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Thread: FBI spy program reportedly used to surveil the Trump campaign has a long history

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    Default FBI spy program reportedly used to surveil the Trump campaign has a long history


    Following reports that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used at least one spy to secretly surveil members of the Trump campaign, fired former FBI director James Comey lashed out at critics of his agency’s activities during the 2016 election.

    “Facts matter. The FBI’s use of Confidential Human Sources (the actual term) is tightly regulated and essential to protecting the country,” Comey tweeted on May 23. “Attacks on the FBI and lying about its work will do lasting damage to our country.”

    While Comey’s record on truth-telling is decidedly mixed, he is correct that facts matter and that the FBI’s use of informants is governed by strict guidelines. How and why many of those guidelines came to be are important facts that the American public deserves to know as it considers revelations that the FBI used wiretaps and spies to surveil Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, his transition, and perhaps even his presidential administration.

    Those guidelines, many of which the Government Accountability Office found were not being followed as recently as 2015, were put in place after rogue FBI agents working in the Boston field office routinely worked to cover up murders committed by their informants. You might say they were the direct result of justifiable attacks on the FBI for unconscionable violations of the public trust.

    In fact, years-long violations of the rules about the FBI’s use of secret spies have led to massive investigations across every branch of government, including a multi-volume, 3,528-page congressional investigative report in 2003, a scathing 314-page report from the Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general in 2005, and even a scathing 228-page, $102 million ruling against the government in 2007 after a federal judge ruled that the FBI deliberately withheld evidence, leading to the wrongful convictions of four men, in order to protect a mob informant. (Three of the men were originally sentenced to death; two died in prison awaiting justice for a crime they didn’t commit.)

    The 2007 ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Gertner, which the federal government chose not to appeal, reads more like a John Grisham novel than it does a legal dictum. In her introduction, Gertner made clear that the horrific miscarriage of justice perpetrated under the guise of the FBI’s confidential spy program wasn’t the result of innocent missteps by a few bad apples, but was instead a coordinated conspiracy involving the rogue agents, their supervisors, and even the FBI director himself.


    http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/24/fbi-used-secret-spy-program-protect-killers-jail-innocents-screw-victims/#.Wwa5M2Q4O-Q.twitter

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    You get that it's part of the FBI's job to surveil people & activities...right?

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    Default DEMOCRATS are pretending the FBI has no rogue agents. But they do.

    The corrupt agents were “given raises and promotions precisely for their extraordinary role in procuring” the wrongful convictions, Gertner wrote.

    “Even when [their informant], the ‘poster boy’ for the new federal witness protection program, committed yet another murder, three federal officials testified — now for the second time — on his behalf,” noted Gertner. “FBI officials up the line allowed their employees to break laws, violate rules and ruin lives, interrupted only with the occasional burst of applause.”

    “When [three of the wrongfully convicted men] were sentenced to death,” Gertner wrote, “the FBI did not stand silently; they congratulated the agents for a job well done.”

    As detailed in a 2003 congressional report detailing the widespread and deliberate FBI corruption surrounding its confidential informant program, one agent who was directly involved in the conspiracy to frame four innocents was not just unapologetic, he was defiant.

    When a congressional panel conducting an investigation into the FBI’s handling of the original criminal case and its aftermath asked the agent if he felt remorse for what happened, he all but openly mocked the idea.

    “Would you like tears or something?” the agent shot back. “I believe the FBI handled it properly.”

    The elected lawmakers who investigated the FBI and later compiled a lengthy report on what happened didn’t expect anyone to pore through all 3,500 pages, so they subtly summarized their findings via the name of their report: “EVERYTHING SECRET DEGENERATES: THE FBI’S USE OF MURDERERS AS INFORMANTS.”

    Since then, the FBI and DOJ have reformed the bureau’s guidelines in hopes of avoiding another scandal like the one in Boston. But its shadow still lingers.

    A 2005 report from the DOJ inspector general found widespread violations of DOJ’s confidential informant guidelines by the FBI, which was then headed by Robert Mueller, who now serves as a special counsel investigating illegal foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

    “We found significant problems in the FBI’s compliance with Guidelines’ provisions,” the inspector general’s report noted. The report specifically called out the FBI’s failure to properly document its explicit approval of illegal activities by its informants.

    “In total, we found one or more Guidelines compliance errors in 87 percent of the informant files we examined,” the investigation concluded.

    The inspector general wrote that the FBI’s failure to comply with basic guidelines governing the use of confidential informants was especially troubling given the FBI’s history in Boston. The report provided 47 separate recommendations to the FBI to improve its compliance with DOJ’s spy guidelines.

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    The most chilling finding by the inspector general was that informants were authorized to engage in illegal activity even when the FBI hadn’t yet fully vetted and registered them as confidential informants. In one instance, the FBI authorized one of its informants to commit robbery, a violent crime, despite the fact that such activity is expressly forbidden by DOJ’s guidelines.

    In mid-2006, the issue of FBI spy abuse still had enough resonance that Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who at the time served as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, required then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to answer detailed questions about his agency’s guidelines for and oversight of the FBI’s confidential spy program.

    “We now know that there were over twenty murders by [FBI] informants in Massachusetts, and the FBI never told state and local law enforcement what it knew,” Leahy wrote. “On your watch, what steps are you taking to ensure that past misuse of confidential informants will not happen again? What safeguards in place to prevent abuses from occurring?”

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    In her ruling excoriating the federal government for its willful perversion of justice through its use of confidential informants, federal judge Nancy Gertner forcefully tossed aside the idea, glibly offered by Comey and many of his defenders, that oversight of the FBI and transparency surrounding its activities and behavior somehow constitute a malicious attack on justice or democracy.

    To the contrary, Gertner noted that abuse by law enforcement officials was especially damaging because so much of our justice system depends on a collective trust in the ability of law enforcement officials, many of whom by necessity must operate in the dark, to be honest and forthright.

    “Sadly, when law enforcement perverts its mission, the criminal justice system does not easily self-correct,” she wrote.

    “While judges are scrutinized — our decisions made in public and appealed — law enforcement decisions like these rarely see the light of day. The public necessarily relies on the integrity and professionalism of its officials. It took nearly thirty years to uncover this injustice. It took the extraordinary efforts of a judge, a lawyer, even a reporter, to finally bring out the facts.”

    “Proof of innocence in this democracy should not depend upon efforts as gargantuan as these.”

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    Quote Originally Posted by Thing1 View Post
    You get that it's part of the FBI's job to surveil people & activities...right?
    As James Comey said, facts matter. And given what we know about the FBI’s history with secret spies, facts matter especially when the FBI decides the public doesn’t deserve to know them.

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    You have to wonder just how far down the management chain Comey's corrupt leadership style allowed corrupt middle management to run wild.

    It looks like Comey wasn't concerned about legal niceties like verified FISA, or informant crimes

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    Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper spilled the beans on Tuesday in an exchange with Joy Behar on The View that will undoubtedly make its way into the history books.

    The question was whether the FBI had ordered undercover agents to “spy” on the Trump campaign in the spring and summer of 2016, well before Donald Trump had won the Republican nomination for president.

    Here is the transcript:

    Behar: … So, I ask you, was the FBI spying on Trump’s campaign?

    Clapper: No, they were not. They were spying on, a term I don’t particularly like, but on what the Russians were doing. Trying to understand were the Russians infiltrating, trying to gain access, trying to gain leverage and influence which is what they do.

    Behar: Well, why doesn’t he like that? He should be happy.

    Clapper: Well, he should be.

    Clapper’s admission – for that’s what it was – was astonishing: the FBI had in fact infiltrated the Trump campaign and was spying on the candidate and his team.

    That’s a first. And it’s on the record.


    https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270251/clapper-spills-beans-spygate-kenneth-r-timmerman#.WwZSIkatB6w.twitter

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    like the guy who walks into the bar and shoots the bartender, but claims he only was there to rob the register.
    so he should just get armed robbery charges

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    Quote Originally Posted by noise View Post
    like the guy who walks into the bar and shoots the bartender, but claims he only was there to rob the register. so he should just get armed robbery charges
    Remember all the indignation when Trump claimed that the FBI had “wiretapped” Trump Tower?

    While Trump might not have used the term of art, he was right.

    He and his campaign were the targets of hostile U.S. government surveillance.

    Clapper has tried to wrap himself in the flag, spinning his monumental admission as an effort to “protect” the Trump campaign from nefarious influence from bad Russian actors.

    But such claims fall flat for one simple reason: whenever the FBI discovers through a counter-intelligence investigation that an American has been targeted by a foreign power, they almost always inform the American to warn them off.

    So when did the FBI warn the Trump campaign of the hostile Russian attempts to penetrate the campaign?

    Certainly not in the spring of 2016, when the FBI detected the first effort to penetrate the Trump campaign by a suspected Russian agent, Joseph Mifsud.

    How do we know this?

    Because in their cockamamie indictment of George Papadopolous, Robert Mueller’s legal team told us that a suspected Russian agent, code-named “the Professor,” twice approached Papadopolous in London with an offer to provide damaging information on Hillary Clinton obtained by the Russian government.

    Papadopolous then blabbed about the stolen emails at a bar with an Australian diplomat, an event the FBI claims “triggered” the investigation into the Trump campaign.

    https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270251/clapper-spills-beans-spygate-kenneth-r-timmerman#.WwZSIkatB6w.twitter

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    But such claims fall flat for one simple reason: whenever the FBI discovers through a counter-intelligence investigation that an American has been targeted by a foreign power, they almost always inform the American to warn them off.

    So when did the FBI warn the Trump campaign of the hostile Russian attempts to penetrate the campaign?
    because Trump was the target of the counter-intelligence probe, not "da Russians"..

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    Quote Originally Posted by Thing1 View Post
    You get that it's part of the FBI's job to surveil people & activities...right?
    Then why did they not do the same to Hillary?

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    The left has to go all in to pretend that the FBI didn’t do what Clapper admitted the FBI did

    Why you may ask?

    Simple because they are protecting Obama. When this blows and it will blow, it will take Obama down.

    At some point the left will realize the jig is up and someone will be forced to take the fall for the Deep State. Who that someone is is still being worked out

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    Quote Originally Posted by ptif219 View Post
    Then why did they not do the same to Hillary?
    They did you're just too stupid to know about it

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    Quote Originally Posted by katzgutz View Post
    They did you're just too stupid to know about it
    Is that so?

    When did the FBI spy on the Hildebeast during the 2016 campaign?

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