Remember when excessive concern about the Russians was a sign you were a simple-minded Cold Warrior?
The good news: There is so far zero evidence of direct Russian “hacking” of the election. Influence, sure – but then, Obama was nobody to gripe about people influencing foreign elections.
The bad news? They were certainly trying to sow chaos and misinformation.
The worse news? Americans are ripe for political manipulation, and American politics is a fertile field for a seasoned chaos-monger, and our media is the problem, not the defense.
If Susan Rice was the person who “unmasked” the names of the Trump people, we are in Watergate territory. Rice was a political appointee. If there had been anything illegal in the Trumpee/Ruskee conversations, the investigation would have been turned over to career intelligence people, not political people.
Agreed that the media is the enemy here–at least the MSM that is running interference for the Democrats. Any club to beat my enemy, and the enemy is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., not in the Kremlin. Yikes.
And to add to MP’s comments, Rice doesn’t seem to work well on her own. If she gets pinched, she tells who gave her orders. Queue up the special prosecutor and see how long it takes to get to the Big Choom.
I think your Salem colleague Hugh Hewitt has this right, Mitch;
Investigators need to look into Three Silos – 1. Did the Russians ‘hack’ or create significant disinformation that it effected the election? 2. Was the Trump team (or members of it) colluding with the Russians in a significant way? 3. Did members of the Obama administration (illegally) unmask Americans working for or with Trump who were the subject of (legal) surveillance?
If I were a RWNJ, I wouldn’t hold out much hope for an Obama prosecution or even a “what did Obama know and when did he know it?” question. He spent most of his time fiddling with his brackets and as Jon Stewart pointed out, getting information about his administration from watching it on the TV News. The media that was so easily manipulated by Ben Rhodes into selling the Iran deal won’t follow-up on anything that makes Obama and the rest of the ‘cool kids’ look bad.
I’m quoting this WSJ editorial linked from Powerline, because the original is behind a paywall:
All this is highly unusual—and troubling. Unmasking does occur, but it is typically done by intelligence or law-enforcement officials engaged in antiterror or espionage investigations. Ms. Rice would have had no obvious need to unmask Trump campaign officials other than political curiosity.
This is some serious shit. Rice was Obama’s NSA. She was a political appointee. She was not a spy. She was appointed to give political oversight to national security. Her job is political, she worked for Obama and the Democrats, she was not a civil servant. There are career civil servants in the intelligence agencies who have the job of monitoring spies and prosecuting them if they break US law. Rice was not part of that organization.
I woke not even thinking about Trump and Russia. Thanks for the reminder. The real story, is the money Trump organizations got from Russian oligarchs looking for safe harbors.
Woolly: If Rice wanted to politicize Intel she could have told America that Trump was under FBI investigation back in July. Obama could have too.
The question you want to ask yourself is why have members of the Trump administration been intercepted in foreign intelligence reports in the first place.
Keep ignoring what the Clintoon’s got from the Russians, the Chinese and several other enemies of the U.S. EI. Just like your DemonRAT overlords who loved not only the Russians, but any other despots, you now see one behind every tree.
The question you want to ask yourself is why have members of the Trump administration been intercepted in foreign intelligence reports in the first place.
No.
This is America. There are no “political crimes” here.
As I have said (repeatedly), Rice is a political appointee. She served Obama in a political role. She was not a civil servant, her appointment was not reviewed by congress. She had no power to investigate or indict anyone.
It is looking very bad for team Obama. They are the people in cover up mode, not Trump.
Yawn…. “what else you got?”
It’s not enough that there is apparently clear evidence that Ms. Rice circumvented laws requiring the identities of U.S. citizens to be hidden unless there was clear evidence of actionable wrongdoing, and then handed that information around to political appointees in the department? Seriously, Emery?
Say SSOLSEmery? Here’s what we got.
We got Neil Gorsuch getting rammed down your throat. We got a Big Ass Wall being built to keep the DEmocrAt base numbers tamped down. We got the money that used to go to Planned Parenthood to flush future Democrats out of the nasty spam purses of leftist skanks (you’re gonna have to foot the bill for your own daughters). We got 125 open seats on the federal bench to fill with angry white men. We got the money that used to go to prop up your nasty, criminal harboring, urban rat holes. We got angry white men and women pulling the chairs out from under all the stinking leftist reprobates at the VA, SSA, DoJ, EPA & etc. We got you and your wretched ilk by your empty ballsacks.
HowYouLikeThemApples?
Kind of an embarrassing response there Emery …….. Anyone want to play the “imagine if Bush had done this to Obama’s incoming administration” game?? Scott Pelley would need mouth-to-mouth and Dan Rather would be calling it another Watergate. Plus ……. racism, duh.
Emery may have a point. We don’t know whether ay particular conversation is legal until we listen to it, so we should listen to all conversations. We know that some people have more power in this country, and therefore more ability to cause trouble, so when we listen to conversations, we should unmask the speakers to see if they are some of those powerful people. And, of course, all agencies charged with protecting the nation should be sharing information, with each other and occasionally with friendly reporters.
Yes, Emery is right. Trump should immediately put every Democrat under constant surveillance and should leak any interesting tidbits. It’s perfectly legal, the precedent has been established.
I’m especially interested in their pizza orders.
Videotape rentals, Joe! Remember Bork?
Joe D – glad you have a keen legal mind to decipher another keen legal mind (Emery’s) and simplify it for the rest of us ……. where do I send your fee ??
JD, you appear to have a solid understanding of the law. If, as a result of the FBI’s investigation, it is determined that the Trump campaign engaged in criminal activities resulting in the election of Trump. Would that suggest that Trumps presidency would be the ill-gotten gains of criminal activity?
Good God Emery. You want to get rid of Trump, you impeach him. Anything else would be unconstitutional. The FBI does not have veto power the votes of the American people. Aside from massive ballot fraud, how in the world could you prove that ” the Trump campaign engaged in criminal activities resulting in the election of Trump”?
I would say Emery Incognito is _trying_ to be stupid, but it looks like he’s just mailing it in.
A lot of people point to this as some sort of “evidence.”
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
It is evidence of nothing. It is an intelligence assessment, by the same people who have made miserably incorrect intelligence assessments in the past.
No sources are named. It is junk.
viz:
What does “high confidence” and “moderate confidence” mean? It’s right there in the document!
Estimative language consists of two elements: judgments about the likelihood of developments or events occurring and levels of confidence in the sources and analytic reasoning supporting the judgments. Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, was well as logic, argumentation, and precedents.
. . .
High Confidence generally indicates that judgements are based on high-quality information from multiple sources. High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; Such judgments may be wrong.
Moderate Confidence generally means that the information is credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence.
In other words, there is nothing in this document that is actionable. You cannot even say with certainty that the Russian government tried to influence the US election. That would require faith, because there is no proof of this presented in the document.
Yet many people on the left are treating this assessment as relaying facts, not opinion (the facts it presents, such as Russian government ownership of RT, are trivial).
There is not even the promise that further investigation will reveal certainty, one way or the other.
But we do know, with certainty, that the leak of some names associated with Trump was illegal. We know that Susan Rice, if she requested the unmasking of the names associated with Trump, was abusing her power (the NSA is not a spy. She is the equivalent of a political officer). The idea that a political appointee of a lame duck president would use her power to spy on politicians of the other party is outrageous. It is third world stuff, the kind of thing that Putin is accused of doing to stifle democracy in his country.
The fact that Rice, and not a career investigator, requested the unmasking indicates that this was a political decision, not a national security decision.
Heads should roll.
The anti-Trump Atlantic:
Susan Rice’s Careful Dance on Trump Surveillance
The former national-security adviser said in an interview she had not conducted any political spying on the president-elect’s team, but suggested she may have asked for members’ names to be revealed to her.
Susan Rice:
“There were occasions when I would receive a report in which a U.S. person was referred to, name not provided,” Rice said. “Sometimes in that context in order to understand the significance of the report and assess its significance, it was necessary to request the information as to who that person was.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/susan-rice-trump/521862/
Rice has always had political jobs, e.g. political appointment jobs. She has never served as an intelligence agency professional. She is not a lawyer. Her degrees are in history and philosophy.
FWIW, I think Rice and her TV network hubby are worth $20 million. Ruling Class stupidity.
Woolly: How precisely would Trump account for the fact that Congressional House Republicans received 3 million more votes than Congressional House Democrats?
I suppose all of those illegal voters who supported Clinton decided to vote for Republicans in Congress?
I just heard Andrew C. McCarthy on this on Hugh Hewitt.
The National Security Advisor is a ***political appointee*** that does not operate on the ***tactical level*** of performing unmasking. This is highly unusual.
It sounds like though, the only way they will get her is if the logs show a very blatant and embarrassing pattern of concentrating on Trump.
Notice how the Nunes Democrat counterpart has just clammed up. Well played Nunes.
Tell me if I have this “story” right:
-Rice receives daily intelligence reports as a part of her normal work duties
-Identities of American citizens are redacted by default – “Citizen A, B C,” etc
-In the course of reviewing some reports, it becomes necessary to know the identity of Citizen A to contextualize the report
-Rice places a request to De-anonymize citizens in a given report
-Pivotally: she doesn’t know who it is she’s asking to unveil when she asks. It’s like picking a door in Let’s Make a Deal! Total unknown.
-Surprise! It’s Trump and his team. Over and over again, related to intelligence targets of interest.
-Now Trump and Co. are named entities, in reports that still only circulate within the intelligence community.
The White House is doing a bang-up job spinning this narrative to make it sound like Rice is hunting down and unveiling Trump with prejudice, rather than simply stumbling over him again and again in the course of her normal duties.
I think the issue is, how embarrassing the supposed spreadsheet call logs are.
She went from saying she knew nothing about it to admitting initiating unmasking within two weeks.
The Ron Paul camp is having a field day.
I don’t know – it’s hard for me to see any U.S. ties to Russia…except for the Flynn thing and the Manafort thing
and the Tillerson thing
and the Sessions thing
and the Kushner thing
and the Carter Page thing
and the Roger Stone thing
and the Felix Sater thing
and the Boris Ephsteyn thing
and the Rosneft thing
and the Gazprom thing
and the Sergey Gorkov banker thing
and the Azerbajain thing
and the Donald Trump, Jr. thing
and the Sergey Kislyak thing
and the Russian Affiliated Interests thing
and the Russian Business Interests thing
and the Alex Schnaider thing
and the hack of the DNC thing
and the Guccifer 2.0 thing
and the Mike Pence “I don’t know anything” thing
and the Russians mysteriously dying thing
and Trump’s public request to Russia to hack Hillary’s email thing
and the Trump house sale for $100 million at the bottom of the housing bust to the Russian fertilizer king thing
and the Russian fertilizer king’s plane showing up in Concord, NC during Trump rally campaign thing
and the Nunes sudden flight to the White House in the night thing
and the Nunes personal investments in the Russian winery thing
and the Cyprus bank thing
and Trump not releasing his tax returns thing
and the Republican Party’s rejection of an amendment to require Trump to show his taxes thing
and the election hacking thing
and the GOP platform change to the Ukraine thing
and the Steele Dossier thing
and the Sally Yates can’t testify thing
and the intelligence community’s investigative reports thing
and Trump’s reassurance that the Russian connection is all “fake news” thing
so there’s probably nothing there
since the swamp has been drained, these people would never lie
probably why Nunes cancels the investigation meetings
all of this must be normal
just a bunch of separate dots with no connection.
Emery: What Rice did was unorthodox. She lied publicly about it. There are more facts to come out on it.
The whole Leftist media and the administrative state is trying to get Trump impeached. So far they don’t have much.
***Steele Dossier*** Really Emery?
Emery: Face it, statist Keynesian thug government went the wrong way under Obama and now they are going to take your Medicare and whatever else when all of these asset bubbles pop. Everyone that isn’t really rich or really poor is going to get hosed big time.
QUOTE: Understand: There would have been no intelligence need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked. If there had been a real need to reveal the identities — an intelligence need based on American interests — the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies. The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president’s staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446415/susan-rice-unmasking-trump-campaign-members-obama-administration-fbi-cia-nsa
QUOTE: The most telling remark that former Obama deputy defense secretary Evelyn Farkas made in her now-infamous MSNBC interview was the throw-away line at the end: “That’s why you have all the leaking.” Put this in context: Farkas had left the Obama administration in 2015, subsequently joining the presidential campaign of, yes, Hillary Clinton — Trump’s opponent. She told MSNBC that she had been encouraging her former Obama-administration colleagues and members of Congress to seek “as much information as you can” from the intelligence community. “That’s why you have the leaking.” To summarize: At a high level, officials like Susan Rice had names unmasked that would not ordinarily be unmasked. That information was then being pushed widely throughout the intelligence community in unmasked form . . . particularly after Obama, toward the end of his presidency, suddenly — and seemingly apropos of nothing — changed the rules so that all of the intelligence agencies (not just the collecting agencies) could have access to raw intelligence information. As we know, the community of intelligence agencies leaks like a sieve, and the more access there is to juicy information, the more leaks there are. Meanwhile, former Obama officials and Clinton-campaign advisers, like Farkas, were pushing to get the information transferred from the intelligence community to members of Congress, geometrically increasing the likelihood of intelligence leaks.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446415/susan-rice-unmasking-trump-campaign-members-obama-administration-fbi-cia-nsa
…….. and the “tell Vlad I’ll have more flexibility after my reelection” thing
Also, Charles Ortel has Clinton massively busted on the Russians and a million other things. Just look at youtube. Trump is just a better direction for a declining system.
A National Security Advisor being concerned about national security is not a scandal. A National Security Advisor (Michael Flynn) being on the payroll of Turkey & Russia is.
My sense is that she would have been derelict in her duty had she not asked for the unmasking of Americans participating in potentially harmful conversations with foreign actors. That the Obama administration did not come forward this summer to alert the public about Russian efforts to undermine Hillary’s candidacy speaks to his integrity and restraint in what he deemed a political controversy.
It would be in everyone’s best interests if Rice would testify in a committee setting and speak to what she knew about the Trump team. If they want to know what she knows, tell them and see what they do with it, which is probably nothing. As Rand Paul said: ‘It makes no sense for republicans to investigate republicans”.
The Andrew C. McCarthy NRO view is waiting Mitch’s moderation.
Trump Removes Stephen Bannon From National Security Council Post
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/us/politics/national-security-council-stephen-bannon.html
No, really–what happened? McMaster finally got through to the Oval Office that Bannon is a ten-ton loose cannon packed with crazy and a very short fuse? Was there an ultimatum? A threat?
Next up: Bannon leaves the White House to spend more time with family.
You seem to believe that Rice is some sort of spy or counter spy, Emery, so I am going to repost this:
Rice has always had political jobs, e.g. political appointment jobs. She has never served as an intelligence agency professional. She is not a lawyer. Her degrees are in history and philosophy.
Susan Rice, two weeks ago:
I’d like to say how much I appreciate the comments from Emery Incognito as documentation of just how far off-the-rails the left has gone while sounding all serious and concerned about “things” and only wanting what’s best for the country.
I also appreciate you who respond to him regardless of how little he seems to comprehend.
The link to the March 22 Susan Rice interview. It’s pretty damning.
If you want the truth from her, she has to be under oath.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/susan-rice-world-wonders-worries-white-house-can-trusted/
Bwaaaahahahahahahahahaaaa!
SSOLSEmery is so triggered, he’s started scraping the bottom of the barrel, “Democrat Underground” comment section for something to copy and paste!!
“I don’t know – it’s hard for me to see any U.S. ties to Russia… except for the Flynn thing, and the Manafort thing … ”
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10028893424
You poor, pathetic thing; all weak and shaking. I can see right into your empty head. Trump is so far up your ass, you can taste him, can’t you SSOLSEmery? Well, get used to it cupcake, because he’s just getting started.
Quite frankly, I really expected a smoother operation from a businessman that routinely ended up in bankruptcy courts.
Now that National Security is in good hands, Bannon will have more time to focus on domestic problems, like Third World invaders, liberals, rootless cosmopolitans in control of the media, black crime, etc.
Somehow Trump will spin this as Obama’s fault.
Tell me if I have copied this comment right
FTFY, SSOLSEmery!
It’s a rare moment when Swiftee is either on something or on to something. “Golf Clap”
General McMaster realized something was sticking to the bottom of his shoe so he scraped it off. Now Bannon can help Jared fix the government and the Middle East.
Somehow Trump will spin this as Obama’s fault.
And you’re gonna scour the filthy little internet holes Democrats hide in to find the best response you can copy and paste, right, you fucking dimwit?
LMAO!!
Fuck you Emery. I can *always* tell when it’s something you’ve stolen from somewhere else; it’s not full of spelling, punctuation and syntax errors.
I swear.
From Hillary, Brazile, Obama, right down to scummy little anonymous internet trolls. Leftists are uniformly the most conniving, dishonest bunch of scumbags this country ever spawned.
How much better off would we be if some deadly, infectious disease would develop that only infected liberals…and no government stepped forward to finance research for a cure.
Hey, dimwit! Watch, I’m gonna teach you something.
“Democrats have gone from: Trump is insane for suggesting Obama admin spied on him —> Susan Rice was just doing her job”
— Katie Pavlich
See what I did there? Passed along a thought provoking bit of schadenfreude to amuse folks, and cited who actually said it.
Since your head is essentially empty as soon as Sesame Street is over every morning, I suggest you put everything you post in quotations as a starting place.
Get Swiftee going — get Swiftee going ;^)
Making far reaching accusations backed by nothing but “feelings” is a Democrat thing:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/joaquin-castro-people-will-probably-go-to-jail-after-russia-probe
At no time during the interview does Blitzer bother to ask Castro which laws he thinks have been broken. What a shitty excuse for a news operation.
I think if you were to ask Josh Marshall (TPM) what laws he thinks the Trumpees have broken you would get a blank stare.
FBI, Senate and House Investigations have yet to reach their conclusions. Everything else is just opinion.
Swiftee is definitely onto something…
Gorsuch writings borrow from other authors
“Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch copied the structure and language used by several authors and failed to cite source material in his book and an academic article, according to documents provided to POLITICO.” http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/gorsuch-writings-supreme-court-236891
Mamm, navigating the world using instinct rather than intellect is a necessity for any creature with small brains. Frogs do pretty well for themselves…unless they run across a rhesus monkey.
Muh feelz is working for them now, but if their disease costs liberals much more brain power though, they might have to go the chemical reaction route of amoeba.