Didn’t intend to neglect this but I was getting 2 sets of questions at once, which gets confusing.
I would rather pretend that the judges are sharp eyed and well experienced, and that the whole thing is part of a greater affront to the USA Freedom Act, if you believe that Trump is out to undo Obamas legacy. Its set to expire in 2019, and this is good fodder to set the tone and justify letting it expire without renewal or replacement.
Sometimes I wonder how people get to where they do from what was written. This is one of those times.
For clarity, that was pertinent to the the cause of the occurrence, not the political chaff that was created from it.
That politicians do it is pretty much pure partisan (on both sides) horse shit.
Given that you accept the existence of the political chaff that was a years long investigation with (arguably?) no beneficial changes after the first few months, how do you think the investigation was somehow pure at the beginning, and not driven by politics?
Oversight investigations are built in to our system of checks and balances?
Somebody has to do it?
Would you rather that wrong doings occur unchecked?
(battery on my nextbook is dying, so I’m going to have to check out for the night)
edit: With the way this particular inquiry is going, I’m starting to wonder if you haven’t studied up on some Gowdy. 
Both of these things somehow point to a politically driven investigation @ 3 months but not @ 0 months?
Obviously not? Would you rather every investigation is allowed to be dragged out for political gain at the taxpayer expense on the off chance it scares a govt employee into following the rules?
No, I’d rather they fess up right off the bat instead of turning it into a legalistic turd polishing contest.
So in the event that guilty people don’t start admitting to being guilty (duh), do you have a particular limit you’d draw on something like a multi million dollar yearS long govt investigation AFTER members of the investigation have openly said it’s just to beat up someone’s political career?
Do we just call a 5 year and/or $100mil (whichever comes first?) cap on political targeting and call it a day?
The “context” was her being questioned as to why the American people had been told the attack was caused by spontaneous protests resulting from a YouTube video despite her telling her daughter Chelsea and the Egyptian Prime Minister that it was a planned terrorist attack unrelated to the film.
But, I know, I know that doesn’t help your narrative.
edit: also, the whole, “It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again” is laughable given the bobbing, weaving, and deflecting she did throughout her entire testimony.
If you’d like, we can now discuss how completely asinine it is to dismiss the need to identify the cause of something immediately before saying we need to determine what happened to prevent if from happening again.
Dude, you’re blaming the dentist for pulling too many teeth when you should be looking at the rotten mouths.
Why did the members of the department of state make it such a protracted process?
I get what you’re saying about “where do you draw the line”, but how else do you get to the bottom of something when you’re working with a bunch of inveterate liars?
Were it not Hillary getting spit roasted by Gowdy& Co. would you have such strong feelings about it?
Would you consider it just if after a certain point (say, 6 mos.) they just give up and call it quits? Lets get hypothetical for a moment and say that the exact same circumstance and results occur with Tillerson. Should an inquiry end once it runs out of an arbitrary time period?
Because it was very very clearly politically driven? Asking why members of the state department didn’t throw themselves to the wolves in an investigation built to defame, not fix, is strange.
I didn’t have strong feelings about it when it was happening. Wasn’t til the joy of hindsight that I got upset about the games and the waste.
Nope. Should Congress have free reign to extend investigations however long they want at our expense and let the public suffer the political games?
Also more specifically to this point, this scenario wouldn’t occur unless Tillerson wanted to run for office. Ultimately it’s Trump’s admin, so it’s his responsibility if Til fucks up (duhduh). The exact same it would have been with HRC/Obama if it wasn’t purely politically driven
Edit: although I guess Trump is fond of letting his people hang out to dry to save himself from papercuts. In the event Tillerson would be investigated, it CERTAINLY wouldn’t span ~ 4 yrs
I’m sure you see the quandry this creates. I certainly don’t have any solutions to it.
Neither do I. Which is why I’m more than willing to settle for GUTTING these people after the fact. I get that fiscal conservatism has been dead since we elected a black guy, but c’mon.
I agree, but I want to hear factual arguments from all sides on this.
Assume for a moment that this memo is 100% true, factual and without error. What does it mean?
It means the shoe is on the other foot, completely. Which means that Steele, Fusion GPS, Clinton and all the offshoots need to be investigated for their role with regards to Russia.
Now I am not saying that it is 100% true. I don’t know, I tend to doubt that it is. But even parts of it being true are vindicating for Trump. I do want to hear the democrat rebuttal and any other pertinent facts before I come to a judgement. Which basically means, the investigation needs to continue and the truth needs to come out once and for all so we can take necessary action and put this to bed.
So McCain is right, we need to find out the truth before we jump to conclusions.
How do you figure that? The memo acknowledges that 1) the Steele dossier wasn’t the impetus for the Russia-Trump investigation (it was Papadopoulos [sp?] shooting his mouth off to the Australians); and 2) that the Steele dossier’s oppo-research origins were noted in the FISA application. What else is in the memo that is of any significance?
And let us not forget: Our intelligence agencies concluded that the Russians interfered in the election with the objective of getting Trump elected. Given this fact, by what lights could someone conclude Steele and/or HRC were in cahoots with them?
Damn shame that Trump and a significant portion of the Congressional GOP don’t agree with you and McCain…
Bolt, Nice to see you. It’s been awhile.
At Trumpkins wanting details on the process, or lay people questioning the FISA process, the actions of the FBI or DOJ.
Your response about the FISA process made me think…
This is to the thread, not just in response to you.
Remember when Steele indicated there was a “cabal” within the FBI, with agents apparently too fixated on HRC’s email? His lack of trust in the FBI’s ability or their apparent inaction in getting his important intel out apparently justified him giving it over to Mother Jones and Buzzfeed of all places. If that’s the case, he didn’t trust our institutions.
We’ve seen Dems question the motives of Comey as politically motivated. Everything from being part of a plot that cost HRC the election, to being inept or using poor judgement in reopening the email issue right before the election. If so, they have a history of questioning our security institutions.
It looks like Sydney Rosenthal was one of Steele’s anonymous sources. The source close to the Clintons. I can’t recall the timeline, but remember it took awhile for it to come out that the Steele intel was even connected to the DNC. That was a bombshell. I’m not a Trump voter, but people should imagine how all this would feel if Obama was just elected and there’s a GOP funded dossier that was leaked to Breitbart. That’s the equivalent of what’s happened here.
It seems like a pretty high order to expect the average person on the street to assume that there’s nothing amiss, while we have members of congress questioning the FISA process. The Grassley referral letter has been in the news over the past couple of days, and it sounds like people within Clinton’s campaign actually fed info to be included in the dossier.
Given all of that, to be curious about exactly how this all went down and to hope more of it is declassified, is equivalent of to quote @EyeDentist here (who I seem to not be able to help smarting off to) “justifying the intentional erosion of faith in our criminal-justice and national-security institutions.” Were Dems doing that when they questioned Comey’s motives? A lot of people were pretty pissed at Comey. Was Steele doing that when he referred to a “cabal” within the FBI, uninterested in moving fast enough on his intel?
At the Fake new study. I have seen some absolutely bizarre conspiracy theory stuff over the past couple of years, so I’m not particularly surprised. I put up an article in the MSM thread a few weeks ago about the disturbing shifts that are happening with information. It’s about how the internet has destabilized news sources and networks. Some of this is a good thing, but it’s also enhanced connectedness for all kinds of crazy and chaos, and allowed confirmation bias and support to build within these extreme groups.
…groups categorized as the “Trump Support Group” and the “Hard Conservative Group” shared more than half of all the fake news the study uncovered."
Obviously, this is not a comparison of average, moderate, or mainstream people.
They ended with this one about “resistance” groups. Also, not surprising there.
But hard right conservatives aren’t the only culprits here. “Resistance” groups — aka hardline anti-Trumpers — spread 18 percent of Twitter’s junk news, the research found.
To me, there’s a very very large difference between questioning Comey “the man” and questioning the FBI as a whole.
I would ask whether or not Steele has the ABILITY to erode the general public’s faith in our criminal justice/national security institutions?
Are we all equally capable of widescale public opinion swaying? I would argue very few people on the planet have the ability, access, means, and knowledge base to erode the publics faith in those respective systems.
Agree. I’m a nobody talking on a BBing political forum with maybe 10 active participants. My capacity for mayhem is fairly small. I would also agree with you wholeheartedly if you said that Trump’s incessant tweeting undermines our institutions. Me talking to my online friends about an article I just read about the history of the FBI, and my thinking out loud about our history, not so much.
Sorry, I meant to respond to this. I don’t know. He’s had a long career with British intelligence, and we’re being asked to trust that he’s gathered some important intel. If he talked about a “cabal” within the FBI so bad that he needed to get his information to the press, well, I don’t know what the average American would think.
Sure. He was the head of the FBI though, so I’m not sure people wouldn’t let their opinions of him color their impressions overall. Certainly we’ve heard that argument about Trump, that he lowers us in the view of the world, or brings a negative impression on America with his comments about “s-hole countries” and such.