Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
On December 06 2019 22:36 iPlaY.NettleS wrote: Biden's 'No Malarkey' tour kicked off in Iowa with him telling an 84 year old farmer "let’s do pushups together here, man. Let’s run. Let’s do whatever you want to do. Let’s take an IQ test. OK?".
Biden is comedy gold, if that ain't malarkey then what is? He's still the frontrunner, somehow.Warren collapsing on RCP poll averages.
I wonder if the DNC will turn away from him. The "gaffs" are adding up and attracting attention.
I'd like to see more of this from Biden, just done better. He was great up until the point where he asked about an IQ test. Keep it strictly to bravado, no need for the iamverysmart.
I mean... really?
If this rates positively on the meter, this election is gonna be a traaaaaaaaainwreck.
I don't see the sense behind anyone on here supporting Biden at all. I can see the electoral logic for the less informed, but everyone on here must know Trump will crush Biden like a paper cup and toss him in the trash. He's Trump's perfect kind of opponent.
I'm far from pro-Biden, but the general electorate is sub-garbage and they really like shows of strength and masculinity. Imagine being someone who thinks it is a good thing to buy a truck without working in construction or some other profession that uses a truck. That's who is voting. That is why Biden doing shit like this is a good thing is he gets the nomination.
I think if it's Biden, there's 80-90% chance trump gets reelected and we're fucked... along with the world.
People wanted real change, and Biden represents the norm. People say that now back to the norm is all we want, but I don't believe people really want things to keep going this way... it's unsustainable. If trump wins, I'll seriously consider leaving the country, if Biden wins... I will also seriously consider it... because nothing will really get better here.
Wages will still be shit, healthcare shit, housing will eventually crash... nothing here is sustainable unless you are already rich... It's all kind of a mess waiting to fall apart. Who would want to have a kid here with the gun problem in schools? Or even bring a kid into the world when we don't seriously do anything about climate change?
I think the only real chance we have is with Bernie, and if he wasn't getting blacked out by the media sooo much, I think the nominee would be him, hands down. They have to suppress him to get some corporate asshole in his place.
It should be Bernie, and the slogan should be "real change." Warren also stands a chance is she just rallies with Bernie and stops trying to straddle the fence.
Edit: Keeping that in mind I will 1,000% back and vote for any dem over that asshole trump... or any repub.
Why we fucked though?
The economy is doing well, jobs are being created, stock markets at all time high.
Rather have an asshole that improve things than a gentleman that can't get anything done.
How much of that is really attributable to Trump and his policies specifically though?
But yeah point taken. A lot of people don’t care for the economy in an abstract sense, much less the stock market, it’s how those things interact with their lives and what they value.
As an employee my selling strategy for my company stocks is when I get wind of some scheme that I think is a terrible idea, wait until it’s announced publicly and then sell shortly after and I usually get a nice bump. Not a particularly subtle strategy, if something is going to be bad for employees it almost certainly gets investors hard because their interests are not aligned.
One thing for sure, is that people are working and getting paid.
On December 07 2019 04:31 Xxio wrote: [quote] I wonder if the DNC will turn away from him. The "gaffs" are adding up and attracting attention.
I'd like to see more of this from Biden, just done better. He was great up until the point where he asked about an IQ test. Keep it strictly to bravado, no need for the iamverysmart.
I mean... really?
If this rates positively on the meter, this election is gonna be a traaaaaaaaainwreck.
I don't see the sense behind anyone on here supporting Biden at all. I can see the electoral logic for the less informed, but everyone on here must know Trump will crush Biden like a paper cup and toss him in the trash. He's Trump's perfect kind of opponent.
I'm far from pro-Biden, but the general electorate is sub-garbage and they really like shows of strength and masculinity. Imagine being someone who thinks it is a good thing to buy a truck without working in construction or some other profession that uses a truck. That's who is voting. That is why Biden doing shit like this is a good thing is he gets the nomination.
I think if it's Biden, there's 80-90% chance trump gets reelected and we're fucked... along with the world.
People wanted real change, and Biden represents the norm. People say that now back to the norm is all we want, but I don't believe people really want things to keep going this way... it's unsustainable. If trump wins, I'll seriously consider leaving the country, if Biden wins... I will also seriously consider it... because nothing will really get better here.
Wages will still be shit, healthcare shit, housing will eventually crash... nothing here is sustainable unless you are already rich... It's all kind of a mess waiting to fall apart. Who would want to have a kid here with the gun problem in schools? Or even bring a kid into the world when we don't seriously do anything about climate change?
I think the only real chance we have is with Bernie, and if he wasn't getting blacked out by the media sooo much, I think the nominee would be him, hands down. They have to suppress him to get some corporate asshole in his place.
It should be Bernie, and the slogan should be "real change." Warren also stands a chance is she just rallies with Bernie and stops trying to straddle the fence.
Edit: Keeping that in mind I will 1,000% back and vote for any dem over that asshole trump... or any repub.
Why we fucked though?
The economy is doing well, jobs are being created, stock markets at all time high.
Rather have an asshole that improve things than a gentleman that can't get anything done.
How much of that is really attributable to Trump and his policies specifically though?
But yeah point taken. A lot of people don’t care for the economy in an abstract sense, much less the stock market, it’s how those things interact with their lives and what they value.
As an employee my selling strategy for my company stocks is when I get wind of some scheme that I think is a terrible idea, wait until it’s announced publicly and then sell shortly after and I usually get a nice bump. Not a particularly subtle strategy, if something is going to be bad for employees it almost certainly gets investors hard because their interests are not aligned.
One thing for sure, is that people are working and getting paid.
The Georgia reporter who is a rape survivor after being violently and sexually violated on Live TV, just gave he first interview. The original video has been viewed over 10+ times and is becoming a prominent piece of the #metoo movement happening in America
The violating abuser has been banned from further marathons in the US and rightfully so.
Matt Taibbi has a very quick rundown how the Horowitz IG report shatters the three long years we spent on Russiagate. While the report does say they didn't find any political motivation (laughable) the "serious" problems with the way the FBI handled the whole affair ought to make those who spent years pushing it as embarrassed as they should have been the day the Mueller report came out. Also, the Nunes memo was 10x closer to the truth than was Schiff's. If only xDaunt were here.
The Guardian headline reads: “DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser.”
If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.
Like the much-ballyhooed report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Horowitz report is a Rorschach test, in which partisans will find what they want to find.
Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz’s conclusion that there was no evidence of “political bias or improper motivation” in the FBI’s probe of Donald Trump’s Russia contacts, an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had “authorized purpose” to conduct.
Horowitz uses phrases like “serious performance failures,” describing his 416-page catalogue of errors and manipulations as incompetence rather than corruption. This throws water on the notion that the Trump investigation was a vast frame-up.
However, Horowitz describes at great length an FBI whose “serious” procedural problems and omissions of “significant information” in pursuit of surveillance authority all fell in the direction of expanding the unprecedented investigation of a presidential candidate (later, a president).
Officials on the “Crossfire Hurricane” Trump-Russia investigators went to extraordinary, almost comical lengths to seek surveillance authority of figures like Trump aide Carter Page. In one episode, an FBI attorney inserted the words “not a source” in an email he’d received from another government agency. This disguised the fact that Page had been an informant for that agency, and had dutifully told the government in real time about being approached by Russian intelligence. The attorney then passed on the email to an FBI supervisory special agent, who signed a FISA warrant application on Page that held those Russian contacts against Page, without disclosing his informant role.
Likewise, the use of reports by ex-spy/campaign researcher Christopher Steele in pursuit of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authority had far-reaching ramifications.
Not only did obtaining a FISA warrant allow authorities a window into other Trump figures with whom Page communicated, they led to a slew of leaked “bombshell” news stories that advanced many public misconceptions, including that a court had ruled there was “probable cause” that a Trump figure was an “agent of a foreign power.”
There are too many to list in one column, but the Horowitz report show years of breathless headlines were wrong. Some key points:
The so-called “Steele dossier” was, actually, crucial to the FBI’s decision to seek secret surveillance of Page.
Press figures have derided the idea that Steele was crucial to the FISA application, with some insisting it was only a “small part” of the application. Horowitz is clear:
We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order.
The report describes how, prior to receiving Steele’s reports, the FBI General Counsel (OGC) and/or the National Security Division’s Office of Intelligence (OI) wouldn’t budge on seeking FISA authority. But after getting the reports, the OGC unit chief said, “receipt of the Steele reporting changed her mind on whether they could establish probable cause.”
Meanwhile, the OI unit chief said Steele’s reports were “what kind of pushed it over the line.” There’s no FISA warrant without Steele.
Horowitz ratifies the oft-denounced “Nunes memo.”
Democrats are not going to want to hear this, since conventional wisdom says former House Intelligence chief Devin Nunes is a conspiratorial evildoer, but the Horowitz report ratifies the major claims of the infamous “Nunes memo.”
As noted, Horowitz establishes that the Steele report was crucial to the FISA process, even using the same language Nunes used (“essential”). He also confirms the Nunes assertion that the FBI double-dipped in citing both Steele and a September 23, 2016 Yahoo! news story using Steele as an unnamed source. Horowitz listed the idea that Steele did not directly provide information to the press as one of seven significant “inaccuracies or omissions” in the first FISA application.
Horowitz also verifies the claim that Steele was “closed for cause” for talking to the media, i.e. officially cut off as a confidential human source to the FBI. He shows that Steele continued to talk to Justice Official Bruce Ohr before and after Steele’s formal relationship with the FBI ended. His report confirms that the Steele information had not been corroborated when the FISA application was submitted, another key Nunes point.
There was gnashing of teeth when Nunes first released his memo in January, 2018. The press universally crapped on his letter, with a Washington Post piece calling it a “joke” and a “sham.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed Nunes for the release of a “bogus” document, while New York Senator Chuck Schumer said the memo was intended to “sow conspiracy theories and attack the integrity of federal law enforcement.” Many called for his removal as Committee chair.
The Horowitz report says all of that caterwauling was off-base. It also undercuts many of the assertions made in a ballyhooed response letter by Nunes counterpart Adam Schiff, who described the FBI’s “reasonable basis” for deeming Steele credible. The report is especially hostile to Schiff’s claim that the FBI “provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting.”
In fact, far from confirming the Steele material, the FBI over time seems mainly to have uncovered more and more reasons to run screaming from Steele, to wit:
The “Steele dossier” was “Internet rumor,” and corroboration for the pee tape story was “zero.”
The Steele report reads like a pile of rumors surrounded by public information pulled off the Internet, and the Horowitz report does nothing to dispel this notion.
At the time the FBI submitted its first FISA application, Horowitz writes, it had “corroborated limited information in Steele’s election reporting, and most of that was publicly available information.” Horowitz says of Steele’s reports: “The CIA viewed it as ‘internet rumor.’”
Worse (and this part of the story should be tattooed on the heads of Russia truthers), the FBI’s interviews of Steele’s sources revealed Steele embellished the most explosive parts of his report.
The “pee tape” story, which inspired countless grave headlines (see this chin-scratching New York Times history of Russian “sexual blackmail”) and plunged the Trump presidency into crisis before it began, was, this source said, based a “conversation that [he/she] had over beers,” with the sexual allegations made… in “jest”!
Steele in his report said the story had been “confirmed” by senior, Western hotel staff, but the actual source said it was all “rumor and speculation,” never confirmed. In fact, charged by Steele to find corroboration, the source could not: corroboration was “zero,” writes Horowitz.
Meanwhile the Steele assertions that Russians had a kompromat file on Hillary Clinton, and that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russians, relied on a source Steele himself disparaged as an “egoist” and “boaster” who “may engage in some embellishment.” This was known to the FBI at the start, yet they naturally failed to include this info in the warrant application, one of what Horowitz described as “17 significant errors or omissions” in the FISA application.
Finally, when the FBI conducted an investigation into Steele’s “work-related performance,” they heard from some that he was “smart,” and a “person of integrity,” and “if he reported it, he believed it.”
So far, so good. But Horowitz also wrote:
Their notes stated: “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness, poor judgment;” “[k]een to help” but “underpinned by poor judgment;” “Judgment: pursuing people with political risk but no intel value;” “[d]idn’t always exercise great judgment- sometimes [he] believes he knows best;” and “[r]eporting in good faith, but not clear what he would have done to validate.”
The Crossfire Hurricane team got all of this, but, again, didn’t pass it upstairs or include any of it in its warrant application.
I’ve written about how reporters used sleight of hand to get the Steele dossier into print without putting it through a vetting process. What Horowitz describes is worse: a story about bad journalism piled on bad journalism, balanced on a third layer of wrong reporting.
Steele in his “reports” embellished his sources’ quotes, played up nonexistent angles, invented attributions, and ignored inconsistencies. The FBI then transplanted this bad reporting in the form of a warrant application and an addendum to the Intelligence Assessment that included the Steele material, ignoring a new layer of inconsistencies and red flags its analysts uncovered in the review process.
Then, following a series of leaks, the news media essentially reported on the FBI’s wrong reporting of Steele’s wrong reporting.
The impact was greater than just securing a warrant to monitor Page. More significant were the years of headlines that grew out of this process, beginning with the leaking of the meeting with Trump about Steele’s blackmail allegations, the insertion of Steele’s conclusions in the Intelligence Assessment about Russian interference, and the leak of news about the approval of the Page FISA warrant.
As a result, a “well-developed conspiracy” theory based on a report that Comey described as “salacious and unverified material that a responsible journalist wouldn’t report without corroborating,” became the driving news story in a superpower nation for two years. Even the New York Times, which published a lot of these stories, is in the wake of the Horowitz report noting Steele’s role in “unleashing a flood of speculation in the news media about the new president’s relationship with Russia.”
No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed.
I posted the whole thing, it's not that long and doesn't have a good halfway point.
On December 11 2019 15:39 Introvert wrote: Matt Taibbi has a very quick rundown how the Horowitz IG report shatters the three long years we spent on Russiagate. While the report does say they didn't find any political motivation (laughable) the "serious" problems with the way the FBI handled the whole affair ought to make those who spent years pushing it as embarrassed as they should have been the day the Mueller report came out. Also, the Nunes memo was 10x closer to the truth than was Schiff's. If only xDaunt were here.
The Guardian headline reads: “DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser.”
If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.
Like the much-ballyhooed report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Horowitz report is a Rorschach test, in which partisans will find what they want to find.
Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz’s conclusion that there was no evidence of “political bias or improper motivation” in the FBI’s probe of Donald Trump’s Russia contacts, an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had “authorized purpose” to conduct.
Horowitz uses phrases like “serious performance failures,” describing his 416-page catalogue of errors and manipulations as incompetence rather than corruption. This throws water on the notion that the Trump investigation was a vast frame-up.
However, Horowitz describes at great length an FBI whose “serious” procedural problems and omissions of “significant information” in pursuit of surveillance authority all fell in the direction of expanding the unprecedented investigation of a presidential candidate (later, a president).
Officials on the “Crossfire Hurricane” Trump-Russia investigators went to extraordinary, almost comical lengths to seek surveillance authority of figures like Trump aide Carter Page. In one episode, an FBI attorney inserted the words “not a source” in an email he’d received from another government agency. This disguised the fact that Page had been an informant for that agency, and had dutifully told the government in real time about being approached by Russian intelligence. The attorney then passed on the email to an FBI supervisory special agent, who signed a FISA warrant application on Page that held those Russian contacts against Page, without disclosing his informant role.
Likewise, the use of reports by ex-spy/campaign researcher Christopher Steele in pursuit of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authority had far-reaching ramifications.
Not only did obtaining a FISA warrant allow authorities a window into other Trump figures with whom Page communicated, they led to a slew of leaked “bombshell” news stories that advanced many public misconceptions, including that a court had ruled there was “probable cause” that a Trump figure was an “agent of a foreign power.”
There are too many to list in one column, but the Horowitz report show years of breathless headlines were wrong. Some key points:
The so-called “Steele dossier” was, actually, crucial to the FBI’s decision to seek secret surveillance of Page.
Press figures have derided the idea that Steele was crucial to the FISA application, with some insisting it was only a “small part” of the application. Horowitz is clear:
We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order.
The report describes how, prior to receiving Steele’s reports, the FBI General Counsel (OGC) and/or the National Security Division’s Office of Intelligence (OI) wouldn’t budge on seeking FISA authority. But after getting the reports, the OGC unit chief said, “receipt of the Steele reporting changed her mind on whether they could establish probable cause.”
Meanwhile, the OI unit chief said Steele’s reports were “what kind of pushed it over the line.” There’s no FISA warrant without Steele.
Horowitz ratifies the oft-denounced “Nunes memo.”
Democrats are not going to want to hear this, since conventional wisdom says former House Intelligence chief Devin Nunes is a conspiratorial evildoer, but the Horowitz report ratifies the major claims of the infamous “Nunes memo.”
As noted, Horowitz establishes that the Steele report was crucial to the FISA process, even using the same language Nunes used (“essential”). He also confirms the Nunes assertion that the FBI double-dipped in citing both Steele and a September 23, 2016 Yahoo! news story using Steele as an unnamed source. Horowitz listed the idea that Steele did not directly provide information to the press as one of seven significant “inaccuracies or omissions” in the first FISA application.
Horowitz also verifies the claim that Steele was “closed for cause” for talking to the media, i.e. officially cut off as a confidential human source to the FBI. He shows that Steele continued to talk to Justice Official Bruce Ohr before and after Steele’s formal relationship with the FBI ended. His report confirms that the Steele information had not been corroborated when the FISA application was submitted, another key Nunes point.
There was gnashing of teeth when Nunes first released his memo in January, 2018. The press universally crapped on his letter, with a Washington Post piece calling it a “joke” and a “sham.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed Nunes for the release of a “bogus” document, while New York Senator Chuck Schumer said the memo was intended to “sow conspiracy theories and attack the integrity of federal law enforcement.” Many called for his removal as Committee chair.
The Horowitz report says all of that caterwauling was off-base. It also undercuts many of the assertions made in a ballyhooed response letter by Nunes counterpart Adam Schiff, who described the FBI’s “reasonable basis” for deeming Steele credible. The report is especially hostile to Schiff’s claim that the FBI “provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting.”
In fact, far from confirming the Steele material, the FBI over time seems mainly to have uncovered more and more reasons to run screaming from Steele, to wit:
The “Steele dossier” was “Internet rumor,” and corroboration for the pee tape story was “zero.”
The Steele report reads like a pile of rumors surrounded by public information pulled off the Internet, and the Horowitz report does nothing to dispel this notion.
At the time the FBI submitted its first FISA application, Horowitz writes, it had “corroborated limited information in Steele’s election reporting, and most of that was publicly available information.” Horowitz says of Steele’s reports: “The CIA viewed it as ‘internet rumor.’”
Worse (and this part of the story should be tattooed on the heads of Russia truthers), the FBI’s interviews of Steele’s sources revealed Steele embellished the most explosive parts of his report.
The “pee tape” story, which inspired countless grave headlines (see this chin-scratching New York Times history of Russian “sexual blackmail”) and plunged the Trump presidency into crisis before it began, was, this source said, based a “conversation that [he/she] had over beers,” with the sexual allegations made… in “jest”!
Steele in his report said the story had been “confirmed” by senior, Western hotel staff, but the actual source said it was all “rumor and speculation,” never confirmed. In fact, charged by Steele to find corroboration, the source could not: corroboration was “zero,” writes Horowitz.
Meanwhile the Steele assertions that Russians had a kompromat file on Hillary Clinton, and that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russians, relied on a source Steele himself disparaged as an “egoist” and “boaster” who “may engage in some embellishment.” This was known to the FBI at the start, yet they naturally failed to include this info in the warrant application, one of what Horowitz described as “17 significant errors or omissions” in the FISA application.
Finally, when the FBI conducted an investigation into Steele’s “work-related performance,” they heard from some that he was “smart,” and a “person of integrity,” and “if he reported it, he believed it.”
So far, so good. But Horowitz also wrote:
Their notes stated: “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness, poor judgment;” “[k]een to help” but “underpinned by poor judgment;” “Judgment: pursuing people with political risk but no intel value;” “[d]idn’t always exercise great judgment- sometimes [he] believes he knows best;” and “[r]eporting in good faith, but not clear what he would have done to validate.”
The Crossfire Hurricane team got all of this, but, again, didn’t pass it upstairs or include any of it in its warrant application.
I’ve written about how reporters used sleight of hand to get the Steele dossier into print without putting it through a vetting process. What Horowitz describes is worse: a story about bad journalism piled on bad journalism, balanced on a third layer of wrong reporting.
Steele in his “reports” embellished his sources’ quotes, played up nonexistent angles, invented attributions, and ignored inconsistencies. The FBI then transplanted this bad reporting in the form of a warrant application and an addendum to the Intelligence Assessment that included the Steele material, ignoring a new layer of inconsistencies and red flags its analysts uncovered in the review process.
Then, following a series of leaks, the news media essentially reported on the FBI’s wrong reporting of Steele’s wrong reporting.
The impact was greater than just securing a warrant to monitor Page. More significant were the years of headlines that grew out of this process, beginning with the leaking of the meeting with Trump about Steele’s blackmail allegations, the insertion of Steele’s conclusions in the Intelligence Assessment about Russian interference, and the leak of news about the approval of the Page FISA warrant.
As a result, a “well-developed conspiracy” theory based on a report that Comey described as “salacious and unverified material that a responsible journalist wouldn’t report without corroborating,” became the driving news story in a superpower nation for two years. Even the New York Times, which published a lot of these stories, is in the wake of the Horowitz report noting Steele’s role in “unleashing a flood of speculation in the news media about the new president’s relationship with Russia.”
No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed.
I posted the whole thing, it's not that long and doesn't have a good halfway point.
On December 11 2019 15:39 Introvert wrote: Matt Taibbi has a very quick rundown how the Horowitz IG report shatters the three long years we spent on Russiagate. While the report does say they didn't find any political motivation (laughable) the "serious" problems with the way the FBI handled the whole affair ought to make those who spent years pushing it as embarrassed as they should have been the day the Mueller report came out. Also, the Nunes memo was 10x closer to the truth than was Schiff's. If only xDaunt were here.
The Guardian headline reads: “DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser.”
If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.
Like the much-ballyhooed report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Horowitz report is a Rorschach test, in which partisans will find what they want to find.
Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz’s conclusion that there was no evidence of “political bias or improper motivation” in the FBI’s probe of Donald Trump’s Russia contacts, an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had “authorized purpose” to conduct.
Horowitz uses phrases like “serious performance failures,” describing his 416-page catalogue of errors and manipulations as incompetence rather than corruption. This throws water on the notion that the Trump investigation was a vast frame-up.
However, Horowitz describes at great length an FBI whose “serious” procedural problems and omissions of “significant information” in pursuit of surveillance authority all fell in the direction of expanding the unprecedented investigation of a presidential candidate (later, a president).
Officials on the “Crossfire Hurricane” Trump-Russia investigators went to extraordinary, almost comical lengths to seek surveillance authority of figures like Trump aide Carter Page. In one episode, an FBI attorney inserted the words “not a source” in an email he’d received from another government agency. This disguised the fact that Page had been an informant for that agency, and had dutifully told the government in real time about being approached by Russian intelligence. The attorney then passed on the email to an FBI supervisory special agent, who signed a FISA warrant application on Page that held those Russian contacts against Page, without disclosing his informant role.
Likewise, the use of reports by ex-spy/campaign researcher Christopher Steele in pursuit of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authority had far-reaching ramifications.
Not only did obtaining a FISA warrant allow authorities a window into other Trump figures with whom Page communicated, they led to a slew of leaked “bombshell” news stories that advanced many public misconceptions, including that a court had ruled there was “probable cause” that a Trump figure was an “agent of a foreign power.”
There are too many to list in one column, but the Horowitz report show years of breathless headlines were wrong. Some key points:
The so-called “Steele dossier” was, actually, crucial to the FBI’s decision to seek secret surveillance of Page.
Press figures have derided the idea that Steele was crucial to the FISA application, with some insisting it was only a “small part” of the application. Horowitz is clear:
We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order.
The report describes how, prior to receiving Steele’s reports, the FBI General Counsel (OGC) and/or the National Security Division’s Office of Intelligence (OI) wouldn’t budge on seeking FISA authority. But after getting the reports, the OGC unit chief said, “receipt of the Steele reporting changed her mind on whether they could establish probable cause.”
Meanwhile, the OI unit chief said Steele’s reports were “what kind of pushed it over the line.” There’s no FISA warrant without Steele.
Horowitz ratifies the oft-denounced “Nunes memo.”
Democrats are not going to want to hear this, since conventional wisdom says former House Intelligence chief Devin Nunes is a conspiratorial evildoer, but the Horowitz report ratifies the major claims of the infamous “Nunes memo.”
As noted, Horowitz establishes that the Steele report was crucial to the FISA process, even using the same language Nunes used (“essential”). He also confirms the Nunes assertion that the FBI double-dipped in citing both Steele and a September 23, 2016 Yahoo! news story using Steele as an unnamed source. Horowitz listed the idea that Steele did not directly provide information to the press as one of seven significant “inaccuracies or omissions” in the first FISA application.
Horowitz also verifies the claim that Steele was “closed for cause” for talking to the media, i.e. officially cut off as a confidential human source to the FBI. He shows that Steele continued to talk to Justice Official Bruce Ohr before and after Steele’s formal relationship with the FBI ended. His report confirms that the Steele information had not been corroborated when the FISA application was submitted, another key Nunes point.
There was gnashing of teeth when Nunes first released his memo in January, 2018. The press universally crapped on his letter, with a Washington Post piece calling it a “joke” and a “sham.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed Nunes for the release of a “bogus” document, while New York Senator Chuck Schumer said the memo was intended to “sow conspiracy theories and attack the integrity of federal law enforcement.” Many called for his removal as Committee chair.
The Horowitz report says all of that caterwauling was off-base. It also undercuts many of the assertions made in a ballyhooed response letter by Nunes counterpart Adam Schiff, who described the FBI’s “reasonable basis” for deeming Steele credible. The report is especially hostile to Schiff’s claim that the FBI “provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting.”
In fact, far from confirming the Steele material, the FBI over time seems mainly to have uncovered more and more reasons to run screaming from Steele, to wit:
The “Steele dossier” was “Internet rumor,” and corroboration for the pee tape story was “zero.”
The Steele report reads like a pile of rumors surrounded by public information pulled off the Internet, and the Horowitz report does nothing to dispel this notion.
At the time the FBI submitted its first FISA application, Horowitz writes, it had “corroborated limited information in Steele’s election reporting, and most of that was publicly available information.” Horowitz says of Steele’s reports: “The CIA viewed it as ‘internet rumor.’”
Worse (and this part of the story should be tattooed on the heads of Russia truthers), the FBI’s interviews of Steele’s sources revealed Steele embellished the most explosive parts of his report.
The “pee tape” story, which inspired countless grave headlines (see this chin-scratching New York Times history of Russian “sexual blackmail”) and plunged the Trump presidency into crisis before it began, was, this source said, based a “conversation that [he/she] had over beers,” with the sexual allegations made… in “jest”!
Steele in his report said the story had been “confirmed” by senior, Western hotel staff, but the actual source said it was all “rumor and speculation,” never confirmed. In fact, charged by Steele to find corroboration, the source could not: corroboration was “zero,” writes Horowitz.
Meanwhile the Steele assertions that Russians had a kompromat file on Hillary Clinton, and that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russians, relied on a source Steele himself disparaged as an “egoist” and “boaster” who “may engage in some embellishment.” This was known to the FBI at the start, yet they naturally failed to include this info in the warrant application, one of what Horowitz described as “17 significant errors or omissions” in the FISA application.
Finally, when the FBI conducted an investigation into Steele’s “work-related performance,” they heard from some that he was “smart,” and a “person of integrity,” and “if he reported it, he believed it.”
So far, so good. But Horowitz also wrote:
Their notes stated: “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness, poor judgment;” “[k]een to help” but “underpinned by poor judgment;” “Judgment: pursuing people with political risk but no intel value;” “[d]idn’t always exercise great judgment- sometimes [he] believes he knows best;” and “[r]eporting in good faith, but not clear what he would have done to validate.”
The Crossfire Hurricane team got all of this, but, again, didn’t pass it upstairs or include any of it in its warrant application.
I’ve written about how reporters used sleight of hand to get the Steele dossier into print without putting it through a vetting process. What Horowitz describes is worse: a story about bad journalism piled on bad journalism, balanced on a third layer of wrong reporting.
Steele in his “reports” embellished his sources’ quotes, played up nonexistent angles, invented attributions, and ignored inconsistencies. The FBI then transplanted this bad reporting in the form of a warrant application and an addendum to the Intelligence Assessment that included the Steele material, ignoring a new layer of inconsistencies and red flags its analysts uncovered in the review process.
Then, following a series of leaks, the news media essentially reported on the FBI’s wrong reporting of Steele’s wrong reporting.
The impact was greater than just securing a warrant to monitor Page. More significant were the years of headlines that grew out of this process, beginning with the leaking of the meeting with Trump about Steele’s blackmail allegations, the insertion of Steele’s conclusions in the Intelligence Assessment about Russian interference, and the leak of news about the approval of the Page FISA warrant.
As a result, a “well-developed conspiracy” theory based on a report that Comey described as “salacious and unverified material that a responsible journalist wouldn’t report without corroborating,” became the driving news story in a superpower nation for two years. Even the New York Times, which published a lot of these stories, is in the wake of the Horowitz report noting Steele’s role in “unleashing a flood of speculation in the news media about the new president’s relationship with Russia.”
No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed.
I posted the whole thing, it's not that long and doesn't have a good halfway point.
Any chance that those that thought the FBI weren't trash before they were investigating Trump ever had this moment of embarrassment?
Well I still don't think most of those people (myself included) are ready to label the entire agency as garbage, although I know you think it is. Certainly a black mark, and cause for concern and review (to use mild language) but I do think the exceptional hate on many of those in a high level of government have for Trump was a very large contributor. But of course, screwing up something like this raises serious questions about how they behave elsewhere. So I think you won't find many people who are going to end up where you are.
On December 11 2019 15:39 Introvert wrote: Matt Taibbi has a very quick rundown how the Horowitz IG report shatters the three long years we spent on Russiagate. While the report does say they didn't find any political motivation (laughable) the "serious" problems with the way the FBI handled the whole affair ought to make those who spent years pushing it as embarrassed as they should have been the day the Mueller report came out. Also, the Nunes memo was 10x closer to the truth than was Schiff's. If only xDaunt were here.
The Guardian headline reads: “DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser.”
If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.
Like the much-ballyhooed report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Horowitz report is a Rorschach test, in which partisans will find what they want to find.
Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz’s conclusion that there was no evidence of “political bias or improper motivation” in the FBI’s probe of Donald Trump’s Russia contacts, an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had “authorized purpose” to conduct.
Horowitz uses phrases like “serious performance failures,” describing his 416-page catalogue of errors and manipulations as incompetence rather than corruption. This throws water on the notion that the Trump investigation was a vast frame-up.
However, Horowitz describes at great length an FBI whose “serious” procedural problems and omissions of “significant information” in pursuit of surveillance authority all fell in the direction of expanding the unprecedented investigation of a presidential candidate (later, a president).
Officials on the “Crossfire Hurricane” Trump-Russia investigators went to extraordinary, almost comical lengths to seek surveillance authority of figures like Trump aide Carter Page. In one episode, an FBI attorney inserted the words “not a source” in an email he’d received from another government agency. This disguised the fact that Page had been an informant for that agency, and had dutifully told the government in real time about being approached by Russian intelligence. The attorney then passed on the email to an FBI supervisory special agent, who signed a FISA warrant application on Page that held those Russian contacts against Page, without disclosing his informant role.
Likewise, the use of reports by ex-spy/campaign researcher Christopher Steele in pursuit of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authority had far-reaching ramifications.
Not only did obtaining a FISA warrant allow authorities a window into other Trump figures with whom Page communicated, they led to a slew of leaked “bombshell” news stories that advanced many public misconceptions, including that a court had ruled there was “probable cause” that a Trump figure was an “agent of a foreign power.”
There are too many to list in one column, but the Horowitz report show years of breathless headlines were wrong. Some key points:
The so-called “Steele dossier” was, actually, crucial to the FBI’s decision to seek secret surveillance of Page.
Press figures have derided the idea that Steele was crucial to the FISA application, with some insisting it was only a “small part” of the application. Horowitz is clear:
We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order.
The report describes how, prior to receiving Steele’s reports, the FBI General Counsel (OGC) and/or the National Security Division’s Office of Intelligence (OI) wouldn’t budge on seeking FISA authority. But after getting the reports, the OGC unit chief said, “receipt of the Steele reporting changed her mind on whether they could establish probable cause.”
Meanwhile, the OI unit chief said Steele’s reports were “what kind of pushed it over the line.” There’s no FISA warrant without Steele.
Horowitz ratifies the oft-denounced “Nunes memo.”
Democrats are not going to want to hear this, since conventional wisdom says former House Intelligence chief Devin Nunes is a conspiratorial evildoer, but the Horowitz report ratifies the major claims of the infamous “Nunes memo.”
As noted, Horowitz establishes that the Steele report was crucial to the FISA process, even using the same language Nunes used (“essential”). He also confirms the Nunes assertion that the FBI double-dipped in citing both Steele and a September 23, 2016 Yahoo! news story using Steele as an unnamed source. Horowitz listed the idea that Steele did not directly provide information to the press as one of seven significant “inaccuracies or omissions” in the first FISA application.
Horowitz also verifies the claim that Steele was “closed for cause” for talking to the media, i.e. officially cut off as a confidential human source to the FBI. He shows that Steele continued to talk to Justice Official Bruce Ohr before and after Steele’s formal relationship with the FBI ended. His report confirms that the Steele information had not been corroborated when the FISA application was submitted, another key Nunes point.
There was gnashing of teeth when Nunes first released his memo in January, 2018. The press universally crapped on his letter, with a Washington Post piece calling it a “joke” and a “sham.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed Nunes for the release of a “bogus” document, while New York Senator Chuck Schumer said the memo was intended to “sow conspiracy theories and attack the integrity of federal law enforcement.” Many called for his removal as Committee chair.
The Horowitz report says all of that caterwauling was off-base. It also undercuts many of the assertions made in a ballyhooed response letter by Nunes counterpart Adam Schiff, who described the FBI’s “reasonable basis” for deeming Steele credible. The report is especially hostile to Schiff’s claim that the FBI “provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting.”
In fact, far from confirming the Steele material, the FBI over time seems mainly to have uncovered more and more reasons to run screaming from Steele, to wit:
The “Steele dossier” was “Internet rumor,” and corroboration for the pee tape story was “zero.”
The Steele report reads like a pile of rumors surrounded by public information pulled off the Internet, and the Horowitz report does nothing to dispel this notion.
At the time the FBI submitted its first FISA application, Horowitz writes, it had “corroborated limited information in Steele’s election reporting, and most of that was publicly available information.” Horowitz says of Steele’s reports: “The CIA viewed it as ‘internet rumor.’”
Worse (and this part of the story should be tattooed on the heads of Russia truthers), the FBI’s interviews of Steele’s sources revealed Steele embellished the most explosive parts of his report.
The “pee tape” story, which inspired countless grave headlines (see this chin-scratching New York Times history of Russian “sexual blackmail”) and plunged the Trump presidency into crisis before it began, was, this source said, based a “conversation that [he/she] had over beers,” with the sexual allegations made… in “jest”!
Steele in his report said the story had been “confirmed” by senior, Western hotel staff, but the actual source said it was all “rumor and speculation,” never confirmed. In fact, charged by Steele to find corroboration, the source could not: corroboration was “zero,” writes Horowitz.
Meanwhile the Steele assertions that Russians had a kompromat file on Hillary Clinton, and that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russians, relied on a source Steele himself disparaged as an “egoist” and “boaster” who “may engage in some embellishment.” This was known to the FBI at the start, yet they naturally failed to include this info in the warrant application, one of what Horowitz described as “17 significant errors or omissions” in the FISA application.
Finally, when the FBI conducted an investigation into Steele’s “work-related performance,” they heard from some that he was “smart,” and a “person of integrity,” and “if he reported it, he believed it.”
So far, so good. But Horowitz also wrote:
Their notes stated: “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness, poor judgment;” “[k]een to help” but “underpinned by poor judgment;” “Judgment: pursuing people with political risk but no intel value;” “[d]idn’t always exercise great judgment- sometimes [he] believes he knows best;” and “[r]eporting in good faith, but not clear what he would have done to validate.”
The Crossfire Hurricane team got all of this, but, again, didn’t pass it upstairs or include any of it in its warrant application.
I’ve written about how reporters used sleight of hand to get the Steele dossier into print without putting it through a vetting process. What Horowitz describes is worse: a story about bad journalism piled on bad journalism, balanced on a third layer of wrong reporting.
Steele in his “reports” embellished his sources’ quotes, played up nonexistent angles, invented attributions, and ignored inconsistencies. The FBI then transplanted this bad reporting in the form of a warrant application and an addendum to the Intelligence Assessment that included the Steele material, ignoring a new layer of inconsistencies and red flags its analysts uncovered in the review process.
Then, following a series of leaks, the news media essentially reported on the FBI’s wrong reporting of Steele’s wrong reporting.
The impact was greater than just securing a warrant to monitor Page. More significant were the years of headlines that grew out of this process, beginning with the leaking of the meeting with Trump about Steele’s blackmail allegations, the insertion of Steele’s conclusions in the Intelligence Assessment about Russian interference, and the leak of news about the approval of the Page FISA warrant.
As a result, a “well-developed conspiracy” theory based on a report that Comey described as “salacious and unverified material that a responsible journalist wouldn’t report without corroborating,” became the driving news story in a superpower nation for two years. Even the New York Times, which published a lot of these stories, is in the wake of the Horowitz report noting Steele’s role in “unleashing a flood of speculation in the news media about the new president’s relationship with Russia.”
No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed.
I posted the whole thing, it's not that long and doesn't have a good halfway point.
Any chance that those that thought the FBI weren't trash before they were investigating Trump ever had this moment of embarrassment?
Well I still don't think most of those people (myself included) are ready to label the entire agency as garbage, although I know you think it is. Certainly a black mark, and cause for concern and review (to use mild language) but I do think the exceptional hate on many of those in a high level of government have for Trump was a very large contributor. But of course, screwing up something like this raises serious questions about how they behave elsewhere. So I think you won't find many people who are going to end up where you are.
Ah yes, the old "anomaly" rather than part of a well established pattern of behavior in order to avoid confronting the contradictions of what is clearly a wildly cynical preservation of the very practices, institutions and people being decried now that they have been aimed at a perceived ally.
If any embarrassment was coming it would have prevented them from trusting the FBI in the first place.
On December 11 2019 15:39 Introvert wrote: Matt Taibbi has a very quick rundown how the Horowitz IG report shatters the three long years we spent on Russiagate. While the report does say they didn't find any political motivation (laughable) the "serious" problems with the way the FBI handled the whole affair ought to make those who spent years pushing it as embarrassed as they should have been the day the Mueller report came out. Also, the Nunes memo was 10x closer to the truth than was Schiff's. If only xDaunt were here.
The Guardian headline reads: “DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser.”
If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.
Like the much-ballyhooed report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Horowitz report is a Rorschach test, in which partisans will find what they want to find.
Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz’s conclusion that there was no evidence of “political bias or improper motivation” in the FBI’s probe of Donald Trump’s Russia contacts, an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had “authorized purpose” to conduct.
Horowitz uses phrases like “serious performance failures,” describing his 416-page catalogue of errors and manipulations as incompetence rather than corruption. This throws water on the notion that the Trump investigation was a vast frame-up.
However, Horowitz describes at great length an FBI whose “serious” procedural problems and omissions of “significant information” in pursuit of surveillance authority all fell in the direction of expanding the unprecedented investigation of a presidential candidate (later, a president).
Officials on the “Crossfire Hurricane” Trump-Russia investigators went to extraordinary, almost comical lengths to seek surveillance authority of figures like Trump aide Carter Page. In one episode, an FBI attorney inserted the words “not a source” in an email he’d received from another government agency. This disguised the fact that Page had been an informant for that agency, and had dutifully told the government in real time about being approached by Russian intelligence. The attorney then passed on the email to an FBI supervisory special agent, who signed a FISA warrant application on Page that held those Russian contacts against Page, without disclosing his informant role.
Likewise, the use of reports by ex-spy/campaign researcher Christopher Steele in pursuit of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authority had far-reaching ramifications.
Not only did obtaining a FISA warrant allow authorities a window into other Trump figures with whom Page communicated, they led to a slew of leaked “bombshell” news stories that advanced many public misconceptions, including that a court had ruled there was “probable cause” that a Trump figure was an “agent of a foreign power.”
There are too many to list in one column, but the Horowitz report show years of breathless headlines were wrong. Some key points:
The so-called “Steele dossier” was, actually, crucial to the FBI’s decision to seek secret surveillance of Page.
Press figures have derided the idea that Steele was crucial to the FISA application, with some insisting it was only a “small part” of the application. Horowitz is clear:
We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order.
The report describes how, prior to receiving Steele’s reports, the FBI General Counsel (OGC) and/or the National Security Division’s Office of Intelligence (OI) wouldn’t budge on seeking FISA authority. But after getting the reports, the OGC unit chief said, “receipt of the Steele reporting changed her mind on whether they could establish probable cause.”
Meanwhile, the OI unit chief said Steele’s reports were “what kind of pushed it over the line.” There’s no FISA warrant without Steele.
Horowitz ratifies the oft-denounced “Nunes memo.”
Democrats are not going to want to hear this, since conventional wisdom says former House Intelligence chief Devin Nunes is a conspiratorial evildoer, but the Horowitz report ratifies the major claims of the infamous “Nunes memo.”
As noted, Horowitz establishes that the Steele report was crucial to the FISA process, even using the same language Nunes used (“essential”). He also confirms the Nunes assertion that the FBI double-dipped in citing both Steele and a September 23, 2016 Yahoo! news story using Steele as an unnamed source. Horowitz listed the idea that Steele did not directly provide information to the press as one of seven significant “inaccuracies or omissions” in the first FISA application.
Horowitz also verifies the claim that Steele was “closed for cause” for talking to the media, i.e. officially cut off as a confidential human source to the FBI. He shows that Steele continued to talk to Justice Official Bruce Ohr before and after Steele’s formal relationship with the FBI ended. His report confirms that the Steele information had not been corroborated when the FISA application was submitted, another key Nunes point.
There was gnashing of teeth when Nunes first released his memo in January, 2018. The press universally crapped on his letter, with a Washington Post piece calling it a “joke” and a “sham.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed Nunes for the release of a “bogus” document, while New York Senator Chuck Schumer said the memo was intended to “sow conspiracy theories and attack the integrity of federal law enforcement.” Many called for his removal as Committee chair.
The Horowitz report says all of that caterwauling was off-base. It also undercuts many of the assertions made in a ballyhooed response letter by Nunes counterpart Adam Schiff, who described the FBI’s “reasonable basis” for deeming Steele credible. The report is especially hostile to Schiff’s claim that the FBI “provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting.”
In fact, far from confirming the Steele material, the FBI over time seems mainly to have uncovered more and more reasons to run screaming from Steele, to wit:
The “Steele dossier” was “Internet rumor,” and corroboration for the pee tape story was “zero.”
The Steele report reads like a pile of rumors surrounded by public information pulled off the Internet, and the Horowitz report does nothing to dispel this notion.
At the time the FBI submitted its first FISA application, Horowitz writes, it had “corroborated limited information in Steele’s election reporting, and most of that was publicly available information.” Horowitz says of Steele’s reports: “The CIA viewed it as ‘internet rumor.’”
Worse (and this part of the story should be tattooed on the heads of Russia truthers), the FBI’s interviews of Steele’s sources revealed Steele embellished the most explosive parts of his report.
The “pee tape” story, which inspired countless grave headlines (see this chin-scratching New York Times history of Russian “sexual blackmail”) and plunged the Trump presidency into crisis before it began, was, this source said, based a “conversation that [he/she] had over beers,” with the sexual allegations made… in “jest”!
Steele in his report said the story had been “confirmed” by senior, Western hotel staff, but the actual source said it was all “rumor and speculation,” never confirmed. In fact, charged by Steele to find corroboration, the source could not: corroboration was “zero,” writes Horowitz.
Meanwhile the Steele assertions that Russians had a kompromat file on Hillary Clinton, and that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russians, relied on a source Steele himself disparaged as an “egoist” and “boaster” who “may engage in some embellishment.” This was known to the FBI at the start, yet they naturally failed to include this info in the warrant application, one of what Horowitz described as “17 significant errors or omissions” in the FISA application.
Finally, when the FBI conducted an investigation into Steele’s “work-related performance,” they heard from some that he was “smart,” and a “person of integrity,” and “if he reported it, he believed it.”
So far, so good. But Horowitz also wrote:
Their notes stated: “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness, poor judgment;” “[k]een to help” but “underpinned by poor judgment;” “Judgment: pursuing people with political risk but no intel value;” “[d]idn’t always exercise great judgment- sometimes [he] believes he knows best;” and “[r]eporting in good faith, but not clear what he would have done to validate.”
The Crossfire Hurricane team got all of this, but, again, didn’t pass it upstairs or include any of it in its warrant application.
I’ve written about how reporters used sleight of hand to get the Steele dossier into print without putting it through a vetting process. What Horowitz describes is worse: a story about bad journalism piled on bad journalism, balanced on a third layer of wrong reporting.
Steele in his “reports” embellished his sources’ quotes, played up nonexistent angles, invented attributions, and ignored inconsistencies. The FBI then transplanted this bad reporting in the form of a warrant application and an addendum to the Intelligence Assessment that included the Steele material, ignoring a new layer of inconsistencies and red flags its analysts uncovered in the review process.
Then, following a series of leaks, the news media essentially reported on the FBI’s wrong reporting of Steele’s wrong reporting.
The impact was greater than just securing a warrant to monitor Page. More significant were the years of headlines that grew out of this process, beginning with the leaking of the meeting with Trump about Steele’s blackmail allegations, the insertion of Steele’s conclusions in the Intelligence Assessment about Russian interference, and the leak of news about the approval of the Page FISA warrant.
As a result, a “well-developed conspiracy” theory based on a report that Comey described as “salacious and unverified material that a responsible journalist wouldn’t report without corroborating,” became the driving news story in a superpower nation for two years. Even the New York Times, which published a lot of these stories, is in the wake of the Horowitz report noting Steele’s role in “unleashing a flood of speculation in the news media about the new president’s relationship with Russia.”
No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed.
I posted the whole thing, it's not that long and doesn't have a good halfway point.
Any chance that those that thought the FBI weren't trash before they were investigating Trump ever had this moment of embarrassment?
Well I still don't think most of those people (myself included) are ready to label the entire agency as garbage, although I know you think it is. Certainly a black mark, and cause for concern and review (to use mild language) but I do think the exceptional hate on many of those in a high level of government have for Trump was a very large contributor. But of course, screwing up something like this raises serious questions about how they behave elsewhere. So I think you won't find many people who are going to end up where you are.
Ah yes, the old "anomaly" rather than part of a well established pattern of behavior in order to avoid confronting the contradictions of what is clearly a wildly cynical preservation of the very practices, institutions and people being decried now that they have been aimed at a perceived ally.
If any embarrassment was coming it would have prevented them from trusting the FBI in the first place.
Well I'll put it slightly differently. I think this episode has shown that the type of people who rise to the top of the organization are clearly not the morally upstanding citizens we wished they were, although that may have been obvious from the very first director. It doesn't have to be an anomaly of kind, but perhaps of scale. Still, most FBI work is not whatever the hell these people thought they were doing. I, and most others, are simply not going to go whole-hog on this with you.
On December 11 2019 15:39 Introvert wrote: Matt Taibbi has a very quick rundown how the Horowitz IG report shatters the three long years we spent on Russiagate. While the report does say they didn't find any political motivation (laughable) the "serious" problems with the way the FBI handled the whole affair ought to make those who spent years pushing it as embarrassed as they should have been the day the Mueller report came out. Also, the Nunes memo was 10x closer to the truth than was Schiff's. If only xDaunt were here.
The Guardian headline reads: “DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser.”
If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.
Like the much-ballyhooed report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Horowitz report is a Rorschach test, in which partisans will find what they want to find.
Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz’s conclusion that there was no evidence of “political bias or improper motivation” in the FBI’s probe of Donald Trump’s Russia contacts, an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had “authorized purpose” to conduct.
Horowitz uses phrases like “serious performance failures,” describing his 416-page catalogue of errors and manipulations as incompetence rather than corruption. This throws water on the notion that the Trump investigation was a vast frame-up.
However, Horowitz describes at great length an FBI whose “serious” procedural problems and omissions of “significant information” in pursuit of surveillance authority all fell in the direction of expanding the unprecedented investigation of a presidential candidate (later, a president).
Officials on the “Crossfire Hurricane” Trump-Russia investigators went to extraordinary, almost comical lengths to seek surveillance authority of figures like Trump aide Carter Page. In one episode, an FBI attorney inserted the words “not a source” in an email he’d received from another government agency. This disguised the fact that Page had been an informant for that agency, and had dutifully told the government in real time about being approached by Russian intelligence. The attorney then passed on the email to an FBI supervisory special agent, who signed a FISA warrant application on Page that held those Russian contacts against Page, without disclosing his informant role.
Likewise, the use of reports by ex-spy/campaign researcher Christopher Steele in pursuit of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authority had far-reaching ramifications.
Not only did obtaining a FISA warrant allow authorities a window into other Trump figures with whom Page communicated, they led to a slew of leaked “bombshell” news stories that advanced many public misconceptions, including that a court had ruled there was “probable cause” that a Trump figure was an “agent of a foreign power.”
There are too many to list in one column, but the Horowitz report show years of breathless headlines were wrong. Some key points:
The so-called “Steele dossier” was, actually, crucial to the FBI’s decision to seek secret surveillance of Page.
Press figures have derided the idea that Steele was crucial to the FISA application, with some insisting it was only a “small part” of the application. Horowitz is clear:
We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order.
The report describes how, prior to receiving Steele’s reports, the FBI General Counsel (OGC) and/or the National Security Division’s Office of Intelligence (OI) wouldn’t budge on seeking FISA authority. But after getting the reports, the OGC unit chief said, “receipt of the Steele reporting changed her mind on whether they could establish probable cause.”
Meanwhile, the OI unit chief said Steele’s reports were “what kind of pushed it over the line.” There’s no FISA warrant without Steele.
Horowitz ratifies the oft-denounced “Nunes memo.”
Democrats are not going to want to hear this, since conventional wisdom says former House Intelligence chief Devin Nunes is a conspiratorial evildoer, but the Horowitz report ratifies the major claims of the infamous “Nunes memo.”
As noted, Horowitz establishes that the Steele report was crucial to the FISA process, even using the same language Nunes used (“essential”). He also confirms the Nunes assertion that the FBI double-dipped in citing both Steele and a September 23, 2016 Yahoo! news story using Steele as an unnamed source. Horowitz listed the idea that Steele did not directly provide information to the press as one of seven significant “inaccuracies or omissions” in the first FISA application.
Horowitz also verifies the claim that Steele was “closed for cause” for talking to the media, i.e. officially cut off as a confidential human source to the FBI. He shows that Steele continued to talk to Justice Official Bruce Ohr before and after Steele’s formal relationship with the FBI ended. His report confirms that the Steele information had not been corroborated when the FISA application was submitted, another key Nunes point.
There was gnashing of teeth when Nunes first released his memo in January, 2018. The press universally crapped on his letter, with a Washington Post piece calling it a “joke” and a “sham.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed Nunes for the release of a “bogus” document, while New York Senator Chuck Schumer said the memo was intended to “sow conspiracy theories and attack the integrity of federal law enforcement.” Many called for his removal as Committee chair.
The Horowitz report says all of that caterwauling was off-base. It also undercuts many of the assertions made in a ballyhooed response letter by Nunes counterpart Adam Schiff, who described the FBI’s “reasonable basis” for deeming Steele credible. The report is especially hostile to Schiff’s claim that the FBI “provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting.”
In fact, far from confirming the Steele material, the FBI over time seems mainly to have uncovered more and more reasons to run screaming from Steele, to wit:
The “Steele dossier” was “Internet rumor,” and corroboration for the pee tape story was “zero.”
The Steele report reads like a pile of rumors surrounded by public information pulled off the Internet, and the Horowitz report does nothing to dispel this notion.
At the time the FBI submitted its first FISA application, Horowitz writes, it had “corroborated limited information in Steele’s election reporting, and most of that was publicly available information.” Horowitz says of Steele’s reports: “The CIA viewed it as ‘internet rumor.’”
Worse (and this part of the story should be tattooed on the heads of Russia truthers), the FBI’s interviews of Steele’s sources revealed Steele embellished the most explosive parts of his report.
The “pee tape” story, which inspired countless grave headlines (see this chin-scratching New York Times history of Russian “sexual blackmail”) and plunged the Trump presidency into crisis before it began, was, this source said, based a “conversation that [he/she] had over beers,” with the sexual allegations made… in “jest”!
Steele in his report said the story had been “confirmed” by senior, Western hotel staff, but the actual source said it was all “rumor and speculation,” never confirmed. In fact, charged by Steele to find corroboration, the source could not: corroboration was “zero,” writes Horowitz.
Meanwhile the Steele assertions that Russians had a kompromat file on Hillary Clinton, and that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russians, relied on a source Steele himself disparaged as an “egoist” and “boaster” who “may engage in some embellishment.” This was known to the FBI at the start, yet they naturally failed to include this info in the warrant application, one of what Horowitz described as “17 significant errors or omissions” in the FISA application.
Finally, when the FBI conducted an investigation into Steele’s “work-related performance,” they heard from some that he was “smart,” and a “person of integrity,” and “if he reported it, he believed it.”
So far, so good. But Horowitz also wrote:
Their notes stated: “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness, poor judgment;” “[k]een to help” but “underpinned by poor judgment;” “Judgment: pursuing people with political risk but no intel value;” “[d]idn’t always exercise great judgment- sometimes [he] believes he knows best;” and “[r]eporting in good faith, but not clear what he would have done to validate.”
The Crossfire Hurricane team got all of this, but, again, didn’t pass it upstairs or include any of it in its warrant application.
I’ve written about how reporters used sleight of hand to get the Steele dossier into print without putting it through a vetting process. What Horowitz describes is worse: a story about bad journalism piled on bad journalism, balanced on a third layer of wrong reporting.
Steele in his “reports” embellished his sources’ quotes, played up nonexistent angles, invented attributions, and ignored inconsistencies. The FBI then transplanted this bad reporting in the form of a warrant application and an addendum to the Intelligence Assessment that included the Steele material, ignoring a new layer of inconsistencies and red flags its analysts uncovered in the review process.
Then, following a series of leaks, the news media essentially reported on the FBI’s wrong reporting of Steele’s wrong reporting.
The impact was greater than just securing a warrant to monitor Page. More significant were the years of headlines that grew out of this process, beginning with the leaking of the meeting with Trump about Steele’s blackmail allegations, the insertion of Steele’s conclusions in the Intelligence Assessment about Russian interference, and the leak of news about the approval of the Page FISA warrant.
As a result, a “well-developed conspiracy” theory based on a report that Comey described as “salacious and unverified material that a responsible journalist wouldn’t report without corroborating,” became the driving news story in a superpower nation for two years. Even the New York Times, which published a lot of these stories, is in the wake of the Horowitz report noting Steele’s role in “unleashing a flood of speculation in the news media about the new president’s relationship with Russia.”
No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed.
I posted the whole thing, it's not that long and doesn't have a good halfway point.
Any chance that those that thought the FBI weren't trash before they were investigating Trump ever had this moment of embarrassment?
Well I still don't think most of those people (myself included) are ready to label the entire agency as garbage, although I know you think it is. Certainly a black mark, and cause for concern and review (to use mild language) but I do think the exceptional hate on many of those in a high level of government have for Trump was a very large contributor. But of course, screwing up something like this raises serious questions about how they behave elsewhere. So I think you won't find many people who are going to end up where you are.
Ah yes, the old "anomaly" rather than part of a well established pattern of behavior in order to avoid confronting the contradictions of what is clearly a wildly cynical preservation of the very practices, institutions and people being decried now that they have been aimed at a perceived ally.
If any embarrassment was coming it would have prevented them from trusting the FBI in the first place.
Well I'll put it slightly differently. I think this episode has shown that the type of people who rise to the top of the organization are clearly not the morally upstanding citizens we wished they were, although that may have been obvious from the very first director. It doesn't have to be an anomaly of kind, but perhaps of scale. Still, most FBI work is not whatever the hell these people thought they were doing. I, and most others, are simply not going to go whole-hog on this with you.
I'm more speaking to how Democrats will explain it away as you are the history of the FBI assassinating civil rights leaders, spying on federal officials, and various other criminal domestic spying endeavors from inception right up until they started in on Trump, and as they conveniently forgot all that to put their faith in the FBI.
Neither group being embarrassed was really on the table throughout all this nonsense.
On December 11 2019 06:19 redlightdistrict wrote: The Georgia reporter who is a rape survivor after being violently and sexually violated on Live TV, just gave he first interview. The original video has been viewed over 10+ times and is becoming a prominent piece of the #metoo movement happening in America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mybIXTqlZ9Q The violating abuser has been banned from further marathons in the US and rightfully so.
Not saying this is ok, it absolutely is not, the ban is deserved, but this seems very blown out of proportions. When you say "violently" and "sexually violated", I expected a lot more than a slap on the butt. As far as situations that should spur a MeToo response, this is pretty far down the list. Being a rape survivor doesn't really matter in this case either.
Also..10 views? Is that a typo? Not exactly a whole lot.
On December 11 2019 06:19 redlightdistrict wrote: The Georgia reporter who is a rape survivor after being violently and sexually violated on Live TV, just gave he first interview. The original video has been viewed over 10+ times and is becoming a prominent piece of the #metoo movement happening in America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mybIXTqlZ9Q The violating abuser has been banned from further marathons in the US and rightfully so.
Not saying this is ok, it absolutely is not, the ban is deserved, but this seems very blown out of proportions. When you say "violently" and "sexually violated", I expected a lot more than a slap on the butt. As far as situations that should spur a MeToo response, this is pretty far down the list. Being a rape survivor doesn't really matter in this case either.
Also..10 views? Is that a typo? Not exactly a whole lot.
redlightdistrict does not know what rape is. Also, it should have been over ten million times. In addition, the ban was not from all marathons as far as I can tell, but specifically the events organized by the group that was running the one pictured.
Redlightdistrict appears to be intent on posting clickbait videos with clickbait descriptions that don't accurately reflect the circumstances in the video. Like in the gun thread, he was doing the same thing. His description does not match the video. Just a heads up so US pol thread people knows.
I wonder what the ‘totally not right wing centrist’ types will have to say on this as it pertains to freedom of speech on campuses. I’m not imagining it will be a whole lot.
On December 11 2019 15:39 Introvert wrote: Matt Taibbi has a very quick rundown how the Horowitz IG report shatters the three long years we spent on Russiagate. While the report does say they didn't find any political motivation (laughable) the "serious" problems with the way the FBI handled the whole affair ought to make those who spent years pushing it as embarrassed as they should have been the day the Mueller report came out. Also, the Nunes memo was 10x closer to the truth than was Schiff's. If only xDaunt were here.
The Guardian headline reads: “DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser.”
If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.
Like the much-ballyhooed report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Horowitz report is a Rorschach test, in which partisans will find what they want to find.
Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz’s conclusion that there was no evidence of “political bias or improper motivation” in the FBI’s probe of Donald Trump’s Russia contacts, an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had “authorized purpose” to conduct.
Horowitz uses phrases like “serious performance failures,” describing his 416-page catalogue of errors and manipulations as incompetence rather than corruption. This throws water on the notion that the Trump investigation was a vast frame-up.
However, Horowitz describes at great length an FBI whose “serious” procedural problems and omissions of “significant information” in pursuit of surveillance authority all fell in the direction of expanding the unprecedented investigation of a presidential candidate (later, a president).
Officials on the “Crossfire Hurricane” Trump-Russia investigators went to extraordinary, almost comical lengths to seek surveillance authority of figures like Trump aide Carter Page. In one episode, an FBI attorney inserted the words “not a source” in an email he’d received from another government agency. This disguised the fact that Page had been an informant for that agency, and had dutifully told the government in real time about being approached by Russian intelligence. The attorney then passed on the email to an FBI supervisory special agent, who signed a FISA warrant application on Page that held those Russian contacts against Page, without disclosing his informant role.
Likewise, the use of reports by ex-spy/campaign researcher Christopher Steele in pursuit of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authority had far-reaching ramifications.
Not only did obtaining a FISA warrant allow authorities a window into other Trump figures with whom Page communicated, they led to a slew of leaked “bombshell” news stories that advanced many public misconceptions, including that a court had ruled there was “probable cause” that a Trump figure was an “agent of a foreign power.”
There are too many to list in one column, but the Horowitz report show years of breathless headlines were wrong. Some key points:
The so-called “Steele dossier” was, actually, crucial to the FBI’s decision to seek secret surveillance of Page.
Press figures have derided the idea that Steele was crucial to the FISA application, with some insisting it was only a “small part” of the application. Horowitz is clear:
We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order.
The report describes how, prior to receiving Steele’s reports, the FBI General Counsel (OGC) and/or the National Security Division’s Office of Intelligence (OI) wouldn’t budge on seeking FISA authority. But after getting the reports, the OGC unit chief said, “receipt of the Steele reporting changed her mind on whether they could establish probable cause.”
Meanwhile, the OI unit chief said Steele’s reports were “what kind of pushed it over the line.” There’s no FISA warrant without Steele.
Horowitz ratifies the oft-denounced “Nunes memo.”
Democrats are not going to want to hear this, since conventional wisdom says former House Intelligence chief Devin Nunes is a conspiratorial evildoer, but the Horowitz report ratifies the major claims of the infamous “Nunes memo.”
As noted, Horowitz establishes that the Steele report was crucial to the FISA process, even using the same language Nunes used (“essential”). He also confirms the Nunes assertion that the FBI double-dipped in citing both Steele and a September 23, 2016 Yahoo! news story using Steele as an unnamed source. Horowitz listed the idea that Steele did not directly provide information to the press as one of seven significant “inaccuracies or omissions” in the first FISA application.
Horowitz also verifies the claim that Steele was “closed for cause” for talking to the media, i.e. officially cut off as a confidential human source to the FBI. He shows that Steele continued to talk to Justice Official Bruce Ohr before and after Steele’s formal relationship with the FBI ended. His report confirms that the Steele information had not been corroborated when the FISA application was submitted, another key Nunes point.
There was gnashing of teeth when Nunes first released his memo in January, 2018. The press universally crapped on his letter, with a Washington Post piece calling it a “joke” and a “sham.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed Nunes for the release of a “bogus” document, while New York Senator Chuck Schumer said the memo was intended to “sow conspiracy theories and attack the integrity of federal law enforcement.” Many called for his removal as Committee chair.
The Horowitz report says all of that caterwauling was off-base. It also undercuts many of the assertions made in a ballyhooed response letter by Nunes counterpart Adam Schiff, who described the FBI’s “reasonable basis” for deeming Steele credible. The report is especially hostile to Schiff’s claim that the FBI “provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting.”
In fact, far from confirming the Steele material, the FBI over time seems mainly to have uncovered more and more reasons to run screaming from Steele, to wit:
The “Steele dossier” was “Internet rumor,” and corroboration for the pee tape story was “zero.”
The Steele report reads like a pile of rumors surrounded by public information pulled off the Internet, and the Horowitz report does nothing to dispel this notion.
At the time the FBI submitted its first FISA application, Horowitz writes, it had “corroborated limited information in Steele’s election reporting, and most of that was publicly available information.” Horowitz says of Steele’s reports: “The CIA viewed it as ‘internet rumor.’”
Worse (and this part of the story should be tattooed on the heads of Russia truthers), the FBI’s interviews of Steele’s sources revealed Steele embellished the most explosive parts of his report.
The “pee tape” story, which inspired countless grave headlines (see this chin-scratching New York Times history of Russian “sexual blackmail”) and plunged the Trump presidency into crisis before it began, was, this source said, based a “conversation that [he/she] had over beers,” with the sexual allegations made… in “jest”!
Steele in his report said the story had been “confirmed” by senior, Western hotel staff, but the actual source said it was all “rumor and speculation,” never confirmed. In fact, charged by Steele to find corroboration, the source could not: corroboration was “zero,” writes Horowitz.
Meanwhile the Steele assertions that Russians had a kompromat file on Hillary Clinton, and that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russians, relied on a source Steele himself disparaged as an “egoist” and “boaster” who “may engage in some embellishment.” This was known to the FBI at the start, yet they naturally failed to include this info in the warrant application, one of what Horowitz described as “17 significant errors or omissions” in the FISA application.
Finally, when the FBI conducted an investigation into Steele’s “work-related performance,” they heard from some that he was “smart,” and a “person of integrity,” and “if he reported it, he believed it.”
So far, so good. But Horowitz also wrote:
Their notes stated: “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness, poor judgment;” “[k]een to help” but “underpinned by poor judgment;” “Judgment: pursuing people with political risk but no intel value;” “[d]idn’t always exercise great judgment- sometimes [he] believes he knows best;” and “[r]eporting in good faith, but not clear what he would have done to validate.”
The Crossfire Hurricane team got all of this, but, again, didn’t pass it upstairs or include any of it in its warrant application.
I’ve written about how reporters used sleight of hand to get the Steele dossier into print without putting it through a vetting process. What Horowitz describes is worse: a story about bad journalism piled on bad journalism, balanced on a third layer of wrong reporting.
Steele in his “reports” embellished his sources’ quotes, played up nonexistent angles, invented attributions, and ignored inconsistencies. The FBI then transplanted this bad reporting in the form of a warrant application and an addendum to the Intelligence Assessment that included the Steele material, ignoring a new layer of inconsistencies and red flags its analysts uncovered in the review process.
Then, following a series of leaks, the news media essentially reported on the FBI’s wrong reporting of Steele’s wrong reporting.
The impact was greater than just securing a warrant to monitor Page. More significant were the years of headlines that grew out of this process, beginning with the leaking of the meeting with Trump about Steele’s blackmail allegations, the insertion of Steele’s conclusions in the Intelligence Assessment about Russian interference, and the leak of news about the approval of the Page FISA warrant.
As a result, a “well-developed conspiracy” theory based on a report that Comey described as “salacious and unverified material that a responsible journalist wouldn’t report without corroborating,” became the driving news story in a superpower nation for two years. Even the New York Times, which published a lot of these stories, is in the wake of the Horowitz report noting Steele’s role in “unleashing a flood of speculation in the news media about the new president’s relationship with Russia.”
No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed.
I posted the whole thing, it's not that long and doesn't have a good halfway point.
Any chance that those that thought the FBI weren't trash before they were investigating Trump ever had this moment of embarrassment?
Well I still don't think most of those people (myself included) are ready to label the entire agency as garbage, although I know you think it is. Certainly a black mark, and cause for concern and review (to use mild language) but I do think the exceptional hate on many of those in a high level of government have for Trump was a very large contributor. But of course, screwing up something like this raises serious questions about how they behave elsewhere. So I think you won't find many people who are going to end up where you are.
Can someone explain a bit better how that is supposed to work? I am getting a bit confused here.
People are protesting against stuff Israel does, and Israel is already a nation. And usually it is okay to protest against stuff nations do?
Judaism is a religion, and thus protected by stuff protecting religious minorities.
If you declare that Judaism is a nation, doesn't that mean that it is okay to protest it, because you can already protest against nations? How does this actually prevent people from protesting against Israel?
Or is it the other way around, that you declare that the nation of Israel is actually a religion and not a nation (or both?), and thus protected by stuff protecting religious minorities?
Is this some weird kind of legalistic workaround where you manage to make it schroedingers nation, where Israel is always protected by being the religion of judaism when people want to protest against it, but judaism is still a religion and not the nation of israel, and israel is a nation whenever people are not protesting against it?
Also, of course it will also be interesting to see how the people championing free speech whenever it allows you to discriminate against gay people will react to this. They should be appalled by the idea of limiting free speech here, right?
EPT
