Trump and Russia

[DC Tom]

2 minutes ago, Tiberius said:

Or announcing an investigation right before the election. 

 

The FBI handed Trump the election and now he--and you, one of his parrots--is repeating his lies about everything under the sun.

 

"You know, I was going to vote for Hillary...but dammit, now that the FBI has told Congress that a two-year old investigation is still going, I just have to vote for Trump now."

 

The hilarious thing about this truly idiotic conjecture is that, for people to change their minds about a woman who's been in the public eye for a quarter-century, at the last minute based on a two-year-old story, you, as a Clinton supporter, have to think Clinton supporters are seriously fickle and ignorant morons.  It's awesome.

 

8 minutes ago, Tiberius said:

The FBI is suppose to watch out for unauthorized contacts between our leaders and criminals running other countries. 

 

The !@#$?  Who authorizes such contact, then?   

[Tiberius]

6 minutes ago, DC Tom said:

 

"You know, I was going to vote for Hillary...but dammit, now that the FBI has told Congress that a two-year old investigation is still going, I just have to vote for Trump now."

 

The hilarious thing about this truly idiotic conjecture is that, for people to change their minds about a woman who's been in the public eye for a quarter-century, at the last minute based on a two-year-old story, you, as a Clinton supporter, have to think Clinton supporters are seriously fickle and ignorant morons.  It's awesome.

 

 

The !@#$?  Who authorizes such contact, then?   

Oh ya, a candidate being investigated by FBI wouldn't influence any votes, ya right. Trump thought so, that's why he jumped all over it and started screaming "Crooked Hillary" and "Lock her up." Played right into his theme. 

 

But ya, no affect on the election. 

 

 

[row_33]

18 minutes ago, DC Tom said:

 

"You know, I was going to vote for Hillary...but dammit, now that the FBI has told Congress that a two-year old investigation is still going, I just have to vote for Trump now."

 

The hilarious thing about this truly idiotic conjecture is that, for people to change their minds about a woman who's been in the public eye for a quarter-century, at the last minute based on a two-year-old story, you, as a Clinton supporter, have to think Clinton supporters are seriously fickle and ignorant morons.  It's awesome.

 

 

The !@#$?  Who authorizes such contact, then?   

 

 

 

Komrade, do you like vote for woman Hillary?

 

Nyet, I mean no, must vote Trump.

 

(call in the FBI and Mueller!!!)

 

 

[Tiberius]

The FBI thing about Clinton helped push the fraudulent idea many of you clowns have been pushing, namely that Hillary was equal to Trump in corruptness. Boy, is that a joke! 

 

Trump is a mob boss stealing everything he can. Pay to play, abuse of power, corruption of our government and shaking down corporations. 

 

If there is a just God, this guy will rot away in jail for the rest of his life 

[Deranged Rhino]

Hillary is not equal to Trump in terms of corruptness. That's the one area where she beats him. 

[Tiberius]

6 minutes ago, Deranged Rhino said:

Hillary is not equal to Trump in terms of corruptness. That's the one area where she beats him. 

You are way up Trump's fat f'n ass aren't you!! Wow. 

 

Did you attend Trump U?? Or are you one of Putin's boyz? 

 

 

 

[Deranged Rhino]

That's not a denial. I've got evidence to back up my statement. You've got... I guess you think they're insults? 

You lose.

[Tiberius]

1 minute ago, Deranged Rhino said:

That's not a denial. I've got evidence to back up my statement. You've got... I guess you think they're insults? 

You lose.

Oh, I love that evidence ?

[Deranged Rhino]

That's good. Because there are about a million more pages of official IG documents coming your way for your reading pleasure. 

[njbuff]

1 hour ago, Deranged Rhino said:

That's good. Because there are about a million more pages of official IG documents coming your way for your reading pleasure. 

 

Can clowns (Fib) read? Especially Doink the clown?

[3rdnlng]

It was such a pleasure not having gator around to mess up every thread with his horseshit.

[njbuff]

21 minutes ago, 3rdnlng said:

It was such a pleasure not having gator around to mess up every thread with his horseshit.

 

My family is full of these left wing nut jobs.

 

Fib is exactly like them UHBAR (unhinged beyond all recognition).

 

 

[B-Man]

BYRON YORK: When did Trump-Russia probe begin? Investigators focus on mystery months.

 

Revelations that an FBI informant insinuated himself into the Trump campaign have led some congressional investigators to rethink their theories on how and why former President Barack Obama’s Justice Department began investigating the 2016 Trump presidential effort.

 

Most reporting has focused on the July 31, 2016, creation of a document formally marking the beginning of the FBI counterintelligence probe targeting the Trump campaign. The document, known as the electronic communication, or EC, is said to have focused on the case of George Papadopoulos, the peripheral Trump adviser who has pleaded guilty to lying to special counsel Robert Mueller about his contacts with people connected to Russia.

 

Most of the key events of the Trump-Russia investigation — the Carter Page wiretap, the wiretap of Michael Flynn’s conversations, the presentation of Trump dossier allegations to the president-elect — took place after the formal start of the FBI counterintelligence investigation.

 

But now comes word of the FBI informant, described in various accounts as a retired American professor living in England. The Washington Post reported that, “The professor’s interactions with Trump advisers began a few weeks before the opening of the investigation, when Page met the professor at the British symposium.”

 

A few weeks before the opening of the investigation — those are the words that have raised eyebrows among Hill investigators. If it was before the investigation, then what was an FBI informant doing gathering undercover information when there was not yet an investigation?

 

 

 

 

What, indeed?

 

 

.

[Deranged Rhino]

This is where the world starts to realize how much of a hero Mike Rogers really is...

[Buffalo_Gal]

4 minutes ago, Deranged Rhino said:

This is where the world starts to realize how much of a hero Mike Rogers really is...

I've seen him referred to as the "man who saved the republic".  That may go down as an apt description.

[Deranged Rhino]

May 6th, 2016. 

 

Why were they so desperate to dirty up Trump campaign staff in May if the investigation didn't start until July 31 2016 officially? 

 

Because on April 18th, 2016 Mike Rogers shut down the illegal access of raw 702 data which, up until that point, had been pilfered by bad actors to spy on multiple campaigns (including Sanders'). This forced the FBI-CID and DOJ-National Security Division (NSD) to have to come up with probable cause for a FISA application. Had Rogers not shut this program down, they never would have needed to justify what - up until then - had been an off the books and illegal surveillance operation. 

 

That's why the FBI's start date of when the investigation began keeps changing... there isn't one. The illicit surveillance abuse was an ongoing operation for years, extending beyond just the 2016 election. But they can't admit that, so starting on April 18th they needed to come up with a way to justify their previous 702 requests. They needed probable cause to justify opening an official investigation before they could even go to the FISC - that took until July 31st. Between those two dates, the bad actors had to cut some corners, take some risks, and move assets like Halper into place to exploit their existing HUMINT sources legally. These sources (G-Pap, Manafort, Page) all came into the campaign in March - just days after Rogers ordered the audit of the 702 system (he hadn't shut it down, yet, but he gave notice to the departments the NSA was doing an audit).

 

Action ---> Reaction. 

 

While all this was happening, the MI team behind Trump were watching their every move and collecting all the evidence which we are only now just officially learning about. 

[B-Man]

[B-Man]

..The Real Origination Story of the Trump-Russia Investigation

By Andrew C McCarthy

 

The Trump-Russia investigation did not originate with Carter Page or George Papadopoulos. It originated with the Obama administration.

 

Exactly when is the “late Spring”?

Of all the questions that have been asked about what we’ve called the “Origination Story” of the Trump-Russia investigation, that may be the most important one. It may be the one that tells us when the Obama administration first formed the Trump-Russia “collusion” narrative.

 

See, it has always been suspicious that the anonymous current and former government officials who leak classified information to their media friends have been unable to coordinate their spin on the start of “Crossfire Hurricane” — the name the FBI eventually gave its Trump-Russia investigation.

The Original Origination Story: Carter Page

First, they told us it was an early July 2016 trip to Moscow by Carter Page, an obscure Trump-campaign adviser.

As we’ve observed, that story became untenable once a connection emerged between the Bureau’s concerns about Page and the Steele dossier. The dossier, compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, portrayed Page’s Moscow trip as seminal to a Trump-Russia conspiracy to hack Democratic email accounts and steal the election from Hillary Clinton.

 

It turned out, however, that the dossier was a Clinton-campaign opposition-research project, the main allegations of which were based on third-hand hearsay from anonymous Russian sources. Worse, though the allegations could not be verified, the Obama Justice Department and the FBI used them to obtain surveillance warrants against Page, in violation of their own guidelines against presenting unverified information to the FISA court. Worse still, the Obama Justice Department withheld from the FISA court the facts that the Clinton campaign was behind the dossier and that Steele had been booted from the investigation for lying to the FBI.

Origination Story 2.0: George Papadopoulos

With the Page origination story cratering, Team Obama tried to save the day with Origination Story 2.0: Papadopoulos did it. In this account, George Papadopoulos, an even more obscure Trump-campaign aide than Page, triggered the investigation by telling Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, in May 2016, that he’d heard from a Kremlin-connected academic, Josef Mifsud, that Russia had thousands of emails potentially damaging to Clinton.

 

{SNIP}

 

The Real Origination

With the revelation last week that the Obama administration had insinuated a spy into the Trump campaign, it appeared that we were back to the original, Page-centric origination story. But now there was a twist: The informant, longtime CIA source Stefan Halper, was run at Page by the FBI, in Britain. Because this happened just days after Page’s Moscow trip, the implication was that it was the Moscow trip itself, not the dossier claims about it, that provided momentum toward opening the investigation. Then, just a couple of weeks later, WikiLeaks began publicizing the DNC emails; this, we’re to understand, shook loose the Australian information about Papadopoulos. When that information made its way to the FBI — how, we’re not told — the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation was formally opened on July 31. Within days, Agent Peter Strzok was in London interviewing Downer, and soon the FBI tasked Halper to take a run at Papadopoulos.

 

But this rickety tale had the signs of an after-the-fact rationalization, an effort to downplay the dossier and the role of Obama officials in the genesis of the probe. There were curious questions about how the twentysomething Papadopoulos came to be meeting with Australia’s highest-ranking diplomat in the United Kingdom, and about how and when, exactly, this Australian information came to be transmitted to the FBI.

 

The real origination story begins in the early spring of 2016 — long before Page went to Russia and long before the U.S. government was notified about Papadopoulos’s boozy conversation with Downer.

 

 

Last week, as controversy stirred over the possibility that the Obama administration had used a spy against the Trump campaign, the eagle eye of the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel caught a couple of key passages from the House Intelligence Committee’s recent report on Russian interference in the election — largely overlooked passages on page 54.

 

It turns out that, in “late spring” 2016, the FBI’s then-director James Comey briefed the principals of the National Security Council on “the Page information.” As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York observes in a perceptive column today, NSC principals are an administration’s highest-ranking national-security officials. In Obama’s National Security Council, the president was the chairman, and among the regular attendees were the vice-president (Joe Biden), the national-security adviser (Susan Rice), and the director of national intelligence (James Clapper). The heads of such departments and agencies as the Justice Department (Attorney General Loretta Lynch) and the CIA (Director John Brennan) could also be invited to attend NSC meetings if matters of concern to them were to be discussed.

 

We do not know what NSC principals attended the Comey briefing about Carter Page. But how curious that the House Intelligence Committee interviewed so many Obama-administration officials who were on, or who were knowledgeable about, the NSC, and yet none of them provided a date for this meeting more precise than “late spring” 2016.

 

The other meeting outlined on page 54 of the House report is one that Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, had with Attorney General Lynch. It probably occurred before the “late spring” Obama NSC meeting, and it was also “about Page.”

 

So . . . what exactly was “the Page information”? Well, we know that Page, an Annapolis alumnus and former naval intelligence officer, is . . . well, he’s a knucklehead. He is a Russia apologist whose “discursive online blog postings about foreign policy,” Politico noted, “invoke the likes of Kanye West, Oprah Winfrey, and Rhonda Byrne’s self-help bestseller, ‘The Secret.’” More to the point, Page blames American provocations for bad relations with the Kremlin and advocates, instead, a policy of appeasing the Putin regime. Page, who has also been an investment banker, has also had business ties to Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled energy behemoth.

 

Most importantly, we know that Page was one of several American businessmen whom Russian intelligence operatives attempted to recruit in 2013. Yet, the main reason we know that is that Page cooperated with the FBI and the Justice Department in the prosecution of the Russian operatives. See Sealed Complaint, United States v. Evgeny Buryakov, pp. 12-13 (Page is identified as “Male-1” — whom one of the Russian spies refers to as “an idiot”).

 

 

Much More at the Link:  https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/trump-russia-investigation-obama-administration-origins/

 

 

 

 

[OCinBuffalo]

11 hours ago, Deranged Rhino said:

May 6th, 2016. 

 

Why were they so desperate to dirty up Trump campaign staff in May if the investigation didn't start until July 31 2016 officially? 

 

Because on April 18th, 2016 Mike Rogers shut down the illegal access of raw 702 data which, up until that point, had been pilfered by bad actors to spy on multiple campaigns (including Sanders'). This forced the FBI-CID and DOJ-National Security Division (NSD) to have to come up with probable cause for a FISA application. Had Rogers not shut this program down, they never would have needed to justify what - up until then - had been an off the books and illegal surveillance operation. 

 

That's why the FBI's start date of when the investigation began keeps changing... there isn't one. The illicit surveillance abuse was an ongoing operation for years, extending beyond just the 2016 election. But they can't admit that, so starting on April 18th they needed to come up with a way to justify their previous 702 requests. They needed probable cause to justify opening an official investigation before they could even go to the FISC - that took until July 31st. Between those two dates, the bad actors had to cut some corners, take some risks, and move assets like Halper into place to exploit their existing HUMINT sources legally. These sources (G-Pap, Manafort, Page) all came into the campaign in March - just days after Rogers ordered the audit of the 702 system (he hadn't shut it down, yet, but he gave notice to the departments the NSA was doing an audit).

 

Action ---> Reaction. 

 

While all this was happening, the MI team behind Trump were watching their every move and collecting all the evidence which we are only now just officially learning about. 

Yes, and let's also remember another cause and effect:

 

Cause: Mike Rogers went personally to Trump Tower and met with the campaign and presumably Trump himself. 

Effect: Trump tweets the famous "They are "wiretapping" me" tweet...taking care to put wiretapping in quotes, because

A) he was told what exactly was happening by Rogers

B) Trump understands the Twitter platform

C) He therefore takes the Rogers info, and makes it Twitter-ready, such that we get "wiretapping" in quotes because

D) he knows the left and the media are going to try and disparage him for repeating the truth Rogers told him. But, by putting it in quotes, there's not much the people who understand grammar can do about it. Thus, we had two days of "debate" about what putting things in quotes means, and the backpedal of those who didn't understand grammar was quite funny.

 

Now the "quotes" story finally has its end. We know why Trump did what he did, and he was as clever about it as he was right. Result: Trump wins again, the leftists, neverTrump,  media all look like unmitigated morons, again, and I get to laugh at them, again.

 

Rogers is a hero. Many medals the armed services hand out have the words "courage", "service with distinction", "duty", "honor", and "country" in their descriptions. Those words define Rogers's actions here, and we hand out medals for this stuff, so yeah, by definition he is a hero.

[OCinBuffalo]

10 hours ago, B-Man said:

So . . . what exactly was “the Page information”? Well, we know that Page, an Annapolis alumnus and former naval intelligence officer, is . . . well, he’s a knucklehead.

 

Yet, the main reason we know that is that Page cooperated with the FBI and the Justice Department in the prosecution of the Russian operatives. See Sealed Complaint, United States v. Evgeny Buryakov, pp. 12-13 (Page is identified as “Male-1” — whom one of the Russian spies refers to as “an idiot”).

Off topic, but, I just have to laugh: it is now a matter of public record that a Naval Academy graduate, or squid, is an idiot. That's delicious for those of us associated with the Army.

 

Look it's never mean-spirited, that's the thing nobody seems to get. The Navy and the Army go back and forth busting balls, when its appropriate, but also, often when it doesn't seem so to those who aren't part of it. Example: joking(read: insulting, by those who don't belong) with a Navy guy whose mother just died, reminds him he belongs...to a very large group of people from both services, who care about him, and that all he has to do is ask any/all of us and he will get what he needs. 

 

That's why we don't take it personally, and all barbs require thought and creativity. Nobody says "You Navy guys suck"  

 

This "Carter Page is an idiot on public record" thing is right on target. The Navy has no comeback for this, and many a squid will be skewered.    

 

PS: Nobody cares about the Air Farce, and we never will, no matter how hard you try to pretend you're part of our thing, you're not. You know why: because you're training isn't as hard as ours, and your mission keeps 98% of you far away from danger.

Edited May 23, 2018 by OCinBuffalo