The Right Side of the News

I’m sort of amazed that they are trying to whitewash Flynn instead of chucking him under the bus.Flynn was sacked for lying to Pence- or that was the official story. Departing from that line doesn’t make Trump look good.

From the Guardian: Justin Amash becomes first Republican to back Trump impeachmentI don't know anything about Amash beyond what's in the article:

You seem to think that the new Barr investigation will overlap with the Mueller investigation.It won't.What Mueller investigated is outside the scope of the Barr investigation. The Barr investigation will only look at the source of the FBI investigation into Russian collusion.Which, of course, we know already and two other investigations are looking into. It's pretty obvious the Barr investigation's only purpose is to placate Trump and give the sheep a straw to cling to.

The Carter Page FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant has been the subject of much recent attention now that US Attorney General William Barr has initiated further investigations into the origins of the Mueller investigation and called it "spying." The FBI stands accused of overstating the reliability of information about the Trump campaign provided by Daniel Steele in their FISA warrant requesting surveillance of Carter Page, who was then a recent resignee from the Trump Campaign.This FISA warrant document contains (I think) all four FISA warrants (the original and the three renewals). It doesn't lend itself to easy reading because the divisions between the warrants is not marked, it is heavily redacted, the PDF version is not searchable, and the text version is divided into 412 separate pages, each of which can be searched, but only one page at a time. For example, to search for all occurrences of the word "dossier" you would have to conduct 412 separate searches, one for each of the 412 pages.Fortunately most of those 412 pages are boilerplate, such as listing the involved parties and recording their signatures, or are exact duplicates of earlier pages (from earlier warrants), with few exceptions. The later warrants do have additional information that the earlier warrants do not have. I've collected the first 67 text pages (what I believe is the original FISA warrant) into a single document and uploaded it to the website: Searchable Carter Page FISA Warrant. This text version is an OCR of the PDF and is pretty poor (many mistakes and short omissions), plus the redacted portions appear as random characters.Three facts must be noted about the original FISA warrant.First, two dossiers are mentioned. One, the only one referred to as a dossier, was of dirt on Hillary Clinton for the Trump campaign obtained by Carter Page from a Russian source. The other was research by Daniel Steele on Donald Trump's ties to Russia for the Clinton campaign, often referred to as the Steele dossier.Second, the fact that there were two dossiers mentioned in the FISA warrant has led critics to become confused. They misread the FISA warrant as saying that both dossiers came from Steele.Third, no information from either dossier is present in the warrant. No claims of accuracy are made for the contents of either dossier.The FISA warrant uses code to refer to people. Steele is "Source #1", Donald Trump is "Candidate #1", and Hillary Clinton is "Candidate #2". Here are complete excerpts of everywhere Steele (Source #1) is mentioned. I've cleaned up or corrected the text as necessary and indicated the redactions:

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First, according to information provided by an FBI confidential human source (Source #1) [redacted] reported that Page had a [redacted] and has been an FBI source since [redacted]. Source #1's reporting has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings and the FBI assesses Source #1 to be reliable. Source #1 has been compensated by the FBI and the FBI is unaware of any derogatory information pertaining to Source #1.

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Source #1, who now owns a foreign business/financial intelligence firm, was approached by an identified US. person, who indicated to Source #1 that a U.S.-based law firm had hired the identified US. person to conduct research regarding Candidate #1's ties to Russia (the identified U.S. person and Source #1 have a long-standing business relationship). The identified US. person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified US. person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1's ties to Russia. The FBI speculates that the identified US. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1's campaign.

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Source #1 tasked his sub-source(s) to collect the requisite information. After Source #1 received information from the sub-source(s) described herein, Source #1 provided the information to the identified US. person who had hired Source #1 and to the FBI. [redacted]

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Notwithstanding Source #1's reason for conducting the research into Candidate #1's ties to Russia, based on Source #1's previous reporting history with the FBI, whereby Source #1 provided reliable information to the FBI, the FBI believes Source #1's reporting herein to be credible. [redacted]

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[redacted]

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...according to Source #1 [redacted] Divyekin [who is assessed to be Igor Nikolayevich Divyekin] [redacted] had met secretly with Page and that their agenda for the meeting included Divyekin raising a dossier or "kompromat"¹² that the Kremlin possessed on Candidate #2 and the possibility of it being released to Candidate #1's campaign. [redacted]

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[redacted]

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¹²Kompromat is a Russian term for compromising material about a politician or political figure, which' is typically used to create negative publicity or blackmail.

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It is important to break in here to make precisely clear what the FISA warrant is stating. This is the only appearance of the word "dossier" in the entire FISA warrant (excepting its possible appearance in redacted portions), and it describes Steele reporting that Page had met with the Russian Divyekin to obtain a dossier on Hillary Clinton (Candidate #2) for possible use by Donald Trump (Candidate #1). This is the section of the FISA warrant that those accusing the FBI of misrepresenting the FISA evidence cite, but they've misinterpreted it badly. It isn't about Steele obtaining a dossier on Trump, but of Page obtaining a dossier on Clinton.Now we move on to the part describing Steele's collecting dirt on Trump:

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[sections unrelated to Steele (Source #1) skipped]

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¹⁶As discussed above, Source #1 was hired by a business associate to conduct research into Candidate #1's ties to Russia. Source #1 provided the results of his research to the business associate, and the FBI assesses that the business associate likely provided this information to the law firm that hired the business associate in the first place. Source #1 told the FBI that he/she only provided this information to the business associate and the FBI. [redacted] The FBI does not believe that Source #1 directly provided this information to the press.

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This is the only reference in the FISA warrant about Steele conducting research on Trump. None of that research is described in the FISA warrant, and so it couldn't be part of the justification for the request for surveillance of Carter Page.The characterization of this FISA warrant as misrepresenting information from Daniel Steele about Trump is plainly false as no information from Steele about Trump is described. The only information in the warrant that is provided by Steele is that Carger Page obtained a dossier on Clinton from a Russian.It shouldn't be difficult for any careful reading of the FISA warrants to reach correct conclusions. Nothing should come of the investigations, not that by the DOJ's Inspector General, nor those initiated by Attorney General William Barr.It is especially disturbing that Barr refers to the FBI's activities in surveilling Page and having an agent meet with Papadopoulos as spying. He's just promoting Trump talking points as if his responsibility were to Trump instead of the American people.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

John Huber, U.S. Attorney in Utah, was appointed by Sessions to investigate the FBI investigation origin. It appears he hasn't done much.

Couldn't possibly be that Barr honestly describes it that way because he sees it that way completely apart from anything Trump has ever said. Naa, of course not. We MUST discredit Barr mustn't we?
"Spying" is a solid English word commonly used in such circumstances by official sources. "Surveillance" means the same thing but it seems to be getting used as a whitewash to deny that it means "spying."Ah well, I DO want to try to stay out of this here as much as possible and let the new investigation deal with these things.
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I agree, but there were others who were men of their time and place. Two that immediately come to mind for me are (more recent than Lee) past Democrats Robert Byrd, a long-time senator, and Hugo Black, the supreme court justice who was influential in the "separation of church and state" decision. Both were Ku Klux Klan members. Both have had memorials erected for them, other than their graves. Here is a list of places in West Virginia honoring Robert Byrd, nothing in the news about efforts to tear them down or re-name them. I agree with that also - I think the time they've been in existence as well as who erected them, should be an important factor in deciding if they should be removed or not. I have no respect at all for actions taken in the last several decades by rag-tag groups of wannabe tough guys that call themselves the Klan. These probably have little resemblance to the Klan of the 20's, 30's, and 40's, of which Byrd and Black were members. That was a different time - I have no strong opinion on justifying whatever the Klan was doing in the 20's, the time of it's largest membership. It must be remembered that the U.S. government, federal, state and local, were all microscopic in size, in comparison to today, and I can understand a desire of people from that time period to feel the need to organize and influence political issues that they felt the government at that time didn't address at all.

"Spying" is loaded with gratuitous negative connotations. That's obviously why Barr and the right are using it. There's nothing to whitewash.Best is to use an accurate description: duly authorized surveillance.

If, when, a consensus builds they’ll come down.Memorializing a violent racist past, no matter how noble such seemed at the time, should not be tolerated in our society. Unfortunately there are quite a few people who believe in a violent racist present and tolerance of racist sentiments is growing.Those who say they have no strong opinion on justifying whatever the Klan was doing are insidious perpetrators of the tolerance of racist sentiments that allows the open hatred of other, different, human beings to flourish deep in the body politic. And we will be correcting the less noble influences of our forefathers for years yet to come just as our grandchildren will be doing to us in the future.

I was dozing a while ago and these thoughts kept waking me up. Are these things true and isn't there something odd about them?

• We have one FISA warrant here and it authorizes surveillance on BOTH campaigns?
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• It involves information from the Russians on both Hillary and Trump?
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• We know a lot about the "dossier" on Trump that Hillary paid for. But what is this supposed dossier on Hillary supposedly obtained by Carter Page for Trump? What is its content? Again we know a lot about the one against Trump but I don't know of any revelation we got from Russia against Hillary.

Please explain.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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We have one FISA warrant here and it authorizes surveillance on BOTH campaigns?

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We have multiple warrants and they only directly authorise surveillance of Carter Page. (The warrants are time-limited).

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It involves information from the Russians on both Hillary and Trump?

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Information from Russian sources is mentioned in at least one application for a warrant.

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We know a lot about the "dossier" on Trump that Hillary paid for. But what is this supposed dossier on Hillary supposedly obtained by Carter Page for Trump? What is its content? Again we know a lot about the one against Trump but I don't know of any revelation we got from Russia against Hillary.

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Only the people with access to the dossier would know why they haven’t released it. It’s not clear if Carter Page got the dossier, or what he did with it if he did. But you can read Percy’s post for the relevant text.

Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

Let's also not forget that Russian spies had already developed Page as an unwitting source back in 2015. Page had already been part of a Russian spy ring before the Trump campaign, so it isn't a stretch to get a FISA warrant on Page when there were questions of Russian interaction within a campaign that had just hired Page.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

However you want to define it, it is worth remembering that the FBI went through all of the correct procedures for acquiring warrants. How is the FBI supposed to find criminals if they aren't allowed to investigate people?

Your statement that the FBI went through the correct procedures is disputed by some. Again, I'm waiting to see how this current investigation turns out.