Posted on 02/03/2018 4:54:56 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
The FISA Abuse Memo is out and now we know why the Democrats were desperate to keep its contents hidden from the public: it confirms the worst fears not just of President Trump’s supporters but of everyone concerned about the abuse of police power, government corruption, and the sanctity of our elections.
The memo shows interference in the 2016 presidential election by hostile elements within a United States intelligence agency. It wasn’t the Russians we had to worry about—it was rogue actors at the highest levels of the FBI and Department of Justice. Left unanswered is to what extent the West Wing knew about or was complicit in this gross abuse of power.
What we now know:
1) The FBI’s case to the FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court was based almost entirely upon a partisan hit-job bought and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. Christopher Steele, the source of the dossier, had “financial and ideological motivations” to undermine Donald Trump according to the Nunes memo. In fact, the FBI’s file records that Steele told Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr that “he was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.”
2)Ohr’s wife was one of just seven employees at FusionGPS, the firm that was paying Christopher Steele. The personal financial relationship between the Ohrs and the dossier was concealed from the court.
3) The FBI could not corroborate the information in the Steele dossier, calling it only “minimally corroborated” but did not disclose this fact to the FISA Court thus leading it to believe that the information in the dossier was either FBI work-product or that it had been independently corroborated by the FBI. Neither was true.
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
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...... one more time for emphasis.
Curious what the FISA court does if anything.
Out of curiousity, when Hillary was fired by Jerry Zeifman, who served as chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings, was she also involved in the drafting of the original FISA legislation leading up to its becoming a law in 1978. Watergate promoted the initial FISA impetus, but didn’t get approved while Ford was in office, but only after Carter came into power.
I wonder if she hadn’t been aware or had plotted to circumvent the checks and balances between the Legislative and Executive Branches during the inception of FISA.
She seems to be a common denominator in both situations.
Yeah, and there’s some interesting background to Watergate that rarely gets mentioned. For instance, the “plumbers” had gotten their name a few years earlier from being tasked with tracking down leaks that were happening between Senate Democrats and the North Vietnamese. Basically dem staffers were trying to undermine Nixon in the Paris accords by leaking his negotiating positions to the other side. So Nixon was dealing with a political opposition that had been using the most devious and treasonous methods against him. Contrast this with the actions of friggin Clarence Page or whatever and there is simply no comparison.
Hate the pic - Nixon was a Patriot and does not deserve to be tainted by being likened to Obama.
What can it do? It's role is defined by statute, and I think most of the warrants it handles are approximately honest.
There is no way to design a system to prevent dishonest actors from abusing it. See Nifong (court problem?). Sometimes the court is the corrupt institution, see the PA courts directing kids to prisons for money.
The structure of FISA system is necessarily biased to trust in the executive (FBI/DOJ), as the courts are not in the business of gathering the evidence that justifies a warrant in the first place. There is a presumption of honesty. In FISA (and in criminal cases too), both the executive/cop and the court work together to have the warrant issue. Courts don;t discourage warrants, they are "fixers," telling the cop what has to go in the warrant application to pass future 4th amendment challenge, if any. It's not check and balance, it is teamwork.
I had completely forgotten about that. Yes...The Democratic Party...The Party of Treason.
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