The “verified” document that wasn’t.
Someone’s (more than one someone) got a lot of ‘splaining to do.
[Update Monday morning]
How the FBI broke its own rules:
In the fall of 1975, FBI agent John Connolly met with Bulger in the agent’s car on an abandoned Boston street corner. What would follow was the FBI’s greatest scandal involving a confidential informant subverting the vast powers of the government in order to target his enemies. This stain on the history of the Department of Justice should have led to effective reforms but instead it only foreshadowed more of the same.
Well, to be fair, it was politically convenient to do the same thing with Steele.
[Update a while later]
Spy versus spy versus spy: How Comey, Clapper, and Brennan are turning on each other.
I hope they all rot in jail.
[Late-morning update]
Trey Gowdy says that there is a potential game changer if certain transcripts are released.
And thoughts on a tale of two coups:
The fact that the losers in this election appear to have attempted to undermine the winners is an extremely bad precedent because it leads to the winners deciding to take it out on the losers next time around and that in turn leads to people not relinquishing power short of being turfed out with violence – see Venezuela and any number of Latin American, Central Asian and African dictatorships. In fact allowing the losers to come up with one way after another to try and delegitimise an election they lost is bad on its own because the ability to “throw the bums out” is a key feature of democracy. If voters can’t trust that their votes will be respected they are likely to resort to other methods of expressing their displeasure with the current set of rulers and that is something that these rulers may come to regret. The good news is that the New AG seems to be doing his job and turning over any number of stones that various parties would have preferred remained unexamined.
Let’s hope.
Why not both? The dossier was being pushed into the government through many different agencies. It is not like just the FBI or CIA had it. The both had it and probably got it through different sources, just like the State Department had it, legislators had it, media outlets had it, ect.
So, we can expect Democrats and the media to take no more than a tenth of a second to shift to saying that using Russian spies to influence an election and remove a President from office is not only permissible but a moral obligation.
Why would anyone give Steele the benefit of the doubt that he was duped rather than he knew exactly what was going on?
And what do all those different agencies have in common? I’d almost suggest that there might be some central controlling authority that they answer to. I admit, it’s a stretch, but with the UN ambassador and State Department leaking names of Trump officials, it extends beyond just the intelligence agencies.
Good point, George. Yes, it almost looks as if there was some chiefly controlling entity, someone with executive authority over them. A chiefly executive, one might say.
Susan Rice is a case in point. She testified that she only did a few of the hundreds of unmasikings done in her name. So, who, precisely, has the power to order unmaskings done, and done under the name of the US Ambassador to the UN? I do not beleive the heads of CIA, NSA, or State have that ability, because that ability devolves from being the legal source of classification power.
That can only be someone very high up, higher than a cabinet secretary, higher than the vice president.
Perhaps we need an investigation (another special councle, perhaps?) to determine whom, exactly, the chief executive of the United States was during the spring and summer of 2016?
I would also advise caution regarding the question above. I well remember the outcry in the media, during the secret service scandals a few years ago, when they identified the start of this culture of corruption within the service; George W. Bush’s state visit to Moscow in 2000. (Slight typo there, purely accidental I’m sure, because that president’s surname began with a C, not a B).
The text messages released to the public have shown that Obama was running meetings on the investigation but obliviously there was coordination with the DNC, Hillary campaign, and the media.
Their defense will probably be that it is OK for the Hillary campaign to collude with the Russians and other foreign governments and that the Obama administration was just doing its job. This might work unless it turns out the CIA and other intelligence agencies began their spying before their current cover story says they did.
Forget it Rand, it’s Georgetown.
I’m afraid I disagree with some of the premises in the article. Specifically, this;
“This underscores the possibility that Steele was duped, and that the dossier is a Russian disinformation operation that U.S. intelligence agencies fell for.”
Really? That does not pass the sniff test. Steele used to head the Russia desk at MI5, he’s not ignorant of Russian methods. He knows, very well, that the Putin regeme frowns upon leaking, calling it espionage (and by frown, I mean a 9mm to the brain kind of frown). Therefor, Kremlin officials would not be particularly eager to be flapping their gums on questions of the kind he claimed to be asking via intermediaries.
Also, since when would MI5 be okay with a former agent using MI5 assets (Steele’s supposed network) for that agent’s private business? Amongst other things, this would be a very good way to get MI5s informants shot (something the do prefer to avoid…)
I think Steele, who as shown was massively politically motivated, was acting as a willing conduit for Russian misinformation. This was know, with no doubt, by Fusion GPS, who were paying Steele with money laundered from the DNC and Clinton campaign (listed as legal fees).
Proof? Remember the Russian lawyer who went to Trump Tower? She was on the refuse-entry list, so somebody at State had to okay her visit. She went to the Fusion GPS offices both before and after the Trump Tower meeting. So, how, exactly, would Fusion GPS have a real Russian agent on call? Steele. Who was a willing tool of the Kremlin, which Fusion well knew, and the Democrats involved knew as well.
So, the Democrats were right all along; there was collusion, and criminal conspiracy, with Russia. And they should know, seeing as how they were the ones doing it.
I agree, although I’m not sure the collusion on the Russian side went very high up, if at all. Steele had some contacts, and I’m sure they reported some of what he was doing, but from their side it would have looked like a bumbling bunch of nonsense that wouldn’t make it past the inbox at any competent US agency.
And indeed, as I understand it, one of the first officials to look at the dossier dismissed it as an obvious hoax as soon as it was received, and reported that finding to the FBI a week before Comey signed off on the first FISA warrant. One obvious clue was that dossier said the Russians were running their political interference operation out of their Miami consulate. The Russians don’t have a consulate in Miami. I doubt Steele would have made such a mistake.
Indeed, everyone could just Google that.
*Googles*
Yep. Addresses, phone numbers, office hours for New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco, and Houston, and which states they cover, all 50. If Hillary would have checked the Russian consulate’s website, she’d have seen that there was a state called Wisconsin way up north under the jurisdiction of the Russian consulate in Seattle.
So this makes me think the Russian sources Steele was using were mostly just trolling him, and have probably been laughing themselves silly ever since.
I have my suspicions, based on how badly the dossier is written, that the author or authors might have been the same people who wrote the final four episodes of Game of Thrones, especially the finale, but I have no direct way to verify that.
#NotMyKing
Is that a thing this morning?
*checks Twitter*
Yep. That’s a thing!
Earlier this morning, the change.org petition was passing 1.2 million signatures.
Jon Snow’s fate was like wrapping up Band of Brothers by having a Russian colonel sentencing Major Dick Winters to life on the Maginot Line guarding France against a German invasion. Not only horrible writing, but completely nonsensical.
I have my suspicions, based on how badly the dossier is written, that the author or authors might have been the same people who wrote the final four episodes of Game of Thrones, especially the finale, but I have no direct way to verify that.
OMG. After every episode, “Its been a great series and you don’t quite know what to expect. Surely, they will pull it off in the end.” Five times I said this to myself and anyone who would listen. Give them a chance! In the end, it was the fans who got killed instead of another Stark.
Good news is that the writers will be moving on to do Star Wars.
The one article said former Russian spy chief.
God, damn! The number of comment’s on McCarthy’s post is pathetic both in volume and content. Pat_Riot has to be a paid troll. No one has the free time to generate such a horrendous volume of mental diarrhea as he does on a daily basis. His actual handle, instead of the laughable Pat_Riot, should be TLDR.
I haven’t waded through many National Review comments threads since probably the spring or summer of 2016. They shut their old system down and changed the policies, apparently because the readership wasn’t sufficiently anti-Trump.
Dissenter is nice. There are even some Dissenter comments here.
It is just as bad when he posts at the Hill. Rather than paid troll, I use the term, Wu Mao.
In China, the government pays people to comment in the media and they are called Wu Mao.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCnnPf2OnHo
Wu Mao, huh? Makes me think of these guys for some reason.