So the Inspector General Shot Down a Bunch of Trumpian Conspiracies But Also Ivanka Is Involved Now?
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So the Inspector General Shot Down a Bunch of Trumpian Conspiracies But Also Ivanka Is Involved Now?
December 9, 2019, 6:25 PM EST
Photo credit: Mark Wilson - Getty Images
In the House Judiciary Committee, Republicans pushed one of the Catch-22s at the heart of their arguments against the impeachment of Donald Trump, American president: the inquiry is only legitimate if it's bipartisan, but Republicans will never back the inquiry, so it will never be bipartisan. The Democratic counsels gave money to Democratic candidates, so the evidence they found is null and void. The Republicans didn't get to call their witnesses from the Trump Conspiracy Extended Universe, so the process was unfair. We didn't hear from Fact Witnesses that the White House has blocked from testifying —another Catch-22—so all this evidence is hearsay. Republican Counsel Steve Castor also suggested Democrats didn't do enough to force those blocked witnesses to testify. That's a new one, and so was Castor's declaration that Joe Biden is not a leading 2020 candidate , so why would Trump target him for investigation?
Across town, though, we were treated to the release of the Justice Department Inspector General's report on the origins of the Russia investigation. Trump and his allies have been banking on this one for some time, eagerly awaiting the damning conclusion that the Deep State set out to destroy him and trampled the law to do so. This is not what Inspector General Michael Horowitz found. While the report highlighted some systemic issues with how the government applies for warrants to surveil people under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—issues that civil liberties organizations like the ACLU have drawn attention to for some time—it found the Justice Department and the FBI had adequate reason to open probes into George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort. In other words, they had reason to believe a crime had been committed or there was a threat to national security, and proceeded accordingly.
You may notice that this flies in the face of what Trump and his allies on Fox News and beyond have been saying for years. So here's what the president had to say on the report's release.
Just say anything. That has always been the motto of Trump's movement, which has seized on the siloed information environment in this country to design entire alternate realities for his supporters to inhabit. Dissenting voices need not apply. Negative information is Fake, positive information is Real. Is it good for me, or is it bad for me? The truth is not relevant. It doesn't exist. The truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe. Fox News will repeat your line, and no one will read the actual report.
The Attorney General of the United States seems to agree: he sent out a press release that, echoing his infamous Summary-Not-Summary of the Mueller Report, completely contradicted the IG report's actual findings. William Barr is working on a separate inquiry with U.S. Attorney John Durham, and Durham released a letter declaring that "we advised the inspector general that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions," though he did not offer much detail beyond that. Durham did say he has access to more information than Horowitz did, which The New York Times suggests refers to his "trips to meet with foreign intelligence officials overseas and to his examination of any role the C.I.A. played." We are really testing the limits of our system now, as the nation's most powerful law-enforcement figures travel the world to dig up something, anything to support the president's narrative.
Photo credit: The Washington Post - Getty Images
Meanwhile, we haven't even gotten to the most outrageous finding of the day, which involved Christopher Steele, the former head of the Russia desk at MI6. After leaving that post, Steele was hired in private practice to dig into Trump's connections to Russia. The report found Steele was actually in touch with—and on apparently good terms with—a member of Donald Trump's family for years before he started investigating the patriarch, and even took a meeting at Trump Tower in 2008. (Steele used this as proof he was actually "favorably predisposed" towards the Trumps before he began his work.) ABC News found that the family member in question was Ivanka Trump, who met Steele at a dinner party in 2007. For some reason, none of the Trumps mentioned this before.
Oh, and one more thing: the report found evidence that plenty of FBI agents were solidly pro-Trump —or at least anti-Hillary. Yet the IG has demonstrated zero interest in looking into that side of things, even when there is public evidence then-Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani was plugged into the Bureau's New York office during the campaign. There's also the small detail that the FBI's most critical intervention in the 2016 campaign was James Comey's announcement that The Email Probe was back open less than two weeks before Election Day. It's impossible to say definitively, but there's a convincing argument to be made that this was a definitive factor in the outcome. And yet, for years on end, we've been subjected to Trumpian yelling that the FBI was out to get him during the election, probably because the president has correctly assessed that if you say something loudly over and over again, the public—including the mainstream press—will eventually fold and accept it. Or at least report that you said it. Every time. Until it becomes True.
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In the House Judiciary Committee, Republicans pushed one of the Catch-22s at the heart of their arguments against the impeachment of Donald Trump, American president: the inquiry is only legitimate if it's bipartisan, but Republicans will never back the inquiry, so it will never be bipartisan. The Democratic counsels gave money to Democratic candidates, so the evidence they found is null and void. The Republicans didn't get to call their witnesses from the Trump Conspiracy Extended Universe, so the process was unfair. We didn't hear from Fact Witnesses that the White House has blocked from testifying —another Catch-22—so all this evidence is hearsay. Republican Counsel Steve Castor also suggested Democrats didn't do enough to force those blocked witnesses to testify. That's a new one, and so was Castor's declaration that Joe Biden is not a leading 2020 candidate , so why would Trump target him for investigation?
Across town, though, we were treated to the release of the Justice Department Inspector General's report on the origins of the Russia investigation. Trump and his allies have been banking on this one for some time, eagerly awaiting the damning conclusion that the Deep State set out to destroy him and trampled the law to do so. This is not what Inspector General Michael Horowitz found. While the report highlighted some systemic issues with how the government applies for warrants to surveil people under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—issues that civil liberties organizations like the ACLU have drawn attention to for some time—it found the Justice Department and the FBI had adequate reason to open probes into George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort. In other words, they had reason to believe a crime had been committed or there was a threat to national security, and proceeded accordingly.
You should tune into the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing going on right now. Michael Horowitz is getting an earful concerning his opinion of "no political bias"
Graham is up. And he's killing it................
" the report found evidence that plenty of FBI agents were solidly pro-Trump —or at least anti-Hillary."
Just because an FBI agent or State department employee leans one way or another politically does not make them corrupt. To automatically impugn their work and ethics by claiming they can no longer do their job merely because they have an opinion about political candidates is beyond ridiculous. And the facts show that Republicans don't give two shits about bias as long as it's bias for their candidate or against their opponent. I'm sure they imagine that as quite normal, just like I consider anyone who views dishonest Donald negatively to be quite normal based on the cornucopia of slimy things he's done. This does not in any way mean someone would abandon their decades of ethical service to illegally sabotage a political candidate they dislike.
" One supervisory special agent wrote via instant message that he was “so elated with the election” and that watching election coverage was like “watching a Superbowl comeback.” The agent later explained his messages to Horowitz’s office, claiming that they thought Hillary Clinton would win and it was “energizing” to see Trump claim victory. “ I didn’t want a criminal a criminal to be in the White House, ” he said.
Two other FBI agents also expressed pleasure with the 2016 election results. “Shit just got real,” one employee wrote in messages uncovered by the IG report. “I saw a lot of scared MFers on... (my way to to work) this morning. Start looking for new jobs fellas. Haha.” The other agent replied, “LOL.” In response, the employee remarked: “Come January I’m going to just get a big bowl of popcorn and sit back and watch.” The other agent replied: “That's hilarious!”.
Those who attempt to make this all one sided and claim there was some deep state conspiracy are mentally unstable. You have to really have a room temp IQ to believe the nonsense coming from the right these days.
To doctor any document, removing information such information as an important fact like Carter Page working for the CIA is not a simple "mistake." It is a criminal act. It dosen't take much soul searching to figure out why an FBI lawyer would do such a thing. The texts of the lead investigator in all the critical investigations Peter Strzok tell us what we need to know. If that's not enough to determine motivation, one only need to tune into CNN and see the discredited, openly biased, former intelligence officials whom they have hired.
I'm sure that many in the Bureau may be pro-Trump, but clearly those who ran the investigations - the top level of the FBI - were Trump haters!
Yeah, Feinstein really dragged him over the hot coals...
More opinion...
What I heard was that the "investigations" never rose to the official level of a full blown investigation
and never went outside of the boundaries which define a "preliminary investigation".
In other words, according to Horowitz, et al., the FBI did it's due diligence as it should have.
Did you hear when the radical Sheldon Whitehouse asked why he thought US Attorney Durham might come to different conclusions on the predicate to an investigation? Whitehouse asked if Horowitz knew of an conceivable reason why Durham would disagree. Horowitz said he simply didn't know why.
I found it odd that Horowitz wouldn't simply say the Durham's investigation is far broader than the IG's ever could be. Durhan can even investigate what the CIA was up to as well as foreign intelligence agencies. He also has far more resources. Why not state the obvious?
But as Horowitz testified, none of them were on any of the Crossfire Hurricane teams.
No, there never was enough credible evidence or reason to spy on American citizens hoping to find something
incriminating, simply because they might have talked to some Russian in passing. This whole investigation was
political in nature and was concocted by the Obama administration and its co-conspirators in the FBI and other agencies to try to find dirt on Trump.
Close inspection of the IG Report shows this conspiracy by Obama and his assorted thugs really did occur.
Now, Barr and Durham are starting to uncover the truth.
Obviously you haven't inspected it closely yet since that is not at all what it reveals. Those are the talking points hand fed to you by dishonest right wing pundits. The IG report showed there was a responsible, legal predicate for the investigation and the supposed "bias" of the agents went both ways while none of their bias appears to have effected the investigations in either direction.
You really would have to be an extreme moron to believe that some biased political "deep state" conspiracy was fomented against Trump and his campaign, as if a concerted effort by a group you claim to be so powerful failed to keep Trump out of the Presidency. If it was so all powerful and used illegal tactics to ruin Trump and his campaign, why did no one find out he was even under investigation until AFTER the election?
And the American people and electoral system averted that. The populace overruled the elitists............and some STILL haven't gotten over that. They weren't as powerful as they would have wished.
You mean the majority who voted against Trump? The 66 million Americans who voted for Hillary or the 5 million who voted for 3rd party candidates are the "populace" you wrongly imagine "spoke" in the election. The 'populace' aka the 'majority'
Populace: noun - the people living in a particular country
71 million voted against Donald. The vast majority of Americans disapprove of the job he's done since being elected by the electoral college. America doesn't want Trump, though apparently with the 63 million who voted for the dishonest liar, the admitted sexual predator, he may be the President we deserve for not educating more of those Americans in civics and the constitution because if we had dirty Donald would never have been elected. So yes, Trump is the symptom of America leaving rural America behind. Most Americans moving forward aren't worried about those behind, they just expect them to keep up, but I suppose that was too much to ask of some so stuck in their ways.
EVERY President is elected by the EC. Please don't act as though it is somehow different because Trump beat Abuela.
Fact is, Trump won. Doesn't matter one iota how many supported him or not. Doesn't matter what his approval ratings are.
Well, it does matter if you're trying to claim it was the "will of the American people" or that the "populace" that "overruled the elitists" when it clearly was not. Dishonest Donald won by the thinnest of margins, just 77,000 votes in three swing States out of 137 million votes. The people did not elect Trump, the electoral college system did. Therefore, there is no "public mandate" given the President, no "will of the majority" he can champion, he is the champion of the minority who elected him, that is all. He is such a tiny little wimp compared to the will of the majority which he will get a taste of in 2020 no matter how much his defenders and sycophants whine, cry and scream in the streets. There will be no second lightning strike in the same place, no thinnest margin win in his future. Only 5 times in US history has a President been elected solely by the electoral college, and that's including John Quincy Adams who was technically didn't have enough electoral votes to win but then congress voted to award him the Presidency. So while your claim that "every President is elected by the EC" is true, it certainly doesn't tell the whole story or even mention how unusual it was for Trump to win even when he lost the popular vote by more than 3 million.
"Is that all you've got? Stupid fucking memes."
Who said it?
No public mandate required.
No overwhelming victory required.
Just enough votes to win required.
Mission accomplished.
The losers will always find something to whine about and try to make it seem as though Trump wasn't elected like every President.
Trump will be one of only three ever impeached.
So what?
The two worst states in the country.
And one of the none ever removed.
Wow, so much nonsense/lies to unpack.
'simply because they might have talked to some Russian in passing.'
When that's all they have, they will defend those lies to the bitter end with more and more lies.
Like Russia, Russia, Russia? Yep, a bunch of people still hold on to that.............after three years of "Nope".
After three years of 'Da', not 'Nyet'
Wow, you don't pay attention do you. Here is the Russian info from the Mueller report.
The investigation found there were over 100 contacts between Trump campaign advisors and individuals affiliated with the Russian government , before and after the election, but the evidence was insufficient to show an illegal conspiracy.[82] The New York Times estimated as many as 140 contacts between "Mr. Trump and his associates and Russian nationals and WikiLeaks or their intermediaries" in the report.[83]
Okay you meme experts, put a bad comb over on Goebbels.
To quote one of the fixtures at Newstalkers, Last I knew Ivanka wasn't running for POTUS.
Gee, I didn't know I was a 'fixture' here, go figure.
If you are a fixture, does that make you Farrah Faucet?
LOL
I guess waiting on today's hearing escaped them...
ya may want to start from the beginning
have fun
The sooner his corrupt progeny gets put on the hot seat, the better.
I didn't know Stephen Colbert weighed 239 pounds.
Too bad he has such low self esteem. He should really get help with that.
You know he was talking about that big fat fucking greasy pig 'president'
More like 300 pounds. He's such an ugly fat fuck