I am sure he is a member of the secret society too.Originally Posted by LA Ute
I am sure he is a member of the secret society too.
The secret society is probably a drinking club or poker group or something similar. Sen. Johnson shouldn't have been running around talking about that lone text message with no context to explain it. Also, Adam Schiff should not have said his committee has "more than circumstantial evidence" of collusion with Russia. Joe McCarthy couldn't have said it better.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
--- Wall Street JournalFBI Officials Delayed Telling Congress of Clinton Emails
Top FBI officials were aware for at least a month before alerting Congress that emails potentially related to an investigation of Hillary Clinton had emerged during a key stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, according to text messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had learned about the thousands of emails by Sept. 28, 2016, and Director James Comey informed Congress about them on Oct. 28, 11 days before the presidential election, the messages show. Mr. Comey later said nothing in the new emails had changed the Federal Bureau of Investigation's decision that Mrs. Clinton had committed no prosecutable offenses.
That lag is one focus of an investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general into a variety of FBI actions in advance of the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the matter.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Yeah, Schiff and nunes/Gaetz are two sides of the same coin.
Schiff's rebuttal to the Nunes memo is "an extraordinarily detailed, point-by-point rebuttal of unbelievably shoddy allegations," Rep Himes, the number two D on House Intel, tells me.But, ominously, Himes doubts it will be released.
(Well, I'm not really from Missouri, but some of my ancestors lived there for a while.)
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Don’t blame me for this. I can’t help it.
Conservatives are more attractive than liberals, study finds
https://www.indy100.com/article/cons...almaer-8181196
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
It is because liberals smell like sulfur.
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Libertarians are drop-dead gorgeous.
“Children and dogs are as necessary to the welfare of the country as Wall Street and the railroads.” -- Harry S. Truman
"You never soar so high as when you stoop down to help a child or an animal." -- Jewish Proverb
"Three-time Pro Bowler Eric Weddle the most versatile, and maybe most intelligent, safety in the game." -- SI, 9/7/15, p. 107.
Well duh. The pretty people don't want things to change or for the gene pool to be diluted.
For me one of the things that Trump routinely does to prove he is a small and petty man is his continued trashing of Hillary Clinton and incessant need to remind people that he won. HRCs little skit I’m seeing today that was featured on the Grammys proves to me that she really is no better.
Hard to imagine any other past presidents or candidates doing this.
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With Trump saying he wants to meet with Mueller and his attorneys saying essentially “hold on a minute...” the Shakespearean idiom “hoisted by his own petard” comes to mind.
I hope Trump’s hubris causes it to happen. I think Mueller is leagues smarter than Trump and will easily corner him into saying something indictable. I’m not certain there was orchestrated collusion going on or not but there seems to definitely be an abundance of stupidly and a remarkable lack of moral clarity and understanding of the law in his campaign.
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If Trump's lawyers ever allow him to testify under oath, they should be disbarred. He would be a disaster. His ego and his penchant for narcissistic self-aggrandizing all but assures it.
It doesn't matter all that much if he is under oath, because it is a felony to lie to a federal law enforcement officer if you are under oath or not. It is much easier to prove a false statement than it is to prove perjury.
But how does the President of the United States refuse to take the oath or refuse to answer questions? Probably doesn't matter anymore.
We should all be grateful we have a guy like Adam Schiff
The first and best.
"It'd be nice to please everyone but I thought it would be more interesting to have a point of view." -- Oscar Levant
Just a further note: I’m not terribly impressed by the potential value of the memo that is being released, because it is not based on original source documents, but is the Republicans‘ interpretation of such material. So it’s going to be attacked right away as spin. I’m not sure why they are so eager to release it. Maybe they want to create pressure for the underlying documents to be released. I hope that happens.
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"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
This certainly appears to be a move to undermine an ongoing investigation. Whether consequences will follow is anybody's guess. The FBI has a history of uncovering untimely info about people and releasing it at inconvenient times. Nunes et al will be wise to keep that in mind, lest his preference for blumpkins comes to light before his next primary election.
Uh, don't look up that word. The word itself sounds phenomenally hilarious, but, like the Cleveland Steamer or Rusty Trombone, it just doesn't seem as appealing in actuality.
I was surprised and disappointed that Trump’s SOTU speech was not more of a rallying cry to unity. That said, I hope the Dems run hard against these things in 2020:
Last edited by LA Ute; 01-31-2018 at 11:06 AM.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Stormy Daniels on Kimmel last night
Let’s just say, someone is trying really hard to manage that whole situation, and they’re doing a terrible job at it.
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How about the Nikki Haley “situation?”
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
I haven’t been following this at all. Is there actually anything to it? What little I’ve heard, has seemed really dumb.
The Hope Hicks rumors though...
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The Slut-Shaming of Nikki Haley
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
As conspiracy theories go, it would be hard to top this one.
A Reckoning for the FBI
Now we know why the FBI tried so hard to block release of the House Intelligence Committee memo. And why Democrats and the media want to change the subject to Republican motivations. The four-page memo released Friday reports disturbing facts about how the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court appear to have been used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath.
The White House declassified the memo Friday, and you don’t have to be a civil libertarian to be shocked by the details. The memo confirms that the FBI and Justice Department on Oct. 21, 2016 obtained a FISA order to surveil Carter Page, an American citizen who was a relatively minor volunteer adviser to the Trump presidential campaign.
The memo says an “essential” part of the FISA application was the “dossier” assembled by former British spy Christopher Steele and the research firm Fusion GPS that was hired by a law firm attached to the Clinton campaign. The memo adds that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told the committee in December 2017 that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought” without the dossier.
This is troubling enough, but the memo also discloses that the FBI failed to inform the FISA court that the Clinton campaign had funded the dossier. The memo says the FBI supported its FISA application by “extensively” citing a September 2016 article in Yahoo News that contained allegations against Mr. Page. But the FBI failed to tell the court that Mr. Steele and Fusion were the main sources for that Yahoo article. In essence the FBI was citing Mr. Steele to corroborate Mr. Steele.
Unlike a normal court, FISA doesn’t have competing pleaders. The FBI and Justice appear ex parte as applicants, and thus the judges depend on candor from both. Yet the FBI never informed the court that Mr. Steele was in effect working for the Clinton campaign. The FBI retained Mr. Steele as a source, and in October 2016 he talked to Mother Jones magazine without authorization about the FBI investigation and his dossier alleging collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. The FBI then fired Mr. Steele, but it never told the FISA judges about that either. Nor did it tell the court any of this as it sought three subsequent renewals of the order on Mr. Page.
We don’t know the political motives of the FBI and Justice officials, but the facts are damaging enough. The FBI in essence let itself and the FISA court be used to promote a major theme of the Clinton campaign. Mr. Steele and Fusion then leaked the fact of the investigation to friendly reporters to try to defeat Mr. Trump before the election. And afterward they continued to leak all this to the press to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s victory.
No matter its motives, the FBI became a tool of anti-Trump political actors. This is unacceptable in a democracy and ought to alarm anyone who wants the FBI to be a nonpartisan enforcer of the law.
We also know the FBI wasn’t straight with Congress, as it hid most of these facts from investigators in a briefing on the dossier in January 2017. The FBI did not tell Congress about Mr. Steele’s connection to the Clinton campaign, and the House had to issue subpoenas for Fusion bank records to discover the truth. Nor did the FBI tell investigators that it continued receiving information from Mr. Steele and Fusion even after it had terminated him. The memo says the bureau’s intermediary was Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, incredibly, worked for Fusion.
Democrats are howling that the memo, produced by Republican staff, is misleading and leaves out essential details. They are producing their own summary of the evidence, and by all means let’s see that too. President Trump should declassify it promptly, along with Senator Chuck Grassley’s referral for criminal investigation of Mr. Steele. But note that Democrats aren’t challenging the core facts that the FBI used the dossier to gain a FISA order or the bureau’s lack of disclosure to the FISA judges.
The details of Friday’s memo also rebut most of the criticisms of its release. The details betray no intelligence sources and methods. As to the claim that the release tarnishes the FBI and FISA court, exposing abuses is the essence of accountability in a democracy.
Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes is doing a service by forcing these facts into the public domain where the American people can examine them, hold people accountable, and then Congress can determine how to prevent them in the future. The U.S. has weathered institutional crises before—Iran-Contra, the 9/11 intelligence failure, even Senator Dianne Feinstein’s campaign against the CIA and enhanced interrogation.
The other political misdirection is that the memo is designed to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into possible Trump collusion with Russia. We doubt Mr. Mueller will be deterred by any of this. The question of FISA abuse is independent of Mr. Mueller’s work, and one that Congress takes up amid a larger debate about surveillance and national security. Mr. Trump would do well to knock off the tweets lambasting the Mueller probe, and let House and Senate Republicans focus public attention on these FISA abuses.
***
If all of this is damaging to the reputation of the FBI and Justice Department, then that damage is self-inflicted. We recognize the need for the FBI to sometimes spy on Americans to keep the country safe, but this is a power that should never be abused. Its apparent misuse during the presidential campaign needs to be fully investigated.
Toward that end, the public should see more of the documents that are behind the competing intelligence memos to judge who is telling the truth. Mr. Trump and the White House should consider the remedy of radical transparency.
Appeared in the February 3, 2018, print edition.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-recko...fbi-1517617641
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Bolded text above - how is this the case? Nobody in the public even knew that Carter Page or anyone involved in the Trump campaign was being monitored by the FBI until well after the election was over. Further, to date no specific information or charges have been made against Carter Page, have there? And it also seems the only reason we know about any of this is because Republicans continue to either leak or release this type of info.
Importantly, is there any indication that the FISA warrant wouldn't have been granted had they said, "We have this dossier by former British Intelligence official Christopher Steele that has some pretty frightening accusations. You should recognize that it was paid for by a research firm employed by HRC." In other words, isn't a warrant just probable cause to search for something?
For example, if a drug addict tells me that my neighbor is selling drugs, do I dismiss it because the guy telling me it is a drug addict?
I guess what I am saying is I have a hard time seeing the true political motivation in the FBI or how this is really all that damning or disturbing. I mean it is a little bit, but well short of earth shattering sort of stuff... it is borderline troubling.
Also, the veracity of the memo has been made suspect by Nunes himself who stated on Fox News that he didn't even read the FISA request. Who knows what other supporting evidence was in there?
A more balanced view:
The Memo that Ate Washington
So the memo that has transfixed close political observers for weeks is finally out and it reveals, perhaps, questionable behavior by some government officials. I say “perhaps” because while we know what the memo says, we do not know what it doesn’t say. We know it says a secret warrant was sought by the government at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in October 2016 against a one-time Trump campaign associate using information compiled by a source hostile to Trump who was in the pay of the Clinton campaign (or, more precisely, a campaign cut-out). We are told that the FISA court was not informed of the ideological and political provenance of the information it was being supplied by the government. We are also told that after it was secured, the warrant was renewed several times, including by Justice Department officials now working under the Trump administration. And we are told that a senior FBI official who has now been cashiered said the “dossier” featuring the hostile information was the primary source for the warrant.
We might indeed be seeing a case in which the process for securing a FISA warrant was somehow corrupted. And that is bad, and worth exploring, and if the process was indeed corrupted, heads should roll. But come on. In the end, whether the civil rights of Carter Page were violated is not a question you would expect the front page or even the back page or practically any page between to be concerned with. Those who are screaming about these abuses don’t care about the abuses; they care that the abuses signal to them a desperate effort to get Donald Trump. And those who are pooh-poohing the notion that Carter Page’s civil rights are of concern would be perfectly happy to scream abuse if he were on their team.
We don’t know what the memo doesn’t say—the “omissions of fact” about which the FBI complained before its release. We don’t know what else the FISA court might have seen to suggest Page needed to be watched. We don’t know what else the Justice Department officials who seem from the text of the memo to corroborate its conclusions might have said that would go against that. And we may never know.
Like every fight in American politics today, this whole business is about legitimacy. Anti-Trump forces have been working to find him illegitimate since he won the election. Pro-Trump forces have responded to this by delegitimating anyone and everyone who opposes him. Thus, the ludicrous idea that the Russians got Trump elected; and the equally ludicrous idea that Trump is under unprecedented assault by a “deep state” at the Department of Justice.
No “deep state” caused Trump campaign officials to take a meeting with a Putin agent at Trump Tower and then to lie about it to the press a year later after an independent counsel had been appointed to look into Russian ties to the election. Nobody told Trump to fire James Comey of the FBI after Trump himself asked Comey to go easy on Michael Flynn, a man who has since pled guilty. No deep state caused Trump to claim falsely he had tapes proving Comey lied, a claim that led directly to the almost automatic appointment of an independent counsel. These were all Trump’s errors. He committed them as the legitimate president of the United States.
Similarly, the idea that the release of the memo was a horrendous threat to national security is belied by the text of the memo itself. War, Clausewitz said, is a continuation of politics by other means. The case for war is made by rallying each side with rah-rah slogans that dehumanize your combatants. Here we are. This is war, 21st Century Washington style
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/p...te-washington/
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Terrible parody. The dog did not make any grammatical errors....
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Spare me the faux outrage over the selectively cherry picked memo. If Page is still under active surveillance (which his active FISA warrant assumes, and which has been ongoing since at least 2013), then FBI assets were outed and could likely face physical danger due to the memo.
To date I believe 11 Russian sources connected to the investigation have died, many of whom 'committed suicide' by shooting themselves two or three times in the back of the head. One was a journalist who helped expose the Panana Papers.
I don’t know, NWUF. What strikes me most about all of this is the political divide. Liberals, like you, tend to believe everything horrible about Trump and his allies and think the concerns about the FBI are nonsense. Sometimes they seem borderline hysterical to me. Conservatives, like me, tend to be very suspicious of the FBI’s behavior in this matter, with the true-blue Trumpians deeply convinced that there some kind of “deep state“ conspiracy against their man and this memo is simply evidence of it. I think the “deep state“ stuff is nonsense.
I’m one of those conservatives whom Trump drives nuts but who just doesn’t know what to believe anymore. Maybe the Mueller investigation will shed some light on all of this. For example, I’ve never heard about the 11 Russians you mention who have died execution-style. If that’s true, I hope the Mueller report at least mentions it.
I personally believe there is a lot of lying, obfuscating, cynicism and spinning going on on both sides, and that no one so far has covered himself or herself in glory in the way he or she has approached this. So far Mueller seems like the only person who has shown integrity and has proceeded forward regardless of outside pressures. I hope that continues, and I look forward to seeing his report.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
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