I can’t wait to see which Trump offspring gets thrown under the bus first.
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Bet John owns a gun
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It’s not so much Trump as it is Nunes, and by extension Paul Ryan (or the utter lack of Paul Ryan). If FBI agents go out and vote Republican next election, they will be voting for aiming this shitspray right at themselves.
You don’t throw your favourite dolls under a bus.
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Indeed. Considering the long history of questionable FBI surveillance – often applauded by the GOP – it’s strange to witness the GOP’s transformation into paranoid hippie radicals.
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Although this is more like when a police force, famous for brutalizing minorities, arrests some rich white person for some flagrant violation of the law, and the person’s response is, “The police force is corrupt and biased (against rich people)!” They’re still fine with all the other shit the law enforcement group was up to, they just thought they were immune.
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CBC story on this is titled: “Controversial Republican memo on Russia investigation released”
I really wish it was titled, “Bizarre Republican smoke and mirrors act comes to inevitable conclusion.”
This is all so dumb. But until I see Paul Ryan do something about Nunes’ position I’m going to assume that this is the sort of dumb shit that leads the death of democracy.
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Hmm - soooo… I am still not sure what this means for anyone. Other than the reality that the “dossier” seems to be probably mostly bullshit 
There goes some peoples wet fantasy.
It appears the FBI moved on this request, even though they knew it didn’t have a lot of evidence grounding it. Honestly, that sounds like something they would do in many situations.
It doesn’t look like there was some vast left wing conspiracy. I think it is hilarious when most of the FBI heads were Republicans. Also, they squeezed out one last drop of the whole “Hillary’s emails” near the election date.
More government incompetence, vs someone pulling the strings in the back ground.
We should be challenging the FBI and making sure they are on the up and up. Though honestly, I think they do decent work, and probably aren’t violating civil rights as much as some other alphabets out there. Though I do question their schemes to groom “terrorists” and then “catching” them. There was an Electric Dreams episode that sorta touched on this.
At the same time, it seems likely that Trump or his staff have more serious issues that may come to light with their condemnation of the FBI. Already there is enough smoke, and people admitting they met with Russians that it seems very fishy.
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I don’t see why you’d say that. The memo doesn’t lay out the FBI’s reasons supporting a warrant. It points out the political bias inherent in one piece of evidence and we have no idea whether that evidence was even important to the court’s decision. It’s hard for me to believe that a judge would put a tremendous weight on a-thing-that-a-guy wrote.
And all that is beside the conspiracy-against-Trump point. I think it’s likely FISA just approves everything that comes across their desks, maybe with rare exceptions. So even if the evidence was flimsy, that doesn’t prove an effort to go Trump, it’s possible getting warrants with flimsy evidence is an every day occurrence.
One intelligence official explained this. The peeing on the bed part may be false, but it’s actually one of the least troubling accusations in the dossier. The dossier was put together relying on a variety of sources including Russian sources. It’s quite likely it contains one or two things that are extremely damning and true, and the rest is utter fabrication.
The point of doing this is to send a message to two audiences. When the dossier eventually comes out, some of it’s claims will be proven false and so it will have no credibility. But to people who know which claims are true, it’s a reminder that you have to do what you are told or else.
Obviously that might not be true, the whole thing might be bullshit. But it’s not safe to jump from one part of it being proven false to assuming the rest is false. There are people motivated to have part be true and part be false, and some of those people might have provided information when it was being created.
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Hey that’s unfair. Ryan even gave an interview today, when asked about removing Nunes, he replied that the tax cuts are working.
Christ, what an asshole.
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When you consider that Nunes has been working with the White House since last February in various ways to stop the investigation, this comes as no surprise. He basically keeps saying “there’s nothing to see here”, except then Flynn and Papadopoulos pled guilty and are cooperating with the investigation, so. . . . . I wonder if Nunes could ultimately be charged with obstruction of justice as well.
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"That’s it?"
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I can see this written ala vintage PT Barnum and Bailey circus poster style.
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Schiff is looking to release the 2nd memo which disputes the Nunes memo. They’re working with FBI/DOJ to make sure that there are no national security issues before doing so. Even if they can’t technically “unclassify” it, they could either leak it or do something like read it aloud during session so it would be part of the public record. The Nunes memo is a joke on it’s own and basically proves nothing.
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It depends how big of a tantrum you’re throwing.
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Some obvious things to consider:
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Trump and Nunes are basically saying the FBI is full of Democrats who are working to depose Trump. Has anyone ever thought of the FBI as full of partisan Democrats?
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Carter Page was under suspicion and may have been under surveillance with a FISA warrant long before he even started working for Trump. They guy lived and worked in Russia, and was constantly on TV there pushing pro-Putin views. So claiming the Steele dossier is the impetus for Page’s surveillance is false.
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Christopher Wray, acting head of the FBI, and Rod Rosenstein at the DOJ (both Trump appointees) have stated that the memo is inaccurate and misleading and advised against it’s release.
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Light save us, (most of) the replies to his tweet…
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I say that because (and granted that memo isn’t very reader friendly, and I only read it once) it said several of the details were admitted, despite them being known, the dossier was a big part of Page’s FISA as well as the Yahoo article, both from the one source which was losing credibility and reliability. Sorta like how the report on Iraq’s WMD was thought to be flawed at the time it was presented, but they went ahead as if it as correct.
Not me. It’s enough that one may want to check it out, just to be sure. And as you said, there is also likely other evidence that the memo doesn’t mentioned.
True, but we don’t even know what all the dossier contains. So it’s also prudent to not put too much weight into it until it both comes to light AND with evidence of it being truthful.
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