Asks Andrew C. McCarthy in "Did Durham find something worse than Watergate? Not so far" (The Hill).
Let’s say a presidential administration puts the government’s law enforcement and intelligence apparatus in the service of its party’s presidential candidate by trying to portray the opposition party’s candidate as a clandestine agent of a hostile government.
To be concrete about it, let’s say the Obama administration tasked the FBI and CIA to help the Democrats’ 2016 candidate, Hillary Clinton, by framing the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, as a mole for the Kremlin. And, to execute this scheme, let’s say the FBI and CIA first tasked operatives of the Clinton campaign to cook up evidence that could be spun to make Trump look like a Russian spy, and then used that bogus evidence as a pretext to (a) open investigations, (b) apply to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court for surveillance warrants, and (c) monitor Trump and his associates. Let’s say the scheme did not prevent Trump from being elected — yes, Hillary Clinton was that bad a candidate — but it otherwise succeeded.
Top government officials — mainly, Obama administration holdovers — were able not only to sustain the “Trump collusion with Russia” narrative well into Trump’s administration; they further impelled the appointment of a special counsel, whose staffers (many of them Obama and Clinton acolytes) impeded Trump’s capacity to govern for two years.
If that had happened, we might have something that was worse than Watergate...
... Durham alleges that by leveraging their trusted access and cozy ties to government data and officials, Clinton campaign operatives managed both to portray the sitting president of the United States as a mole of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and to urge an investigation of Trump under the guise of protecting national security.
If true, this would be one of the most devious political dirty tricks of all time. But in Watergate, the government officials were the culprits; in Russiagate, to hear Durham tell it, the government officials were just saps.... There is no grand Watergate conspiracy, unless top government officials are willfully abusing their power. In Durham’s account, they are guileless victims, hypnotized by Clinton’s machinations.
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102 comments:
Maddow went all-in - she "leaned in" on the TRUMP IS A RUSSIAN AGENT! FOR YEARS AND YEARS. Mueller god did not manage to fork up the goods... and then even old feeble Mueller was thrown under the bus by Maddow's loyalist hiveminders.
"What does 'worse than Watergate' mean?"
It means really, really bad, but not bad enough to invoke Hitler and the Holocaust.
The scale goes like this:
Incompetent Government < Watergate < What Durham is Finding < End of Democracy < Holocaust < American Racism in 2022
Authoritarianism, you see, fits neatly into every category. It's like a political Groupon for whatever else you're angry about.
There are a lot of people running cover for Russiagate. After all, most wrote scathing posts in support of the gullible and easily manipulated career bureaucrats. Bureaucrats up and down the line to the director of the FBI and the 2nd in command of the DOJ. All graduates of our finest elite indoctrination centers.
So which is worse, political appointees acting badly or 20+ year career technocrats who are easily duped by the most dubious manufactured "evidence" given to them by former political appointees of a favored political party that doesn't pass the smell test of anyone not aligned with the political party?
Professional incompetence at the highest career ranks of American law enforcement and intelligence is worse than Watergate.
'In Durham’s account, they are guileless victims, hypnotized by Clinton’s machinations."
Considering how laughably thin the evidence was, and that the FBI has already admitted to have *lied to a FISA court*, the only possible explanation is that they wanted to be duped. The "guileless victims" bit is the FBI's defense; lack of mens rea, you know, the finding that the FBI made to let Hillary off the hook, that and changing the finding to "extreme carelessness" from the original "gross negligence," because that's how many angels can dance on the head of a pin! The FBI plainly was quite happy to be lied to. More is coming, we shall see how "guileless" the FBI was in this.
McCarthy has been defending the FBI all along, and the New York Times and The Washington Post are not prepared to admit that their Pulitzer was won based on a lie.
Pulitzer is the guy who lied us into the Spanish American war, BTW, to sell copies of the New York Times, and probably to do favors for people who greatly benefitted from that war. "Remember the Maine!"
Asks Andrew C. McCarthy in "Did Durham find something worse than Watergate? Not so far"
Even by McCarthy's GOPe reckoning, "Not so far."
"There is no grand Watergate conspiracy, unless top government officials are willfully abusing their power."
Both Horowitz and Durham have already shown that the FBI willfully abused its power. The FISA court went along with lies. The Mueller appointment was itself a gross abuse of power.
"In Durham’s account, they are guileless victims, hypnotized by Clinton’s machinations."
Well, "so far" he portrays the Clinton-FBI connection as a Clintonian machination. Methinks (sorry) it's not the final story.
When you have to build a straw man to make an argument, your starting out in low and weak ground.
If that had happened, we might have something that was worse than Watergate...
That's what did happen.
As can be seen from the fact that Kevin Clinesmith, who deliberately lied to the FISA Court to push the spying on Trump, now has his law license back.
There's no excuse for what Clinesmith did. The only people who'd work to get him his law license back are people whose actions were equally and knowingly as corrupt as his were.
in Russiagate, to hear Durham tell it, the government officials were just saps
Wow, so someone who's spent the majority of his life in government claims to believe that the government people weren't really culpable and evil.
Kind of like the schtick that Andrew C. McCarthy has been peddling for years at the National Review, where he solemnly tells us that every single government official who turns out to be a corrupt ing the tank for the Democrats hack is really an "upstanding public official"
The FBI fired Steele because they caught him lying to them, and then continued to use his trash to spy on Trump. This has been already established.
But for McCarthy, no member of the Deep State is ever bad
Durham is not done yet. There is a point at which government officials crossed the line from being duped to willfully being duped as a cover for active participation in a crime. Proving it is very difficult because the actors used intelligence techniques in the execution of the crime, e.g., cutouts, plausible deniability, etc. that’s why it was so hard to nail the mafia. The conspiracy against Trump was sedition, which is punishable for up to 20 years in jail. Very serious stuff.
Btw, what exactly was so bad about Watergate? Lying about a coverup of a petty burglary that did not affect the outcome of the election one iota? Sure, they broke the law, but the Clinton conspiracy was an attempt to bring down a duly elected president. Now THAT was an attack at the very heart of our precious democracy and an attack against the will of the American people.
But in Watergate, the government officials were the culprits; in Russiagate, to hear Durham tell it, the government officials were just saps....
So they weren't criminals, they were simply too stupid to see what was obviously a political hit job? Nice defense there Andy.
The FBI should have known this was all bullshit from the beginning.
The combination of incompetence and partisanship is nauseating.
The right people were fired — Comey, McCabe, Strzok and Page.
When you hire and promote based on ideology and not competence you get incompetent ideologues.
According to the left, EVERYTHING Trump did for 4 years was WORSE THAN WATERGATE, when Hillary funding the spying on Candidate, then President Trump actually IS worse than WATERGATE, and OBAMA knew about it.
So, do you think the spin is going to continue to be "the people running the nation's top law enforcement and intelligence agencies are all gullible, incompetent, boobs. So, no bad."
On the other hand, if we look at it as dirty tricks by a presidential candidate (not the government), then this is way worse than Watergate.
Is Andy McCarthy just trolling us with this “Gummint people were saps?” Does he sincerely think that’s what Durham is arguing: that, oh sure, some bare-knuckled campaign tricks by HRC and her party hacks, and she and they duped the morons who run FBI and CIA —whose man-centuries of close study of Russian methods and comprehensive knowledge of Soviet aims and agents did not prevent FBI and other US intel experts from starting and running a multi-year surveillance op, breaking plenty of black letter US law along the way, predicated on nothing more than fourth-hand anonymous hearsay and bar-room BS?
Riiiight.
Obama? Obama? Did someone mention Obama?
Say, where was he, the night the Bengazi deal went down? Anyone ever find out?
The problem with the worse than Watergate narrative has always been that from the outset, the center of gravity of the Justice Department investigation has been in bi-partisan, career public servant territory, populated by life long Republicans like Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein, Richard Burr (Republican Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee), and others with similar credentials. What Durham--hand picked by Bill Barr, no friend to the Mueller investigation, to inquire into its origins--is finding is that those people in fact acted in good faith and that they had legitimate reason to conduct and support an independent investigation. McCarthy seems disappointed by this finding, but what did he actually expect the evidence to show?
This is how McCarthy covers for his FBI and DoJ sources, which is what he has been doing with his "analysis" all along. Everybody's gotta eat, not everybody has a cushy gig like McCarthy's, which rice bowl he has no intention of giving up.
If that had happened, we might have something that was worse than Watergate...
That's what did happen.
It's the same strategy of the 2020 election investigations- The headline does not match the findings.
Their behavioral psychologists say people will remember the headline and ignore the facts. Unfortunately for us all the psychologists are correct...
According to Scott Adams, "Worse than Watergate" is a trademarked IP belonging to Carl Bernstein and can't be used without paying him royalty.
One of the things I find hard to understand is how stupid people must be to fall for this crap. Last week they were talking about Important Government Papers! being flushed down the toilet at Mar-a-Lago.
And this:
Book reveals Trump staff found flushed papers in White House toilet
Maggie Haberman's new book "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America" reveals that staff in the White House during Trump's presidency say they found documents periodically flushed down the toilet in the White House.
https://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2022/02/10/donald-trump-documents-toilet-white-house-haberman-newday-vpx.cnn
Are they SCUBA diving in the septic tank or something?
John LGBTQBNY Henry
This is a question for Carl Bernstein. Every other sentence out of his mouth was “this is worse than Watergate”, whenever he appeared on CNN. Because he wanted people to remember how bad Watergate was and how wonderful he WAS.
as long as Hillary is paying the bills, any lie will do. It's all about the money.
She--> needs that Clinton Foundation fake charity slush fund, and she needs her--> players to aid in her manipulations. Most are happy to do so. Again ... follow the money.
Despite overwhelming evidence, McCarthy refuses to see his FBI/DOJ friends as corrupt.
I've stopped reading his spin.
I have a bridge to sell Mr. McCarthy.
Btw, what exactly was so bad about Watergate?
If you are a Democrat, Watergate was a Godsend. Mark Felt easily manipulated Woodward and Bernstein and the WaPo into a media melodrama that deposed Richard Nixon. They did it because ...
Nixon was worse than Hitler and any other POTUS in history ...
...until Reagan who was the worst ...
... until Bush who was the worst ...
... until ...
.. we eventually get to Trump who was the absolute worst.
Wait until DeSantis gets elected in 2024.
No one ever claimed that the Alfa Bank server mystery was more than that. And in spite of FBI and Congressional investigations the mystery was never explained to the public. It never rose to the level of being part of a narrative of Trump-Russia collusion. As far as I can tell the only justification for Durham raising it in his last filing is to explain his worry about conflicts within Latham and Watkins for its multiple representations of figures involved in the upcoming Sussman trial.
Worse than Watergate but Better than Ezra.
No. Fuck Andrew McCarthy. He was relentlessly, hilariously wrong about everything in Russia collusion and especially the Mueller inquiry. He's far too biased to spend columns heaping humiliation upon himself, and I'm not in the mood to explain to Facebook grandmas why he's not a DOJ straight shooter. I didn't think law was too hard for post-wall Barbies, but Durham's finding of fact that Rodney Joffe abused his sensitive arrangement with the Executive Office of the President to spy for political rivals is the kind of breach of fiduciary duty that would get a normal person in fishnets on Cell Block D. Much less in breach of the contracts that would have to be signed with the government or the Trump organization.
If you want opinions from someone who's actually educated, start at this post on Ace of Spades and search for anything involving "JackStraw."
http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=397818
Then move on to this one.
https://technofog.substack.com/p/durham-clinton-allies-spied-on-the
“in Russiagate, to hear Durham tell it, the government officials were just saps
“Wow, so someone who's spent the majority of his life in government claims to believe that the government people weren't really culpable and evil.”
Maybe what needs to be remembered is that AG Garland could shut down Durham anytime he wants. I think that he hasn’t done so, because the optics would be bad. But Garland is responsible for the DOJ (and thus, to some extent, the FBI). A thread running through a lot of this is the bureaucratic interests of the career employees of these agencies. If Durham stomps too hard on either agency, the natives (career bureaucrats) won’t be happy, and Garland will feel a lot of pressure to fire Durham. So, as long as his investigation mostly just incriminates Crooked Hillary, her law firm, Jaffe, etc, the employees at these agencies will suffer the investigation. They are far more accepting of being called dupes than conniving political actors, which most of us know them to have been.
One corollary to this theory is that it means that Crooked Hillary is no longer a threat to be concerned about. It is very unlikely that she will get the 2024 Dem nomination, or then win the Presidency. Her power, despite her loss in 2016, runs through the entire FileGate and RussiaGate investigations and scandals. Her power was even evident in the staffing of the Mueller investigation - those were her people, not really Obama’s. She blew her wad, and really doesn’t have the power anymore to keep Durham at bay. Moreover, she was too weak to be running for the Presidency by the 2016 election. She would be 8 years older in 2024. Instead of a wheelchair, are they going to use a gurney this time? Her time is past, and everyone, except for her and her girlfriend Huma, probably know it. I think that it means that she is no longer feared as she was in 2016 and earlier.
Andrew McCarthy is disappointing, to say the least. Some of his columns over the past few years have been very insightful. McCarthy showed how deep and extensive the corruption really was, numerous times. But he always ends up pulling his punches, and acting like the FBI and other agencies deserve the benefit of the doubt. It's virtuous to show some restraint at first, but at some point you have to acknowledge reality. We live under a very wicked government that commits all sorts of crimes, and continuously gets away with it. Andy should know that by now. The FISA court incident alone should have made him realize how rotten the entire system is. He can't hide behind naivete or a good faith opinion of his former colleagues anymore.
McCarthy is always a bit late to the necktie party when the FBI and the DOJ are involved. Let’s see where this goes. Remember both the FBI and the CIA refused to play ball with Nixon’s coverup. They weren’t so scrupulous here.
Spying has nothing to do with making stuff up. It's almost the opposite. So I can't understand the hype on the right.
It always seemed to me to be a lying to a federal official crime at some low level of staffing.
“So, do you think the spin is going to continue to be "the people running the nation's top law enforcement and intelligence agencies are all gullible, incompetent, boobs. So, no bad."”
Very much so. We have our villains: Crooked Hillary, her campaign, and her attorneys. They are being hung out to dry, and almost no one is shedding a tear. I expect her personal protection to hold up, but with those around her being named, that isn’t going to help her reputation. But no one cares, because she is now a has been.
Top government officials — mainly, Obama administration holdovers — were able not only to sustain the “Trump collusion with Russia” narrative well into Trump’s administration; they further impelled the appointment of a special counsel, whose staffers (many of them Obama and Clinton acolytes) impeded Trump’s capacity to govern for two years.
If that had happened, we might have something that was worse than Watergate... [My emphasis]
@Althouse, you and McCarthy can keep scrambling to find some way to excuse the Democrats and the government agencies. You and he are reduced to calling senior officials from the federal law “guileless victims, hypnotized by Clinton’s machinations.” If they were “guileless victims,” then from whence came the process traps, the falsified FISA court applications, the edited 302s, and on and on?
The difference between Watergate and what happened to Donald Trump is just this. Nixon tried to use the IRS and FBI and other federal agencies against his real and perceived enemies. Fifty years these agencies had the integrity to tell the President to go pound sand. By contrast fifty years later, the top FBI officials, FISA judges, and the intelligence community used a flimsy pretext that any sufficiently skeptical child could have seen through. These were not “guileless victims”; they were willing co-conspirators.
Critter said...
Btw, what exactly was so bad about Watergate? Lying about a coverup of a petty burglary that did not affect the outcome of the election one iota?
IIRC, Watergate was part of an operation by the Nixon team whose point was to drive every competent Democrat candidate, like Muskie, out of the Dem Primary, so only McGovern (or some other hard left fruitcake who couldn't win) was left.
Maybe it wouldn't have affected the election one iota. But it's clear that the Nixon campaign didn't agree with you, since otherwise they wouldn't have ordered the burglary.
No?
There was not a grand operation to frame Donald Trump.
The CIA thought that Russia was trying to influence the election, but not in collusion with Trump.
The FBI thought there was some collusion between Trump and Russian Intelligence -- with Carter Page as the go-between.
The Clinton campaign believed in Christopher Steele's story.
Some Trump-hating computer experts thought that communications between Trump Tower and Alfa Bank were a key element.
There were various suspicions by various people who hated Trump and were eager to believe flimsy "evidence".
There was a mass hysteria -- a witch-hunting mentality. Millions of people really did believe that Trump had colluded with Russia and thus had won the US Presidential election unfairly.
======
The major actor was the FBI -- specifically FBI Counter-Intelligence. The FBI tried to keep its suspicions secret, but those suspicions were revealed to the public by Senator Harry Reid.
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A wise Special Counsel might have dissipated the hysteria.
Unfortunately, the Special Counsel turned out to be Robert "The FBI Whitewasher" Mueller. Suffering from dementia, he allowed his team to spend two years trying to lure President Trump into an obstruction-of-justice situation that would enable Congress to impeach Trump and to remove him from his elected position.
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The recent news about Alfa Bank is mostly nonsense. A few Trump-hating computer experts were able to collect data related to computer communications between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower. This data never proved anything, and therefore the data was dismissed quickly by the FBI and CIA.
If Trump were colluding with Russian Intelligence, would they conduct their secret communications between 1) Trump Tower and 2) Russia's Alfa Bank?
The Trump-hating computer experts gave their data to Michael Sussman, who offered it to the FBI and the CIA.
This situation is being exploited by Durham, who is accusing Sussman of the process crime of offering the data while concealing his relationship to the Clinton campaign. Durham intends to compel Sussman to squeal to him about the Clinton campaign.
Aside from being Durham's tool to pressure Sussman, the Alfa Bank stuff is just nonsense. In particular, this was not a matter of "spying" on Trump. Rather, those computer experts were able to collect data about computer communications among Alfa Bank, Trump Tower and eventually several other Trump-related facilities. However, none of this data proved or even suggested anything significant.
Watergate shook the faith in government. Both parties could see it, and Nixon had to go.
Russiagate shook the faith in government. One party is currently still celebrating this and are proud of it.
As far as a legal standard, you can argue which is worse. However, that's not the standard. We are past that. The standard now is the legitimacy of the federal government and the "deep state." That is the sort of thing that could get resolved via a bunch of people being charged and going to jail, but it is also the sort of thing that gets resolved by more... extreme methods. I tire of supposedly intelligent people not seeing the danger in front of them, still worrying about seat belts and checking their blind spots when the car is on fire. This is not business as usual. This is not about a few corrupt actors that can be purged. This is an existential crisis.
It used to baffle me how great empires could decay into irrelevance, despite the dangers being very obvious and very fixable. I understand now.
Shipwreckedcrew's recent Twitter take on the matter:
(22 years as federal prosecutor; 8 as defense attorney, "CLDL," pronouns "Me/I/Sir/Your Grace/"Dickhead" (from my wife).)
Dr. Shipwreckedcrew.substack.com@shipwreckedcrew·17h
"I disagree with Andy because if Durham only has a report in mind, he could have saved all these details for the report. I cannot imagine what his motive would be to do this if there wasn't intention behind his disclosures."
Replying to:
Nice reality check by @AndrewCMcCarthy on Durham. Time will tell where this ends up. If I was a cynical person, I’d say that Durham’s conflict of interest motions in the Sussmann and Danchenko cases were a “legal leak” of what MIGHT be coming. But I’m from Missouri on Durham.
I was a quarter of the way through reading the UVA “rape” story in Rolling Stone when I knew it was bullshit. No fraternity in history has had a glass topped coffee table. The tell was so obvious. Likewise the peeing on the bed story. A lie of the same quality as the UVA lie. And both lies swallowed whole, greedily, by a cohort ready to believe the wors of masculinity, fraternities, Trump.
McCarthy has been courageous in criticizing former colleagues and old friends of his from Justice. Few people pay this kind of price to tell the truth. Here he faces a dilemma about some of those same friends: almost unbelievably stupid/ignorant, or dishonest law-breakers? Hmmmm .....
This is how McCarthy covers for his FBI and DoJ sources, which is what he has been doing with his "analysis" all along
These bad actors are McCarthy's friends for years and years. This is the original "old boy network." It wasn't about feminism. It was about the fact that Kim Philby's father was one of "the right sort." McCarthy knows that criminal acts were done but he can't admit that it was done by his friends.
What does "worse than watergate mean"?
I suggest Handy Andy asks Carl Bernstein and John Dean. They've only used the phrase 1,000 times in the last 45 years.
Anyway, McCarthy is playing dumb or trying to impute good faith to his friends. They weren't evil or corrupt just fools.
Right.
The Clinton campaign funded (indirectly) Christopher Steele's dossier, promoted the Alfa Bank nonsense, complained about Facebook ads, and declared that all 17 US Intelligence agencies agreed that Russia secretly was affecting the US election.
However, if the Clinton campaign had not committed any of those excesses, then the excesses nevertheless might have happened. For example, Christopher Steele might have been funded by someone else. For example, plenty of consulting companies were trying to peddle threat analyses about Russian cyberwar.
======
Given more time, the US Intelligence Community might have resolved many of the concerns.
Suppose that the the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation had remained secret. The FBI tried to keep it secret, but its essence was revealed to the public by Senator Harry Reid a few days before the election. In continuing secrecy, the Trump-Russia collusion paranoia might have been debunked eventually by the FBI's own analysis and by inter-agency analysis.
After Trump won the election unexpectedly, however, normal analysis did not prevail. Instead, the investigation was turned over to the demented Robert "The FBI Whitewasher" Mueller, who assembled a Trump-hating team that tried for two years to lure President Trump into an obstruction-of-justice situation. That stupid effort was terminated only because Bill Barr became the US Attorney General.
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Durham seems to be studying the history honestly and effectively. New information is being released to the public.
There will not be much criminal prosecution, because the officials who suspected Russia-Trump collusion really did believe that such collusion was happening. Those officials were not "framing" Trump. Rather, they thought they were investigating their suspicions honestly and correctly. They generally were not acting in a criminal manner.
In your blockquote you left out McCarty's next sentence which changes the thrust of this strange column:
"I find this hard to swallow, having studied Russiagate and written a book about it."
I don't understand what he is trying to say unless it is that Durham is in on the fix but he, McCarthy, is afraid to say that definitively.
In his response to Special Counsel, Sussmann has noted that Durham has misrepresented the dates of the anomalous data found at the Executive Office of the Presidency that Mr. Sussmann presented at a February 9, 2017 meeting with the CIA. The data predates the Donald Trump inauguration.
Although the Special Counsel implies that in Mr. Sussmann’s February 9, 2017 meeting, he provided Agency-2 (CIA) with Executive Office of the President data from after Mr. Trump took office, the Special Counsel is well aware that the data provided to Agency-2 pertained only to the period of time before Mr. Trump took office, when Barack Obama was President. Further—and contrary to the Special Counsel’s alleged theory that Mr. Sussmann was acting in concert with the Clinton Campaign—the Motion conveniently overlooks the fact that Mr. Sussmann’s meeting with Agency-2 happened well after the 2016 presidential election, at a time when the Clinton Campaign had effectively ceased to exist. Unsurprisingly, the Motion also omits any mention of the fact that Mr. Sussmann never billed the Clinton Campaign for the work associated with the February 9, 2017 meeting, nor could he have because there was no Clinton Campaign.
Sussmann has asked Judge Christopher Cooper to strike the improper language from the motion.
"In addition, Mr. Sussmann reserves all rights to submit appropriate motions and seek appropriate relief concerning this conduct should the Indictment not be dismissed and should the case proceed to trial, including by seeking extensive voir dire about potential jurors’ exposure to prejudicial media resulting from the Special Counsel’s irresponsible actions."
Nonsense. If they were ignorant, it was willful. They got this campaign propaganda and didn't look to hard at it. They wanted to get Trump and were more than happy to oblige Hillary Clinton, who they viewed as their future boss. They never thought they'd get caught because they didn't think Trump would win.
I try to look at the big picture. And if you do then the behavior of Trump deranged democrats and their friends in the media is several orders of magnitude worse than Watergate. They hated Trump so much (for what reason I still can't understand) that they were willing to do virtually anything to make him look bad regardless of the impact to the country. You can't convince me they all didn't know the Russian stuff was complete BS. And then the censorship and ignoring of huge stories like Clinton offsite mail servers, the obvious corruption of the Clinton Foundation, the Hunter Biden laptop with Joe's corruption exposed by it. It's the most despicable and unethical behavior I have ever witnessed in my entire life. Just a complete lack of character in those people, far, far worse than the Trump they hated so vehemently. Anyway, my opinion.
Not even Watergate was worse than Watergate.
This story is still being written, so anything anyone can say about it up to now is based only on what has been released. Andrew McCarthy is a very sharp guy, very sharp prosecutor. He is saying what he sees thus far. Nothing more. He's being very precise, which is what he does. Yet there is more that will be added to this story in due time.
So...I am neither feeling good or bad about what has come out thus far. I expect nothing to happen and I base that on years of watching how Washington DC and our media work. I'm waiting for more to come. More facts, more info. But honestly, I don't know why. I know the outcome already.
Look- everyone knows something not right took place. What we don't know is if there will be enough to prosecute, or if- like so many times before- we'll be asked to swallow it down and like it.
Just not sure if our country is ready to swallow anymore shite from DC or our media.
Everybody needs to remember Andy is a creature of the "Deep State" and, while not a lefty, his allegiances is to bureaucratic rule.
Similar vibes to the comments on the McCarthy and O'Rourke posts. A problem with Irishmen?
"They generally were not acting in a criminal manner."
Other than falsifying evidence, lying to gain secret warrants, leaking illegally to the press, providing false testimony under oath, etc. etc. etc.
Other than that, "they generally were not acting in a criminal manner".
About the only illegal thing they weren't doing was picking up hookers on overseas junkets. They left that to the Secret Service.
FBI Counter-Intelligence believed that Russian Intelligence had managed to compromise Donald Trump over the course of several years. Russian Intelligence might be able to influence, blackmail and control Trump at crucial moments if he became President.
Plausible arguments along those lines were made, but these arguments were extremely secret within the FBI.
The FBI leadership had to study these suspicions very carefully and maintain the very strict secrecy.
The public can only guess about many elements of this situation as it developed within the FBI.
=======
I guess that the FBI leadership failed to include any skeptical nay-sayers into FBI Counter-Intelligence. It's likely that there was not even one Trump-supporter in the FBI leadership -- and in particular within FBI Counter-Intelligence.
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In general, the US Intelligence Community feared that Trump might be able to win the 2016 election because of an October Surprise. Specifically, the Russian Government might be able to release embarrassing information about Hillary Clinton shortly before the election.
A panic developed that Russia had stolen a huge number of Clinton's e-mails. It seemed likely that those e-mails contained much information about Clinton's corrupt use of her Clinton Family Foundation to collect money from foreigners while she had been the Secretary of State.
Trump was critical of NATO and suggested that the US should withdraw from NATO. For such reasons, Putin might prefer that Trump win the election. In this situation, Putin might even collaborate with Trump to optimize the October Surprise.
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No such October Surprise happened, but Trump won the election anyway.
In the weeks following Trump's victory, the FBI's suspicions about Trump became known to the public. A mass hysteria spread among much of the population.
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Perhaps if someone else other than Robert Mueller had been appointed as a Special Counsel, the situation might have developed better.
Explaining this complicated and secret history to the public will take many years. There will not be many prosecutions of officials. Maybe there will be no prosecutions at all.
After all the statutes of limitations expire, the task of explaining the history will pass from government officials to academic historians.
Stephen said...
The problem with the worse than Watergate narrative has always been that from the outset, the center of gravity of the Justice Department investigation has been in bi-partisan, career public servant territory, populated by life long Republicans like Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein, Richard Burr (Republican Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee), and others with similar credentials.
Which is to say: corrupt hacks who wanted Trump gone because he wasn't part of the "Inner Party".
Comey? They guy who rewrote the law in order to cut Hilary slack for her illegal email server? The guy who tried to sit on the fact that NY FBI agents had found out that there were Hilary emails on the Weiner laptop, then when they threatened to go public he went public first and lied about it (claiming that the laptop had been examined and there was nothing there, when in fact that had not examined it)?
That's your version of a "Republican"?
GFY
What Durham--hand picked by Bill Barr, no friend to the Mueller investigation, to inquire into its origins--is finding is that those people in fact acted in good faith
No, they didn't.
No one lies to the FISA Court "in good faith". No one who's been told that Carter Page served as a CIA source AGAINST Russian Intelligence, as the people at the FBI were told, turns around and gets a warrant to spy on him and all his contacts on the grounds that "he might be a Russian spy".
The Mueller Team found out in 2017 that teh predicate for their investigation was garbage, but kept on going for over a year more for the purpose of hamstringing the Trump Admin, and hurting the Republicans in the 2018 elections.
There was no "there" there. If Trump had been a Putin Manchurian candidate, then anyone responsible for revealing that would be dead, as would any family members who were still in Russia. Which means that Steele could have provided all his sources to the FBI for face to face interviews.
Which he didn't do, because he knew his stories were lies.
And the FBI and CIA people never asked to see those people, because they knew it was all lies, too.
If Putin wanted trump to win, he would have released salacious bits of Hilary's emails, because we know that Putin has all of them
Queue Carl Bernstein
The insurrection and coup to remove Nixon succeeded when his support was withdrawn, the braying from WaPo exceeded tolerable levels, and his erstwhile backers became his affirmative action antagonists, accompanied by a progressive series of unfortunate missteps. Deja vu, almost.
“ There was not a grand operation to frame Donald Trump.
“The CIA thought that Russia was trying to influence the election, but not in collusion with Trump.
“The FBI thought there was some collusion between Trump and Russian Intelligence -- with Carter Page as the go-between.
“The Clinton campaign believed in Christopher Steele's story.
“Some Trump-hating computer experts thought that communications between Trump Tower and Alfa Bank were a key element.
“There were various suspicions by various people who hated Trump and were eager to believe flimsy "evidence".
“There was a mass hysteria -- a witch-hunting mentality. Millions of people really did believe that Trump had colluded with Russia and thus had won the US Presidential election unfairly.”
Glosses over a lot. Both the Steele Dossier and AlphaBank “intelligence” were created by agents of the Clinton campaign. They didn’t so much believe it, but created it instead. We now know that much of the nonsense was created by a former Russian spy, sitting around shots of vodka with his cronies in Georgetown (DC). Best of all, he got paid for it, and that meant that the vodka was free.
What is being left out of the AlphaBank scandal is that Joffe, expecting a high level Clinton Administration appointment as a computer czar, got an IC (I believe CIA, but could have been FBI) contract that gave him and his bunch of hackers high level access to their servers. They then proceeded to generate traffic with Russia, and having “discovered” it, proceed to inform both agencies of their “discovery”. That was bad, but what was worse was that they intercepted Trump team emails. Even worse, this apparently continued into Trump’s Presidency. The Clinton campaign weren’t innocent bystanders, but rather the primary perpetrators and beneficiaries of the plot. The crime was essentially not telling the FBI the entire story, but instead hiding from them that they were the ones who had created the suspicious Internet traffic in the first place.
Something to note here - Joffe, etc, had access to these servers through the Intelligence Community, as a contractor doing work for them. This was almost identical to what had gone on a couple months earlier with the FBI giving contractors access to NSA databases through their 702 access interface, that allowed them to do opposition research of those NSA databases, targeting and tracking Sanders and Trump campaign staff and associates, and funneling the results back to the Clinton campaign (some of which results appear to have mysteriously shown up in the Clinton campaign funded Steele Dossier). This was the skulduggery discovered by NSA Dir Adm Rogers in late spring of 2016, and subsequently quickly shut down. There seems to be a high likelihood that covering up this illegal NSA database access for the benefit of the Clinton campaign was the impetus for their Steele Dossier and 4 Carter Page FISA warrants.
Mike Sylwester said...
There was not a grand operation to frame Donald Trump.
Yes, there was
The CIA thought that Russia was trying to influence the election, but not in collusion with Trump.
No, they didn't, and neither did any other person with a functioning brain.
Hilary used her illegal email server while she was in Moscow. There is zero chance the Russians missed that, and there's zero chance they did not immediately hack into it, steal copies of everything there, and keep on stealing until the server was shut down.
If Russia had wanted to influence the election for Trump, then they would have taken salacious bits of Hilary's emails, and released them.
That didn't happen.
Therefore Putin wanted the corrupt Hilary to win.
Anyone at the CIA who didn't know that is too stupid to be trusted to tie her shoes
The FBI thought there was some collusion between Trump and Russian Intelligence -- with Carter Page as the go-between.
Carter Page helped the CIA break a Russian Intelligence plot. The FBI knew that, because they asked the CIA if Page had ever worked for them, and they told the FBI that he had, and had been helpful
The Clinton campaign believed in Christopher Steele's story.
The Clinton campaign made up the Steele stories out of whole cloth, in an attempt to use charges of "Trump Russian collusion" to distract from concerns about Hilary's highly illegal and highly insecure email server
Some Trump-hating computer experts thought that communications between Trump Tower and Alfa Bank were a key element.
Lie. They knew that the "communications" were nothing, but lied to try to turn them in to "something"
There were various suspicions by various people who hated Trump and were eager to believe flimsy "evidence".
There was never the slightest shred of "evidence" that Trump was doing anything on that front.
This wasn't "will to believe", it was "willingness to corrupt and lie in order to steal political power"
There was a mass hysteria -- a witch-hunting mentality. Millions of people really did believe that Trump had colluded with Russia and thus had won the US Presidential election unfairly.
Millions of ignorant and stupid leftists fell for the hoax, because they wanted to, and because people like Schift were lying to them and telling them there was classified information that they had seen, that would prove Trump guilty.
Every single one of the people making those claims was a knowing liar
But no one ever believed any of the charges in their fields, because none of the charges were even remotely credible once you looked at the data and though about it for 30 seconds or more
The major actor was the FBI -- specifically FBI Counter-Intelligence. The FBI tried to keep its suspicions secret, but those suspicions were revealed to the public by Senator Harry Reid.
Lie. They helped leak to Reid
A wise Special Counsel might have dissipated the hysteria.
A wise Special Counsel would never have been offered the case, because everyone involved, up to and including Rod Rosenstein, was in on the corruption
Mike Sylwester said...
This situation is being exploited by Durham, who is accusing Sussman of the process crime of offering the data while concealing his relationship to the Clinton campaign.
Bzzt.
"Hi, I'm bringing you this information about Candidate X because I'm a loyal American"
"Hi, I'm bringing you this information about Candidate X because I'm being paid by Candidate Y to smear Candidate X"
Telling the first, when the second is what's true, isn't a "process crime", and it's not a minor crime. It is proof of a willful attempt to deceive the FBI for corrupt purposes
If one had any question as to whether or not you're a dupe, or a liar, you attempt to cover that up show taht "lair" is clearly the correct diagnosis
Durham intends to compel Sussman to squeal to him about the Clinton campaign.
In particular, this was not a matter of "spying" on Trump. Rather, those computer experts were able to collect data about computer communications among Alfa Bank, Trump Tower and eventually several other Trump-related facilities. However, none of this data proved or even suggested anything significant.
Running traffic analysis on someone's internal communications is most definitely "spying"
So you fail agin
Joffe generated internet traffic with Russia and whom? The comment reads like fan fiction.
Your lies never stop, do they?
Mike Sylwester said...
FBI Counter-Intelligence believed that Russian Intelligence had managed to compromise Donald Trump over the course of several years. Russian Intelligence might be able to influence, blackmail and control Trump at crucial moments if he became President.
No, they didn't. And to the extent that was a concern for either candidate, it was Hilary whose Clinton Foundation was taking Russian bribes and therefore subject to "influence, blackmail and control".
Any FBI individual who had actual concerns there would have been targeting Hilary
In general, the US Intelligence Community feared that Trump might be able to win the 2016 election because of an October Surprise. Specifically, the Russian Government might be able to release embarrassing information about Hillary Clinton shortly before the election.
A panic developed that Russia had stolen a huge number of Clinton's e-mails. It seemed likely that those e-mails contained much information about Clinton's corrupt use of her Clinton Family Foundation to collect money from foreigners while she had been the Secretary of State.
Trump was critical of NATO and suggested that the US should withdraw from NATO. For such reasons, Putin might prefer that Trump win the election. In this situation, Putin might even collaborate with Trump to optimize the October Surprise.
=======
No such October Surprise happened, but Trump won the election anyway.
So, let's see:
We all agree that Putin had serious dirt on Hilary, and that if he wanted Trump in office he had the means at his disposal to get Trump there.
But he never leaked any of the emails
Which therefore tells us, and told every single "involved" person at the FBI, that Putin wanted Hilary, not Trump, in the White House.
This had to be suspected by late October, and was clearly true by Election Day.
So it is not even remotely possible that any of those people harbored honest fears about Trump by 11/4/16
In the weeks following Trump's victory, the FBI's suspicions about Trump became known to the public.
More lies. Steele got "fired" by the FBI because he leaked to Michael Isikof, who published at the end of September. Reid also made the claims before the election
I'm curious, are you paid to write these lies, or do you do it for fun?
Blogger Readering said...
Joffe generated internet traffic with Russia and whom? The comment reads like fan fiction.
The Hillary Cult members think anything negative about her and Bill is fiction. Even a blind bird finds an occasional worm but not the cult members.
JK Brown said @10:38 "There are a lot of people running cover for Russiagate."
Oh so not true. Color me cynical, but until several of these traitorous rodents actually go to jail or otherwise have their lives ruined, all of this is just a nothingburger.
Durham ain't no high-minded crusader, no how, no way. He is as much a swamp dweller as the rest of them. Don't believe me? Check and see how old Kevin Clinesmith is doing.
Oh, Durham will dangle a shiny lure or two out there, but the media certainly won't bite and he knows it.
At the end of the day, Durham will say he did all he could, and all of the perps will walk away scot-free … knowing that they got away it, and the next gang of thieves will do likewise.
Washington takes care of Washington, first, last, and always.
— Don Suber, May 14, 2019
@Critter: "What exactly was so bad about Watergate?"
Nixon. Not our kind, dear.
Andrew McCarthy: "There is no grand Watergate[-like] conspiracy, unless top government officials are willfully abusing their power."
In what universe were top government officials not abusing their power?
Just Democrats stalling forward progress again. Wasting time and treasure, just running out the clock. Lotsa lawyers gettin paid though, there's that aspect of lawyers making work for lawyers. What did Mueller's employees accomplish? BILLABLE HOURS!
"In Durham’s account, they are guileless victims, hypnotized by Clinton’s machinations."
In Durham’s account, they are active conspiracists, inspired by Clinton’s machinations."
Fixed for McCarthy.
Greg the Class Traitor at 2:26 PM
Mike Sylwester said...
FBI Counter-Intelligence believed that Russian Intelligence had managed to compromise Donald Trump over the course of several years. Russian Intelligence might be able to influence, blackmail and control Trump at crucial moments if he became President.
No, they didn't. ....
What FBI Counter-Intelligence believed is told by Peter Strzok in his book Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump.
People keep claiming that the FBI acted in good faith. If they'd been acting in Good faith, they would've told Trump he was target of the Russians and that several if his aides were under suspicion.
Instead, they diliberarely kept Trump in the dark. They discussions with him about the "Dossier" were also dishonest since the purpose was to monitor trump's reactions for anything that could be used against him. It was not a good faith "Hey, lets tell the POTUS elect what's going on". And the same is true of every Comey interaction with Trump.
But why be surprised? As we known everyone involved in the TRump investigation at the FBI 2016-2017 was a Trump hater and almost all supported Hillary. McCabe and Comey lied under oath to the FBI IG and/or Congress and were allowed to skate.
Remember Mueller "Forgetting" his cellphone in the oval office? Remember Rosenstein thinking about wearing a wire when talking to Trump?
But of course Andy is right, they were all just DUMB - and not part of the conspiracy.
"I'm curious, are you paid to write these lies, or do you do it for fun?"
Well:
"Opossums carry diseases such as leptospirosis, tuberculosis, relapsing fever, tularemia, spotted fever, toxoplasmosis, coccidiosis, trichomoniasis, and Chagas disease."
the plumbers tried to tap the dnc, but they failed, howard hunt tried to splice some cables re the diem hit, he didn't succeed
Greg the Class Traitor at 2:26 PM
In the weeks following Trump's victory, the FBI's suspicions about Trump became known to the public.
More lies. Steele got "fired" by the FBI because he leaked to Michael Isikof, who published at the end of September. Reid also made the claims before the election
In September 2016, the public did not know anything about Steele being fired by the FBI.
Senator Reid's letter complaining to the FBI was reported on October 31, 2016. The election was on November 8. In the weeks following Trump's unexpected victory, the public discussion grew and intensified.
-------
The FBI had tried to keep its Crossfire Hurricane investigation secret.
Before the election, there had been some unconfirmed reports of a FISA investigation.
Before the election, Christopher Steele had briefed some reporters about his Dossier.
The reports on October 31 about Senator Reid's letter were an important revelation that the FBI was conducting an investigation involving Trump and Russia.
At that point, though, the public expected Clinton to win the election. After Trump won, the public became much more interested in the existence of an FBI investigation.
------
The main point I am trying to make here is that the FBI intended to keep its Crossfire Hurricane investigation secret from the public. Despite that intention, the investigation became known to the public, especially after Trump won the election.
Readering said...
No one ever claimed that the Alfa Bank server mystery was more than that. And in spite of FBI and Congressional investigations the mystery was never explained to the public. It never rose to the level of being part of a narrative of Trump-Russia collusion.
It is a shame that nobody told the Clinton campaign that this was not part of the narrative, as a senior policy advisor there released a statement days before the election saying
"This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow. Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.
"This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump's ties to Russia...
Apparently Slate and MSNBC were also unaware that this was not part of the narrative.
*facepalm*
Blogger Mike Sylwester said...
Greg the Class Traitor at 2:26 PM
Mike Sylwester said...
FBI Counter-Intelligence believed that Russian Intelligence had managed to compromise Donald Trump over the course of several years. Russian Intelligence might be able to influence, blackmail and control Trump at crucial moments if he became President.
No, they didn't. ....
What FBI Counter-Intelligence believed is told by Peter Strzok in his book Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump.
No, what Peter Strzok (the lying sack of shit who was cheating on his wife with Lisa Page and working to sabotage Trump for personal political reasons) wrote in his book is whatever shit he thought he could get away with saying to justify his criminal behavior.
Are you really so stupid that you believe anything Strzok says or writes?
Democrats hate Trump because:
1) He's an ex-Democrat. That makes him an apostate.
2) He's not part of the Repub-Dem deep state. His mission was to tear down the deep state and them.
Mike Sylwester said...
The FBI had tried to keep its Crossfire Hurricane investigation secret.
Of course they did, after Trump won, and the lack of any Putin "October Surprise" proved that Putin was backing Hilary, not Trump.
They were dishonestly and illegally spying on the incoming President of the US, and they were trying to carry out a coup by getting anything they could to try to drive the rightful President of the US out of office.
Hiding Crossfire Hurricane is entirely different from trying to keep claims of Trump Russian collusion out of the press.
I held a TS/SAP clearance. The program I was on required that I had to inform the security people when I left the country at least 30-days ahead. I got a pre-trip briefing, then did a post-trip debrief after I got back. Part of the briefing was a defensive brief of ways adversaries could trick the travelers into revealing classified information of becoming a new "friend"
The FBI didn't give Trump that briefing. Dissolve the FBI. Fire all employees and confiscate their pensions.
Lewis said
"...They hated Trump so much (for what reason I still can't understand) that they were willing to do virtually anything to make him look bad regardless of the impact to the country."
I suspect the reason Trump was so hated was his campaign pledge to "drain the swamp."
These people are the swamp, and a determined outsider like Trump could disrupt their cozy world by exposing their corruption and sleeze. He didn't drain it, but he sure exposed it.
rcocean at 2:38 PM
People keep claiming that the FBI acted in good faith. If they'd been acting in Good faith, they would've told Trump he was target of the Russians and that several if his aides were under suspicion. ....
The FBI officials who made the decisions not to inform Trump suspected that Trump was being controlled by Russia. They really, mainly were investigating Trump, not just some of Trump's aides (e.g. Page, Papadopoulos, Flynn).
In this situation, the FBI decided not to inform Trump about the investigation. That FBI decision has been criticized plenty.
Keep in mind, though, that the FBI intended to keep the investigation secret. To some extent, that intention justifies the FBI decision not to inform Trump that some of his aides were being suspected and investigated.
As events developed, the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was revealed to the public. A major early culprit in that revelation was Senator Harry Reid, who attacked the FBI for conducting its investigation for being insufficiently aggressive.
They didn't have the internet during Watergate. Change of venue.
rcocean at 2:40 PM
Remember Mueller "Forgetting" his cellphone in the oval office? Remember Rosenstein thinking about wearing a wire when talking to Trump?
At that time, Mueller no longer was an FBI official. Rosenstein never was an FBI official.
Mueller and Rosenstein were acting sneaky and wrong in this situation.
However, these particular actions were not FBI actions.
Ignorance is Bliss at 3:04 PM
It is a shame that nobody told the Clinton campaign that this was not part of the narrative, as a senior policy advisor there released a statement days before the election saying: "This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow. Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank."
During and after 2016, the suspicion about Alfa Bank was not developed by the FBI or other government agencies.
Rather, that suspicion was developed by Christopher Steele, by the Clinton campaign, by some independent computer experts and by Trump-hating mass media.
I think that the suspicion about Alfa Bank originated in about 2014, when an international gambling ring, based in Russia, was operating in Trump Tower. That gambling ring did a huge number of financial transactions, using Russia's Alfa Bank.
The FBI broke up that gambling ring. In the process, the gambling ring's communications were monitored for a long time, and eventually the ring's documents and computers were seized. The FBI had plenty of opportunity to discover any evidence that Alfa Bank and Trump were incriminated in any criminal activity.
It's likely that some person knowledgeable about that FBI investigation suggested later, in 2015-2016, that Alfa Bank and Trump were involved in some significant wrong-doing. So, some Trump-hating computer experts began studying computer communications between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower.
However, by that time, the FBI no longer was interested in that subject. Michael Sussman offered some such data to the FBI, but the FBI quickly dismissed it as useless.
Likewise, Sussman offered the data to the CIA, which ignored it.
The idea that Trump and Russian Intelligence were communicating secretly through Russia's Alfa Bank was an absurd idea. In comparison, the FBI's idea that Trump and Russian Intelligence were communicating secretly through Carter Page was much more plausible.
Bruce Hayden at 2:10 PM
Glosses over a lot. Both the Steele Dossier and AlphaBank “intelligence” were created by agents of the Clinton campaign. ... Joffe, expecting a high level Clinton Administration appointment as a computer czar, got an IC (I believe CIA, but could have been FBI) contract that gave him and his bunch of hackers high level access to their servers. They then proceeded to generate traffic with Russia, and having “discovered” it, proceed to inform both agencies of their “discovery”. ... they were the ones who had created the suspicious Internet traffic in the first place. .... Joffe, etc, had access to these servers through the Intelligence Community, as a contractor doing work for them. ....
I doubt that Joffe and his fellows were trying to create false information or to frame Trump.
Rather, they were trying to discover real information that might help the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc., investigate Trump.
They also were trying to agitate the public to be suspicious about Trump and Russia.
Joffe and his fellows were able to find instances of computer contacts between Alfa Bank and some specific computers in Trump Tower. Apparently, such instances seemed suspicious to seem people, but they were dismissed as useless by the FBI and CIA.
Computers contact each other all the time for many reasons.
-------
For an international gambling ring to use Alfa Bank for financial transactions made perfect sense.
For Trump and Russian Intelligence to use Alfa Bank for conspiratorial communications did not make any sense at all. The absurdity of this idea apparently did not occur to Joffe and his fellows.
Mike Sylwester said...
The idea that Trump and Russian Intelligence were communicating secretly through Russia's Alfa Bank was an absurd idea. In comparison, the FBI's idea that Trump and Russian Intelligence were communicating secretly through Carter Page was much more plausible.
Bzzt, again
Cater Page worked with the CIA to shut down a Russian spy ring. The FBI people knew this, because they asked teh CIA and the CIA told them that.
The idea that Trump and Russian Intelligence were communicating secretly through Carter Page never had the slightest shred of credibility.
Continuing to make that claim, while ignoring Page's actual record, just shows that you're not credible, either
Mike Sylwester said...
The FBI officials who made the decisions not to inform Trump suspected that Trump was being controlled by Russia.
No, they didn't.
1: If Trump were controlled by Russia, Putin would have October Surprised Hilary
2: Hilary's policies were far more favorable to Putin and Russia than Trump's were. By supporting fracking and drilling, Trump helped drive down the price of oil, which really hurt Russia
Biden is following what Hilary would have done, leading to higher gas prices and more wealth for Putin to play with.
You can repeat the lie all you want. That doesn't make it true, it just establishes that you can't be trusted
No thinking human being over the age of 20 could have possibly believed that Trump was a Putin sleeper by the time the criminal thugs in charge of the FBI started lying to incoming President Trump to hide their "investigation" from him.
There is no possible reasonable "benefit of the doubt" that can excuse what they did
Anti-trumpers knew it was all lies, but they liked it - because it damaged Trump.
LOL - Hillary lets Hillarywoodland "Vanity Fair" (Laughs) come to her rescue.
recall when Hillary smeared Monica. Yeah - same crap. day ending in a Y.
Keep in mind, though, that the FBI intended to keep the investigation secret. To some extent, that intention justifies the FBI decision not to inform Trump that some of his aides were being suspected and investigated.
The FBI had no evidence that TRump was Russian Spy, nor did they have any credible evidence that he was in touch with Putin. If Russia was attempting to influence Trump through his aides the obvious thing to do was to inform Trump.
But Yes, the whole of the Demcorat/Liberal FBI was to target Trump and destroy him. There was no "Good Faith". Further, the wiretaps were used not only investigate Trump on "Russia Collusion" but to hopefully find someting else that could be used.
And yes you can look at it from the perspective: "Well if Putin favored Trump he would've done X and he didn't".
But its much simpler. The FBI had ZERO credible evidence that Trump was a Russian Spy. Or working for Putin. Again, if the concern was that Russian was trying to "gain control of Trump", then Trump should have been the first one informed. Instead of Comey continued to lie to Trump until he was fired. He told Trump directly, several times, that Trump was NOT a target.
And all the while Trump WAS a Target of Lying Jim Comey and Leftwing DNC controlled McCabe.
"At that time, Mueller no longer was an FBI official. Rosenstein never was an FBI official."
Mueller was Comey's best friend forever. And had recomended Comey for the FBI job. He later led the Special investiagation and chose FBI agents and lawyers that were all Democrats or hated Trump. Rosenstein discussed the wire with McCabe WHO WAS with the FBI.
Rosenstein discussed the wire with McCabe WHO WAS with the FBI.
Thank you for reminding me about McCabe's role in that situation.
rcocean:
.... The FBI had ZERO credible evidence that Trump was a Russian Spy. ... Comey continued to lie to Trump until he was fired. He told Trump directly, several times, that Trump was NOT a target.
Some FBI officials thought the evidence against Trump was credible. For example, former FBI Counter-Intelligence officer Peter Strzok wrote an entire book presenting such evidence.
The book did not convince me, but Strzok obviously is convinced.
Yes, Comey did lie to Trump about Trump not being investigated. Comey felt that such a lie was justified in the circumstances.
Comey should have resigned. He hated Trump too much to be Trump's FBI Director.
It's the media as a whole, and the Mueller investigation in particular that should be ashamed of themselves.
Fat chance...
Trump fucked up by not declassifying everything as he had the power to do.
And I mean EVERYTHING. I don't care about 'sources and methods.'
He should have burned it all down and didn't.
Big mistake.
The McCarthy article is not behind a paywall and I believe some commenters here are being unduly harsh in their assessment of McCarty. First, writers rarely pen the title that tops their articles. And a careful reading of the complete piece informs one that he is telling us what he Durham's apparent motivations and thoughts, not his own.
The bureaucrats even may have been just a tad politically biased against Trump, predisposed to believe he was the bad guy and the Clintonistas — like-minded party of government types — were just trying to protect America. The government officials were naifs, and Clinton rolled them, in Durham's version.
I find this hard to swallow, having studied Russiagate and written a book about it. I imagine many Americans who want answers will feel the same way...
If there is a “worse than Watergate” scandal here, this is a strange way to go about finding it.
Mike Sylwester said...
rcocean:
.... The FBI had ZERO credible evidence that Trump was a Russian Spy. ... Comey continued to lie to Trump until he was fired. He told Trump directly, several times, that Trump was NOT a target.
Some FBI officials thought the evidence against Trump was credible. For example, former FBI Counter-Intelligence officer Peter Strzok wrote an entire book presenting such evidence.
Peter Strzok wrote a book as a CYA after he was caught screwing around on the job and fired.
Pretending to believe him just marks you as a worthless chump
For Trump and Russian Intelligence to use Alfa Bank for conspiratorial communications did not make any sense at all. The absurdity of this idea apparently did not occur to Joffe and his fellows.
Coming to this exchange late but Joffe knew who was paying him. Seth Rich could not be reached for comment.
Echoing Rabel and Rit: This is very important to the context. Like Neo, I think McCarthy is starting to believe.
=======================
The government officials were naifs, and Clinton rolled them, in Durham's version.
I find this hard to swallow, having studied Russiagate and written a book about it. I imagine many Americans who want answers will feel the same way.
Trump supporters have great expectations about special counsel Durham’s probe. They are going to be deeply disappointed. There is no grand Watergate conspiracy, unless top government officials are willfully abusing their power. In Durham’s account, they are guileless victims, hypnotized by Clinton’s machinations.
========================
"Worse than Watergate" means that Robert Creamer was/is worse than G. Gordon Liddy. I think that's true.
Hah! Andrew McCarthy would be the very last asshole I would bother to read regarding Trump being spied on. Andy pooh poohed the idea Mueller was anything but a "straight shooter" and that the FBI would never, EVER be involved with any of these spying shenanigans.
After being proved wrong time and again he trots out these "Well this could be smoke but then again maybe not"
But Clinton herself was a high-ranking government official, wasn't she?
“Look- everyone knows something not right took place.”
What do you mean by this? There’s a shit-ton of people “out there” that only believe what their preferred media outlets tell them- and I don’t mean the ones who’re watching Fox. Not this time, anyway. It can be as bald a faced lie as Kojak- until Rachel Maddow et al personally correct their misinformation campaigns: profess on air their numerous lies and cover ups of Dem talking points, ask forgiveness, do penance and recite the Act of Contrition- these loyal, brainwashed, cotton-headed ninny-muggins(es) will never cede to factual evidence.
It’s a machine. A One World machine, if I may be so bold.
Hopefully, the parts won’t jive.
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