US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9845

On February 04 2018 02:53 Simberto wrote:


And the response to that is the same that has been given in this thread before: You can not judge easily whether something is true or not when the people who would disagree with it are not allowed to talk about it or present their own evidence due to stuff being classified. I do not think that this is a good way of acquiring information, and especially not a good way to have a fair public discourse.

Thus, there are two possibilities, which are not distinguishable for us on the outside: The memo is literally true, and thus no one claims that it is full of outright lies, or it is not true, but the people who could contest it are not allowed to do so. We only excluded the possibility of it being true and the people who could and would contest it being allowed to do so.

But even if we believe it is literally true, that does not mean that it is "the truth". There are a lot of lies one can tell while still technically stating the truth. All of the above could be true if the FISA application mentioned the Steele dossier half-heartedly on page 278 of 500 as a minor item (and all of the things mentioned in the memo were not talked about because it wasn't a pivotal part of the whole evidence situation), while also providing incredibly solid evidence on the remainder of the application. We do not know whether that is the case or not, because we only know one incredibly biased selection of parts of that application in the form of a political propaganda piece.

The memo paints the picture of the dossier basically being the sole evidence in the application. That is probably not true. This is the main problem with the whole situation. We only get to hear what one side of the story wants to tell us, and that side is Trumps side.

“Carter Page was, more likely than not, an agent of a foreign power. The Department of Justice thought so. A federal judge agreed. The consensus, supported by the facts, forms the basis of the warrant issued,” Nadler said.

What’s more, Nadler said, is that a “well-established body of law” says that a FISA warrant could be voided only if the government “included false information or excluded true information that was or would have been critical to the court’s determination of probable cause.”

“The Nunes memo alleges nothing that would even come close to meeting this standard,” Nadler writes.

On February 04 2018 06:34 Danglars wrote:
https://twitter.com/becketadams/status/959825293182754822

Interesting move, WaPo & Phil Mudd. Double down.

But to attack career employees at the F.B.I. who are barred by regulations from publicly responding, he said, “that’s really bad.”

Josh Campbell, who spent a decade at the F.B.I. and worked directly for Mr. Comey at one time, wrote in The Times on Saturday that he was resigning so that he could speak out. “These political attacks on the bureau must stop,” he wrote. “If those critics of the agency persuade the public that the F.B.I. cannot be trusted, they will also have succeeded in making our nation less safe.”

One F.B.I. supervisor in a field office said public shaming of his colleagues had wiped out any desire he had to work at the bureau’s headquarters in Washington. “I’d rather chew glass,” he said.

The attacks are having an impact. A new SurveyMonkey poll for Axios, a news website, released on Saturday showed that only 38 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of the F.B.I., compared to 64 percent of Democrats. In interviews, more than a dozen officials who work at or recently left the Justice Department and the F.B.I. said they feared that the president was mortgaging the credibility of those agencies for his own short-term political gain as he seeks to undercut the Russia inquiry led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

“Thanks to this rhetoric, there is a subset of the public that won’t believe what comes out of the Mueller investigation,” said Christopher Hunter, a former F.B.I. agent and prosecutor who left the Justice Department at the end of last year. Mr. Hunter said he worried that juries might be more skeptical of testimony from agents even in criminal trials unrelated to Mr. Trump. “All it takes to sink a case,” he said, “is for one juror to disbelieve the F.B.I.”