“The former FBI director puts great weight on yet another distinction that is laughable by any reasonable standard. He says that the Trump campaign wasn’t being investigated, just four people associated with it. But this wasn’t a coincidence. It wasn’t as though they were all under investigation for disparate, random things. The FBI was probing whether they were conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election. To pretend this had nothing to do with the campaign is completely ridiculous.”
To expand on that excellent point just a bit: Who does DJT trust? If he were to have been conspiring with Russia would he be doing it through peripheral figures like Carter Page and George Papadopolous? Or would be be more likely to have used — oh, I don’t know — Rudy Giuliani (just to pick a name)?
And let’s not forget the clumsy way the FBI attempted to roll George P. up in a currency violation (the $10,000 ‘fee’ that an intermediary handed him for consultation). Had P not left the money in Greece he would be sitting in jail right now and the Dems would be incrementally closer to making an apparent case against Trump.
Excellent point!
If the FBI wanted to investigate just the four people, they could have done it with regualar warrants. These people were just used to get a FISA warrant with its two-op surveillance permission. Nearly every person in the Trump circle, up to and including Trump, could be caught up in it. They were probably already being spied on, but the evildoers in the FBI, CIA etc. needed something to make it legal.