It's hard to characterize any particular development in the whole web of palace intrigue that has been a feature of the Trump era as a bombshell. but this is.
It appears that that FBI planted a mole in the Trump campaign back in 2016.
The Department of Justice lost its latest battle with Congress Thursday when it agreed to brief House Intelligence Committee members about a top-secret intelligence source that was part of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Even without official confirmation of that source’s name, the news so far holds some stunning implications.Among them is that the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation outright hid critical information from a congressional investigation. In a Thursday press conference, Speaker Paul Ryan bluntly noted that Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes’s request for details on this secret source was “wholly appropriate,” “completely within the scope” of the committee’s long-running FBI investigation, and “something that probably should have been answered a while ago.” Translation: The department knew full well it should have turned this material over to congressional investigators last year, but instead deliberately concealed it.House investigators nonetheless sniffed out a name, and Mr. Nunes in recent weeks issued a letter and a subpoena demanding more details. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s response was to double down—accusing the House of “extortion” and delivering a speech in which he claimed that “declining to open the FBI’s files to review” is a constitutional “duty.” Justice asked the White House to back its stonewall. And it even began spinning that daddy of all superspook arguments—that revealing any detail about this particular asset could result in “loss of human lives.”This is desperation, and it strongly suggests that whatever is in these files is going to prove very uncomfortable to the FBI.The bureau already has some explaining to do. Thanks to the Washington Post’s unnamed law-enforcement leakers, we know Mr. Nunes’s request deals with a “top secret intelligence source” of the FBI and CIA, who is a U.S. citizen and who was involved in the Russia collusion probe. When government agencies refer to sources, they mean people who appear to be average citizens but use their profession or contacts to spy for the agency. Ergo, we might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign.This would amount to spying, and it is hugely disconcerting. It would also be a major escalation from the electronic surveillance we already knew about, which was bad enough. Obama political appointees rampantly “unmasked” Trump campaign officials to monitor their conversations, while the FBI played dirty with its surveillance warrant against Carter Page, failing to tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that its supporting information came from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Now we find it may have also been rolling out human intelligence, John Le Carré style, to infiltrate the Trump campaign.Which would lead to another big question for the FBI: When? The bureau has been doggedly sticking with its story that a tip in July 2016 about the drunken ramblings of George Papadopoulos launched its counterintelligence probe. Still, the players in this affair—the FBI, former Director Jim Comey, the Steele dossier authors—have been suspiciously vague on the key moments leading up to that launch date. When precisely was the Steele dossier delivered to the FBI? When precisely did the Papadopoulos information come in?
She concludes with the same point that Andrew McCarthy made in the summing-up paragraph of his NRO piece the other day on the redactions-to-the-Russia-report aspect on all this.
The president needs to declassify every last bit of it. As Strassel puts it, "It's time to rip off the Band-Aid."
Brilliant! Since providing Nunes with the full details of an ONGOING investigation is tantamount to providing the information to the Trump operation itself, why go through the middleman. In fact, in order to achieve the full transparency being sought, in all future investigations undercover operatives should wear uniforms and badges. Confidential informants (known as "C.I.'s" on TV and "moles" by, well, others) should definitely be outed for all to see. Perhaps we could supply them with distinctive T-shirts.
ReplyDeleteI'm still hunting for a good "sarcasm" emoji for use in posts like this. Cheers. :o)
It sounds like you're okay with the probability that the FBI spied on a presidential campaign.
ReplyDeleteWhile I wouldn’t be called as an expert witness,during my minute-and-a-half as Chief Deputy Sheriff, I did become familiar with how an investigation works. And your statement is very narrow in scope. Would you be ok with the FBI or, say, the Bartholomew County Sheriff Department investigating a church? Or, is that perhaps not enough information? Say you had probable cause to open an investigation on a youth minister suspected of child molestation. Then would it be okay?
ReplyDeleteWhat if, in the scope of the investigation of Russian involvement in the 2016, the FBI learned of 75 contacts between one of the presidential campaigns and Russia linked operatives, including at least 22 meetings and that at least 22 high-ranking campaign officials and advisors were aware of contacts with Russia-linked operatives during the campaign and transition and that NONE of these contacts were ever reported to the proper authorities. Okay for the FBI to start asking a question or two? Would it be okay with you if they DID NOT?
We aren’t talking about Cointelpro here. Am I okay with the FBI investigating…oh, excuse me, “spying” on a presidential campaign, or a church for that matter? I have to say the question is an incomplete and inadequate inquiry. In both the cases cited above informants supplied the information that initiated the investigations. And the article you have quoted is intentionally shoveling horsesh#t.
When you consider some context - the text messages back and forth between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok about an "insurance policy," an idea based on the assumption that someone so outrageous as Trump would never win the presidency, but in case he did, there'd have to be some backup way to thwart him, and, in fact, at least one in-person conversation about this that took place in Andrew McCabe's office, as well as the FISA-warrant judge not being informed that the Madame Bleachbit campaign had paid for the Steele dossier - it less an awful lot of credence to the idea that there was strong anti-Trump sentiment at the FBI and DoJ.
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DeleteWater-thin gruel to pin your hopes on. Especially if you spend any time at all fleshing out those "accusations'. The WSJ has done some good investigative coverage of this, especially if you examine the context (which I agree is important, and not just because it actually bolsters MY position).
DeleteThe "insurance policy" reference was in response to Page's observation in McCabe's office that they did not have to rush the Russian-collusion probe because Trump was not going to win anyway, to which Strzok was saying you don't "expect" to die before age 40, but you buy insurance anyway. He was arguing against taking a leisurely pace with the Russian investigation, which ironically, he felt was likely NOT to produce meaningful results.
Was there an anti-Trump sentiment? Given the required education levels for those positions (the FBI requires a minimum of a Bachelors, and many agents are full-fledged attorneys), matched up with polling demographics, and it is not surprising that most professional FBI employees preferred his defeat.
Finally, your FISA warrant accusation, which originates with the embarrassingly debunked Nunes memo, suffers a "pretty thorough demolition” according to Julian Sanchez, an expert on surveillance at the Cato Institute. Indeed, only someone totally uninformed (or uninterested) in what sort of requirements are necessary to obtain such a warrant would give credence to Nunes’ claim that the Steele document was “essential” to its procurement. But more important, the suggestion the judge was unaware of the dossier’s origins are flat-out false!
From Vox: In the key line, the application explicitly notes that “the FBI speculates” that Steele had been hired to find “information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s [Trump’s] campaign.
Each and every rebuttal point you have made crumbles to meaningless dust under the barest scrutiny. If you are going to keep making me do all the relevant research and fact-checking for your posts, then we need to talk about compensation. Cheers. :o)