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Trey Gowdy Didn’t Even See Documents He Claims Exonerate FBI On Spygate:
- Thread starter dukkha
- Start date
You rightys are nuts. Gowdy, a far right tea bagger, who is inside the investigations, said "After a classified briefing he became more convinced the FBI did exactly what you would want them to . Yet you idiots who think there is a secret cabal trying to take down Trump . You think your basement opinions have more weight than his. Trump has made suckers out of you all.
another one who doesn't get it. even the thread title should give you a clueYou rightys are nuts. Gowdy, a far right tea bagger, who is inside the investigations, said "After a classified briefing he became more convinced the FBI did exactly what you would want them to . Yet you idiots who think there is a secret cabal trying to take down Trump . You think your basement opinions have more weight than his. Trump has made suckers out of you all.
Darth Omar
Russian asset
You rightys are nuts. Gowdy, a far right tea bagger, who is inside the investigations, said "After a classified briefing he became more convinced the FBI did exactly what you would want them to . Yet you idiots who think there is a secret cabal trying to take down Trump . You think your basement opinions have more weight than his. Trump has made suckers out of you all.
Yet he has only seen what they want him to see.
Why the secrecy? Wouldn’t it be better to show everything and blow our ‘conspiracy theory’ out of the water?
I trust a "classified briefing" from Rosenweasel about as much as I do Russian dezinformatsiyaYet he has only seen what they want him to see.
Why the secrecy? Wouldn’t it be better to show everything and blow our ‘conspiracy theory’ out of the water?
Darth Omar
Russian asset
I trust a "classified briefing" from Rosenweasel about as much as I do Russian dezinformatsiya
Yup lol.
I don’t know about Gowdy. Why wasn’t he more forthright about not seeing everything?
you get a classified briefing - you think the DoJ isn't a shit house full of partisan rats, and they yank your chain.Yup lol.
I don’t know about Gowdy. Why wasn’t he more forthright about not seeing everything?
It's ez to believe, it takes a healthy skepticism to question the shit sandwich they are serving up
another one who doesn't get it. even the thread title should give you a clue
Another idiot who waves away classified briefings to hold on to a stupid meme. Do you think you know more than Gowdy? He is as far right as you are. He has heard all the fake news that Fox and Brietbart threw out. But actually has real knowledge. Not like you.
Tranquillus in Exile
New member
Then there's McConnell.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Thursday after attending a classified briefing that he continues to support special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, including possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
"I don't really have anything to add to this subject based upon the Gang of Eight briefing that we had today, which was classified."
. . . .
Trump has asserted that Mueller's investigation is a "hoax" and a "witch hunt" intended to undermine his presidency.
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/...backs-mueller-probe-after-classified-briefing
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Thursday after attending a classified briefing that he continues to support special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, including possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
"I don't really have anything to add to this subject based upon the Gang of Eight briefing that we had today, which was classified."
. . . .
Trump has asserted that Mueller's investigation is a "hoax" and a "witch hunt" intended to undermine his presidency.
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/...backs-mueller-probe-after-classified-briefing
The bridge to the Russia investigation wasn’t erected in Moscow during the summer of the 2016 election.
It originated earlier, 1,700 miles away in London, where foreign figures contacted Trump campaign advisers and provided the FBI with hearsay allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, bureau documents and interviews of government insiders reveal. These contacts in spring 2016 — some from trusted intelligence sources, others from Hillary Clinton supporters — occurred well before FBI headquarters authorized an official counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016.
The new timeline makes one wonder: Did the FBI follow its rules governing informants?
Here’s what a congressman and an intelligence expert think.
“The revelation of purposeful contact initiated by alleged confidential human sources prior to any FBI investigation is troublesome,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), an ally of President Trump and chairman of a House subcommittee that’s taking an increasingly aggressive oversight role in the scandal, told me.
Kevin Brock agrees that Congress has legitimate questions. The retired FBI assistant director for intelligence supervised the rewriting of bureau rules governing sources, under then-director Robert Mueller a decade ago. Those rules forbid the FBI from directing a human source to target an American until a formally predicated investigative file is opened.
Brock sees oddities in how the Russia case began. “These types of investigations aren’t normally run by assistant directors and deputy directors at headquarters,” he told me. “All that happens normally in a field office, but that isn’t the case here and so it becomes a red flag. Congress would have legitimate oversight interests in the conditions and timing of the targeting of a confidential human source against a U.S. person.”
Other congressional and law enforcement sources express similar concerns, heightened by FBI communications suggesting political pressures around the time the probe officially opened.
TEXT:“We’re not going to withstand the pressure soon,” FBI lawyer Lisa Page texted fellow agent Peter Strzok on Aug. 3, 2016, days after Strzok opened the official probe and returned from a trip to London. At the time, they were dealing with simultaneous challenges: the wrap-up of the Hillary Clinton email scandal and the start of the Russia-Trump probe.
Over several days, they exchanged texts that appear to express fears of political meddling or leaking by the Obama White House, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the CIA.
TEXT:“This is MUCH more tasty for one of those DOJ aholes to leak,” Strzok wrote as the two FBI colleagues — then having an affair, the bureau later told Congress — debated how long they could delay a CIA-FBI meeting so as to TEXT:“not play into the agency’s BS game.”
They voiced alarm when an FBI colleague — “Liz” — suggested the Obama White House was about to hijack the investigation. TEXT:“Went well, best we could have expected,” Strzok texted Page after an Aug. 5, 2016, meeting. “Other than Liz quote ‘the TEXT: White House is running this.’ ” Page then texted to assure Strzok of a paper trail showing the FBI in charge: TEXT:“We got emails that say otherwise.”
The next day, they went into further detail about their White House concerns. TEXT:“So maybe not the best national security president, but a genuinely good and decent human being,” Page texted Strzok, referencing former President Obama. Strzok replied: TEXT:“Yeah, I like him. Just not a fan of the weakness globally. Was thinking about what the administration will be willing to do re Russia.”
In the end, the FBI secretly investigated the Trump campaign for months, engaging with other agencies on a more limited inquiry of Russian efforts to hack Clinton’s campaign.
The summer 2016 text messages are bookends to a series of London contacts that pre-date the official opening of the investigation and produced the evidence the FBI used that fall to justify its court-ordered surveillance of presidential campaign figures.
According to documents and government interviews, one of the FBI’s most senior counterintelligence agents visited London the first week of May 2016.
Congress never got the FBI to explain that trip — but, soon after it, one of the most consequential moments of the scandal occurred: On May 10, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer met in a London bar with Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, who boasted of knowing that Russia would release dirt on Clinton.
That contact was not immediately reported to U.S. intelligence.
By early June, a second overture to a Trump campaign adviser occurred in London. In a “Dear Carter” email, a Cambridge University graduate student invited Trump campaign adviser Carter Page to attend a popular July security conference in London.
Carter Page declined to tell me the student’s identify but confirmed the student studied under Stefan Halper, a Cambridge University professor who helped organize the conference and has been identified in media reports as a confidential FBI source.
Carter Page said conference organizers paid his airfare and provided him dorm lodging, and Halper spent time with him during the conference, then continued conversations with him for months.
He says Halper asked to be introduced to a high-ranking Trump campaign official, Sam Clovis. On July 16, 2016, Carter Page relayed the overture to Clovis: “Professor Stef Halper spends part of the year in Virginia where he has a home in Falls Church; he's a big fan of yours having followed you on CNN and offered a range of possibilities regarding how he and the University might be able to help.”
Halper, a month later, emailed Clovis, referencing his contacts with Carter Page. “May I suggest we set a time to meet when you are next in Washington?” Halper invited on Aug. 29, 2016.
In the ensuing months, Carter Page, Clovis and Papadopoulos all became FBI focuses. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in 2017 to a misleading statement about his knowledge of facts in the Russia case. Page become the subject of four surveillance warrants, and Clovis was interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller; neither has been accused of wrongdoing.
The FBI received two more contacts about Trump-Russia allegations before formally opening its probe, both from people tied to Clinton.
A week before Carter Page left for London, the FBI was contacted by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, recently hired by the Fusion GPS research firm to find Trump-Russia dirt; Fusion was paid by the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party.
The FBI did not act on Steele’s July 5, 2016, overture but, weeks later, Steele began working with agents. His now-infamous dossier became a key document justifying the surveillance warrants against Carter Page.
On July 23, 2016, shortly after WikiLeaks released the first hacked Clinton campaign emails, the Australian government contacted the State Department’s deputy chief of mission in London about Downer’s May 10 conversation with Papadopoulos. State forwarded the information to FBI headquarters.
A decade earlier, as Australia’s foreign minister, Downer arranged a $25 million grant to the Clinton family foundation to help fight AIDS.
Downer’s information moved FBI headquarters into action. Strzok was dispatched to London; a formal investigation was opened by month’s end.
This timeline doesn’t prove wrongdoing; these contacts could have occurred organically, or been directed legally through intelligence channels. Yet, congressional investigators and FBI insiders tell me, they raise questions about when the investigation officially started and how.
“There is no doubt the FBI kept getting ‘snowflakes’ in spring 2016 pointing toward Russia and Trump, and the bridges to the case ... clearly were built in London,” a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the investigation said.
The question is whether those bridges, as the children’s rhyme goes, come falling down when more facts surface.
http://thehill.com/opinion/white-ho...wn-curious-origins-of-fbis-trump-russia-probe
It originated earlier, 1,700 miles away in London, where foreign figures contacted Trump campaign advisers and provided the FBI with hearsay allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, bureau documents and interviews of government insiders reveal. These contacts in spring 2016 — some from trusted intelligence sources, others from Hillary Clinton supporters — occurred well before FBI headquarters authorized an official counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016.
The new timeline makes one wonder: Did the FBI follow its rules governing informants?
Here’s what a congressman and an intelligence expert think.
“The revelation of purposeful contact initiated by alleged confidential human sources prior to any FBI investigation is troublesome,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), an ally of President Trump and chairman of a House subcommittee that’s taking an increasingly aggressive oversight role in the scandal, told me.
“This new information begs the questions: Who were the informants working for, who were they reporting to and why has the [Department of Justice] and FBI gone to such great lengths to hide these contacts?”
Kevin Brock agrees that Congress has legitimate questions. The retired FBI assistant director for intelligence supervised the rewriting of bureau rules governing sources, under then-director Robert Mueller a decade ago. Those rules forbid the FBI from directing a human source to target an American until a formally predicated investigative file is opened.
Brock sees oddities in how the Russia case began. “These types of investigations aren’t normally run by assistant directors and deputy directors at headquarters,” he told me. “All that happens normally in a field office, but that isn’t the case here and so it becomes a red flag. Congress would have legitimate oversight interests in the conditions and timing of the targeting of a confidential human source against a U.S. person.”
Other congressional and law enforcement sources express similar concerns, heightened by FBI communications suggesting political pressures around the time the probe officially opened.
TEXT:“We’re not going to withstand the pressure soon,” FBI lawyer Lisa Page texted fellow agent Peter Strzok on Aug. 3, 2016, days after Strzok opened the official probe and returned from a trip to London. At the time, they were dealing with simultaneous challenges: the wrap-up of the Hillary Clinton email scandal and the start of the Russia-Trump probe.
Over several days, they exchanged texts that appear to express fears of political meddling or leaking by the Obama White House, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the CIA.
TEXT:“This is MUCH more tasty for one of those DOJ aholes to leak,” Strzok wrote as the two FBI colleagues — then having an affair, the bureau later told Congress — debated how long they could delay a CIA-FBI meeting so as to TEXT:“not play into the agency’s BS game.”
They voiced alarm when an FBI colleague — “Liz” — suggested the Obama White House was about to hijack the investigation. TEXT:“Went well, best we could have expected,” Strzok texted Page after an Aug. 5, 2016, meeting. “Other than Liz quote ‘the TEXT: White House is running this.’ ” Page then texted to assure Strzok of a paper trail showing the FBI in charge: TEXT:“We got emails that say otherwise.”
The next day, they went into further detail about their White House concerns. TEXT:“So maybe not the best national security president, but a genuinely good and decent human being,” Page texted Strzok, referencing former President Obama. Strzok replied: TEXT:“Yeah, I like him. Just not a fan of the weakness globally. Was thinking about what the administration will be willing to do re Russia.”
In the end, the FBI secretly investigated the Trump campaign for months, engaging with other agencies on a more limited inquiry of Russian efforts to hack Clinton’s campaign.
The summer 2016 text messages are bookends to a series of London contacts that pre-date the official opening of the investigation and produced the evidence the FBI used that fall to justify its court-ordered surveillance of presidential campaign figures.
According to documents and government interviews, one of the FBI’s most senior counterintelligence agents visited London the first week of May 2016.
Congress never got the FBI to explain that trip — but, soon after it, one of the most consequential moments of the scandal occurred: On May 10, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer met in a London bar with Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, who boasted of knowing that Russia would release dirt on Clinton.
That contact was not immediately reported to U.S. intelligence.
By early June, a second overture to a Trump campaign adviser occurred in London. In a “Dear Carter” email, a Cambridge University graduate student invited Trump campaign adviser Carter Page to attend a popular July security conference in London.
Carter Page declined to tell me the student’s identify but confirmed the student studied under Stefan Halper, a Cambridge University professor who helped organize the conference and has been identified in media reports as a confidential FBI source.
Carter Page said conference organizers paid his airfare and provided him dorm lodging, and Halper spent time with him during the conference, then continued conversations with him for months.
He says Halper asked to be introduced to a high-ranking Trump campaign official, Sam Clovis. On July 16, 2016, Carter Page relayed the overture to Clovis: “Professor Stef Halper spends part of the year in Virginia where he has a home in Falls Church; he's a big fan of yours having followed you on CNN and offered a range of possibilities regarding how he and the University might be able to help.”
Halper, a month later, emailed Clovis, referencing his contacts with Carter Page. “May I suggest we set a time to meet when you are next in Washington?” Halper invited on Aug. 29, 2016.
In the ensuing months, Carter Page, Clovis and Papadopoulos all became FBI focuses. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in 2017 to a misleading statement about his knowledge of facts in the Russia case. Page become the subject of four surveillance warrants, and Clovis was interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller; neither has been accused of wrongdoing.
The FBI received two more contacts about Trump-Russia allegations before formally opening its probe, both from people tied to Clinton.
A week before Carter Page left for London, the FBI was contacted by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, recently hired by the Fusion GPS research firm to find Trump-Russia dirt; Fusion was paid by the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party.
The FBI did not act on Steele’s July 5, 2016, overture but, weeks later, Steele began working with agents. His now-infamous dossier became a key document justifying the surveillance warrants against Carter Page.
On July 23, 2016, shortly after WikiLeaks released the first hacked Clinton campaign emails, the Australian government contacted the State Department’s deputy chief of mission in London about Downer’s May 10 conversation with Papadopoulos. State forwarded the information to FBI headquarters.
A decade earlier, as Australia’s foreign minister, Downer arranged a $25 million grant to the Clinton family foundation to help fight AIDS.
Downer’s information moved FBI headquarters into action. Strzok was dispatched to London; a formal investigation was opened by month’s end.
This timeline doesn’t prove wrongdoing; these contacts could have occurred organically, or been directed legally through intelligence channels. Yet, congressional investigators and FBI insiders tell me, they raise questions about when the investigation officially started and how.
“There is no doubt the FBI kept getting ‘snowflakes’ in spring 2016 pointing toward Russia and Trump, and the bridges to the case ... clearly were built in London,” a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the investigation said.
The question is whether those bridges, as the children’s rhyme goes, come falling down when more facts surface.
http://thehill.com/opinion/white-ho...wn-curious-origins-of-fbis-trump-russia-probe
To hear the Federal Bureau of Investigation tell it, its decision to launch a counterintelligence probe into a major-party presidential campaign comes down to a foreign tip about a 28-year-old fourth-tier Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos.
The FBI’s media scribes have dutifully reported the bare facts of that “intel.” We are told the infamous tip came from Alexander Downer, at the time the Australian ambassador to the U.K. Mr. Downer invited Mr. Papadopoulos for a drink in early May 2016, where the aide told the ambassador the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. Word of this encounter at some point reached the FBI, inspiring it to launch its counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign on July 31.
Notably (nay, suspiciously) absent or muddled are the details of how and when that information made its way to the FBI, and what exactly was transmitted. A December 2017 New York Times story vaguely explains that the Australians passed the info to “American counterparts” about “two months later,” and that once it “reached the FBI,” the bureau acted. Even the Times admits it’s “not clear” why it took the Aussies so long to flip such a supposedly smoking tip. The story meanwhile slyly leads readers to believe that Mr. Papadopoulos told Mr. Downer that Moscow had “thousands of emails,” but read it closely and the Times in fact never specifies what the Trump aide said, beyond “dirt.”
When Mr. Downer ended his service in the U.K. this April, he sat for an interview with the Australian, a national newspaper, and “spoke for the first time” about the Papadopoulos event. Mr. Downer said he officially reported the Papadopoulos meeting back to Australia “the following day or a day or two after,” as it “seemed quite interesting.” The story nonchalantly notes that “after a period of time, Australia’s ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, passed the information on to Washington.”
My reporting indicates otherwise. A diplomatic source tells me Mr. Hockey neither transmitted any information to the FBI nor was approached by the U.S. about the tip. Rather, it was Mr. Downer who at some point decided to convey his information—to the U.S. Embassy in London.
That matters because it is not how things are normally done. The U.S. is part of Five Eyes, an intelligence network that includes the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The Five Eyes agreement provides that any intelligence goes through the intelligence system of the country that gathered it. This helps guarantee information is securely handled, subjected to quality control, and not made prey to political manipulation. Mr. Downer’s job was to report his meeting back to Canberra, and leave it to Australian intelligence. We also know that it wasn’t Australian intelligence that alerted the FBI. The document that launched the FBI probe contains no foreign intelligence whatsoever. So if Australian intelligence did receive the Downer info, it didn’t feel compelled to act on it.
But the Obama State Department did—and its involvement is news. The Downer details landed with the embassy’s then-chargé d’affaires, Elizabeth Dibble, who previously served as a principal deputy assistant secretary in Mrs. Clinton’s State Department.
When did all this happen, and what came next? Did the info go straight to U.S. intelligence? Or did it instead filter to the wider State Department team, who we already know were helping foment Russia-Trump conspiracy theories? Jonathan Winer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, has publicly admitted to communicating in the summer of 2016 with his friend Christopher Steele, author of the infamous dossier. *Steele Dossier II*
I was unable to reach Mr. Downer for comment and do not know why he chose to go to the embassy. A conservative politician, he was Australia’s longest-serving foreign minister (1996-2007). Sources speculate that he might have felt his many contacts justified reaching out himself.
Meanwhile, something doesn’t gel between Mr. Downer’s account of the conversation and the FBI’s. In his Australian interview, Mr. Downer said Mr. Papadopolous didn’t give specifics. “He didn’t say dirt, he said material that could be damaging to her,” said Mr. Downer. “He didn’t say what it was.” Also: “Nothing he said in that conversation indicated Trump himself had been conspiring with the Russians to collect information on Hillary Clinton.”
For months we’ve been told the FBI acted because it was alarmed that Mr. Papadopoulos knew about those hacked Democratic emails in May, before they became public in June. But according to the tipster himself, Mr. Papadopoulos said nothing about emails. The FBI instead received a report that a far-removed campaign adviser, over drinks, said the Russians had something that might be “damaging” to Hillary. Did this vague statement justify a counterintelligence probe into a presidential campaign, featuring a spy and secret surveillance warrants?
Unlikely. Which leads us back to what did inspire the FBI to act, and when? The Papadopoulos pretext is getting thinner.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cu...b4f818caf1dc6535ba89d&ref=article_email_share
The FBI’s media scribes have dutifully reported the bare facts of that “intel.” We are told the infamous tip came from Alexander Downer, at the time the Australian ambassador to the U.K. Mr. Downer invited Mr. Papadopoulos for a drink in early May 2016, where the aide told the ambassador the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. Word of this encounter at some point reached the FBI, inspiring it to launch its counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign on July 31.
Notably (nay, suspiciously) absent or muddled are the details of how and when that information made its way to the FBI, and what exactly was transmitted. A December 2017 New York Times story vaguely explains that the Australians passed the info to “American counterparts” about “two months later,” and that once it “reached the FBI,” the bureau acted. Even the Times admits it’s “not clear” why it took the Aussies so long to flip such a supposedly smoking tip. The story meanwhile slyly leads readers to believe that Mr. Papadopoulos told Mr. Downer that Moscow had “thousands of emails,” but read it closely and the Times in fact never specifies what the Trump aide said, beyond “dirt.”
When Mr. Downer ended his service in the U.K. this April, he sat for an interview with the Australian, a national newspaper, and “spoke for the first time” about the Papadopoulos event. Mr. Downer said he officially reported the Papadopoulos meeting back to Australia “the following day or a day or two after,” as it “seemed quite interesting.” The story nonchalantly notes that “after a period of time, Australia’s ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, passed the information on to Washington.”
My reporting indicates otherwise. A diplomatic source tells me Mr. Hockey neither transmitted any information to the FBI nor was approached by the U.S. about the tip. Rather, it was Mr. Downer who at some point decided to convey his information—to the U.S. Embassy in London.
That matters because it is not how things are normally done. The U.S. is part of Five Eyes, an intelligence network that includes the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The Five Eyes agreement provides that any intelligence goes through the intelligence system of the country that gathered it. This helps guarantee information is securely handled, subjected to quality control, and not made prey to political manipulation. Mr. Downer’s job was to report his meeting back to Canberra, and leave it to Australian intelligence. We also know that it wasn’t Australian intelligence that alerted the FBI. The document that launched the FBI probe contains no foreign intelligence whatsoever. So if Australian intelligence did receive the Downer info, it didn’t feel compelled to act on it.
But the Obama State Department did—and its involvement is news. The Downer details landed with the embassy’s then-chargé d’affaires, Elizabeth Dibble, who previously served as a principal deputy assistant secretary in Mrs. Clinton’s State Department.
When did all this happen, and what came next? Did the info go straight to U.S. intelligence? Or did it instead filter to the wider State Department team, who we already know were helping foment Russia-Trump conspiracy theories? Jonathan Winer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, has publicly admitted to communicating in the summer of 2016 with his friend Christopher Steele, author of the infamous dossier. *Steele Dossier II*
I was unable to reach Mr. Downer for comment and do not know why he chose to go to the embassy. A conservative politician, he was Australia’s longest-serving foreign minister (1996-2007). Sources speculate that he might have felt his many contacts justified reaching out himself.
Meanwhile, something doesn’t gel between Mr. Downer’s account of the conversation and the FBI’s. In his Australian interview, Mr. Downer said Mr. Papadopolous didn’t give specifics. “He didn’t say dirt, he said material that could be damaging to her,” said Mr. Downer. “He didn’t say what it was.” Also: “Nothing he said in that conversation indicated Trump himself had been conspiring with the Russians to collect information on Hillary Clinton.”
For months we’ve been told the FBI acted because it was alarmed that Mr. Papadopoulos knew about those hacked Democratic emails in May, before they became public in June. But according to the tipster himself, Mr. Papadopoulos said nothing about emails. The FBI instead received a report that a far-removed campaign adviser, over drinks, said the Russians had something that might be “damaging” to Hillary. Did this vague statement justify a counterintelligence probe into a presidential campaign, featuring a spy and secret surveillance warrants?
Unlikely. Which leads us back to what did inspire the FBI to act, and when? The Papadopoulos pretext is getting thinner.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cu...b4f818caf1dc6535ba89d&ref=article_email_share
New evidence contradicts the DOJ/FBI timeline leaked to the media
Sources say the Trump investigation initiated overseas in Great Britain, not the United States
John Brennan, James Clapper, Samantha Power, Loretta Lynch were all briefed by James Comey on the alleged Russian interference into the Trump campaign, yet the Trump campaign was left in the dark
According to reports, Germany, Poland and Estonia also shared communications related to members of the Trump campaign with the United States
Sources say the Trump investigation initiated overseas in Great Britain, not the United States
John Brennan, James Clapper, Samantha Power, Loretta Lynch were all briefed by James Comey on the alleged Russian interference into the Trump campaign, yet the Trump campaign was left in the dark
According to reports, Germany, Poland and Estonia also shared communications related to members of the Trump campaign with the United States
Conservatives here are revealing their own shortsightedness, as I noted earlier, conservatives for eight years have bought Gowdy's opinion and remarks pretty much carte blanche yet starring yesterday they are now questioning him and how he formulated his opinion largely cause they didn't like what he said
And then they once again as a rebuttal they regurgitate all the inneundos and scenarios we've been seeing for over a year now, nothing new, same old, same old, none of which has been proven or validated beyond a partisan author's opinion piece on a partisan source
And then they once again as a rebuttal they regurgitate all the inneundos and scenarios we've been seeing for over a year now, nothing new, same old, same old, none of which has been proven or validated beyond a partisan author's opinion piece on a partisan source
The document that launched the FBI probe contains no foreign intelligence whatsoever.
How does he know what it contained???!!!
How does he know what it contained???!!!
Don't ask questions that challenges their scenario, all you'll get is yet another regurgitation of all the circumstantial innuendos offered by opinion writers on right wing websites
Yup lol.
I don’t know about Gowdy. Why wasn’t he more forthright about not seeing everything?
To give his opinion?
Shut up you fucking retard.
Darth Omar
Russian asset
To give his opinion?
Shut up you fucking retard.
It would be nice to hear the opinion from someone who has all the facts in hand.
Not counting the Brennan or Clapper weasel-duo.
do some research.How does he know what it contained???!!!
The founding date of July 2016 is Steele dossier. Now we are finding out the investigation actually stated in Spring 2016..so the investigation started earlier then the EC says it does
https://spectator.org/the-counterintelligence-probes-phantom-origin/
Brennan’s bumptiousness was so great in pushing and publicizing this bogus probe that even Harry Reid would remark upon it to David Corn and Michael Isikoff. Brennan had an “ulterior motive” in leaking the existence of the probe to him, Reid told the authors. The very thought of Donald Trump as president made Brennan see red and caused him to lose all judgment.
I’d be careful about reporting that Obama said there was no wiretapping,” Jon Favreau, one of Obama’s speechwriters, tweeted out in 2017. Members of the media, loath to let anything complicate their anti-Trump propaganda, chided him for this unhelpful slip and he quickly withdrew it, saying that he deferred to James Clapper’s denial of any wiretaps. But Favreau had already given himself away. In retrospect, the tweet is even more telling and confirms that knowledge of the spying was widespread at Obama’s White House. If a White House speechwriter far from the action knew about warrants on Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn, who didn’t?
From the beginning of this farce, the Obama administration has shifted back and forth between taking pride in the spying and denying its existence. We are back in the denial phase. But at the height of the hysteria after Trump’s election and inauguration, members of the Obama administration wanted everyone to know they had been spying on Trump and feared that he would destroy their “intelligence.” They leaked to the New York Times in March 2017 that they had “scrambled” to preserve the supposed damning results of their spying, in order to leave a “clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.”
By “intelligence,” they meant their own feverishly partisan sifting through negligible, half-cocked leads. Had there been any substance to their “intelligence,” they would have leaked it out. Having failed, they still thought they deserved an A for effort. They also saw the future political benefits of sliming Trump with innuendo, striking a posture that can be summed up as: Trust us, you guys, what we have found is really bad, but we can’t tell you yet. They couldn’t tell us because they had nothing to tell, but they needed to leave the impression of yet-to-be-disclosed dirt in order to trigger the Mueller investigation, and thanks to the recusal of Jeff Sessions they pulled it off.
Apologists for the Obama administration’s spying are still playing this game, wallowing in what they would have once called unconscionable McCarthyism. They make sinister references to “intelligence,” never tell us what it is, and then paper over the nothingness with blather about the “depth” of this or that person’s “concern.” Christopher Steele was “worried,” John Brennan was “worried,” and so on. Who cares? Where is the evidence?
So far the “evidence” justifying the Obama administration’s spying on the Trump campaign has been stunning in its simpleminded crudity. The “evidence” includes: candidate Trump didn’t condemn Putin enough, Trump once jokingly told Russia to look for Hillary’s deleted emails, the RNC strengthened (but not sufficiently so to the satisfaction of the media) a Russian plank in its platform, Stefan Halper saw Michael Flynn talking to a Russian woman at Cambridge back in 2014, Carter Page gave a speech in Moscow, Russian government officials were overheard talking about the Trump campaign (this is non-evidence hyped as worrisome “signals intelligence” that is common about any presidential campaign), and an Australian diplomat had a chat at a London bar with a Trump campaign volunteer who said something speculative that anybody reading the newspaper could have also ventured.
Is the threshold for something as significant as spying on an opposing presidential campaign really this low? The answer is yes, if those with the power to start the probe are partisans in the grip of Trump Derangement Syndrome. The capacity of John Brennan and Jim Comey to believe the worst about Trump lies at the root of this debacle and explains why they would treat his campaign as a criminal enterprise to be infiltrated.
In recent days, the chattering class has tried out the feeble, question-begging cry: Well, what were they supposed to do? Ignore this “troubling information”? It is hilarious to watch Philip Agee-quoting ACLU donors and former cheerleaders of the Church committee suddenly turn into the most paranoid, gung-ho institutionalists, for whom every government investigation, no matter how flimsy its foundation, deserves a robust defense. My gosh, they say, we are talking about “suspected Russian agents”! How could you not shadow them? Never mind that the FBI so far is 0 for 4; never mind that the FBI didn’t have anything close to a justification for placing Page, Papadopoulos, Manafort, and Flynn in the category of probable Russian agents.
Just as a basketball player who fouls his way into the key and then misses the dunk doesn’t want anyone to see a replay of the game, so the Obama administration doesn’t want the public to see the tape, as it were, of how it sought FISA warrants based on Hillary’s campaign smears, ran a spy into the Trump’s campaign ranks, and still came up empty. It shows them to be utterly corrupt and incompetent asses, engaged in a probe that was desperately searching for justifying evidence, not based on any. Hence, the need for a spy to groom and entrap members of the campaign.
The whole thing was insanely ill-advised. If in one of the propaganda pieces it spoon-feeds to the New York Times, FBI officials just said something like — “This wasn’t our idea. John Brennan and others in the Obama administration took us for a ride. They wanted us to pursue their partisan hunches about the Trump campaign. It was dumb, but we did it and found nothing” — that would be comprehensible. But instead we get relentless lying about the probity, value, and firm origins of the counterintelligence probe. They are all so proud of their fruitless non-spying! But, oh by the way, nobody in the Trump campaign was a Russian agent and we have just hobbled the presidency for a year and a half, with a nation-roiling impeachment attempt in the offing!
Naturally, the Stupid Party is hitting the brakes, not gas, on this outrageous scandal. Leave it to the Marco Rubios and Trey Gowdys to sanitize the worst spying on the GOP ever. Here we have the most partisan members of the Obama administration using Stefan Halper, a spy who endorsed Hillary Clinton in the midst of his spying, to infiltrate the Trump campaign — and Gowdy and Rubio call it non-partisan, non-spying! It all looks kosher to them. Well, that settles it. Nothing to see here. The FBI, according to Gowdy, deserves our hearty thanks for throwing the country into chaos on a partisan hunch. It is what every American should “want” FBI agents to do. While we are at it, apparently, we should thank the CIA for plunging the Middle East into untold bloodshed and chaos with its half-baked WMD assessment. That too deserved an A for effort, we were told.
How the ruling class closes ranks around lying incompetents, then tries to hector Americans into not seeing what is in front of their noses, is amazing to watch. That major figures of the GOP would join in this charade is sickening but typical and tells you where all of this is headed if the rank-and-file don’t light a fire under GOP leaders. Left to their own cowardly, doltish instincts, they will succumb to the media’s propaganda and attach Trump’s neck to the albatross that by rights should be Obama’s.
https://spectator.org/hit-gas-not-brakes-on-spygate/
From the beginning of this farce, the Obama administration has shifted back and forth between taking pride in the spying and denying its existence. We are back in the denial phase. But at the height of the hysteria after Trump’s election and inauguration, members of the Obama administration wanted everyone to know they had been spying on Trump and feared that he would destroy their “intelligence.” They leaked to the New York Times in March 2017 that they had “scrambled” to preserve the supposed damning results of their spying, in order to leave a “clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.”
By “intelligence,” they meant their own feverishly partisan sifting through negligible, half-cocked leads. Had there been any substance to their “intelligence,” they would have leaked it out. Having failed, they still thought they deserved an A for effort. They also saw the future political benefits of sliming Trump with innuendo, striking a posture that can be summed up as: Trust us, you guys, what we have found is really bad, but we can’t tell you yet. They couldn’t tell us because they had nothing to tell, but they needed to leave the impression of yet-to-be-disclosed dirt in order to trigger the Mueller investigation, and thanks to the recusal of Jeff Sessions they pulled it off.
Apologists for the Obama administration’s spying are still playing this game, wallowing in what they would have once called unconscionable McCarthyism. They make sinister references to “intelligence,” never tell us what it is, and then paper over the nothingness with blather about the “depth” of this or that person’s “concern.” Christopher Steele was “worried,” John Brennan was “worried,” and so on. Who cares? Where is the evidence?
So far the “evidence” justifying the Obama administration’s spying on the Trump campaign has been stunning in its simpleminded crudity. The “evidence” includes: candidate Trump didn’t condemn Putin enough, Trump once jokingly told Russia to look for Hillary’s deleted emails, the RNC strengthened (but not sufficiently so to the satisfaction of the media) a Russian plank in its platform, Stefan Halper saw Michael Flynn talking to a Russian woman at Cambridge back in 2014, Carter Page gave a speech in Moscow, Russian government officials were overheard talking about the Trump campaign (this is non-evidence hyped as worrisome “signals intelligence” that is common about any presidential campaign), and an Australian diplomat had a chat at a London bar with a Trump campaign volunteer who said something speculative that anybody reading the newspaper could have also ventured.
Is the threshold for something as significant as spying on an opposing presidential campaign really this low? The answer is yes, if those with the power to start the probe are partisans in the grip of Trump Derangement Syndrome. The capacity of John Brennan and Jim Comey to believe the worst about Trump lies at the root of this debacle and explains why they would treat his campaign as a criminal enterprise to be infiltrated.
In recent days, the chattering class has tried out the feeble, question-begging cry: Well, what were they supposed to do? Ignore this “troubling information”? It is hilarious to watch Philip Agee-quoting ACLU donors and former cheerleaders of the Church committee suddenly turn into the most paranoid, gung-ho institutionalists, for whom every government investigation, no matter how flimsy its foundation, deserves a robust defense. My gosh, they say, we are talking about “suspected Russian agents”! How could you not shadow them? Never mind that the FBI so far is 0 for 4; never mind that the FBI didn’t have anything close to a justification for placing Page, Papadopoulos, Manafort, and Flynn in the category of probable Russian agents.
Just as a basketball player who fouls his way into the key and then misses the dunk doesn’t want anyone to see a replay of the game, so the Obama administration doesn’t want the public to see the tape, as it were, of how it sought FISA warrants based on Hillary’s campaign smears, ran a spy into the Trump’s campaign ranks, and still came up empty. It shows them to be utterly corrupt and incompetent asses, engaged in a probe that was desperately searching for justifying evidence, not based on any. Hence, the need for a spy to groom and entrap members of the campaign.
The whole thing was insanely ill-advised. If in one of the propaganda pieces it spoon-feeds to the New York Times, FBI officials just said something like — “This wasn’t our idea. John Brennan and others in the Obama administration took us for a ride. They wanted us to pursue their partisan hunches about the Trump campaign. It was dumb, but we did it and found nothing” — that would be comprehensible. But instead we get relentless lying about the probity, value, and firm origins of the counterintelligence probe. They are all so proud of their fruitless non-spying! But, oh by the way, nobody in the Trump campaign was a Russian agent and we have just hobbled the presidency for a year and a half, with a nation-roiling impeachment attempt in the offing!
Naturally, the Stupid Party is hitting the brakes, not gas, on this outrageous scandal. Leave it to the Marco Rubios and Trey Gowdys to sanitize the worst spying on the GOP ever. Here we have the most partisan members of the Obama administration using Stefan Halper, a spy who endorsed Hillary Clinton in the midst of his spying, to infiltrate the Trump campaign — and Gowdy and Rubio call it non-partisan, non-spying! It all looks kosher to them. Well, that settles it. Nothing to see here. The FBI, according to Gowdy, deserves our hearty thanks for throwing the country into chaos on a partisan hunch. It is what every American should “want” FBI agents to do. While we are at it, apparently, we should thank the CIA for plunging the Middle East into untold bloodshed and chaos with its half-baked WMD assessment. That too deserved an A for effort, we were told.
How the ruling class closes ranks around lying incompetents, then tries to hector Americans into not seeing what is in front of their noses, is amazing to watch. That major figures of the GOP would join in this charade is sickening but typical and tells you where all of this is headed if the rank-and-file don’t light a fire under GOP leaders. Left to their own cowardly, doltish instincts, they will succumb to the media’s propaganda and attach Trump’s neck to the albatross that by rights should be Obama’s.
https://spectator.org/hit-gas-not-brakes-on-spygate/
Darth Omar
Russian asset
I’d be careful about reporting that Obama said there was no wiretapping,” Jon Favreau, one of Obama’s speechwriters, tweeted out in 2017. Members of the media, loath to let anything complicate their anti-Trump propaganda, chided him for this unhelpful slip and he quickly withdrew it, saying that he deferred to James Clapper’s denial of any wiretaps. But Favreau had already given himself away. In retrospect, the tweet is even more telling and confirms that knowledge of the spying was widespread at Obama’s White House. If a White House speechwriter far from the action knew about warrants on Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn, who didn’t? [Spectator link]
“I’d be careful about reporting that Obama said there was no wiretapping” lol.
It will be ignored because it’s an opinion piece—but it’s one of the better ones I’ve seen in the sense it captures the essence of The Swamp in all its incompetent malfeasance.
Obama’s own speech writer knew of the wiretapping. Let that sink in. Flip it over, and let’s say someone on Trump’s staff Tweeted something like ‘I’d be careful about reporting that Junior didn’t get dirt on Hillary at The Meeting’.
Someone would be getting the 3 am visit from the feds.
That’s exactly how upside down this whole charade is.
“I’d be careful about reporting that Obama said there was no wiretapping” lol.
It will be ignored because it’s an opinion piece—but it’s one of the better ones I’ve seen in the sense it captures the essence of The Swamp in all its incompetent malfeasance.
Obama’s own speech writer knew of the wiretapping. Let that sink in. Flip it over, and let’s say someone on Trump’s staff Tweeted something like ‘I’d be careful about reporting that Junior didn’t get dirt on Hillary at The Meeting’.
Someone would be getting the 3 am visit from the feds.
That’s exactly how upside down this whole charade is.