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The FBI has to get the FISA court warrant to get the two hop surveillance. Once they had that they were free to surveil past and present communications between the person in the warrant and every person he communicated with and every person that first group communicated with. It is EVIL. They had a year to spy on Trump in every way they chose.
Four Americans who had the temerity to mount a credible, energetic challenge to Hitlery Clinton.
And they all just happened to work for the Trump campaign. How convenient. How that isn’t investigating the Trump campaign as Comey claims, is beyond me. It still doesn’t explain why they used a knowingly unverified dossier about candidate Trump as evidence for FISA warrants in order to spy on four Americans, especially when Comey claims Trump wasn’t a target. It makes no friggin’ sense.
So, he confirms they set out to get Trump even before the election.
“I’m sure there was lots of effort to figure out what the heck was going on with the Russians because we saw their effort blossom in the middle of June. But I’m not aware of any information before that at the end of July about the possibility that Americans were working with the Russians,” he said.
This, while the Democrats, the FBI, and the CIA at a minimum were quite busy "working with the Russians". They were gathering together the information from the Russians that was passed to Steele and on to the Clinton campaign. And the NYT and others.
And what could Comey possibly mean by the Russian efforts blossoming in the middle of June.
Papadop: duped / seduced by Italian (now wife), given 10k cash which he wisely left with European lawyers. Page: extorted using prior work for FBI helping them with anti-Russian counterintel. He clearly helped the USA but they probably flipped the script and accused him of being a double agent. Flynn, an anti-Trump maverick who was a known foreign policy freelancer. Probably extorted into infiltrating the Trump campaign. Manafort, a man with a theoretical 10-20 years of jail time but was never prosecuted (most similar tax cases are settled with fines). Possibly extorted into joining the Trump campaign.
Of course any or all of the four could have been Russian-connected but that is extremely doubtful. Any of the four could have been part of an election collusion scheme. However it is known that Halper and Mifsud have ties to western intelligence and that pretty much exonerates Papadop.
Page has a history with one of the very few successful takedowns of a russian agent. The Page collusion story was obviously being shopped. See http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/30/new-details-reinforce-fbi-used-fake-pretexts-start-investigating-trump/
Flynn is more of a mystery to me. Not sure what he was doing in 2016, but he was clearly part of a selective prosecution and hit job by McCabe in 2017. It's possible McCabe had earlier evidence from 2016 to go on, but it's much more likely that he just hated Trump and Flynn and wanted to take them out.
Manafort was the bad boy of the bunch but also hit with very selective prosecution for havng been part of the Trump campaign. "According to The Guardian, Manafort met with the WikiLeaks’ founder at the embassy three times—in 2013, 2015, and in spring 2016." see http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/29/guardians-manafort-story-far-just-another-evidence-less-spygate-smear-strategy/ Those stories seem to be post hoc narratives designed to justify the misuse of the intellgence services against a political opponent.
Even if you keep a very open mind about Russian collusion possibilities (which make no sense except perhaps as a general way to sow chaos), the misuse of the intelligence services is something fit for a banana republic. The deep state might well just be a bunch of over-eager McCabe types, but tossing the principles of justice over a botched political hit puts us way down on the slippery slope. Possibly without any way to recover without herculean political efforts, No republicans seem willing to step up and Dems are in the enemy camp.