The FBI’s disappointing surveillance of Carter Page illustrates the difficulty of implicating the president in illegal collusion.
Peter Strzok, an FBI agent who called Donald Trump an "idiot" and rooted against him in 2016, was nevertheless reluctant to join the investigation of possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russians who sought to influence the presidential election. Strzok, who was removed from the probe after his anti-Trump comments came to light, expressed his qualms in a May 19 text message to FBI lawyer Lisa Page, his girlfriend at the time: "I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there's no big 'there' there."
It is looking more and more like Strzok's gut was right. The FBI's surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, which Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee criticize in a memo that was declassified last week, shows investigators putting a lot of time and effort into a line of inquiry that apparently led nowhere.
Given the low legal bar for wiretapping suspected foreign agents, it seems likely that the FBI could have obtained permission to wiretap Page even without the evidence that the memo portrays as questionable and tainted by partisan bias. But that does not mean the bureau's investigation of Page, an oil industry consultant known for his pro-Russian views, was fruitful.
The FBI questioned Page in 2013 about his encounter with a Russian intelligence agent (who he apparently did not realize was a spy) and reportedly monitored his conversations in 2014. In October 2016, after press coverage of Page's chumminess with the Russian government led him to part ways with the Trump campaign, the FBI obtained a new warrant, which lasted 90 days and was renewed three times, meaning he was under FBI surveillance for a full year.
Despite all this interest in Page, a peripheral figure in the Trump campaign who served as a foreign policy adviser for half a year, he was never charged with a crime.
Some interesting comments that follow, pointing to Greenwald himself failing to correctly quote...eg, California did in fact say they were hacked. Who to believe anymore?
Don't hold your breath. The kleptocracy model of civilization (using the term in Jared Diamond's sense, not Wikipedia's) has sustained itself uninterrupted for centuries, and consistently demonstrated the ability to conquer or eliminate more egalitarian societies/political models.
these sanctions, like all sanctions, just punish the plebeians
silly political posturing at the expense of the vulnerable
seeking a sustainable peaceful solution through political force and violence is like running east looking for a sunset
remind me to act surprised when this buffoonery eventually fails
Don't hold your breath. The kleptocracy model of civilization (using the term in Jared Diamond's sense, not Wikipedia's) has sustained itself uninterrupted for centuries, and consistently demonstrated the ability to conquer or eliminate more egalitarian societies/political models.
I was thinking that Russiagate is starting to look like the program to report and promote UFO sightings (to suppress talk about all the strange flying machines then being tested over the western desert) so the opening line of “The Big Fat Compendium Of Russiagate Debunkery” struck a cord:
“Russiagate is like a mirage: from a distance it looks like something, but once you move in for a closer look, there’s nothing there. Nothing. Nothing solid, nothing substantial, nothing you can point at and say, ‘Here it is….'”
If so the question is: What is Russiagate supposed to prevent us from talking about?
This article is an interesting example of crowd-sourced journalism, which is new to me. It seems to be enabled by Twitter.
It is surprising for the same reason you and I would be surprised if Fox News "reported" a flattering story about Hillary Clinton, Vox is like Fox for more reasons than the similarity in letters.
Translated: "I read an article there that I didn't like."
Vox has had some pretty impressive mood swings but they're new. Read everything with a grain of salt, and their mission to report and explain in the same article is fraught with peril, but on the whole, I think most of the things of theirs that I've read have been solid. Some are junk, just like everywhere.
President Donald Trump is about to resign as a result of the Russia scandal. Bernie Sanders and Sean Hannity are Russian agents. The Russians have paid off House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz to the tune of $10 million, using Trump as a go-between. Paul Ryan is a traitor for refusing to investigate Trump’s Russia ties. Libertarian heroine Ayn Rand was a secret Russian agent charged with discrediting the American conservative movement.
These are all claims you can find made on a new and growing sector of the internet that functions as a fake news bubble for liberals, something I’ve dubbed the Russiasphere. The mirror image of Breitbart and InfoWars on the right, it focuses nearly exclusively on real and imagined connections between Trump and Russia. The tone is breathless: full of unnamed intelligence sources, certainty that Trump will soon be imprisoned, and fever dream factual assertions that no reputable media outlet has managed to confirm.
Twitter is the Russiasphere’s native habitat. Louise Mensch, a former right-wing British parliamentarian and romance novelist,spreads the newest, punchiest, and often most unfounded Russia gossip to her 283,000 followers on Twitter. Mensch is backed up by a handful of allies, including former NSA spook John Schindler (226,000 followers) and DC-area photographer Claude Taylor (159,000 followers).
There’s also a handful of websites, like Palmer Report, that seem devoted nearly exclusively to spreading bizarre assertions like the theory that Ryan and Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell funneled Russian money to Trump — a story that spread widely among the site’s 70,000 Facebook fans.
No one knowledgeable claims that conservatives have a monopoly on ignorance or gullibility.
Does being the minority party increase the incentive to abandon common sense and skepticism regarding digesting propaganda and fake news? We shall see.
Nothing to "decide." If I decide "no," it's still true. That's the problem with truth.
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It is surprising for the same reason you and I would be surprised if Fox News "reported" a flattering story about Hillary Clinton, Vox is like Fox for more reasons than the similarity in letters.
President Donald Trump is about to resign as a result of the Russia scandal. Bernie Sanders and Sean Hannity are Russian agents. The Russians have paid off House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz to the tune of $10 million, using Trump as a go-between. Paul Ryan is a traitor for refusing to investigate Trump’s Russia ties. Libertarian heroine Ayn Rand was a secret Russian agent charged with discrediting the American conservative movement.
These are all claims you can find made on a new and growing sector of the internet that functions as a fake news bubble for liberals, something I’ve dubbed the Russiasphere. The mirror image of Breitbart and InfoWars on the right, it focuses nearly exclusively on real and imagined connections between Trump and Russia. The tone is breathless: full of unnamed intelligence sources, certainty that Trump will soon be imprisoned, and fever dream factual assertions that no reputable media outlet has managed to confirm.
Twitter is the Russiasphere’s native habitat. Louise Mensch, a former right-wing British parliamentarian and romance novelist,spreads the newest, punchiest, and often most unfounded Russia gossip to her 283,000 followers on Twitter. Mensch is backed up by a handful of allies, including former NSA spook John Schindler (226,000 followers) and DC-area photographer Claude Taylor (159,000 followers).
There’s also a handful of websites, like Palmer Report, that seem devoted nearly exclusively to spreading bizarre assertions like the theory that Ryan and Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell funneled Russian money to Trump — a story that spread widely among the site’s 70,000 Facebook fans.
