Barr says he thinks spying occurred on 2016 Trump campaign

Way to aim high, "patriot".

"Yay! The "presuhdint" wasn't indicted but pulled a lot of ****! Hooray!!"

 

Narrative, narrative, blah, blah, narrative.

 

"Hooray! Mr. Trump is fake innocent because he wasn't indicted!! The report says he's not exonerated, but who cares!!? Not me!! Yay!!!!"

So much for holding a president to higher standards, or any standards at all. Aim high, Republicans.

 

Trump should be ashamed of himself for having hoaxes and smears thrown at him.

 

I agree that he should be ashamed, but because he's a lying bag of dicks who likely committed crimes.

He, however, is shameless. So are his willfully blind supporters.

 

Barr's remarks on this spying directly relate to Mueller's investigating. There are many criticisms of the investigation effort, I think it is a farse, that its aim is to hold this cloud off illegitimacy over Trump to justify strong opposition and resistance to everything the President does. The investigation has served that function well. However, to maintain the opposition and resistance it has been necessary to periodically leak on its progress and there had to be some indictments. The leaks and indictments maintained that cloud of illegitimacy, but haven't sustained the collusion claim which was the justification for investigating.

Opposition and resistance to Trump has suffered from the absence of convincing evidence of collusion as the leaks and indictments have made clear the breadth and depth of the effort, excesses and tendentiousness in the investigation and apparent illegalities in the prosecution. Now Barr is addressing the wrongdoing in the investigation and major players in the effort may be made to account for some of the questionable ways they've proceeded. Trump complained about his campaign being spied on, so Barr needs to establish when this actually all began.

Was it when Papadopoulos told Downer Mifsud said Russians had dirt on Hillary? How reliable is Mifsud, is that what Papadopoulos told Downer, did Downer tell anyone about this before he acknowledges (2 months later), what was Halpern's role, why was Priestap there, did Steele play any role? The FBI's investigating ostensibly began in July 2016, when Downer described Papadopoulos' boastful drunken utterances, why were Mifsud, Halpern, Priestap and Downer in London when this went down two months before the FBI began investigating? What justified that? Was it Steele's work?

There's a timeline for Steele's work, he delivered and was paid for his reports earlier. This work was improperly characterized by the law firm, but it wasn't FBI spying, this was a private effort commissioned by Hillary for dirt on Trump and something from a foreign source of value to her campaign, probably about as illegal as Cohen's hush money payments to pole dancers. However, there's a question about whether Steele's dossier reports were disseminated to other participants in the subsequently 'official' FBI investigatory effort. This is troubling (if true) because it would both affect the objectivity of the investigators and could provide evidence of an earlier start. Then there's the whole issue of the veracity of that dossier as much of it remained uncorroborated many months later when it was nonetheless used to support warrant requests to monitor Carter Page's phone.

The FISA warrant issue is another matter Barr should be concerned about in two areas; compliance with the FISA procedures, and, more importantly, how this enables the monitoring of communications with others, by people the monitored individual calls. This would enable the FBI to monitor all of Trump's calls to anyone if Page ever called him. Enough has been reported on this to call into question the 'candor' of the FBI's applications and its procedural compliance with the strictures of the FISA court (apparently no new intelligence was adduced in each of the subsequent warrant renewals). Were any of those handling this process recipients of Steele's updates? Why did they rely on uncorroborated allegations? How come exonerating evidence relating to Page's prior collaboration with FBI counterintelligence was not reported in the warrant application and renewals? What intelligence did the FBI obtain from monitoring Trump's calls?

Then there's the issue of bias among the investigators. If, as I suspect, top figures in the intelligence community had been receiving and discussing among themselves, the updates from Steele's dossier long before any investigation was officially launched, given the character of that dossier (and Steele's explicit bias), this could not be an objective effort from the outset. We don't need to belabor those text messages between Strzok and his adulterous mistress, or McCabe's involvement, but should acknowledge how this casts a strong doubt on their motivations and the integrity of their effort.

There's plenty to sustain Barr's uncertainty over this investigation of Trump's collusion, in my view the evidence of perfidy in the FBI's effort is stronger than that of Trump's collusion to defeat Hillary.

 

Misfud has ties to the CIA and MI5 and he is the one that brought up the Clinton email question. It is also looking like this started in general against all of the Republican candidates in 2015 and became an obsession in 2016 when it looked like Trump would win the nomination.

Spygate.

 

That's funny.

Trump should be ashamed of your claim that something bad is, somehow, likely.

 

It takes a liberal to be angry that our President is not a traitor.

 

Who did the spying and who ordered the spying?

FBI and Obama?

 

No you have not gotten the final report on Trump, not by a long shot. You will note that the lawyers on Mueller's team are starting to speak out.

 

Any prosecutor can only accuse. A prosecutor accuses and does their best to uncover evidence that will later convict by jury, or in this particular case, convict in the senate.

Mueller himself, 19 team prosecutors, 40 FBI agents, 2800 subpoenas, 40 million dollars, and almost two years of painstaking investigation produced a nothing burger.

No indictment, no collusion, no wrongdoing by Trump. That the MSM has convicted Trump means nothing at all.

 

Where?

I hope that you're not referring to the reports that someone said that somebody said something.

 

Yes, I think he was a "plant". What is interesting is the timing since Papadopoulos met Mifsud in March, four months before the FBI allegedly began their investigation. If Mifsud was a plant, the investigating must have begun earlier. I think Papadopoulos was a "target of opportunity", recent graduate, unexpectedly named by Trump as a foreign policy advisor, trying to burnish his resume with academic contacts in Europe, they set up this relatively unknown scholar to rumor Russia had Hillary's missing emails.

Perhaps, but even on election day nobody thought Trump had the slightest chance of winning the election.

 

"Perhaps, but even on election day nobody thought Trump had the slightest chance of winning the election."

Even so, they felt that they needed an insurance policy.

 

Trump didn't find someone to look into "spying" on him when he felt there was a cabal out to get him? Really? You're as much as saying Trump is dumber than a post.

 

Liberals would be smart to support a conservative public network for same reason conservatives are smart to continue supporting NPR.

 

Some Trumpites don't have the good sense to squirm.

 

The "Deep State" is a figment of fevered conservative minds.

 

Well considering that the last time Barr was AG he launched an vast illegal spying program on hundreds of thousands of private citizen's international phone calls, I'd say he has direct experience on illegal spying.

OTOH, legal surveillance is not spying. Perhaps he was just confused or more likely playing his "trump" card.

 

He was smooching Bonespurs' orange buttocks.

 

*LOL*

Uh, no. Just no.

No indictment doesn't mean no wrongdoing. Why you trumpers keep celebrating someone who wasn't exonerated, and yet not indicted for reasons we don't know yet is bizarre.

That's like boasting about not dying after getting the tar beaten out of you in a fight.

 

You fugure, do you, I back Useless Hillary and Friends because I had the good sense not to support the freebooting con artist you inflicted on the country? Hohhhh-Kayyyyy...

 

I think the shock and dismay over describing a counterintelligence investigation and criminal investigation into an opposition campaign as "spying" can be considered squirming. As if a counterintelligence investigation and criminal investigation into an opposition campaign is acceptable in any terms.

 

Trump is a freebooting con man.