Posted on 12/11/2019 9:33:18 AM PST by paul in cape
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“must we not expect that Obama was spying on ALL ogf the candidates, not just Trump?”
I think, if anyone dug into this, they would find it went well beyond the candidates in the 2016 election.
Remember, they were spying on Sharyl Attkisson, as far back as 2013, while she was still employed at CBS, just because she dared to challenge the official Benghazi story. So if they were willing to abuse these powers to go after mainstream reporters, do you really think they weren’t spying on the RNC, all the “Tea Party” groups, etc?
The obvious guess is that Halper was working on behalf of a friendly foreign government (the UK most likely), since we know they had their own investigation going beforehand. The information they provided is what gave the FBI the flimsy excuse to start “Crossfire Hurricane” in the first place.
This whole thing is a case study in how the intelligence apparatus abuses every loophole to accomplish what should be illegal spying, but give it the color of legality. The CIA/NSA can’t just spy on US citizens, but they can ask foreign governments to do it for them. However, if those foreign governments spied on them inside the US, then that would cause problems, so they ask them to do it when the US citizen travels OUTSIDE the US.
Then, when they need to gin up a BS FISA warrant to spy domestically, they need to verify all the information in it. Unless that information comes from a confidential informant, so there’s another loophole. They just get the CI to tell them what they need to get the warrant, and it can be transparently false, because they will never have to verify it at all.
Then they abuse the “hop” system, so if they can’t get a warrant on someone they want to monitor, they just have to find someone in the outer orbit connected to that target by a few degrees, and gin up enough fake evidence to get a warrant on that secondary target.
That’s not even going into some of the other scams they pulled, like using one asset to feed incriminating information to a target, then using another asset to draw that information back out and report it, to disguise the actual source of the information. Or the other kind of entrapment scams they were attempting, or the falsifying of interview records, or trying to bully subjects into false confessions with threats and intimidation.
It’s kind of amazing that even though they seem to have used every dirty trick in their playbook, they still didn’t manage to get a single shred of dirt to stick on Trump. I doubt if any actual career politician could have withstood that treatment.
Yep, Jeb’s campaign actually was paying Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump. They may have been the ones ultimately behind the beginning of the “Steele dossier”, and it just got handed off to Hillary after Jeb lost.
“Remember what happened to Herman Cain?”
Sure, Herman was a “test case” I believe. They later did the exact same thing to Roy Moore and attempted it with Trump too, and Kavanaugh.
Also, remember when Sarah Palin’s email got hacked? Awfully convenient if you wanted to tie her up fending off attacks in Alaska and stop her from trying to run again at the national level.
What difference does it make if the criminals are not punished?
Not one single indictment in 3 years. Yep 3 years.
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THIS EXACTLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
For example, my feelings on McCain were one of them, which for years, I refused to condemn him simply because I come from a Navy family, did a hitch in the USN, and actually served under McCain for a few months. I had a really nice Freeper who sent me a Freepmail which, instead of attacking me and trying to eviscerate me, conveyed that they could see my refusal to condemn McCain was due more to my ingrained sense of loyalty which was taking me down an erroneous path. That helped me see the light, for that I am very grateful.
But another thing along those lines was my acceptance and support of the PATRIOT Act. In my mind, we were at war, and I have more in common (both emotionally and structurally) with a generation that understood the loss of freedom in a time of war, and I accepted that, which I should not have.
I accepted the loss of freedom and threat of government abuse of the powers the PATRIOT Act implicitly bestowed on the government, because at that time, I still had faith that we still had moral people available in the government who could be trusted.
To my regret and shame, and as part of a maturing process even at my age, I had to come to grips with three things and recognize just how wrong I was, and to accept that my tacit support has contributed to the government's abuse of freedoms we see going on today:
"...Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war.
If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour."
It is that line "by the lights of perverted science" that makes me dwell on this, and suspect that this surveillance technology may well be one of those things Churchill was referring to even though he had no window into the future. We live in a time where your movements can and are being tracked minutely. Your license plate number being recorded with a date, time, and location as you pass though an intersection with cameras. Your phone calls and emails being routinely captured and stored, ostensibly never to be looked at by anyone unless...a FISA warrant is issued, and then they can, using the two-hop rule, go back five years and look at everyone you emailed, called, or texted, and look at everyone THOSE people emailed, called, or texted. They had to change it to the two-hop rule, because the three-hop rule allowed them to blanket vast multitudes of people creating a blanket that could legally look at EVERYONE.
OUR GOVERNMENT IS NO LONGER MORAL AND REPRESENTATIVE
The Democrat Party and much of the Republican Party are no longer bound to any moral constraints.
They can rationalize everything, break any law, and there are no consequences. People barely even bat an eye anymore at the hideous immorality we see them display.
It is even shameless to the point that this Lisa Page rationalizes that she has been done wrong by the government that released her texts on her government issued phone spanning conversations she had with a co-conspirator she was sleeping with. And it barely raises an eyebrow. And she will probably win her suit. Amazing.
HUMAN NATURE DOES NOT PERMIT OUR GOVERNMENT OR ANY PERSON TO LEGALLY WIELD THIS POWER TO SURVEIL AND DESTROY PEOPLE
I have always understood the basic tenet of conservatism that we must have checks in place to guard against the abuses of power and technology by a government against its citizenry.
I have a particular admiration for our Founders and our Constitutional Republic, because they had enough foresight to bake it into the republic. But as you can tell from the point I make about moral people in government...I did not fully accept that there is NO person or entity who can be "trusted" with the kind of power the PATRIOT Act imparts. That power is irresistible to men and women in power. It WILL be used to persecute and destroy people who have done nothing wrong, and in the case of Trump and his associates, that power was irresistible to the likes of the Democrat party as it is so constituted today.
They are inclined by human nature to do it, impelled by their ideological beliefs that they can rationalize any abuse of it, and are composed of such low moral fiber that their abuses were and are inevitable, predictable, and widespread.
So, in that light, when I look back now at my shameful acceptance of the PATRIOT Act with all the safeguards, assurances, good intentions, and rationalizations, I am filled with regret. I have to live with that. My only prayer is that my small individual part in this will not result in the downfall of our republic, but...I am no longer filled with hope on that point.
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