"Earlier this week, the Justice Department finalized a $1.25 million settlement to Trump’s 2016 campaign adviser Carter Page..."

"... to settle claims that he was illegally surveilled by federal authorities. Multiple courts had dismissed federal lawsuits that Page — who was never charged with a crime — filed against the government, saying the statute of limitations on his ability to make these claims had lapsed. Last month, the Justice Department reached a settlement with Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn for more than $1 million, asserting he had been the victim of a politicized prosecution. Flynn pleaded guilty to charges that he lied to law enforcement about his conversations with a Russian diplomat during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, then later sought to withdraw that plea. The case against him was dismissed in 2020 after Trump pardoned him.... The department under the Biden administration had fought to have the suits filed by Page and Flynn thrown out, arguing that they were legally meritless...."

From "DOJ is paying out Trump allies, undermining former investigations/Since Trump’s return to the White House last year, the Justice Department has paid more than $8.5 million to resolve legal claims brought by allies and supporters" (WaPo)(gift link).

"Carter Page sued fired FBI Director James Comey, fired FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, the FBI, and others involved in the improper Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act snooping..."

"... on the former Trump campaign associate that relied upon British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier to obtain approval from the FISA court."

The Washington Examiner reports.

"A New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his role perpetrating the Russia collusion hoax was tasked with framing the news that a former top FBI lawyer was to plead guilty..."

"... to deliberately fabricating evidence against a Donald Trump campaign affiliate targeted in the Russia probe. The resulting article is a case study in how to write propaganda. Adam Goldman broke, and cushioned, the news that former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was to plead guilty to fabricating evidence in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant application to spy on Trump campaign affiliate Carter Page. His job was to present the news as something other than an indictment of the FBI’s handling of the Russia collusion hoax, to signal to other media that they should move on from the story as quickly as possible, and to hide his own newspaper’s multi-year participation in the Russia collusion hoax.... The 434-page Horowitz report identified major abuses by the FBI that violated Page’s civil liberties....  Here’s how Goldman puts it: 'Republicans have seized on a narrow aspect of the inquiry — the investigation into Mr. Page — in a long-running quest to undermine it.'... FISA abuse was never a 'narrow aspect' of the inquiry and everyone should have 'seized' on it because lying to a FISA court and violating an American’s civil liberties are evil."

Writes Mollie Ziegler Hemingway at The Federalist. Much more at the link.

"The FBI was warned sections of the controversial Steele dossier could have been part of a 'Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations'..."

"... according to newly declassified footnotes from a government watchdog report. The December report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz examined the FBI's investigation into alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia as well as the FBI's four surveillance warrants for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.... Several footnotes in Horowitz's report were redacted, and Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson pushed for the declassification of four footnotes related to the Steele dossier... Footnote 350 in the IG report addresses the FBI's knowledge of Russian contacts with Steele and the potential for disinformation. Steele had 'frequent contacts with representatives for multiple Russian oligarchs, we identified reporting the Crossfire Hurricane team received from (redacted) indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele's election reporting.'..."

Writes Catherine Herridge at CBS News.

"The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered the government Tuesday to explain what the FBI will do to ensure the bureau does not mislead judges again..."

"... when applying for surveillance orders like those used in the 2016 investigation of the Trump campaign. The four-page order from Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, the presiding judge of the FISC, takes the FBI to task for 17 omissions and errors contained in applications to the court to secretly monitor the electronic communications of Carter Page, a former Trump adviser.... 'When FBI personnel misled (the Justice Department) in the ways described above, they equally misled the FISC,' Collyer wrote. 'The FBI’s handling of the Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the (inspector general) report, was antithetical to the heightened duty of candor' expected of FISC filings. Collyer is the judge who signed the very first surveillance application for Page sought by the FBI in October 2016.... 'The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable,' Collyer wrote."

WaPo reports.

"If you don’t consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is?"

"But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that’s what these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course. In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it. It’s brimming with proof of FBI subterfuge and deceit, all in service of persuading a FISA court of something that was not true: that U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign official Carter Page was an agent of the Russian government and therefore needed to have his communications surveilled...."

Writes Glenn Greenwald at "The Inspector General’s Report on 2016 FBI Spying Reveals a Scandal of Historic Magnitude: Not Only for the FBI but Also the U.S. Media" (Intercept). Much more at the link.

"The activities we found here don’t vindicate anybody who touched this..."

Said Michael E. Horowitz, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, reported in the NYT.

Mr. Horowitz was responding to [Senator Lindsey] Graham’s mention of an Op-Ed by the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey published in The Washington Post after Mr. Horowitz’s report became public.

While Mr. Comey acknowledged that the inspector general found “mistakes” in the administrative process associated with the wiretap applications targeting the former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page — the focus of the report — Mr. Comey wrote that Mr. Horowitz’s “most important” finding was his debunking of the insinuations by Mr. Trump and his allies that F.B.I. officials, driven by political bias, conspired to sabotage Mr. Trump.

Here's the op-ed in question: "James Comey: The truth is finally out. The FBI fulfilled its mission." (WaPo).

"The Justice Department inspector general has found evidence that an FBI employee may have altered a document connected to court-approved surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser..."

"... but has concluded that the conduct did not affect the overall validity of the surveillance application, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. The person under scrutiny is a low-level FBI lawyer who has since been forced out of the agency, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss material that has not yet been made public. They declined to identify the lawyer.... That conduct did not alter Horowitz’s finding that the surveillance application of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page had a proper legal and factual basis, the officials said. [Inspector General Michael] Horowitz has been exploring various aspects of the Russia probe but was focused in particular on applications the FBI filed with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Page’s electronic communications.... Separately, Attorney General William P. Barr tapped U.S. Attorney John Durham to explore the origins of the FBI probe and U.S. intelligence agency activities aimed at the Trump campaign, and Durham is expected to pursue the allegation surrounding the altered document to see whether it constitutes a crime, people familiar with the matter said.... Conservatives have alleged that a medley of wrongdoing occurred during the investigation, which was eventually taken over by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, and they are likely to seize on any criticism that Horowitz directs at those involved in the probe...."

WaPo reports.

"Now the dossier — financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and compiled by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele — is likely to face new, possibly harsh scrutiny from multiple inquiries."

Says the NYT.

Mr. Mueller’s report contained over a dozen passing references to the document’s claims but no overall assessment of why so much did not check out....

Republicans in Congress have vowed to investigate. The Justice Department’s inspector general is considering whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation improperly relied on the dossier in applying to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a warrant to eavesdrop on Carter Page, a Trump adviser. The inspector general wants to know what the F.B.I. learned about Mr. Steele’s sources and whether it disclosed any doubts about their veracity to the court....

[It] could be Russian disinformation. That would mean that in addition to carrying out an effective attack on the Clinton campaign, Russian spymasters hedged their bets and placed a few land mines under Mr. Trump’s presidency as well....

But Mr. Mueller, after a two-year investigation involving roughly 40 F.B.I. agents and other specialists, provided no evidence to support the claim[s]....

Much more detail at the link.

"The baffling thing was why they were baffled. Barr's statement was accurate and supported by publicly known facts...."

"It is a fact that in October 2016 the FBI wiretapped Carter Page, who had earlier been a short-term foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. The bureau's application to a secret court for that wiretapping is public. It is heavily redacted but is clearly focused on Page and 'the Russian government's attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.' Page was wiretapped because of his connection with the Trump campaign. Some critics have noted that the wiretap authorization came after Page left the campaign. But the surveillance order allowed authorities to intercept Page's electronic communications both going forward from the day of the order and backward, as well. Investigators could see Page's emails and texts going back to his time in the campaign. So there is simply no doubt that the FBI wiretapped a Trump campaign figure.... [I]t is also known that the FBI engaged at least one informant, a professor named Stefan Halper, to penetrate the Trump campaign... [D]espite the cries from outraged Democrats and the media analysts who simply can't imagine what Barr might have been referring to, the attorney general's words were demonstrably true."

Writes Byron York at The Washington Times.

"Leading Democrats should explain how it is that their promises of 'more than circumstantial evidence of collusion,' as Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) put it, resulted in zero indictments on such charges when #MuellerTime ran out."

"Top intelligence officials, both current and retired, also owe us an explanation: not just for their explosive statements—such as former CIA director John Brennan’s prediction earlier this month that a new round of conspiracy indictments was coming—but for their investigatory decisions from the start. That includes relying on the Steele dossier to seek a surveillance warrant against Trump’s former campaign adviser Carter Page, and to open a counterintelligence investigation on Trump himself, motivated in part by disagreement with his public embrace of Russia. Accountability on this front may well serve Trump’s self-promotional claims of a 'witch hunt.' But it is vital that intelligence abuses be held to account as well, no matter the partisan consequences. A failure to do so could very well hurt progressives in the future, should overzealous intelligence officials put them in their sights."

From "RIP, Russiagate/The implosion of the collusion theory is a humiliation for everyone who promoted it" by Aaron Maté at The Nation.

The self-interest part is particularly amusing. Overzealous intelligence officials need to be held to account, because they could very well hurt progressives in the future. You should have been saying that all along.

"It is truly the deep state house of cards collapsing — as I have been predicting — right before our very eyes."

Said Sean Hannity on Fox News just now (my transcription).

He's talking about tonight's statement from the White House press secretary:

At the request of a number of committees of Congress, and for reasons of transparency, the President has directed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice (including the FBI) to provide for the immediate declassification of the following materials: (1) pages 10-12 and 17-34 of the June 2017 application to the FISA court in the matter of Carter W. Page; (2) all FBI reports of interviews with Bruce G. Ohr prepared in connection with the Russia investigation; and (3) all FBI reports of interviews prepared in connection with all Carter Page FISA applications.

In addition, President Donald J. Trump has directed the Department of Justice (including the FBI) to publicly release all text messages relating to the Russia investigation, without redaction, of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr.

"What exactly might an 'insurance policy' against Donald Trump look like? He would have to be marginalized at every turn."

"Strategies would encompass politics, the courts, opposition research and the media. He’d have to become mired in lawsuits, distracted by allegations, riddled with calls for impeachment, hounded by investigations. His election must be portrayed as the illegitimate result of a criminal or un-American conspiracy.... Once Trump is in office, a good insurance policy would call for neutralizing the advisers seen as most threatening, including his attorney general. The reigning FBI director could privately send the implicit message that as long as Trump minds his own business, he won’t be named as a target. When the president asks the FBI director to lift the cloud and tell the public their president isn’t under investigation, the FBI director could demur and allow a storm of innuendo to build. Idle chatter benefits the plot. There would be rampant media leaks, both true and false, but none of them would benefit Trump. All would be well unless the president removes the FBI director. Then, a rider on the insurance policy would kick in...."

Writes Sharyl Attkisson at The Hill.

Also at The Hill: "The handwritten notes exposing what Fusion GPS told DOJ about Trump," by John Solomon.

... Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson — paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to find dirt on her GOP rival — met secretly with [then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr], right after Trump won the 2016 election. And all of it was captured in the official’s handwritten notes — a contemporaneous record that intelligence professionals tell me exposes the flaws plaguing the early Russia collusion case....

Early on, Ohr’s notes detail, the conversation focused on a theory apparently offered by Simpson that revolving Trump team members — former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, followed by informal adviser Carter Page, then personal lawyer Michael Cohen — forged a secret channel with Moscow to hijack the election. All three men long have been cited in the Russia investigation; each denies any coordination with Russia. But Ohr’s notes are the first to quote Simpson as suggesting the three essentially were shark-tooth spies who replaced each other in a secret plot....

The Ohr interview and many other now-public actions in the Russia collusion case are “breaking every protocol at the fundamental level of intelligence gathering,” one highly decorated intelligence professional told me....

"Carter Page on Sunday called the accusations against him detailed in the foreign surveillance warrant application released by the FBI 'so ridiculous.'"

"'You talk about misleading the courts, it's just so misleading... It's literally a complete joke.'"

CNN reports on the interview that was on CNN's "State of the Union."

I have not attempted to read the long document that was released, but one of the commenters in last night café, Yancey Ward, did:

Believe it or not, I read the FISA applications in less than an hour. It is 90%+ redacted, so there are about 40 pages of actual material. The bulk of the material that is redacted appears to be nothing related to Page at all — it appears in procedures, minimization, and is connect otherwise to general descriptions of what Russia is thought to do in such areas- in other words, classified means and methods. Indeed, the only portions that are unredacted are the parts related to Page.

Here is the absolute truth — all of the applications rely on the Steele Dossier and the Isikoff story from September 2016 — a story that Steele himself was the source for. Those are the only two pieces of "evidence" the FBI supplied to the FISA court that could reasonably be inferred to assign probable cause that Page was a knowing Russian agent. The only other things mentioned in regards to Page are that he lived in Russia for a time, travels there sometimes as an energy consultant, and was approached by Russian agents in the past, one of whom Page himself helped to trap and convict by serving as a willing FBI informant. That last part is incongruous with designating him as a Russian agent, but is included any way as an attempt, not to exonerate him, but to tar him.

Also, if you do a page by page comparison of all four applications, there is little material added from one to the other —if you compared the applications side by side, practically every redacted section is identical in shape and length and page designations. In other words, in each of the renewals, it is apparent that the FBI got jackshit from the surveillance — there was nothing they could add to each application, and so just mostly copied the first application serially.

In addition, none of the applications told the court that the Clinton Campaign is the one who paid Steele and FusionGPS — not a single time. Indeed, the only mention in all the applications of "Candidate 2" is in the very last renewal, and that section wasn't discussing who hired the law firm, but was instead discussing some letters Page wrote criticizing the Clinton Campaign. The FBI knew who hired the law firm — they knew Steele (Source 1) was hired by Glenn Simpson (aka US citizen), and they knew Simpson was hired by a law firm- i.e. the FBI knew which law firm and thus it was the Clinton Campaign. The applications studiously avoid mentioning "Candidate 2" at every point they describe the chain of cutouts- always ending with "law firm".

Finally, it clear the FBI confirmed nothing of the Steele Dossier. At no point does it appear that Steele revealed his sources to the FBI- they are always described as "subsources"- this is FBI legalese for "we don't even know the name so that we can designate them by number".

The House Intelligence Republican memo was correct on all counts. The Democrat memo was extremely misleading — there is nothing else other than the Steele Dossier and the story Steele sourced to Isikoff.

I don't have the patience to read the thing myself, but that shows why government officials may chose to write long, evasive documents. Let me know if there's anything about Yancey Ward's description that you think is wrong and tell me exactly why. And don't be verbose! I'm suspicious of verbosity. It makes me feel that you are hiding something.

"The New York Times is asking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to unseal secret documents related to the wiretapping of Carter Page..."

Great!

Normally, even the existence of such material is a closely guarded secret.... But President Trump lowered the shield of secrecy surrounding such materials on Friday by declassifying the Republican memo about Mr. Page, after finding that the public interest in disclosing its contents outweighed any need to protect the information. Because Mr. Trump did so, the Times argues, there is no longer a justification “for the Page warrant orders and application materials to be withheld in their entirety,” and “disclosure would serve the public interest.”

This is basically what I was saying I wanted in "How to resolve the discrepancy of opinion over the Nunes memo" (February 3):

So, it seems, the question is whether it was significantly deceptive to give the FISA court enough information to make it possible for the court to infer that the information came from people who were biased against Trump but to withhold the known and specific information that it was paid for by the Democratic National Committee or the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign....

[E]xactly how was this general information phrased? The unnamed official in the WaPo article says there was "ample disclosure" — but how much disclosure was there?... I want to know exactly what the language was and how deceptive it may have been....

AND: Andrew McCarthy (at National Review) develops another angle: The question isn't so much whether Christopher Steele was trustworthy (given who paid him) but whether his sources were corroborated. It's not enough for the FBI and the Justice Department to trust the sources because Steele is trustworthy. Steele is another investigator, not the source of the information.

From everything we have heard thus far, the FBI did not corroborate Steele’s informants. Their inflammatory allegations about Trump are acknowledged to be “salacious and unverified.” According to the Nunes memo, FBI corroboration efforts were only in their “infancy” at the time the first warrant was sought, and they never yielded anything but “minimal” verification (which may be a charitable way of putting it)....

To justify a finding of probable cause, the government must satisfy the court as to the credibility of the informant who, it is claimed, witnessed the factual transactions described in the warrant. There is no vicarious credibility: The informant’s reliability cannot be shored up by the impeccable credentials of the investigative agent. The agent is not the witness; the informant is.

"Why an Unreleased 4-Page Memo From Devin Nunes Is Causing a Frenzy on the Right."

New York Magazine:

[H]ere’s what we know up to this point about this latest madness: a) There is an undisclosed four-page memorandum, b) written by Nunes’s staff, c) which was made available in a party-line vote to anyone in the House, d) but remains unreleased to the public at large, e) and for which no one but Nunes and a handful of House Intelligence members and staffers have seen the evidence in support of it.

The New York Times’ Charlie Savage reported that the heart of the memo’s grievances is a secret warrant federal authorities obtained to monitor the activities of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in the lead-up to the 2016 election. According to Nunes’s memo, the FBI, in seeking the warrant, all but misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by withholding that the supporting evidence for the warrant came from Republicans’ favorite whipping boy, Steele — the former British spy contracted by research firm Fusion GPS (which in turn was contracted by the Democratic Party) to investigate Trump’s dalliances with Russia. According to Savage’s reporting, those who sought the warrant didn’t disclose that Steele was getting paid by Democratic interests, but merely referred to him in court documents as a trusted FBI source who had already done good work for the bureau in an earlier case....

"As the Dossier Scandal Looms, the New York Times Struggles to Save Its Collusion Tale."

A must-read by Andrew McCarthy (at National Review).

Seven months after throwing Carter Page as fuel on the collusion fire lit by then-FBI director James Comey’s stunning public disclosure that the Bureau was investigating possible Trump campaign “coordination” in Russia’s election meddling, the Gray Lady now says: Never mind. We’re onto Collusion 2.0, in which it is George Papadopoulos....

Well, it turns out the Page angle and thus the collusion narrative itself is beset by an Obama-administration scandal: Slowly but surely, it has emerged that the Justice Department and FBI very likely targeted Page because of the Steele dossier, a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed disguised as intelligence reporting. Increasingly, it appears that the Bureau failed to verify Steele’s allegations before the DOJ used some of them to bolster an application for a spying warrant from the FISA court (i.e., the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court)....

"The FBI obtained a secret court order last summer to monitor the communications of an adviser to presidential candidate Donald Trump..."

"... part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign, law enforcement and other U.S. officials said," The Washington Post reports.

The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page’s communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials.

This is the clearest evidence so far that the FBI had reason to believe during the 2016 presidential campaign that a Trump campaign adviser was in touch with Russian agents. Such contacts are now at the center of an investigation into whether the campaign coordinated with the Russian government to swing the election in Trump’s favor....

“This confirms all of my suspicions about unjustified, politically motivated government surveillance,” Page said in an interview Tuesday. “I have nothing to hide.” He compared surveillance of him to the eavesdropping that the FBI and Justice Department conducted against civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

The NYT headline says "C.I.A. Judgment on Russia Built on Swell of Evidence" and I'm instantly skeptical about whether what's in the article supports that headline.

Because there's so much fake news these days.

Ever notice how cries of "fake news!" slip out of the news when the news outlets have some fake news to slip over? Oh, first let me show you Trump's new tweet:

Can you imagine if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card. It would be called conspiracy theory!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2016

Now, let's get down to the work of checking to see whether the NYT really presents evidence to justify that headline. I'm reading every word of the rather long article but will only give you the actual evidence offered for the proposition that the Russian government intervened in the U.S. election for the purpose of helping Donald Trump win. There's a lot of material in the article that is not about that at all. I'm excluding that, which is padding if the headline is the correct headline. Go to the link if you want to see what it is.

The first relevant material comes in the 16th paragraph: The DNC's servers and John Podesta's email account were hacked and a lot of damaging and embarrassing material was released onto the internet.

Next:

American intelligence officials believe that Russia also penetrated databases housing Republican National Committee data, but chose to release documents only on the Democrats. The committee has denied that it was hacked.

So here's the crucial disputed question of fact: Were the GOP servers also hacked? We're not told what evidence supports the belief that the GOP servers were also hacked, but the GOP says they were not. Yet some "intelligence officials believe" it was. Why? Where's the "swell of evidence" you were going to tell me about?

Even if that fact were nailed down, there would still be more leaps needed to get to the conclusion. First: Was there any embarrassing material? What? If I knew what, I could begin to think about the next question: Why would embarrassing material be withheld? All I can see from the supposed "swell of evidence" here is an assumption that if the DNC was hacked, the GOP committee was also hacked, and that if bad material was found in the DNC server, bad material would also be found in the GOP server, and since we only saw the DNC material, there must have been a conscious decision — by whom?! — to leak only the DNC things and that decision must have been made to help Trump win. That's not evidence itself, only inference based on evidence.

Finally, there are a few paragraphs about why "Putin and the Russian government" might be thought to prefer a Trump presidency to a Clinton presidency. Trump and Putin have given each other some compliments.

That's no swell of evidence! That's a lot of leaping guesswork. And this is nothing more than I already read in the article the NYT put out on December 9th, which I put effort into combing through and rejected for the same reasons I'm putting in this new post.

This might be the biggest fake news story I've ever seen!

Squirreled away at the end of the article is the admission that people at the FBI are skeptical about the conclusion. An unnamed "senior American law enforcement official" told the NYT that "the Russians probably had a combination of goals, including damaging Mrs. Clinton and undermining American democratic institutions" and that "any disagreement between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and suggested that the C.I.A.’s conclusions were probably more nuanced than they were being framed in the news media." The NYT observes that the FBI holds itself to "higher standards of proof," since its work is geared toward prosecuting criminal cases in court, but: "The C.I.A. has a broader mandate to develop intelligence assessments."

I'm staring at that headline again. You said there was a "swell of evidence." Shouldn't that satisfy the FBI's higher standard rather than the good-enough-for-the-CIA standard? I think I see the reason for the different standards. The CIA is concerned about what might happen in the future. But why are we trusting them in an FBI/CIA disagreement about what happened in the past?

The very end of the NYT article is about the FBI investigating "numerous possible connections between Russians and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, including former Trump aides like Paul Manafort and Carter Page, as well as a mysterious and unexplained trail of computer activity between the Trump Organization and an email account at a large Russian bank, Alfa Bank." This investigation began in the summer and seems to have played out by September and October — for reasons that are "are not entirely clear" and that the FBI won't talk about.

Speaking of embarrassing material... that headline, with that content... in the NYT. So awful.

I'm distracted into reading about the word "swell" in my dictionary (the OED). One usually reads of a swell of the sea or of music or emotion.  "Fenc'd no where from the least Surge or Swell of the Water," wrote Daniel Dafoe. "And up the valley came a swell of music on the wind," wrote Tennyson.  "Of all the actors who flourished in my time... Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, the emotions consequent upon the presentment of a great idea to the fancy," wrote Charles Lamb.

But swell of evidence...

Swell is the talk of upwelling emotion and romanticism.

Swell is a tell.