OMG Politics, I'm over it already.

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On her show last night, Rachel [Maddow] brought up a dot that I hadn’t even seen in the puzzle before. She asked a very simple question, “How did we end up with transcripts of the Mike Flynn phone calls to the Russian ambassador”? It is both legal, and standard practice for US intelligence agents to monitor foreign nationals, so they do. But there’s a loophole there. It’s legal to monitor a foreign national’s phone calls, but still illegal to monitor a US citizen. If they’re following protocol, they were required to hang up and disconnect their phone surveillance the moment they identified an American citizen on the line. So, how did we end up with a transcript of their conversation?

Here’s how. They could keep on listening in and taping merrily away if they already had a FISA warrant out on Mike Flynn. With that warrant, all bets are off. So, if they ended up with a transcript of Flynn’s call(s) to the ambassador, then it’s a de facto admission that there was already a FISA warrant on Flynn before the phone calls took place, otherwise they would have had to disconnect the call once they identified Flynn.

How long have they had a warrant for Flynn? How much more have they collected before the phone calls tipped their hands? And who else is wandering around out there with a warrant taped to their backs? We have no way of knowing, but the way things are going down with this Klown Kar circus, we might be finding out more soon.

And one more thing to consider. For the most part, the Trump campaign hierarchy are not seasoned political operatives, they’re rank outsiders. They have personal agendas that they will be loathe to risk. Think the knowledge that someone like Flynn apparently had a warrant already on him may be giving them a twitchy feeling between their shoulder blades? Almost makes you wonder what a knock on the front door from a couple of FBI agents might uncover right out of the gate? ​
 
@GDSmithTX

i read an article yesterday (can't find it now) where FBI went to FISA for a warrant to wiretap trump and they were turned down, initially, but then they provided some more probable cause and were granted to warrant. has to do with trump claiming that obama wire tapped him, but it wasn't obama, it was the feds.

so if the FBI were granted a FISA warrant, WHAT did they have that would justify it??
something one would very much like to know.
 
I think the DOJ is just using a simple organized crime strategy against the Trump team. The DOJ knows that people in the Trump campaign were communicating with the Russian government. There was strong evidence of something illegal going on, which is why warrants were granted to conduct surveillance. And they have evidence of a coverup, because they went after the attorney general shortly after he took office. If this was all just about recordings of some legitimate diplomatic calls this would already be over. If this actually implicated Trump or Bannon or Putin it would be over. But it’s not over.

That means that the FBI knows what was going on. They know who did it, they know when they did it, they know where they did it. They could bust these guys right now and file charges. But the DOJ doesn’t have evidence to convict whomever was in charge. The DOJ might not even know who was calling the shots. So they’re setting up a net around all these guys and tightening it. The Trump guys thought it was OK because their guy Jeff Sessions was going to be able to shut all this down from the inside, but now he’s recused himself because he knows that he’s just setting himself up for more prison time if he doesn’t. So now everybody is scared. Flynn is scared. Manafort is scared. Sessions is scared. Donald Trump Jr. is scared. Their staff are scared. Paranoia is going to set it. Soon each of these guys will have his own lawyer telling him to cut a deal. Staffers will have their parents hiring lawyers. And the leaks will keep coming, because the DOJ wants these guys to know that they have no secrets.

Eventually one of those guys is going to start talking to the DOJ. Then they’ll all start talking to the DOJ. And eventually the DOJ is going to have a case against the guy at the top. Even if Trump isn’t the bad guy he’ll have no credibility left. He’ll either resign in disgrace or live out out the most pathetic one-term presidency since Buchanan.
 
jp_nyc said:
I think the DOJ is just using a simple organized crime strategy against the Trump team. The DOJ knows that people in the Trump campaign were communicating with the Russian government. There was strong evidence of something illegal going on, which is why warrants were granted to conduct surveillance. And they have evidence of a coverup, because they went after the attorney general shortly after he took office. If this was all just about recordings of some legitimate diplomatic calls this would already be over. If this actually implicated Trump or Bannon or Putin it would be over. But it’s not over.

That means that the FBI knows what was going on. They know who did it, they know when they did it, they know where they did it. They could bust these guys right now and file charges. But the DOJ doesn’t have evidence to convict whomever was in charge. The DOJ might not even know who was calling the shots. So they’re setting up a net around all these guys and tightening it. The Trump guys thought it was OK because their guy Jeff Sessions was going to be able to shut all this down from the inside, but now he’s recused himself because he knows that he’s just setting himself up for more prison time if he doesn’t. So now everybody is scared. Flynn is scared. Manafort is scared. Sessions is scared. Donald Trump Jr. is scared. Their staff are scared. Paranoia is going to set it. Soon each of these guys will have his own lawyer telling him to cut a deal. Staffers will have their parents hiring lawyers. And the leaks will keep coming, because the DOJ wants these guys to know that they have no secrets.

Eventually one of those guys is going to start talking to the DOJ. Then they’ll all start talking to the DOJ. And eventually the DOJ is going to have a case against the guy at the top. Even if Trump isn’t the bad guy he’ll have no credibility left. He’ll either resign in disgrace or live out out the most pathetic one-term presidency since Buchanan.
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one can only hope.

on the other hand.....you should contact Tom Clancy :)
 
PunkKitty said:
Interesting...
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A stunning detail from the @newyorkermag piece on Russian cybercrime - via BoingBoing

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war
Click to expand...

sometimes fiction novels get lucky and seem to predict events that, for the most part, actually occur.
case in point....Tom Clancy's "Debt of Honor". it's a story about how a pilot flies a 747 into the capitol building during a joint session of congress, and kills nearly everyone in the US federal gov't....and it was published in 1994. it has several parallels to 9/11.
but Clandy didn't actually "predict" it. the bad guys in his novel were the japanese, not the middle east.
just sayin'
 
mongooz said:
sometimes fiction novels get lucky and seem to predict events that, for the most part, actually occur.
case in point....Tom Clancy's "Debt of Honor". it's a story about how a pilot flies a 747 into the capitol building during a joint session of congress, and kills nearly everyone in the US federal gov't....and it was published in 1994. it has several parallels to 9/11.
but Clandy didn't actually "predict" it. the bad guys in his novel were the japanese, not the middle east.
just sayin'
Click to expand...
This isn't a fiction novel. It's a piece in The New Yorker magazine.
 
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