US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9971

On February 25 2018 19:27 Gorsameth wrote:
GH's arguments could work if you assume voters are rational actors.

They are not.

On February 25 2018 13:46 GreenHorizons wrote:


Well it wasn't limited to the senate, in that the whole house is up for election, but I forgot mention that part in my most recent rebuttal. By most favorable. I meant the aspects like "the angry party goes to the polls" and the garbage filled tire fire that is the GOP+Trump and being able to focus on a few particular big name races.

That would be had they not endorsed that whole bipartisan culling of the electorate in favor of trading safe states with the GOP in part leading to the situation you guys describe. In particular the "that's just the way it is" way that implies Democrats share little-no share of the responsibility for the electorates looking like they do for better or worse politically.

So perhaps I was unclear or assumed too much as far as leaving things not clearly articulated but my criticism wasn't limited to the context of this 2018 election without context beyond 2016 or 2018.

I don't expect Democrats to sweep either house in 2020 either. (I don't think they can be awful enough to not get a majority in either, but they've been known to surprise me in that way before).

On February 26 2018 00:31 iamthedave wrote:
I'm very weak on understanding of a lot of individual politicians in the US spectrum. Can someone fill me in a little on issues with Ms. Feinstein? If I remember right she used to be popular but is losing it over time? Or am I mixing her up with Pelosi?

On February 26 2018 01:33 GreenHorizons wrote:

Both, but she's too hawkish for a modern California. She came up around the time of Reagan and got her seat the same year Clinton won the presidency.

She supported extending Trump's administration the authority to continue warrantless wiretapping for example.

LOS ANGELES — California Democrats are united in their disdain for President Donald Trump. But that’s about all they can agree on.

Heading into the annual state Democratic Party convention in San Diego this weekend, the Democratic-controlled Legislature is mired in a contentious sexual harassment scandal. Cutthroat primaries have party officials on edge. And grass-roots activists are still seething, nearly two years after Hillary Clinton defeated Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary.

.....

Southern California is critical to Democratic efforts nationally to retake the House, so party endorsements in a number of races add another dose of volatility to the weekend.

In races for 14 GOP-held House seats around California, the number of Democrats lining up to take on Republican incumbents is record-breaking, leading party leaders to worry that the competition, and the elbow-throwing, could damage the unity and energy that has been fired up by the party faithful’s dislike of Trump.

Those fights will unfold against the backdrop of mounting fears that the state’s top-two primary — in which the top two vote-getters advance to the November general election regardless of party affiliation — could leave Democrats off the November ballot in several key House contests.

Rep. Adam Schiff acknowledged California Democrats need to become more focused.

“The jungle primary is a real concern … we saw before in the district that [Congressman] Pete Aguilar now represents that you can have a district that is even majority or plurality Democratic, and you get too many Democratic candidates — and you get two Republicans in the runoff. So that is a real concern,” he said.

Earlier this month, Democratic strategist Joe Trippi and pollster Paul Maslin launched a new super PAC, CA-BAM!, in part to help cull the field in competitive races, while national and state party leaders press candidates to consider the potential ramifications of over-crowded primaries.

“There have been conversations going on between party leadership and [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] leaders and members of Congress trying to talk to various candidates,” said Eric Bauman, chairman of the California Democratic Party. “Without telling people, ‘Hey, you have to get out of the race’ — because that’s not the way Democrats do things — but to try to bring people to a sense of realization that if we have five, six, seven Democrats running in a race and they have two Republicans, they’re going to get the two spots.”

In a recent call with candidates seeking to succeed retiring Rep. Ed Royce, Bauman said he told the group, “If we lose the opportunity to deliver three, four or more seats to the Democratic conference, then America loses the opportunity to have at least one House that acts as a stop for Trump’s divisive and hateful agenda.”


...

On February 25 2018 19:55 GreenHorizons wrote:


I don't expect you (not a US citizen) to have much faith in the electorate our politicians abandoned, but it's kinda sad to see how many US citizens have written off nearly half the population as irreparably damaged without taking any responsibility.

Oh this is just too good. The patronizing tone and vilification of Steele is a nice touch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-FSrL6Jhpw

3:15 is where it starts to get good, even better at 5:00, 6:00 Steele is done with this idiot.

On February 26 2018 07:46 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:



Wow...

I love Steele's range of facial expressions at 5:20. From trying to understand the others viewpoint to 'wait did i hear that correctly' to 'is he really saying this' to 'this next thing he says makes even less sense' to 'wtf'. That feeling when someone tells you you need to have some grace when receiving literal racist comments and not take the worst out of it

+ Show Spoiler +

And then he even goes for the old Kellyanne Conway defense 'don't listen to his words, think about what is in his heart'.

On February 26 2018 07:47 Plansix wrote:
Ah California, the land of wildly dysfunctional state government. The land of high minded progressives and a prison system that the Supreme Court ruled was a fucking mess at least three times.

On February 26 2018 03:39 iamthedave wrote:


Ah, yes. That doesn't seem in line with modern Democratic thinking at all.

The Schiff Memo Harms Democrats More Than It Helps Them

It confirms that the FBI and the DOJ relied heavily on uncorroborated, third-hand, anonymous sources in their FISA application.

Maybe Adam Schiff has more of a sense of humor than I’d have given him credit for. The House Intelligence Committee’s ranking Democrat begins his long awaited memo — the minority response to the Nunes memo that was penned by staffers of the committee’s Republican majority — by slamming Chairman Devin Nunes’s unconscionable “risk of public exposure of sensitive sources and methods for no legitimate purpose.” The Schiff memo, which has been delayed for weeks because the FBI objected to its gratuitous effort to publicize highly classified intelligence, including methods and sources, then proceeds to tell its tale through what appear to be scores of blacked-out redactions of information Schiff pushed to expose.

Heavy Reliance on Steele Dossier Confirmed

The FBI and the Justice Department heavily relied on the Steele dossier’s uncorroborated allegations. You know this is true because, notwithstanding the claim that “only narrow use” was made “of information from Steele’s sources,” the Democrats end up acknowledging that “only narrow use” actually means significant use — as in, the dossier was the sine qua non of the warrant application. The memo concedes that the FISA warrant application relied on allegations by Steele’s anonymous Russian hearsay sources that:

Page met separately while in Russia with Igor Sechin, a close associate of Vladimir Putin and executive chairman of Roseneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company, and Igor Divyekin, a senior Kremlin official. Sechin allegedly discussed the prospect of future U.S.-Russia energy cooperation and “an associated move to lift Ukraine-related western sanctions against Russia.” Divyekin allegedly disclosed to Page that the Kremlin possessed compromising information on Clinton (“kompromat”) and noted the possibility of its being released to Candidate #1’s [i.e., Donald Trump’s] campaign. . . . This closely tracks what other Russian contacts were informing another Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.

This passage puts the lie to two of the main Democratic talking points:

1) This was obviously the most critical allegation against Page. The Democrats attempt to make much of Page’s trip to Moscow in July 2016, but the uncorroborated Sechin and Divyekin meetings, which Page credibly denies, are the aspect of the Moscow trip that suggested a nefarious Trump-Russia conspiracy. That’s what the investigation was about. Far from clandestine, the rest of Page’s trip was well publicized and apparently anodyne. And saliently — for reasons we’ll get to in due course — Page was clearly prepared to talk to the FBI about the trip if the Bureau wanted to know what he was up to.


Moreover, because Page was an American citizen, FISA law required that the FBI and the DOJ show not only that he was acting as an agent of a foreign power (Russia), but also that his “clandestine” activities on behalf of Russia were a likely violation of federal criminal law. (See FISA, Section 1801(b)(2)(A) through (E), Title 50, U.S. Code.) It is the Steele dossier that alleges Page was engaged in arguably criminal activity. The Democrats point to nothing else that does.

2) Democrats implausibly insist that what “launched” the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation was not Steele’s allegations but intelligence from Australia about George Papadopoulos’s contact with what Democrats elusively describe as “individuals linked to Russia.” As we learned when Papadopoulos pled guilty, though, it is anything but clear that these “individuals linked to Russia” had much in the way of links to Putin’s regime: London-based academic Joseph Misfud, who is from Malta and apparently does not speak Russian; an unidentified woman who falsely pretended to be Putin’s niece; and Ivan Timofeev, a program director at a Russian government-funded think-tank.

Even if we assume for argument’s sake that these characters had solid regime connections — rather than that they were boasting to impress the credulous young Papadopoulos — they were patently not in the same league as Sechin, a Putin crony, and Divyekin, a highly placed regime official. And that, manifestly, is how the FBI and the DOJ saw the matter: They sought a FISA warrant on Page, not Papadopoulos. And, as the above-excerpted passage shows, they highlighted the Steele dossier’s sensational allegations about Page and then feebly tried to corroborate those allegations with some Papadopoulos information, not the other way around. (More on that when we get to Schiff’s notion of “corroboration.”)

Concealing the Dossier’s Clinton-Campaign Origins

Another major takeaway from the Schiff memo is that the FBI and the DOJ withheld from the FISA court the fact that Steele’s work was a project of the Clinton campaign. Naturally, the reader must ferret this admission out of a couple of dense paragraphs, in which Democrats risibly claim that the “DOJ was transparent with the Court about Steele’s sourcing.”

How’s this for transparency? The FISA warrant application says that Steele, referred to as “Source #1,” was “approached by” Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, referred to as “an identified U.S. person,” who

indicated to Source #1 that a U.S.-based law firm had hired the identified U.S. Person to conduct research regarding Candidate #1’s [i.e., Trump’s] ties to Russia. (The identified U.S. Person and Source #1 have a longstanding business relationship.) The identified U.S. Person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified U.S. 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 U.S. Person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign. [Emphasis in Schiff memo, p. 5]

The first thing to notice here is the epistemological contortions by which the DOJ rationalized concealing that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for Steele’s reporting. They ooze consciousness of guilt. If you have to go through these kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid disclosing something, it’s because you know that being “transparent” demands disclosing it.

Next, Schiff — again, hilariously enough to make you wonder if it’s done tongue-in-cheek — accuses Nunes of hypocrisy for condemning the omission of Mrs. Clinton’s name after having rebuked the Obama administration’s “unmasking” of American names. Of course, the two things have nothing to do with each other.

“Unmasking” refers to the revelation of American identities in intelligence reports. These are Americans who, though not targeted as foreign agents, are incidentally intercepted in surveillance. In marked contrast, we are talking here about a FISA warrant application, not an intelligence report. In a warrant application, it is the DOJ’s honorable practice, and the judiciary’s expectation, that the court must be informed about the material biases of the sources of the factual allegations that the DOJ claims amount to probable cause.

As the Democrats’ own excerpt from the FISA application illustrates, unmasking has nothing to do with it, because there is no need to use names at all: Note that Simpson is referred to as “an identified U.S. person”; Perkins-Coie is referred to as “a U.S.-based law firm.” The dispute here is not about the failure to use the words “Hillary Clinton.” They could have referred to “Candidate #2.” To state that “Candidate #2” had commissioned Steele’s research would have been just as easy and every bit as appropriate as the DOJ’s reference to a “Candidate #1,” who might have “ties to Russia.” Had DOJ done the former, it would not have “unmasked” Hillary Clinton any more than Donald Trump was unmasked by DOJ’s description of him as “Candidate #1”; but it would have been being “transparent” with the FISA court. By omitting any reference to Clinton, the DOJ was being the opposite of transparent.

Two other things to notice here.

1) The DOJ’s application asserted: “The identified U.S. Person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia.” There is only one reason to include such a statement: The DOJ well understood that the implied biases in the process of compiling the dossier’s allegations, including Steele’s implied biases, were material to the FISA court’s evaluation. A prosecutor does not get to tell a judge reasons that a source’s reports should be thought free of bias while leaving out why they should not be thought free of bias. If you know it’s necessary to disclose that “identified U.S. person” Simpson was being paid by “a U.S.-based law firm” (Perkins-Coie), then it is at least equally necessary to disclose that, in turn, the law firm was being paid by its clients: the Clinton campaign and the DNC. To tell half the story is patently misleading.

2) Schiff comically highlights this DOJ assertion as if it were his home run, when it is in fact damning: “The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. Person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.” This is the vague reference that Democrats and Trump critics laughably say was adequate disclosure of the dossier’s political motivation. But why would the FBI “speculate” that a political motive was “likely” involved when, in reality, the FBI well knew that a very specific political motive was precisely involved?

There was no reason for supposition here. If the FBI had transparently disclosed that the dossier was a product of the Clinton campaign — oh, sorry, didn’t mean to unmask; if the FBI had transparently disclosed that the dossier was a product of “Candidate #2’s” campaign — then the court would have been informed about the apodictic certainty that the people behind the dossier were trying to discredit the campaign of Candidate #2’s opponent. It is disingenuous to tell a judge that something is “likely” when, in fact, it is beyond any doubt.

The Issue Is the Credibility of Steele’s Informants, Not of Steele Himself

When the Justice Department seeks a warrant from a court, the credibility that matters is not that of the agent who has assembled the information from the informants; it is that of the informants who observe the fact matters that are claimed to be a basis for finding probable cause. That is, what mattered was the credibility of Steele’s anonymous Russian sources, not the credibility of Steele himself. By dwelling on the countless reasons why Schiff is wrong about the adequacy of the disclosure of Steele’s biases, I am falling into the trap I have warned against (here, and in section C here).

To be clear, the only reason Steele’s own biases have any pertinence is that the FBI and the DOJ relied vicariously on Steele’s credibility, as a substitute for their failure to corroborate his informants’ information. It was improper to do this. Yet even if a prosecutor goes down a certain road wrongly, the duty to be candid with the tribunal still applies. The prosecutor is obliged to tell the whole story about potential bias, not a skewed version.

Schiff’s memo struggles mightily, and futilely, to demonstrate that Steele’s credibility issues were sufficiently disclosed. But that is a side issue. The question is whether Steele’s informants were credible. To the limited extent that committee Democrats grapple with this problem, they tell us that, after the first FISA application, the FBI and the DOJ provided additional information that corroborated Steele’s informants. There are four problems with this:

1) It would not justify using uncorroborated allegations in the first warrant.

2) The supposedly corroborative information is blacked out; while that may be an appropriate protection of sensitive intelligence, we are still left having to take Schiff’s word for it.

3) Taking Schiff’s word for it would be unwise given his memo’s warped conception of “corroboration.” Recall the Schiff memo passage excerpted in the first section above. In the last part, the Democrats argue that the dossier claim that Page met with Kremlin official Divyekin was somehow corroborated because it “closely tracked” what Papadopoulos was hearing from his dubious “Russian contacts.” But the supposed “Russian contacts” were telling Papadopoulos that the Kremlin had thousands of Clinton-related emails. That did nothing to confirm Steele’s claim that Page had met with Divyekin, a top regime official; nor did it corroborate that the “kompromat” Divyekin referred to was the same thing as the emails that Papadopoulos’s “Russian contacts” were talking about. (Of course, it may well be that Page never actually met with Divyekin and that Papadopoulos’s sources were wrong about emails; if so, committee Democrats are in the strange position of contending that the non-existent can corroborate the non-existent.)

4) Most significantly, Democrats seem not to grasp that the flaw here lies not merely in the failure to corroborate the information from Steele’s sources. There appears not even to be corroboration that these sources existed — i.e., that they are real people whose claims are accurately reported. Indeed, it is worse than that. Even if we stipulate for argument’s sake that Steele’s anonymous Russian informants are authentic, they are generally hearsay witnesses, one or more steps removed from the events they relate. The real question, then, is whether the informants’ sources are real, identifiable, reliable informants. Based on what has been disclosed, we must assume that the FBI did not know. That is why the DOJ inappropriately tried to rely on Steele’s credibility.

On February 26 2018 09:28 Introvert wrote:
As usual I like to wait a few days on this matter until people who know these topics chime in. This is only about half of the whole thing. And before anyone gets too annoyed, McCarthy has been very careful about what he says and what he doesn't say, he's hardly been a partisan throughout this.

You know this is true because, notwithstanding the claim that “only narrow use” was made “of information from Steele’s sources,” the Democrats end up acknowledging that “only narrow use” actually means significant use — as in, the dossier was the sine qua non of the warrant application.

Democrats implausibly insist that what “launched” the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation was not Steele’s allegations but intelligence from Australia about George Papadopoulos’s contact with what Democrats elusively describe as “individuals linked to Russia.”

On February 26 2018 09:52 WolfintheSheep wrote:


Memo says investigation started 7 weeks before Dossier was received. Apparently seeing 7 weeks into the future is more plausible than having other reasons to investigate..

On February 26 2018 09:52 WolfintheSheep wrote:


You know someone only sees what they want when they can say stuff like this with a straight face:


Yes, narrow actually means significant.


Memo says investigation started 7 weeks before Dossier was received. Apparently seeing 7 weeks into the future is more plausible than having other reasons to investigate.



I could keep going, but the whole article is, again, a lot of speculation from someone who cannot, and will never see, the actual FISA application. And because it's a black box, this lets people like McCarthy presume that the application was bad and the court was stupid, and no one will ever contest it to a degree that proves him wrong.

On February 26 2018 09:52 WolfintheSheep wrote:


You know someone only sees what they want when they can say stuff like this with a straight face:


Yes, narrow actually means significant.


Memo says investigation started 7 weeks before Dossier was received. Apparently seeing 7 weeks into the future is more plausible than having other reasons to investigate.



I could keep going, but the whole article is, again, a lot of speculation from someone who cannot, and will never see, the actual FISA application. And because it's a black box, this lets people like McCarthy presume that the application was bad and the court was stupid, and no one will ever contest it to a degree that proves him wrong.