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If They Can Do It to Carter Page, They Can Do It to You
Reading Wednesday’s article by Mollie Hemingway (far and away one of the best writers in Washington) “Criminal Referral Confirms Nunes Memo’s Explosive Claims of FISA Abuse,” then reading the entire Senate Referral memo comes very close to causing one’s head to simply explode. There is ample evidence contained within of the most blatant kind of dishonesty and fraud practiced upon a Federal Court. These are the kind of lies to a court which would – and should — get almost any lawyer whose name is not Clinton or Obama permanently disbarred, or at the very least severely disciplined by a Bar Association.
Which raises a naturally occurring question: has the DC Bar Association completely shut down? Is it no longer a functioning organization with the usual disciplinary enforcement procedures?
But, the question we (my wife and law partner and I) keep coming up with is this one, and to which there is no logical answer we can see, unless there are major facts not yet in the public record: why has the entire Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, en banc, not issued contempt show cause orders to Comey, Rosenstein the Reptile, Yates, McCabe, Strzok, and the whole barrel of twisting, hissing, frighteningly dangerous snakes who lied and lied and lied to the Court, time and time and time again? I simply cannot understand it unless, as one must say to be as fair as possible under these circumstances, there is very strong evidence yet to come outside the Nunes memo and now this Senate Memo.
I only know that if I had done this to a Court, I would be sitting in my newly-hired lawyer’s office getting ready for a contempt hearing, after which would come a disciplinary hearing before the Office of Disciplinary Counsel of the Louisiana State Bar Association.
Don’t think Gestapo tactics could ever happen here in America? Ask Gen. Flynn, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, et al., what they think about that.
Published in General
Again, once surveillance of Page was authorized on the basis of Clinton campaign procured disinformation, access to past present and future communications
ofwith his contacts, including in the Trump campaign was permitted.@jimgeorge linked to Andrew McCarthy’s NRO column of today. This is his heartsick conclusion:
But only conversations in which Page is participating, right?
Or, if Page talks to Person A, does the FBI then have carte blanche to surveil Person A and all of Person A’s contacts, including people Page never spoke to?
It looks as though I wasn’t correct. McCarthy:
Which I gather was the whole point of spying on him. Indirect spying on anyone he communicated with.
Page was just a useful pawn.
Here’s the Eli Lake bit mentioned earlier.
We Should Care About What Happened to Carter Page.
A question for you: If you were the FBI and you wanted to find out what was happening in the Trump campaign, wouldn’t you have been able to find a better way than wiretapping a guy who had already been booted by the campaign, or at least publicly disavowed by the campaign, and who never had access to Trump or anyone close to Trump? I’m not sure which is more disturbing: that the FBI might have been spying for political purposes, or that the FBI was so bad at it. I mean, if they were going to lie in order to get a wiretap, shouldn’t they have tried to get one on Jared Kushner or someone like that?
Too obvious? Might have tripped their hand? Remember, they needed plausible deniability. They felt they had it with Page.
Apparently not all that plausible.
Depends on who you ask.
I wouldn’t completely rule out that the FBI were really bad at it. For example, just look at that dossier. It reads like a parody. The Russian whores they claimed were hired by Trump to pee on the bed that Obama slept on. Really? Golden showers? Trump laughingly joked, “Hey, I’m a germaphobe.” The vagueness and third party references. The thing was a joke. And what about the FISA judge? We gotta see that application for a warrant because if these special judges rubber stamp crap like that dossier in an area as critical as national security and 4th amendment constitutional rights, there is a serious problem with the entire program. John Yoo stated that the FISA judges are appointed by the Chief Justice and serve in the locality of their District. They are all already Federal Judges. The prominent one that gets the most work is likely from D.C. or New York. I am guessing that because of the regionality, the same judge heard all of the rennual requests. But that is a guess.
Nah. They just farmed it out to Sid Blumenthal and the Clinton machine.
They farmed out examining the “hacked” DNC server, so why not?
Yes, this is the part that is the weirdest to me. Why persist with Page through three warrant renewals if he is a dead end? Unless they just needed someone to use a boogeyman tenuously connecting Trump to Russia?
Possible answers:
There are missing links here, unless the plan was simply to create as many Trump/Russia connections as possible without any interest in establishing something substantial.
Now that would be a more damning piece of evidence than anything involving Page himself. If the FBI was repeatedly seeking warrants against Trump-adjacent targets, and getting denied by a court that almost never denies such a request, then the dots become much easier to connect. Still circumstantial, of course, but much stronger. Do you recall where you read that?
Summing it up, this time the testilying was being done to the Trump campaign and then the Trump administration by lawless Obamaites in the FBI, by lawless attorneys in the Justice Department, and signed off on by lawless FISA judges who are supposed to be the last safeguard for our civil rights.
If treason prosper, none dare call it treason; if Hillary had won they would have been promoted.
This is banana republic stuff.
It’s been referenced in several news articles, and must be based on this:
http://www.uscourts.gov/news/2017/04/20/new-report-foreign-intelligence-surveillance-court-issued
Wikipedia only goes to 2013, but the number of rejections in 2016 is notable if not large.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court#FISA_warrants
Some clarity on my questions, from Tablet Magazine:
I don’t know anything about Tablet’s reliability, but so far this seems like a sober analysis.
Lee Smith and Andrew McCarthy are two who are doing excellent work on this topic. I’d trust it.
I would put Lee Smith right up there in McCarthy’s level when it comes to depth of research and clarity of writing; he has, in recent months, become one of my favorites. And on this particular point he is writing about, it’s most interesting that yesterday when Sen. Cotton asked Director Wray point blank if this oligarch had paid for the dossier, he declined to answer in a public hearing but said he would in a closed hearing. Once again, we’re forced to try to “read the tea leaves” in all this, but it seems a reasonable conclusion that there is definitely a “there” there; not at all sure what it means, however.
Sincerely, Jim.
Yes, of course. The Flynn judge recused himself in a big hurry once this began to leak out.