Russia Gate

[FriendlyFire]

The crime was the FBI lying to a fisa court to spy on an innocent man being framed as a traitor

Remember annexing lands is good when Russia dose it /s
The guy big mouth supporting Russia is what attracted the attention of the FBI, Birds of a feather.
Its just amazing that Republicans are outraged by this, when the entire country is on fire.

“Washington and other Western powers have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change,” Page said during a speech in Moscow in front of prominent Russian government officials.

Page called the Obama administration’s approach to Russia “sanctimonious,” with an air of “moral superiority” comparable to that of a slave-owner to a slave. He criticized the administration for encouraging the overthrow of Ukraine’s Russian-backed President Viktor Yanukovych.

During his speech, in which he appeared to defend the authoritarian model in former Soviet Central Asian republics, Page cited a 2012 decree by Putin

After dodging repeated questions about whether he would support a lifting of U.S. sanctions against Russia imposed over its annexation of Crimea and east Ukraine intervention, Page said the U.S. political system is “not as liberal” as it appears.

https://web.archive.org/web/2016071...-mutual-respect-among-nations-in-moscow-visit

 

[cardgame]

The crime was the FBI lying to a fisa court to spy on an innocent man being framed as a traitor

Who's the innocent man here?

 

[innonimatu]

If the "Russiagate conspiracy" was supposed to be used against Trump, why was it not used during the campaign when Trump's campaign was flailing -such as during Trump's handsy comment on female anatomy? Instead, it was leaked piecemeal through Buzzfeed of all places after mainstream news agencies didn't publish it because they didn't know how to deal with it.

That they had to shop around to get it published should tell you how much it stunk. But ignoring that, and the absurdities within, lets of people fervently came to believe in this report after the election. And why only after? For two reasons: one it didn't looked like it would be necessary, it looked like Trump would lose anyway. Clinton's people within the bureaucracies wanted to look like good servants, doing things to help her, but weren't really pressed to work hard. A cloud of suspicion was enough. Producing details might backfire because there was zero evidence for the allegations.

But the people actually involved in the russagate thing weren't the common political party people, it was just a handful of people within the state bureaucracy seeking to impress what they thought would be the next executive, aiming for some reward for services and loyalty. A small game. But one they lost, and now had to deal with a hostile administration who might go after them. Russiagate as it developed after the election was a preemptive strike against Trump: while "under investigation", or at least public controversy, he would hesitate to fire the people who had been allied with Clinton and were now accusing him, because that would seem to validate their accusations. It was very obvious. Then the media took it and ran away with t because it was polemic and therefore sold. The public embraced it because those in denial of the defeat could blame someone else for it. Etc. Bureaucrats covering their ass wouldn't manage to built it to what it became: it was millions of people on the defeated side desperately wanted a narrative to deny their responsibility in the electoral defeat... it wasn't their candidate that stunk, it was "the russians"

It really is laughable, looking at it with some distance.

Additionally, I do not get this insistence on defending Michael Flynn. The guy has dangerous ideas out the wazoo, to the point his own staff would make fun of him for his fantasies and delusions. Flynn was also no political neophyte who got trapped in a web beyond his understanding. He was a high profile general who was appointed National Security Advisor. He should know better than anyone the very legalistic approaches the US takes to counterintelligence investigations. At the end of the day, Flynn lied to FBI investigators while serving as National Security Advisor, a position where the occupant should not be lying especially if Flynn was convinced said contacts were legal.

The Flynn lied to the FBI thing has been proven as a fishing expedition to prompt "lies", the intention was entrapment. The alleged lies were inconsequential details, the kind that people don't hope to know exactly unless they assume they're going to prosecuted and exercise their right to remain silent and speak only with layers present. The very bad thing with this is that it can be done to anyone, it's the sort of practice that needs to be denounced and condemned: law and its enforcement agencies abused for political aims, where they are supposed to be neutral.
Flynn was not naive except in assuming that Trump would see thought the thing. Trump was naive and dropped Flynn, which he didn't have to do at all.

And "legalistic approaches", the US? :lol the laws is or is not applied according to the interests of prosecutors.

 

[Berzerker]

Remember annexing lands is good when Russia dose it /s The guy big mouth supporting Russia is what attracted the attention of the FBI, Birds of a feather. Its just amazing that Republicans are outraged by this, when the entire country is on fire.

And he was dressed provocatively

From your link

President Barack Obama delivered a speech at the same graduation event in 2009

Democrats did it, Democrats did it... So Page said the US was hypocritical about human rights and democracy. And he's wrong? Page was working for the CIA on Russian matters. And when the CIA told the FBI he had worked for them that information was kept from the fisa court because it was exculpatory. Steele framed him as a traitor and you're okay with that.

Who's the innocent man here?

Carter Page and all the people around him. Family, friends, business acquaintances, etc. Every person the FBI spied on as a result of their lying to a fisa court.

 

[Ajidica]

That they had to shop around to get it published should tell you how much it stunk. But ignoring that, and the absurdities within, lets of people fervently came to believe in this report after the election. And why only after? For two reasons: one it didn't looked like it would be necessary, it looked like Trump would lose anyway. Clinton's people within the bureaucracies wanted to look like good servants, doing things to help her, but weren't really pressed to work hard. A cloud of suspicion was enough. Producing details might backfire because there was zero evidence for the allegations.

But the people actually involved in the russagate thing weren't the common political party people, it was just a handful of people within the state bureaucracy seeking to impress what they thought would be the next executive, aiming for some reward for services and loyalty. A small game. But one they lost, and now had to deal with a hostile administration who might go after them. Russiagate as it developed after the election was a preemptive strike against Trump: while "under investigation", or at least public controversy, he would hesitate to fire the people who had been allied with Clinton and were now accusing him, because that would seem to validate their accusations. It was very obvious. Then the media took it and ran away with t because it was polemic and therefore sold. The public embraced it because those in denial of the defeat could blame someone else for it. Etc. Bureaucrats covering their ass wouldn't manage to built it to what it became: it was millions of people on the defeated side desperately wanted a narrative to deny their responsibility in the electoral defeat... it wasn't their candidate that stunk, it was "the russians"

I think you need to start separating the underlying concerning activity between the Trump campaign and various disreputable Eastern Europeans, and the media hysteria/Democratic Party looking to explain away the 2016 defeat. Right now, you are dismissing the underlying activity because it was used by other parties to advance their own narrative.

The Flynn lied to the FBI thing has been proven as a fishing expedition to prompt "lies", the intention was entrapment. The alleged lies were inconsequential details, the kind that people don't hope to know exactly unless they assume they're going to prosecuted and exercise their right to remain silent and speak only with layers present. The very bad thing with this is that it can be done to anyone, it's the sort of practice that needs to be denounced and condemned: law and its enforcement agencies abused for political aims, where they are supposed to be neutral.
Flynn was not naive except in assuming that Trump would see thought the thing. Trump was naive and dropped Flynn, which he didn't have to do at all.

The trouble with that argument is that absolutely nothing forced Flynn not to tell the truth in that interview. And while FBI officials appear to have discussed the strategic purpose of the interview, there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with that. To be sure, a possible criminal prosecution based on the Logan Act case was weak leverage, given that the statute has virtually no history of enforcement, but agents hold relatively weak leverage over witnesses all the time. And yes, it’s wrong for the bureau to set up an interview in the absence of a viable case in order to induce a witness to lie for purposes of prosecution, but there’s no evidence that is what happened—merely evidence that the possibility was on a list of possible strategic goals for the interview. And yes, the bureau will sometimes confront a witness with a lie and specifically warn the person about lying being a felony, but that is not a legal requirement.

In fact, the Flynn interview gave Flynn every opportunity to tell the truth. As the FBI’s partially redacted memo documenting Flynn’s interview reflects, the questions were careful. They were specific. The agents, as Strzok later recalled in a formal FBI interview of his own, planned to try to jog Flynn’s memory if he said he could not remember a detail by using the exact words they knew he had used in his conversation with Kislyak. And Flynn, as he admitted in open court—twice—did not tell the truth. That is not entrapment or a set-up, and it is very far indeed from outrageous government conduct. It’s conducting an interview—and a witness at the highest levels of government lying in it.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/flynn-redux-what-those-fbi-documents-really-show
Flynn lied to the FBI and then to Pence on a material fact - his contacts with the Russian ambassador- in the context of an ongoing counter-intelligence investigation. It was not an inconsequential detail like "Flynn actually attended a reception with the Russian UN ambassador instead of the Russian ambassador to the US and misspoke in passing". In multiple situations Flynn, as the National Security Advisor during a counterintelligence investigation, either deliberately misrepresented his communications with the Russian ambassador or demonstrated an active disregard for accurate description of his communications with the Russian ambassador. Flynn had been around long enough at the highest levels of the US security services to know better.

 

[innonimatu]

https://www.lawfareblog.com/flynn-redux-what-those-fbi-documents-really-show
Flynn lied to the FBI and then to Pence on a material fact - his contacts with the Russian ambassador- in the context of an ongoing counter-intelligence investigation. It was not an inconsequential detail like "Flynn actually attended a reception with the Russian UN ambassador instead of the Russian ambassador to the US and misspoke in passing". In multiple situations Flynn, as the National Security Advisor during a counterintelligence investigation, either deliberately misrepresented his communications with the Russian ambassador or demonstrated an active disregard for accurate description of his communications with the Russian ambassador. Flynn had been around long enough at the highest levels of the US security services to know better.

This lawfareblog is a partisan site and you must know it, home to several russiagate conspiracy theorists talking about the coming smoking guns that never were. There was a single interview with Flynn by the FBI, not "multiple situations". The interviewers were actively conspiring to entrap Flynn asking questions about details fo his conversation, trying to catch him "lying" about a detail. He did not deny talking to the Russian ambassador. The details of the conversation between the future NSA to the president and the ambassador should not in any case be for the ears of FBI agents who were actively conspiring against the president. Strozk, one of the sources quoted in the piece you linked to, has his history of political partisanship and subversion of the bureaucracy for personal political goals well known, having been fired. His aim to overthrow the elected executive by any means available to him is on the record, his conversations with colleges about it having been published. This is not a reliable source and his notes from the interview don't even deserve credibility: an agent who hates someone politically cannot do a credible investigation of that person. As for Flynn's "admissions", he has his son threatened, had been dropped by Trump, and was misled by lawyers who were themselves connected to other figures of the case. The guy was a victim of abuse of power by the FBI. Abuse is abuse, regardless of whom it targets.

Context is important here. The new administration knew that the outgoing Obama administration had been spying on its campaign and trying to concoct a phony "russian connection". Trump had been threatened with a dossier that anyone could see was a compilation of lies, the sole basis - and this is important, the sole basis - for this spying by Obama/Clinton machine on a political opponent. The people of the new administration knew that a dirty bureaucratic war was being waged against them and obviously they would not cooperate willingly with the people conducting it. This is politics 101! Strozk wasn't a neutral official doing his job: he was a political enemy seeking a way to overthrow the new administration.
In this too lawfareblog is totally rotten: it pretends that the origin of the investigations didn't matter, but of course it mattered.

Trump's mistake was bowing at the start and firing Flynn, the one person he had who knew something about the "intelligence community" political promiscuity. Had he not fired him the housecleaning would have been done very quickly.

I care about the past record being recorded truthfully, and I care about bureaucratic interference with democratic politics, more worryingly whet it's police and intelligence agencies doing it. You should care too. It's a bigger issue that what side of the coin got to rule in 2016. It really threatens democracy. And a threat to the already very imperfect democracy in the world's most influential country is serious even for people outside it.

 

[EnglishEdward]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...tion-figure-unconscious-in-hospital-says-aide

Russian activist Alexei Navalny unconscious after being 'poisoned'

It seems it is a dangerous business being an opposition politician in Russia.

 

[innonimatu]

On the russiagate thing, how do those who still believe explain this recording of Halper saying that Flynn would be brought down, before the CIA's mouthpiece in the Washington Post set in motion the process to do it?

Taibbi: Yes. So his relationship with Halper has deteriorated over the years, Halper being his doctoral advisor. And he says that with Halper’s permission, he had begun taping exchanges with with Halper as early as 2015, so that really so that he could go back and point out to him inconsistencies in his academic advice, I think is the idea. So he has lots of tape of Halper talking, and the two of them during these conversations. And after he met with the Durham people, the first time, he went back and reviewed some of those conversations, and some of them he didn’t expect to hear anything terribly interesting. But in one of them, it was two days before the big leak involving Michael Flynn. If you remember that story, the one that was written in the Washington Post involving reporting to David Ignatius, and he’s asking Halper, "Hey, do you think would be a good idea for me to go try to work for Michael Flynn who is now the National Security Advisor?" This guy had a long record of working with Republican politicians, you know, why not? And Halper says, "No, I don’t think he’s going to be around very long."
Horton: In fact, let’s just put that conversation here.

Horton: So what did we just hear?
Taibbi: Okay. Yeah. So basically this is January 10, 2017, and that’s two days before the Washington Post came out with this story that ended up having enormous consequences because the January 12 story said that Flynn had been on the phone with the Russian ambassador, Sergei Kislyak. And as a result of that leak, which incidentally was an illegal leak of telephonic surveillance, the FBI decided to re-interview Flynn. It was a result of that re-interview that they built their false statements charge and prosecuted Flynn. So the notion that somebody would know two days before that leak happened that Flynn was in deep trouble that he was not going to be around for very long, and that "if you know how these things work," and that his opponents and so-called enemies are going to "turn up the heat" and all that stuff, it’s very suggestive of, you know, perhaps foreknowledge that something bad was going to happen to Flynn. From Schrage’s point of view, in the way he puts it was like, "I would have thought that the last person who would have job security issues in the Trump administration would be Flynn because he one of the only people who have real experience in Trump’s inner circle." But, you know, the tapes incident suggests otherwise.

The only way all the pieces fit together is: there was a group of people inside the soup of letters agencies in the US bent on scaring the new administration and making it clear the power they weilded. Scaring a new president is in fact business as usual for some of these people, but this was far worse than usual. And that was because they were scared (and had reason to be) over their own careers: they needed a preemptive strike before they were struck. Against Flynn because that was the one person whom they immediately feared in the new administration: he had experience with the "intelligence community" and could figure out their interference into the election and get some of them replaced, fired and prosecuted. More importantly: he could tell Trump whom to appoint to the top jobs in replacement. So he had to go. And the way to do that was good old-fashioned bureaucratic politics with help from the friends in the media.

So what started as boot-licking for career advancement under an expected Clinton administration turned into a fight to prevent any consequences from that by forcing the new administration into the defensive. And it succeeded because Trump thought he could just move on and fired the one person he could have used to navigate those DC waters in the beginning. It could have ended with Flynn's firing. It's funny really because the people in the FBI and CIA who had helped Clinton could then rest and expect some peace, Trump probably just wanted that also. Here, I did what you wanted, you can keep your jobs, take this peace offering and let's end it not hard feelings...
But by then the Democratic Party grandees had seized "russian collusion" as an excuse for their defeat - and ran with it! Its a comedy of errors at the imperial court, as different actors, different groups, seek to protect themselves at the expense of others by taking over the tools the others created and changing their aims. Comey just wanted the thing to go away, and then his friend Mueller gets appointed to do an investigation that could not overthrow Trump (no way to find evidence of something that didn't happen), but would make him inconvenienced and angry enough to strike back and fire Comey and the others! Thus negating their earlier success with russiagate. And, also part of the comedy, after three years of circus the DNC failed to use it to overthrow Trump or even to seriously undermine his popularity: only those who already hated Trump got on board with russiagate. But the DNC got stuck with it, had to conduct a failed impeachment and come out as losers.

 

[innonimatu]

And I'll have to say one more thing, to those who swore by the Steele Report, and still invoke lies from it now. What do you have to say about the source?

we found out finally who Christopher Steele’s sources were after being told they were high-level Russian government employees and people who work for powerful oligarchs and all this stuff this whole time. It turns out that what now? Where did he get this stuff?
Taibbi: From a Washington-based analysts from the Brookings Institution named Igor Danchenko, who didn’t live in-country. He did travel to Russia for the story, but in an affidavit the FBI released where they interview him, he says he didn’t have any contact with any senior intelligence or any intelligence officials, that part of his M.O. was to drink heavily with the sub-sources that he talked openly about his sub-sources trying to monetize their relationship with him. It’s absurd that anybody ever took any of this stuff seriously. And if you read the FBI’s interview with this guy, you realize he was just kind of selling wolf whistles the whole time. He was openly going around telling people they can make money by giving him information. And they guessed what he wanted and gave him some information, but it’s not reliable.

 

[Naskra]

Nice work innonimatu. Important side note: Flynn is still under gag order.

 

[Zardnaar]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...tion-figure-unconscious-in-hospital-says-aide



It seems it is a dangerous business being an opposition politician in Russia.

Didn't fall out a window though.

 

[red_elk]

He is moved to Germany.
Preliminary diagnose given in Omsk hospital was poisoning. Blood tests showed only 0.2 permille of alcohol and very low blood sugar.
Moscow forensics lab can possibly find traces of poison if it was something rare.
Before moving to Germany he was in coma, but stable.
Germans not saying anything, took pause till Monday.