on information from Steele about Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow, also cited a September 2016 Yahoo News article by reporter Michael Isikoff. “This article,” the memo states, “is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News.”
In other words, the memo alleges the Yahoo News article amounted to circular reasoning.
Schiff said the article was not included in the application to corroborate Steele. That was one of the memo’s “serious mischaracterizations” about the FISA application.
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Kris said it’s more likely that the Justice Department cited the Yahoo News article “to show that the investigation had become public and that the target [Page] therefore might take steps to destroy evidence or cover his tracks.”
The Justice Department “uses lots of consultants who you could argue are not competent,” said Marcy Wheeler, a national security expert who runs the national security blog Emptywheel. Steele, she said, is a competent consultant. “If you want to deal with the issue of consultants in rule of law, you do that systematically; you don’t do that in this one memo.”
Karoun Demirjian contributed to this report.
A couple anonymous sources who did fisa warrant applications for the justice department saying 'don't worry, everything is okay." Ahh, okay. other than the fact that the justice department and the fbi is filled with fucking liars at the top whose credibility is falling like dominoes. But, that's fine. Just bring in the ones who did the warrant and get on with the real story. Not to forget too that -for obvious reasons- the justice department is filled with people running around arguing that this warrant was okay and therefore there is no need to question any other warrants either- ahhh, okay- good luck wit dat.
The process is a double edged sword for the dems though. If they can demonstrate that they did sufficient disclosure about the political origins then the fbi may skate on allegations of fraud.
However, as part of doing that, they confirm that a political document produced by camp Clinton was used to obtain the warrant. Not pretty.
Also, the article states that the general political nature of the source was disclosed but not details and you and the lefty media assume that none of those details matter. For example, did those details include revealing to the court that the yahoo news article submitted to support the document the warrant was based on information leaked to the media by an fbi/fusion coordinated effort?
There will be and is pushback to the nunes memo, including memo from the dems, and then probably another memo from the republicans to respond to the dems memo, and so on. Fine. As I have said countless times, the burr under my saddle is that the fbi/justice department should not have been allowed to resist providing information to the committee. But they did, and now the price they pay is not only having the committee see the info but watching the whole thing being played out in public. And I am absolutely in favor of the dems raising a whole bunch of issues- because it only fuels the fire for an independent counsel, unless we want to have six months of memos and counter-memos in public.
Did the memo move the ball forward? Yes. And will the dem response move it forward and reveal a bunch of stuff that we would not have seen, yes. And.......and this a BIG BEAUTIFUL "AND"......will all of this lead to material to "discuss" with comey and all the other justice department clowns when they are back in before the committee? Yup, it will.
Oh, and don't forget that- this all leads over to the State Department too. More on that to come.
from the article:
“No thinking person who read any of these applications would come to any other conclusion but that” the work was being undertaken “at the behest of people with a partisan aim and that it was being done in opposition to Trump,” the official said."
heh, nice. as I said, it may help argue against the issue of whether disclosure was sufficient but look at what they are confirming.
The process is a double edged sword for the dems though. If they can demonstrate that they did sufficient disclosure about the political origins then the fbi may skate on allegations of fraud.
However, as part of doing that, they confirm that a political document produced by camp Clinton was used to obtain the warrant. Not pretty.
Also, the article states that the general political nature of the source was disclosed but not details and you and the lefty media assume that none of those details matter. For example, did those details include revealing to the court that the yahoo news article submitted to support the document the warrant was based on information leaked to the media by an fbi/fusion coordinated effort?
There will be and is pushback to the nunes memo, including memo from the dems, and then probably another memo from the republicans to respond to the dems memo, and so on. Fine. As I have said countless times, the burr under my saddle is that the fbi/justice department should not have been allowed to resist providing information to the committee. But they did, and now the price they pay is not only having the committee see the info but watching the whole thing being played out in public. And I am absolutely in favor of the dems raising a whole bunch of issues- because it only fuels the fire for an independent counsel, unless we want to have six months of memos and counter-memos in public.
Did the memo move the ball forward? Yes. And will the dem response move it forward and reveal a bunch of stuff that we would not have seen, yes. And.......and this a BIG BEAUTIFUL "AND"......will all of this lead to material to "discuss" with comey and all the other justice department clowns when they are back in before the committee? Yup, it will.
Oh, and don't forget that- this all leads over to the State Department too. More on that to come.
from the article:
“No thinking person who read any of these applications would come to any other conclusion but that” the work was being undertaken “at the behest of people with a partisan aim and that it was being done in opposition to Trump,” the official said."
heh, nice. as I said, it may help argue against the issue of whether disclosure was sufficient but look at what they are confirming.
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It doesn’t matter where the information came from. Drug dealers tell on other drug dealers all the time.
The only scenario where you make any sense would be if the dossier were the stand alone evidence. And that still has nothing to do with it’s origination, that’s just that there was no corroborating evidence in support. Highly doubtful.
and let’s all remember for all that is involved in this investigation the best this committee came up with is the fisa application for Carter Page, used a political opposition research dossier. It means nothing. Page isn’t the Lynch pin. As best we know it was popodopolous but something may have predated that.
And another point about “moving the ball forward.” At what cost.
While you guys have convinced yourselves that the DOJ and fbi is rife with dirty cops, there’s no evidence of that. There’s no evidence of that and since when is going to war with a law enforcement agency good for the country. There’s many processes the president can invoke and congress via of oversight that do not include jeopardizing national security for political gain.
While you guys have convinced yourselves that the DOJ and fbi is rife with dirty cops, there’s no evidence of that. There’s no evidence of that and since when is going to war with a law enforcement agency good for the country. There’s many processes the president can invoke and congress via of oversight that do not include jeopardizing national security for political gain.
No. The issue is whether the dossier was substantially relied upon by the fbi (not just the court) to initiate action against a political opponent and against a private citizen.
The report states that McCabe testified that there would be no fisa warrant without the dossier. If so, that establishes the FBI's view toward the importance of that dossier.
I understand that the dems argue that that was or may not be the exact words of McCabe, and that's fine. They have their memo coming out and they should say what the right answer is then. There are serious allegations against the dems and the FBI. They absolutely should move to put on a defense and I am absolutely okay with it. A few short weeks ago we had the Justice Department tell us/the committee that we would not see anything and that they would not make their employees available as witnesses. Now we see everyone doing a mad scramble to get as much out to the public as possible. I AM MORE THAN HAPPY WITH THAT.
If I see the exact words of McCabe, I will adjust my views as needed. Some of the dems are making much of the fact that McCabe's words were not in quotes, but are not saying that he did not say words to that effect. Fine, if that gets everyone a few days, go for it. But the exact words better be in the memo- or in the republican's memo to respond to the dem memo. We can try this whole thing before the people if they want.
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