Ok, so when Comey announced that Clinton’s emails were being investigated just days before the election, that was what, exactly? It can’t be both ways. Either they can divulge what they are doing or they can’t, unless you mean to suggest that announcement was at Obama’s direction.
Moreover–and I know you know a lot more about this stuff than I do, and I legit would like to understand it better-- if it were as simple as you made it out to be, how could the intelligence community ever investigate the executive branch, which is happening even as we speak.
Edit: just to be clear, I think there’s a LOT of blame to go around, not just the intelligence community, and ourselves are on the list.
When Comey made his Clinton announcement, it was a stunning breach of protocol. But to be clear: it involved him speaking on the record about an investigation of a private citizen (Hillary Clinton).
The FBI cannot officially directly “investigate” a sitting president, unless directed to by the Attorney General or a special prosecutor acting in the stead of the Atttorney General. The FBI is part of the Department Of Justice, which is part of the same executive branch as the president.
Essentially, the US constitution and federal law makes it a major no-no for one piece of the executive branch to come out against the sitting President. The checks to a President on matters of wrong-doing fall to Congress, who can convene a hearing and then call members of the intel community to testify under oath. At that point the intel community can go on the record with damning information, if it exists.
RE: Comey… Let me also be clear that if his FBI knew about these Trump ties to Russia and how constant they were, and if Comey sat on that info while releasing info on a go-nowhere nothingburger involving Clinton, he may be facing future investigations over his own conduct at the head of the agency. Because yeah, that’s really bad if it went down that way.
WASHINGTON — Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.
American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.
The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.
But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.
And that raises the question of what motivates Trump’s Russia policy in the first place. The famed dossier compiled by former British MI6 agent Christopher Steele, alleging that Russian President Vladimir Putin cultivated Trump over several years as part of a plan to subvert the West, contained some errors, but U.S. officials have told CNN that they have corroborated some of its information. Trump and Putin have dismissed the dossier’s allegations, but Trump was vehement during the campaign about the need to transform relations with Putin’s regime and perhaps lift all sanctions against Russia.
The most important question the dossier raises is whether Trump colluded with Russia in its interference in the U.S. presidential election. That is crucial not just because it might constitute treason, but because if it did occur, that alone would amount to kompromat. Forget the prostitutes. If Trump and the Kremlin worked together, that fact alone gives Putin something with which to pressure Trump to act in Russia’s interest.
Even if there was no direct collusion between Trump and Russia, his aides may have made arrangements without his knowledge. The dossier claims that a representative from Trump’s presidential campaign, Carter Page, met last July with Igor Sechin, head of the Russian oil monopoly Rosneft and a senior Kremlin official. Sechin reportedly offered a 19 percent stake in Rosneft in exchange for lifting sanctions, and Page was “non-committal in response.”
Nobody reads them any more at least not directly. What the report gets turned into 30 second and 140 character tweets, Plus for about 1/2 the population what they report is dismissed as a giant lie
This stuff is pretty jaw dropping. We’ve had a real problem over the last few years with rot at the top in the military and intelligence communities filtering down to the rank and file, and this is just going to make any attempt at shoring up professionalism and responsibility even harder.
Next I expect to see stories of Trump’s DoD appointees ordering “Deus Vult” painted on our military vehicles and making repeated viewings of Alexander Nevsky mandatory for the troops.
[quote]“I don’t remember talking to any Russian officials, ever. Certainly during the time we’re talking about,” he said, calling the allegations “boggling.”
“I have knowingly never talked to any intelligence official or anyone in Russia regarding anything of what’s under investigation,” he said. “I have never had any connection to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin or the Russian government before, during or after the campaign.”[/quote]
Really? You were an advisor to Yanukovich, Russia’s puppet in Ukraine, and you never spoke to any Russian officials? How did you do your job, then?
So there seems to be a lot of smoke here, but I’m not sure there’s any evidence of a fire. Trump’s inner circle talked to some Russian operatives during the campaign. This was known before the election. We have no idea what was said during the conversations, though, so all outrage is purely speculation. I mean it seems to line up with the hacking and leaks of DNC emails, but nothing difinitive yet.
These folks have simple outs: “Sure, I talked to Russians and French and Australians and Brits and all manner of people during the campaign. That’s my business.”
Manafort has plausible deniability so far to suggest that if the people he was talking to were agents that he certainly didn’t know about it at the time.
So am I missing something? Or are we expecting the other shoe to drop soon?
It kind of depends on things we don’t know, like the identities of the agents (do they have plausible covers, or are they blatantly FSB management?) and the content of the intercepted communications, which hasn’t been disclosed in any of the reporting I’ve seen (other than for Flynn). The reports talk about intercepts and communications data, so it’s possible the intercepted calls are fairly innocuous (at least by Trump admin standards), but the Feds think there may be fire in the calls they only know the existence of.
I kind of agree that, so far, all we’ve really had is confirmation of what was reported (and denied) during the campaign. So far, the fire is just that contradiction, and obviously the context of Trump’s bizarre approach to Russia.
I’m betting someone does indeed know the contents of those conversations, but that sort of thing if it exists poses a problem, because it’s going to be compartmented up the wazoo.
Still, I can’t really think of any reason for these Trump officials to have been in contact with the people they were in contact with that doesn’t at the very least call into question their wisdom and understanding of political and diplomatic reality. So at the least they are stupid, or they are mendacious, one or the other. Neither is good, though perhaps only one is truly actionable.
Pretty much rule one of talking with a foreign power, if you are in a position of power, is to assume the other guy is an agent. Most of the time, even if he or she isn’t directly in the employ of the security services, what you say is going to get back to the security services. It’s pretty elemental tradecraft.
Who will die in jail? And for what exactly? These tweets are as fulfilling as those “OMG u guyz, I just got my hands on the most amazing and damning thing about this person. I’ll reveal it in 13 hours…” Only to never deliver anything in any capacity.
Peanut gallery informers are wearing out their welcome.
