Diamondeye wrote:
Andrew McCarthy has explained all this in painstaking detail on National Review, and since it is spread over months of articles I will not link individual ones because it's a lot of work and any one of them will only present part of the picture.
Yeah, I read McCarthy's pieces on this pretty regularly, and I agree that he's a highly knowledgeable and experienced legal commentator on the subject, but it's important to bear in mind that he's writing as an advocate rather than a neutral analyst. That doesn't mean he's a partisan hack - as you note, he often does point out areas where Trump has some legal exposure - but he's definitely trying to persuade readers that the investigation was/is improper and presenting factual and legal arguments that support that position. I find it's helpful to read other knowledgeable and experienced legal commentators that disagree with his position on this to see where the holes in his arguments are and how a similarly persuasive argument can be made in the other direction on the basis of the same facts and laws.
Quote:
The problem arises (in a large part, although not exclusively) from the FBI's use of its counterintelligence function to begin an investigation into US persons. When Rynar says "based on intelligence", that should, in fact, refer to "reasonable suspicion" because the FBI is allowed to do all sorts of things in conducting counterintelligence that it absolutely is not permitted to with regard to US persons.
I agree that there's a problematic blurring of the lines between intelligence investigations and criminal investigations generally - the whole concept of FISA courts granting secret warrants to surveil American citizens is incredibly dangerous and open to abuse - but there's been a bipartisan effort to deliberately weaken those walls for decades now, particularly after 9/11. When the procedures were being used mainly to spy on, detain, and deport Muslim Americans suspected of terrorist ties on the basis of secret intel, however, no one cared. It's possible even those weakened procedures were bypassed here, or that they were followed correctly but for improper purposes, or that good faith investigators began with reasonable suspicion then fell victim to confirmation bias and investigatory/prosecutorial momentum, or that this is all exactly how it's designed to work and the public is just now paying attention enough to realize it. My view is that we don't actually have enough information to form a solid conclusion yet, but that giving the public a peek behind the curtain in a case that flips the usual partisan script is a good thing. If the upshot of this whole thing is that Trump walks and the FISA process gets reformed, I'm good with that.
Quote:
In other words, no credible intelligence was ever received, except insofar as the "Salacious and unverified" (Jim Comey's words) intelligence was read by the FBI, other intelligence agencies, and continues to be read by the left and the press as credible only because of an idea that "Well, Trump must have been up to something because he is Trump."
This I disagree with. From what we know, I think there was sufficient justification for an investigation even without the Steele Dossier (incidentally, Comey didn't say it was "salacious and unverified" in whole; he was only referring to a couple of specific parts and he's repeatedly said that other parts were in fact corroborated). See, for example, David French's
article from National Review yesterday on the non-Steele bases for an investigation. In fact McCarthy himself wrote an article yesterday intended to undermine the FBI/DOJ timeline on when their investigation began, but which inadvertently supports the argument that the investigation began on the basis of pre-Dossier intel regarding the activities of certain Trump staffers. Here are some relevant passages:
The real origination story begins in the early spring of 2016 — long before Page went to Russia and long before the U.S. government was notified about Papadopoulos’s boozy conversation with Downer....It turns out that, in “late spring” 2016, the FBI’s then-director James Comey briefed the principals of the National Security Council on “the Page information.”...So, what exactly was “the Page information”? Well, we know that Page, an Annapolis alumnus and former naval intelligence officer, is . . . well, he’s a knucklehead. He is a Russia apologist...[who] blames American provocations for bad relations with the Kremlin and advocates, instead, a policy of appeasing the Putin regime. Page, who has also been an investment banker, has also had business ties to Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled energy behemoth. Most importantly, we know that Page was one of several American businessmen whom Russian intelligence operatives attempted to recruit in 2013. Yet, the main reason we know that is that Page cooperated with the FBI and the Justice Department in the prosecution of the Russian operatives.
...What would have been the reason for Lynch, Comey, and McCabe to discuss Carter Page? Well, on March 21, 2016 — i.e., early spring — the Trump campaign announced the candidate’s foreign-policy advisory team. Trump had been spurned by the Republican foreign-policy clerisy and was under pressure to show that he had some advisers. So the campaign hastily put out a list of five little-known figures, including Page....Another source of consternation: On March 29, just a few days after Page was announced as a foreign-policy adviser, Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign. Manafort and his partner, Richard Gates (who also joined the Trump campaign), had been on the FBI’s radar over political-consultant work they’d done for many years for a Kremlin-backed political party in Ukraine — the party deeply enmeshed in Russian aggression against that former Soviet satellite state.
In discussing Page, one of the things Lynch, Comey, and McCabe discussed was the possibility of providing the Trump campaign with a “defensive briefing.” This would be a meeting with a senior campaign official to put the campaign on notice of potential Russian efforts to compromise someone — Page — within the campaign....Was the interview of Page [in March 2016] a reaction to his joining the Trump campaign? Was it an effort to gauge whether Page was still a recruitment target? Was it a substitute for giving the campaign a defensive briefing, or a preparatory step in anticipation of possibly giving such a briefing? We don’t know. But here is what we can surmise. Carter Page and Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign in early spring, and the FBI was concerned about their possible ties to Russia. These were not trifling concerns, but they did not come close to suggesting a Trump-Russia espionage conspiracy against the 2016 election.
These FBI concerns resulted in a briefing of the Obama NSC by the FBI sometime in “late spring.” I suspect the “late spring” may turn out to be an earlier part of spring than most people might suppose — like maybe shortly after Page joined the Trump campaign. There are many different ways the Obama administration could have reacted to the news that Page and Manafort had joined the Trump campaign. It could have given the campaign a defensive briefing. It could have continued interviewing Page, with whom the FBI had longstanding lines of communication. It could have interviewed Manafort. It could have conducted a formal interview with George Papadopoulos rather than approaching him with a spy who asked him loaded questions about Russia’s possession of Democratic-party emails.
Instead of doing some or all of those things, the Obama administration chose to look at the Trump campaign as a likely co-conspirator of Russia — either because Obama officials inflated the flimsy evidence, or because they thought it could be an effective political attack on the opposition party’s likely candidate. From the “late spring” on, every report of Trump-Russia ties, no matter how unlikely and uncorroborated, was presumed to be proof of a traitorous arrangement. And every detail that could be spun into Trump-campaign awareness of Russian hacking, no matter how tenuous, was viewed in the worst possible light.
In short, Trump assembled a foreign policy team that included several individuals on the FBI's radar for questionable links to the Russian government, including one who had previously been actively recruited by Russian intelligence and had thus been on the FBI's radar years. This was worrisome enough to trigger an NSC meeting on the subject. Then, in rapid succession over the ensuing months, we got the Page meeting in London, the reports from the Australian ambassador, Trump's son and senior campaign staff taking a meeting with a liason for the Russian government expressly for the purpose of getting dirt on Clinton, the DNC server being hacked by Russian-linked WikiLeaks, Trump intervening at the Republican convention to soften the platform on Russia, public recognition of the fact that a lot of Trump's business was financed by Russian oligarchs, etc., etc. In light of all of that, it strikes me as an entirely reasonable basis for a counterintelligence investigation and, to the extent reasonable suspicion could be established, FISA warrants targeting American citizens under the current law. No need for any nefarious explanation for any of it. Just a legitimate investigation that may or may not have been pursued over-zealously for either partisan reasons or simply because of run of the mill momentum and confirmation bias.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
". He has months of writing that started out as "lol the FBI wouldn't be that stupid" evolving into "uh, looks like I was wrong, they really were that stupid." He has also not been shy about pointing out where legal jeopardy might still exist for the President and his associates either. - but in every instance so far, something new has been revealed to further compromise that legal vulnerability.