The Carter Page stuff has always made me wary. I mean that insofar as, I'm highly skeptical of anyone who claims any longstanding US citizen is a spooky russian agent when it serves their interest yet they have no evidence for the claim. Carter Page has a long history of being a voice sympathetic to russia and favoring better relations, but he's as american as apple pie and served in the navy. The guy was born in minneapolis, not moscow. The simplest explanation has always been that he's just a consultant with legitimate pro-russia views of his own. And that would be very much in line with him being willing to hear out russian operatives posing as legitimate businessmen in good faith, whether they are just seeking influence or want to exploit him as a catspaw, yet still be loyal and cooperate with the FBI to take them down when it becomes clear they are state actors. So its not hard to believe that he did his country a service in the name of national security yet still supports a putin-friendly agenda. What is hard to believe, is that he's some nefarious russian boogeyman who's been hiding in plain sight, known to the FBI, crooked for years and yet despite being so exposed was somehow unproven by the FBI in the meantime and still chosen for some massive conspiracy in the 2016 election. Because none of that makes a lick of fucking sense.

Its well known that the FISA courts are rubber stamps and they've approved 99.99% of requests, and all the circumstances around the approval have stunk to high heavens since the flynn leaks began. Its a lot easier to sell a narrative of FISA being abused by domestic actors for political purposes in a contentious election than it is for some shadowy conspiracy of spooky russians.

people wouldnt commit treason for the right amount of money and power? i mean, your whole post reads like a long winded case for no motive, and u ignore the biggest ones.

i also find your constant lack of nuance pretty funny. it's either that the Russians have agents on every corner or that Democrats are pulling a McCarthy to abuse the courts system for political means. FISA warrants aren't like criminal warrants, you don't base them on their conviction rate. Most roads lead to no where, and the FBI is aware of that when they seek such warrants. There's a reason its the FBI conducting such investigations, when they lead to no where usually no one knows. This just happens to be a high profile example that's subject to leaks. Overall I think you do a disservice to the conversation to not mention at every turn that these FISA warrants don't require and arguably shouldn't require the same legal backing that a criminal warrant in regular circumstances require. The right is using this tactic as a diversion, constantly making comparisons to your house being raided on the same grounds the FBI used for Page. That's not even getting into the alternative proofs teh FBI brought to the FISA court that aren't in the memo, all we know is "the dossier was used for most of the proof to get the FISA warrant". I don't take words like "most" in a partisan hack piece to mean much personally.

It's also worth noting that in order to get an extension(at least in theory), the FBI has to show that the FISA warrant is actually producing useful material.

I agree with your point on Goom's lack of nuance... Page believes that an administration friendlier to Russia is good for both US and Russian interests, so in his mind colluding with Russia in some way wouldn't be a betrayal of the United States.

This post was edited by IceMage on Feb 6 2018 09:51am

people wouldn't commit treason for the right amount of money and power in the open and then somehow fail to get caught despite having the FBI breathing down their neck for half a decade, then do it again and still go a year undetected.
Domestic FISA warrants are at their core a form of unconstitutional surveillance that tramples all over any judicially constructed right to privacy. Its bad enough that they can rubber stamp reasons to spy on domestic targets under the umbrella of what's supposed to be a foreign surveillance act designed to explicitly shield citizens. And I wouldn't doubt that other FISA warrants are just as thin and flimsy as the Carter Page one, after all, how much effort can be put into constructing ironclad cases of reasonable suspicion for what's little more than a veneer of legitimacy from the yes-men courts?

The thing with Page is, this wiretapping took place during the campaign, while he was still in Trump's orbit, and expanded to encompass secondary Trump campaign officials. That's not an arbitrary distinction that can be handwaved by FISA's being normally a low burden of suspicion, rubber stamp approval. Because as I so frequently point out, you have to put this back into the watergate context: These FBI officials are knowingly spying on a political opponent during a campaign. They know full well the toxicity and precarious implications of peeking into trump's doing. Even if they aren't acting as democrat-aligned partisans, even if the honestly hold to apolitical neutrality (which they plainly don't, as comey and strzok and a year of leaks show), they'd still have to know that putting wiretaps into the Trump campaign is such a dangerous move that you better have rock solid evidence before you do it. Like peeking up the queens knickers to see if she's a real human or a reptilian with a cloaca, if you're wrong and get caught in the process, its a major incident.

As far as lack of nuance goes, I think there's some implied false dichotomy between what is the legal burden for spying, and whether its abusive and scandalous. In the Obama era, so often the nuance is that just because its technically legal doesn't mean its right. If we're holding spying on political opponents to the extraordinarily low and farcical requirements of standard FISA approval that makes a grand jury indicting a ham sandwich look like a herculean effort by comparison, then we've opened the door to political abuses of domestic surveillance. If all they have to show is the minimum technical requirement and the government has twisted that law to remove all the constitutional protections, then why bother with mercenaries and burglars when you can just ask some allies at the FBI to do it legally?

I really dislike trump but the stock market tanked because investors and traders thought that wage growth was so strong the fed would increase interest rates early.

The stock market over a couple of years is not an accurate measure of presidential success so I don't attribute this downswing to Trump, but that also means Trump shills on here can't use stock market growth as proof of Trump's success

This post was edited by dro94 on Feb 6 2018 11:07am

You expect consistency from shills?

Hannity blamed only Obama for the DOW drop the other day

Trumpism is a mental disorder.

Hannity is a fuckin moron though. Now that O'Reilly is gone he's trying even harder and making himself look even dumber.

Oreilly is very intelligent, he went to Princeton or one of the best unis in the states. I heard hannity struggled completing his degree