Or, just blindly insist that the gun is Hillary’s. (They are already doing this; somehow she got the Russians to hack her email so she could win the election because Uranium? Or something?)
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At this point, the evidence of time-travel is overwhelming.
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I certainly don’t intend this as a compliment; but how do you even commit “FISA abuses”; much less “shocking” ones?
The standards are so low that what would count as as ‘abuse’ of any more conventional warrant is probably an intended use case in this situation.
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Have I mentioned the underground space lizards?
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Lol, like a plot is required. Just have to let him speak, or tweet.
It is indeed a low bar, but the bar is information provided from US intelligence agencies. The Steele Dossier is political opposition research (ie. dirt) provided from a private UK entity, and paid for by politically interested parties.
From a WaPo article:
“Trump’s attorneys have crafted some negotiating terms for the
president’s interview with Mueller’s team, and they could be presented
to the special counsel as soon as next week, according to the two
people. The president’s legal team hopes to provide Trump’s
testimony in a hybrid form — answering some questions in a face-to-face
interview and others in a written statement.” (emphasis mine.)
Does this sound like someone who has nothing to hide?
(I suppose it could also be evidence that his attorneys know he’s an idiot who will never get anything straight.)
And isn’t this whole “release the memo” bullshit just another kind of next-level obstruction of justice? We have sitting congressmen trying to stop an investigation into someone from their own party.
At some point Mueller might be brought before Congress to answer questions, and if so I hope he has some good 1-liners in his pocket, not for shits and giggles, but because that’s how American zeitgeist works. Maybe something like “Is it worth destroying American democracy just so you can keep your jobs?” or “Are you against criminal investigations in general, or just ones that involve your own political party?”
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Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!
Heeeeere’s Donnie!!!
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Corruption will increase to meet the needs of increasing corruption. Ditto delusion, time travel.
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I wasn’t able to dig up the exact rules of what is admissible in the time I had(if they are indeed available); but that bar isn’t really a meaningful distinction in practice: unless an intelligence agency is just making things up(which would be obviously undesirable) anything “provided from” it is based on their observation of information from the outside world; from which they attempt to draw conclusions.
It would obviously be absurdly bad practice for an agency to just believe something cooked up by an obviously interested party; but following up on tips from such parties, if they seem them sufficiently plausible, is pretty standard.
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Hell, the FBI takes tips from mobsters and drug kingpins, and manages to sort out information despite the tips coming from “non credible” sources. Now we have the Republican party basically saying tips from Democratic opposition researches are somehow less credible, and all of that predicated on the idea that the Steele Dossier launched the investigation, which it obviously didn’t, given the FBI investigation’s timeline.
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Dirt, eh? Well, if that’s the spin you want to put on it. As was pointed out above, Carter Page was under investigation for a long time prior to Steele reaching out to the FBI. It’s a stretch, given the low bar here, to think that what was known before Steele wasn’t sufficient to get a warrant. That, and the whole reason that Steele was able to reach out to the FBI and be taken seriously is that he was a known quantity to our intelligence agencies. He was taken seriously because he’s a serious person. I doubt many fucks were given about who paid his bills (republicans to start, recall, democrats later).
What you call dirt I see as information, open for confirmation.
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The funny thing is they’re not even that. What we know for certain about the Steele dossier is it was only the result of dnc oppo.
It appears to be an in house compilation of everything Steel ran across while working on multiple things fusion had been hired for. First a conservative never Trump paper. Then a GOP primary candidate. Then the democrats. And god knows who else. Fusion seems like one of those firms everyone hires because they’re reliable. Steele’s document was clearly never release directly to any client. And none of the info in it even appears to have been directly used.
So yeah even if it spawned the investigation. Hell even if it spawned the investigation and nothing in it turned out to be valid but it lead to something valid. That’s all fine. That’s all perfectly appropriate.
The focus on discrediting the investigation by connecting it to the Steele dossier is very similar to the attacks we’ve seen on the investigation branching out into areas not directly related to Russian collusion. As if it’s somehow wrong. Unusual. And not allowed to investigate and prosecute clear criminality just because you didn’t set out to find that specific kind of criminality.
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Well of course it’s mostly American GOP dupes who are spreading it. But it seems to me it’s pretty clearly seeded by extranational propaganda.
The amount of people behind it isn’t the issue. The issue is, who started it early on?
I have to wonder how exactly they perform such an analysis and if it isn’t mostly BS.
Since the initial russian social medial debacle they’ve gotten better and better about creating more authentic account profiles, using ips from the usa in consistent locations, etc. essentially making it virtually impossible to tell they are from russia.
They don’t release the memo when they could. They complain that the Dems are blocking the release when they aren’t. etc. old pattern, works every time.
this.
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