I hate vanities.
YOURS was good.
There were hundreds of people unmasked. I think that is part of this.
Well hell, one FISA warrant can authorize spying on any and every citizen in the USA. Time to end FISC.
And how precisely was this info passed back to the Clinton campaign as we all know it was?
Who really thinks they spied on JUST ONE...? You think they would just play ROULETTE and spy on just one..?
Sorry, there is juuuust NO WAY.
The conversation went something like this, "The illegality of it all is pretty major and if you spy on just ONE Presidential Candidate...? You might as well just DO THEM ALL..."
It's like what they say about a mass-shooter. The FIRST one is the death penalty so the rest are all "for free".
They must have done it to ALL OF THEM.
Most people have no idea about the two hop nature of a FISA warrant. What is wrong with conservative media? They keep talking about spying on Carter Page, a single person, instead of talking about the enormous reach of such a warrant. We FReepers have known about this for a long time. Every American should and would know this if media on our side mentioned it every time they talked about Carter Page.
This is why Ratcliffe was blocked by the GOP Senate from the DNI post. Too many big donors making billions off the IC.
A Title I FISA warrant gives “two hops” from the target.
That means anyone who communicated with Carter Page could be surveilled including his ex-girlfriend, his family, and oh, the entirety of the Trump campaign.
This is why they went after low-level aides like Page and Papadopoulos. They were the entry to the event for the feast.
The feast being the ability to listen in (’wiretap’) every phone call of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne, etc.
Everyone.
Then they went back to pig out several more times to the FISA Court. So they could spy on the ENTIRE Trump Administration!
Yeah, nothing here but massive criminality.
Horowitz says he looked only at surveillance results that were related to Russian Collusion as if that was somehow laudable. It’s funny how when you exclude looking at evidence you don’t find anything.
This is something that those of us following this subterfuge here on FR have known, like since the beginning. Not difficult to understand.
FISA’s License to Hop
A conspiratorial enterprise is bound to involve communications beyond Carter Page’s first circle of direct contact, so investigators need to look at the next circle as well. They may need to look further, depending on the communications patterns they find in the first two circles radiating from their named target. But under current rules, it’s the first two that government investigators can routinely gain access to in order to “uncover the full scope of a conspiratorial enterprise,” without needing to apply for further warrants.
This convention is referred to as the “two-hop” rule, and, like many provisions of surveillance law, has come in for criticism by civil libertarians. The original FISA was passed in 1978, before the internet age. After 9/11, information technology enabled surveillance operators under the Patriot Act, which complemented and in some ways overlapped FISA surveillance, to inaugurate a “three-hop” rule exploiting computer-networked communications to look well beyond the first-order contacts of a central subject (under Patriot Act surveillance, a terror suspect). This was done via presidential order and came as an unwelcome surprise to the public when the practice was revealed, and initially dubbed “warrantless wiretapping,” in 2005.
Subsequent efforts to rein in intelligence-community hopping resulted in some restrictions on the margins, but ultimately in the codification of post-9/11 practice, which was framed as aiming to prevent a terror attack on the US homeland. In 2008, with the FISA Amendments Act, Congress effectively authorized the three-hop rule used under the Patriot Act—although that point was understood by the public only in hindsight, following the revelations about surveillance practices made by National Security Agency (NSA) contract worker Edward Snowden.
More at link
And yes, you are right, the mainstream media pretends they don’t know this. Trump was their target. Page was just the door they used to gain access to Trump. They tried Papadopoulos first but their own lawyers shot them down because there was no crime alleged even if he did say something silly in that London bar.
And as we now know, they wouldn’t have even been able to get to Page if they didn’t have the lies of the Steele Dossier and the documents they forged and the exculpatory evidence they withheld.
The creation of the Steele Dossier is probably the “insurance policy” they discussed. The Horowitz report tells us they got a tip from an unnamed spy in July but by its description it seems that that this spy was Steele. Then in August Page and Strzok text each other about an insurance policy. Then in September they get the written Steele Dossier. The FBI claims they didn’t get any evidence until September but Horowitz says they got it in July. I suggest that the “insurance policy” was their decision to get Steele to put his lies into writing so that they could take it to the FISA Court. Otherwise, without it being in writing, they had no probable cause to get the warrants in the first place.
Seems to me they did all of this intentionally. They pushed Steele off the FBI payroll and attached him with Glen Simpson’s firm in order that they could collect his Dossier without it appearing as if the FBI itself was running the operation, but merely ‘acting on a tip’. The entire scheme was contrived and made to look legit and it probably started in the spring of 2016.
This is a common tactic for law enforcement. Go after the low guy to reach the big guy. It has been this way since they started taking down the crime families. This is not an unknown tactic either. Know your history as this was a no brainer.
They are allowed to drill down 3 layers. So If Page had 100 people on his contact lists, this includes email and phone that’s 100, then they also can monitor each of those 100, so if each had only 100 contacts then that’s 10,000 being monitored. and that’s only 2 levels down, so those 10,000 are monitored and we reach a million
Section 702 shouldn't be legal
There has to be a list.