April 11, 2019

"The F.B.I.’s surveillance of [John] Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose."

"What is more surprising, and ultimately more unsettling, is the degree to which the surveillance turns out to have been intertwined with electoral politics. At the time of the John Sinclair rally, there was talk that Lennon would join a national concert tour aimed at encouraging young people to get involved in politics — and at defeating President Nixon, who was running for re-election. There were plans to end the tour with a huge rally at the Republican National Convention. The F.B.I.’s timing is noteworthy. Lennon had been involved in high-profile antiwar activities going back to 1969, but the bureau did not formally open its investigation until January 1972 — the year of Nixon’s re-election campaign. In March, just as the presidential campaign was heating up, the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to renew Lennon’s visa, and began deportation proceedings. Nixon was re-elected in November, and a month later, the F.B.I. closed its investigation. If Lennon was considering actively opposing Nixon’s re-election, the spying and the threat of deportation had their intended effect. In May, he announced that he would not be part of any protest activities at the Republican National Convention, and he did not actively participate in the presidential campaign. After revelations about the many domestic SPYING abuses of the 1960’s and 1970’s — including the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. — new restrictions were put in place. But these protections are being eroded today, with the president’s claim of sweeping new authority to pursue the war on terror...."

From "While Nixon Campaigned, the F.B.I. Watched John Lennon," published in The New York Times in 2006. I wanted to reach outside of the Trump Era for something to help people think about William Barr's statement, yesterday, that the FBI spied on Donald Trump's campaign in 2016.

Here's the Wikipedia article on the John Sinclair rally. Lots of video of the event on YouTube.

The rally took place in December 1971, under President Nixon, who was facing reelection in 1972. The NYT piece, which uses the term "domestic spying" as a matter of course, was published during the Bush administration, when there was a high level of vigilance about domestic surveillance. The alleged surveillance of the Donald Trump campaign took place under President Obama, who, obviously, deserves the same degree of scrutiny as any other President.

ADDED: Also from the NYT in 2006, there's "F.B.I. Struggling to Reinvent Itself to Fight Terror":
Five years after the Sept. 11 attacks spurred a new mission, F.B.I. culture still respects door-kicking investigators more than deskbound analysts sifting through tidbits of data. The uneasy transition into a spy organization has prompted criticism from those who believe that the bureau cannot competently gather domestic intelligence, and others, including some insiders, who fear that it can....

[I]f making arrests is no longer the top priority, many agents fear that an ill-defined quest for domestic intelligence is likely to lead to political trouble, as the hunt for Communists in the 1960’s led to surveillance on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon. Michael Rolince, a veteran F.B.I. counterterrorism official who retired last year, said the attorney general’s investigative guidelines, first imposed as a reform in 1976, “are absolutely necessary to keep F.B.I. agents out of trouble.”....

Mr. Mudd said he knew that concern about civil liberties was “in the DNA” at the F.B.I., and he recently read a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, whose long tenure as director was marred by abuses, to recall the dangers of uncontrolled domestic spying. Still, he said, “I do bristle a bit at people saying, ‘You want to just go back to the 60’s and 70’s.’ ”...
ALSO: Now, I'm looking at today's New York Times and see a gigantic set of articles on the surveillance of private citizens. There are at least 12 articles collected under the heading "The Privacy Project," introduced like this:
Companies and governments are gaining new powers to follow people across the internet and around the world, and even to peer into their genomes. The benefits of such advances have been apparent for years; the costs — in anonymity, even autonomy — are now becoming clearer. The boundaries of privacy are in dispute, and its future is in doubt. Citizens, politicians and business leaders are asking if societies are making the wisest tradeoffs. The Times is embarking on this months long project to explore the technology and where it’s taking us, and to convene debate about how it can best help realize human potential.
The collected articles are not new. They include "The Domestic Spying Trap," an editorial from 2003:
The Central Intelligence Agency's supporters in Congress recently made a quiet effort to give it broad new powers to engage in domestic spying....

Intelligence gathering has long been divided between the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose jurisdiction is domestic, and the C.I.A., which operates overseas. The C.I.A. charter, a federal statute, prohibits it from engaging in ''law enforcement'' and ''internal security functions'' -- and from exercising subpoena power. But at the direction of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the C.I.A. engaged in illegal spying against domestic targets, including antiwar protesters.

The F.B.I. engaged in its own abuses by spying on antiwar groups and civil rights leaders, but it now operates under guidelines governing its agents' actions. Because its goal is to collect evidence that can be used in court, it has an interest in following the law.... 

58 comments:

rhhardin said...

The FBI was behind Yoko Ono too.

rhhardin said...

Clicking older posts gets you older posts. It's an odd change though.

Henry said...

This should not be news to anyone with a brain or a conscience.

rhhardin said...

With mega-data running around all over the place, it's hard to see how the FBI could avoid archiving and cataloging it even if it wanted to, just as a hedge against value in a future legitimate case.

Targeting for extra collection without cause though would be wrong.

rhhardin said...

Windows offers the option to send out fake MAC addresses (a number that uniquely identifies your machine). Maybe the same ought to be allowed with social security numbers, so you can move out west and start over, making useless all the collected data to that point.

Henry said...

There's an entertaining history of populist digs at the FBI.

You see it in various movies, most notably Die Hard, in which the NYC detective and the LA patrolman show up the FBI terrorist experts.

Tony Hillerman's detective novels also take shots at the FBI for vulturing crime scenes.

rhhardin said...

Blackface is okay if its only purpose is to defeat facial recognition cameras.

n.n said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
n.n said...

While the administration was carrying out domestic spying, the press was running a cover-up and disinformation campaigns. War without borders. Refugee crises without commitment. Immigration reform to gerrymander districts. Social justice in lieu of justice. Clear and rabid diversity. Children in cages. The tell-tale hearts beating ever louder and older. Here's to progress.

Wince said...

From "While Nixon Campaigned, the F.B.I. Watched John Lennon," published in The New York Times in 2006. I wanted to reach outside of the Trump Era for something to help people think about William Barr's statement, yesterday, that the FBI spied on Donald Trump's campaign in 2016.

The New & Improved Obama surveillance state.

"That was then, this is now."

H said...

And Cointelpro. What rankles me is people on the left who were justifiably alarmed with use of DoJ FBI CIA< etc. efforts to interfere with politics when those efforts were done to harm candidates and groups they supported, but who seem to think it's perfectly okay when those efforts were done to harm candidates and groups they opposed. It's always wrong, if done by Nixon or if done by Obama. And it does seriously undermine our political system and culture.

rhhardin said...

Also allowed against facial recognition cameras are stretching eyes into oriental shape as done in old Charlie Chan movies, and Groucho noses.

Kevin said...

When Obama did it, it was for their own protection.

AllenS said...

Ah, back to normal.

Ann Althouse said...

"Clicking older posts gets you older posts. It's an odd change though."

I changed the setting back to the old way. Thanks for the heads up.

What I was trying to do was to keep the day's posts on the front page, but the setting caused the new day to bump the previous day.

Bay Area Guy said...

1. Did the FBI spy on John Lennon?

Yes, see story above.

2. Did the FBI spy on Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Yes, see various Memos/Recordings by William Sullivan (Asst Director of FBI)

3. Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign in 2016?

How dare you even ask this dangerous and dubious question?!!? My God how reckless and irresponsible can a person be?!!?! For the love of Christ, you must instantaneously RETRACT this nefarious insinuation!!!!!

Temujin said...

But under Obama, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and IRS all worked as an arm of the Executive Branch to spy on private citizens. I'm being too generous. They worked as an arm of the Democrat Party, which is why they are all so loudly dismissive of Willam Barr's testimony. Under Obama, the IRS stymied conservative groups activities prior to an election, while the larger, more dangerous process took place in Obama's last year/months in office: unmasking and spying on several members of the campaign team from the opposing party in the upcoming Presidential election. None of this is small stuff. There should be heads rolling.

Right now, Lois Lerner's head is probably rolling on a chaise lounge in Aruba.
James Comey is writing another book.
James Clapper is setting his schedule on MSNBC & CNN.
James Brennan is following around Joe & Mika asking them, when he can get on again.
Peter Strzok is writing a book.
Lisa Page is hoping for a job in the Sanders Administration.
Bruce and Nellie Ohr are about to fully retire.
All are collecting nice pensions via your tax dollars.

While Google & Amazon both listen to, and read anything you say or write.

Nice country you have there. It's be a shame if anything were to happen to it.

CJinPA said...

That is some great perspective.

This jumped out at me:

"At the time of the John Sinclair rally, there was talk that Lennon would join a national concert tour aimed at encouraging young people to get involved in politics..."

"There were plans to end the tour with a huge rally at the Republican National Convention.

It doesn't seem either of those things happened. The "talk" and "plans" do a lot of the heavy lifting in this narrative.

daskol said...

I was very upset about the obvious abuses of power by the federal govt law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and the disinformation campaign in the press, when it became clear to me what was going on around two years ago. So much time has passed, though, and it's difficult to sustain any outrage throughout the slow motion trainwreck of the failed coup attempt and the beginning of the denouement we are witnessing for its perpetrators. I'd still like to see punishment of the key actors, as something just and necessary and to discourage this thing in the future. But the incredibly long time scale on which perfidy of this scale plays out diminishes not only the emotional benefits of punishing the crime, but also any benefits in terms of restoring trust in our civil and political institutions. Bummer.

YoungHegelian said...

Within any form of government, or even within large organizations of any type (e.g. the clergy sex scandal within the RCC), the great moral question remains: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The Founding Fathers did their best, but modern government is just too big & too complicated. It's clear that in this case separation of powers didn't work. What worked, as much as it pains me to admit it, is that we had Donald Trump as the right man in the right place at the right time. He just son-of-a-bitched his way through.

H said...

Before some dredges up some nut (Roger Stone??) who loves Nixon and hates Obama, let me remind everyone that it was a meeting with Republican leaders of the House (Rhodes) and Senate (Scott), and the most recent Republican presidential nominee (Goldwater) that convinced Nixon he must resign. The Republican establishment presented a solid front that the activities involved in covering up Watergate -- attempts by Nixon to use the CIA to influence the FBI investigation -- were not acceptable and could not be defended.

Birkel said...

But, Althouse!
Orange Man Bad.
And other reasons.
/Leftist Collectivist

The power sought by the Left is power for its own sake.
It is the Will to Power.
The Will to Rule.

Perhaps if they knew how to craft magical rings...

Shouting Thomas said...

Democrats feel comfortable about breaking the law when they hold office because they are at war with the bigots.

They have taken the language of the 60s civil rights movement into the arena of public office.

So, we routinely hear Democratic office holders claiming to "speak truth to power" when they are power. Dems have created a bizarre world in which government office holders are engaging in "civil disobedience" against the will of the electorate, with their behavior justified by the great war against the bigots.

In short, Democrats have legitimized breaking the law when in office. They're doing it for our own moral good.

Ralph L said...

CNN (and probably others) linked Trump's recent complaints to Mueller's investigation instead of the spying that led to it. They must assume they're our only source for news so their deceit won't be noticed.

McCabe and Brennan et al can choose between treachery or paranoia. Incompetence was also a factor, but they won't choose that one.

M Jordan said...

All the gears in the present spy ring — Clapper, Brennan, Stryock, Yates, et al — have taken comfort in the fact they are under the Obama umbrella. Since Obama is untouchable, they can all eventually say “I was just following orders from Our Lord and Savior.” Which, I’m sure, they were. Clapper has already floated that. They will never be accused of throwing Obama under the bus because ... you can’t. There ain’t no bus big enough to roll over Our Lord and Savior.

So it’s all just a game.

Phil 314 said...

When I see a headline like "While Nixon Campaigned, the F.B.I. Watched John Lennon," My first thought is “Well that’s Nixon” and a flood of impressions formed during that come to mind: paranoid, insecure, power hungry etc. What survives that era (during my adolescent and early adult years) are not so much the specific facts but the deep narratives created by the media and later reinforced by that same media, now older and in book form. That narrative overwhelms memories of “opening up China” or “Bring us together”

Will I (or we) ever have those same thoughts and memories of the Obama years? Can this Obama admin/FBI scandal explode to the point where we forget “Hope and Change” and healthcare reform?

mockturtle said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Wince said...

But the incredibly long time scale on which perfidy of this scale plays out diminishes not only the emotional benefits of punishing the crime, but also any benefits in terms of restoring trust in our civil and political institutions. Bummer.

That aspect of the Clinton Playbook has gotten stronger, for one side, with the in-the-tank press coverage and the accelerating news cycle.

But I think there are countervailing forces as well, like when the scales are finally lifted -- if they are ever lifted -- from the eyes of free thinkers.

mockturtle said...

Tony Hillerman's detective novels also take shots at the FBI for vulturing crime scenes.

The FBI certainly slapped a lid on the Las Vegas shooting investigation. And fast.

narciso said...

Yes and the dems have a wry laugh at that, Clinton and Obama have gotten away with things Nixon wouldn't have dared dream actually supply a drug cartel with weapons, shut down civilian opposition with irs (Nixon only proposed it)

Birkel said...

Phil 3:14

Funny, because when I think of Nixon I think of him growing the power of the federal government. He crafted the tent directly on top of the camel's nose with the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. The EPA has power to destroy commerce because of Nixon. Paul Ehrlich smiles.

He also gave us the Endangered Species Act. That also allows the federal government to stop commerce. Rachel Carson smiles.

Richard Nixon also gave us globalist and Big Government George HW Bush as the Ambassador to the UN. That led HW to be 2nd Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China after Nixon opened China. And that got Reagan saddled with HW as VP.

And that gave us George W Bush.

So, really, all I care about Nixon is that he grew the government and promoted others who grew the government even more. It's all policy related and Nixon was awful.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Outstanding post Althouse. Providing context for current events by quoting the very media organs that are coming under scrutiny now. The tone of historical disapproval in the NYT is unmistakeable. Will they maintain there anti-domestic spying stance now that their ox is being gored?

Jeff Brokaw said...

Young Hegelian @ 7:59 said “It's clear that in this case separation of powers didn't work. What worked, as much as it pains me to admit it, is that we had Donald Trump as the right man in the right place at the right time. He just son-of-a-bitched his way through.”

This x 1000.

Think about that. It took Donald Trump to expose the rot among our “elites”.

!!!!

narciso said...

Trump is restoring that balance, Nixon embracing the genghis Khan of the 20th century, was not a good look it also gave us the Khmer rouge

narciso said...

However Reagan wasnt readily available at that time and scranton and Rockefeller were worse.

Jeff Brokaw said...

The coming unwinding of cognitive dissonance is going to be painful for some but entertaining and satisfying for others.

It has to happen though. We need a reset in a lot of people’s brains when 40% of the population is willing to unleash the formidable power of the federal government on people they don’t like.

Especially when most of those 40% are IN that federal government.

John henry said...

So john lennon planned to interfere in a US presidential election?

Isn't that illegal?

Why would it be wrong for the fbi to spy on him to see if he really was interfereing?

Why would it be wrong to use every means available to prevent it?

Oh. Silly me. It was JOHN FREAKING LENNON!! so he gets a pass.

John Henry

Unknown said...

So the FBI has interests then...

Michael S. Kochin said...

In 2006, the New York Times thought it was wrong for a President FBI to prevent foreign interference in US elections.

Bruce Hayden said...

All the gears in the present spy ring — Clapper, Brennan, Stryock, Yates, et al — have taken comfort in the fact they are under the Obama umbrella. Since Obama is untouchable, they can all eventually say “I was just following orders from Our Lord and Savior.” Which, I’m sure, they were. Clapper has already floated that. They will never be accused of throwing Obama under the bus because ... you can’t. There ain’t no bus big enough to roll over Our Lord and Savior.

Following the orders of their boss was known in an earlier time as the "Nuremberg Defense". Nazi war criminals tried that - Hitler ordered them to kill all the Jews, Gypsies, Gays, etc. And they were just obeying orders. My grandfather served on a war crimes tribunal that hung people like that.

Big Mike said...

Tony Hillerman's detective novels also take shots at the FBI for vulturing crime scenes.

When I read of Hillerman’s death eleven years ago and realized that there would be no more novels about Navajo tribal detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, I felt thoroughly bereft. I heartily recommend the books. Also, at the other end of the continent, the recent movie “Wind River.”

Hillerman gets his digs in on other ripe targets. For instance he characterized Navajo families as consisting of a husband, a wife, two children, and a graduate student in anthropology.

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

"Oh. Silly me. It was JOHN FREAKING LENNON!! so he gets a pass. "

Why does Remington Steele get a pass? Didn't he and Hillary commit British collusion?

Big Mike said...

Think about that. It took Donald Trump to expose the rot among our “elites”.

@Jeff Brokaw, it does explain Chuck’s hatred, though, doesn’t it?

dreams said...

Its seems the liberal media strategy is to portray the spying on Trump as just business as usual so no big deal.

mccullough said...

The FBI had information that foreign national John Lennon was an agent of the Soviet Union seeking to meddle in the election and collude with the McGovern campaign.

Give Peace a Chance was a Soviet disinformation operation.

Michael K said...

When I read of Hillerman’s death eleven years ago and realized that there would be no more novels about Navajo tribal detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, I felt thoroughly bereft.

Our daughter is also a big fan. I found Navajo tribal police badge at a gun show and gave it to her. The badge was a temporary one given to officers who have lost theirs. It said "Navajo Tribal Police" so she was happy,

DavidD said...

“The NYT piece, which uses the term ‘domestic spying’ as a matter of course, was published during the Bush administration, when there was a high level of vigilance about domestic surveillance. The alleged surveillance of the Donald Trump campaign took place under President Obama, who, obviously, deserves the same degree of scrutiny as any other President” but who, obviously, is a Democrat.

Yancey Ward said...

Yeah, this is what Lee Moore was parodying in the later thread.

Yancey Ward said...

And did everyone else notice that Inga, Roesch/Voltaire, Howard, and Readering somehow all failed to post any comment on this thread? Even Pecan Pie Detective failed to show up.

Anonymous said...

So Lennon, a foreign national was trying to impact a US Presidential election

So was Steele

So was Putin?

The FBI launched a counter-intelligence investigation along with surveillance

see a pattern?

just because one like Lennon or dislikes Nixon or Trump, what is the difference exactly?

wouldn't you consider Lennon's work to be an illegal campaign contribution by a foreign national?




David said...

The central issue of the 21st century is the extent of personal freedom and the authority of the state. What must be recalled is that this kind of surveillance has gone on for decades in one form or another. Eventually a nation ends up with a huge bureaucracy of informants and finally thousands of citizens locked away in prisons. The rulers finally decide they are running a giant prison and most of their expenses are to finance all this 'control' Russia's GULAG comes to mind or N. Korea's prison camps and now China's Islamic detention. It feeds on itself and becomes a dead weight. Eventually the public will get fed up. 800 million Chinese smash their phones and smash all those security cameras and the surveillance state will fall apart just as the Soviet Union crumbled. You can't shoot everyone and you can't put everyone in a prison. Even the most hardened dictator will get tired of the whole thing and end it.

Bruce Hayden said...

When I read of Hillerman’s death eleven years ago and realized that there would be no more novels about Navajo tribal detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, I felt thoroughly bereft.

A bit OT, but last weekend my partner's daughter and son-in-law went up to the Navajo reservation for a wedding. We had met the couple maybe a month earlier, and expect that when business slows up a bit, that he will put brick pavers down in the back yard (it is still in dirt, and the more than occasional weed). I think that he was the Navajo, and she Hispanic, but could have been reversed. Nice couple, but their kid seems to already be showing the excess weight that you see so much of with the Navajos. In any case, apparently one of the more eclectic weddings that step daughter had ever seen. A little white/Hispanic, and a little Navajo. I seem to remember maybe a sheepskin vest over a white wedding dress. And mixed Christian and Indian vows. They had an entire roasted pig cooked in a pit. And then the wedding party ended up in their cars eating the roast pig and drinking beer, amidst a raging sand storm (after all, it was the Res). They thought that it was totally bizarre. Oh, and then they rented a hotel room for the night (remember the beer?), and it was so horrible that they couldn't spend the night there. It looked like it hadn't been cleaned for a bit, with semen stains on the bedspread, insects running around, etc. I think that they ended up sleeping on the side of the road instead.

We probably expect to be through there in the next couple weeks. We came down from MT on I-15 to Las Vegas. But was in Vegas about the first of March, and so expect to take the eastern route back up, which goes through Flagstaff, then on US 89 north across the Navajo Reservation, up and over the north rim of the Grand Canyon, then swings up relatively parallel to I-15, to pop over the ridge well into Utah, bypassing the Vegas traffic. I hate that long drive across the reservation, then through just as uninviting terrain along the north rim. It only gets away from miles of dust and cactus when you start gaining altitude finally, as you again head north at Kanab. Even without the Vegas traffic, it is a couple hours shorter. But, I still don't like it. But expect that if we spend the night in Flagstaff, and start that stretch early in the morning, we should be on I-15 before we start flagging, and then the driving is easy, until you hit SLC, where no one seems to know about speed limit signs. Mormons are supposed to be very law abiding. You could surprise me, after driving on their freeways through town.

I said that the Navajo reservation has horrible scenery, mostly just dirt, mile after dusty mile. But there is an exception, and that is Monument Valley. Heading north on US 89, you head NE right before Tuba City on US 160, and follow that towards Moab, running into and through the iconic Monument Valley right on the AZ/UT border (state line runs right through the place, with, I think a little more in AZ than UT). Used to take that route maybe once a month or so between PHX and DEN areas to see the woman whom I now share my life (we took better than a decade to get to the point of settling down together). The drive to Kayenta, just south of Monument Valley, was always rough, but from there on up, all the way through to Moab, and a dozen or so more miles, was always nice, with huge rock formations most of the way. Then, scenery almost as bad as the Navajo reservation across UT until the CO border, where all of a sudden you get some green again (caused by connecting with the CO river).

Nichevo said...

Re: digs at the FBI



'Why don't you like the FBI?' Arkady asked.
The manic power that was Kirwill made a slight revolution. The grin twisted. 'Well, for a lot
of reasons. Professionally, because the FBI doesn't conduct investigations, they pay informers.
Doesn't matter what kind of case — spies, civil rights, Mafia — all they know is informers. Most Americans are touchy about informing, so the bureau specializes. Their informers are mental
cases and hit men. Where the bureau touches the real world, suddenly you get all these freaks
who know how to kill people with piano wire. Say a freak got caught, and now he's willing to fry
his friends. He tells the bureau what it wants to hear and makes up what he doesn't know. See,
that's the basic difference. A cop goes out on the street and digs up information for himself. He's
willing to get dirty because his ambition in life is to be a detective. But a bureau agent is really a
lawyer or an accountant; he wants to work in an office and dress nice, maybe go into politics.
That son of a bitch will buy a freak a day.'
'Not everyone who informs is a freak,' Arkady muttered. He saw Misha standing in the church,
took another drink and pushed the image aside.
'When their freaks are finished testifying, they move them and give them new names. If the
freak kills someone else, the bureau moves him again. There are psychopaths who've been
moved four, five times — totally immune. I can't arrest them; they've got better pardons than
Nixon. That's what happens when you don't do the job yourself, when you use freaks.'
The detective returned from the bar with a wood-grained plastic bowl. Kirwill opened the
peanuts into it. 'While you're up, Billy,' he said, 'why don't you call the pens and find out if
they've released our friend Rats yet.'
'Shee-it!' Billy said, but went to the phone booth.
'What's "shee-it"?' Arkady asked.
'Two scoops of shit,' Rodney said.
'Osborne says he is an informer for the FBI,' Arkady said.
'Yeah, I know.' Kirwill looked up as if his eyes were on the moon. 'You can just imagine the
day when John Osborne walked into the bureau. They probably stepped on their cocks they stood
so fast. Someone like him — been to the Kremlin, been to the White House, high society —
won't take a penny, could buy and sell any man in the bureau. Hobnobs with all sorts of pinkos
here and Reds there. He's your dream freak come true.'
'Why didn't he go to the CIA?'
'Because he's smart. The CIA has thousands of sources of Russian information, a hundred men
going in and out of Russia. The FBI was forced to shut its Moscow office. All it had was
Osborne.'
'All he could give them was gossip.'
'That's all they wanted. They just wanted to get on some congressman's lap and put their hot
lips to his ear and whisper that they'd heard from their own special source that Brezhnev had
syph. Same as they whispered about the Kennedy boys and King. That's what congressmen are
willing to pay for, that's what federal budgets are all about. Only, now the bureau has to pay;
Osborne is calling in his notes. He wants the bureau to protect him, and he's not going to change his name and hide. He's got the bureau by its delicate pearl-sized balls and he's just started to
squeeze.'


--Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith

Kirk Parker said...

mockturtle,

how is it that the FBI is involved with the Las Vegas shooting in the first place? Last time I looked, Las Vegas is totally contained within the boundaries of the state of Nevada.

Michael The Magnificent said...

Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign in 2016?

When a Republican does it, it's called "spying" and results in Watergate, with "plumbers" going to jail.

But when a Democrat does it, it's called "investigating."

What do Democrats call selectively leaking their "investigation's" findings to the press?

And why is Carter Page, purported to be a foreign agent for the purposes of securing a Title 1 FISA warrant, and FOUR renewals of that warrant, still walking around free as a bird? Because he isn't a foreign agent, that's why. The FISA warrant's purpose was to spy on Carter Page, and spy on anyone Carter Page communicated with; The purpose was to spy on the Trump campaign.

Michael K said...

how is it that the FBI is involved with the Las Vegas shooting in the first place?

Read the WEB Griffin Police series novels. He, and the Philadelphia cops who told him the stories, really did not like the FBI.

Yet, all those novels were in the Quantico FBI Academy bookstore.

Kirk Parker said...

I don't have any of those books, and don't have time to read them at the moment anyway.

Just curious about what the pretext is for the FBI having any jurisdiction there.

Michael The Magnificent said...

Another question: Since the Obama DOJ and FBI thought Carter Page was a foreign agent (enough so that they got a Title 1 FISA warrant on him and renewed it four times), how come the DOJ/FBI didn't warn the Trump campaign of their beliefs of Carter Page? Why leave a suspected foreign agent in the Trump campaign?

They didn't alert the Trump campaign because they wanted to spy on the Trump campaign.