Omnibus Politics Thread: Campaign 2016 EditionFollow

You dumb liberal. He says "if" it were reversed, not "when it actually is reversed." Someone has to read emails.

Um... To spy on foreign operatives? Terrorists? Was that a trick question?

You're not seriously suggesting that the point of having an intelligence service is to be used by the party in charge of the executive branch to dig up dirt on political opponents so as to maintain their party's power, do you? Cause that seems awfully like exactly the sort of "abuse of power" that FISA was passed to prevent.

Edited, Apr 27th 2017 5:00pm by gbaji

One of these things is not like the other.

You swing from "OH! Them Dems absolutely did this!" to "seems to be the case". It's stuff like this which we keep pointing out as examples of your inconsistency that you claim you never do.

Just trying to help you see what you're doing. I'd hate for you to continue to embarrass youself like that.

They have to look at the person's linkedin profile first to see if they're spies.

Da, comrade.

I guess it'll be a while before we win so much we'll be sick of it.

Which would be a welcome change of pace from just being sick of it.

Maybe might have a budget. Also:



Everyone around here will be breathing a lot easier this week, assuming this goes through as planned. Slowly warming up to having Trump as President since most of his stupid ideas aren't going anywhere. If he can continue like this, being generally inept and powerless, I might just vote for him in 4 years.

Edited, May 1st 2017 7:17am by someproteinguy

trump thinks Andrew Jackson would have prevented the Civil War. Really? http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/331349-trump-why-was-there-the-civil-war Caution Autoplay is one when you load the page.

I almost would get a premium membership again, just to rate you up, right now.

As someone who lived with Jonwin's knowledge of the Civil War and had to listen to him constantly give talks about Maryland and the Civil War, I am flabbergasted at how stupid 45 is.

Also Jackson almost stated the Civil War when he threaten to send troops to S.C.

The Civil War, the Palestinian-Israel conflict...there's no reason why these things had to happen.

Well you have to pass the time somehow. No one likes sitting in the hut all day just waiting for the lions to attack.

Sure. But it wasn't just the Obama administration folks. It was also the news media. The prevailing response to Trumps claim was that it was a ridiculous conspiratorial thing, because of course, no US president would actually do this to an incoming president during the transition. It's unthinkable! Unconstitutional. Probably totally illegal. And certainly unethical.

And then, when it turned out that this is precisely what was done, suddenly... silence. Or, the narrative changed from "there's no way that could happen", to "there's nothing unusual about this happening", or "well, if it happened, there must have been a good reason". All of which I find to be wishful thinking after the fact. The first and pretty universal reaction was that this was something that should not be done. Period. It was only after it was discovered that this wasn't just some unfounded rumors floating around some fringe conservative sites, but had actually happened, that the excuses started flowing.

So yeah. I find that problematic. It's a somewhat obvious and extreme partisan circling of wagons IMO.



Honestly? I'm not sure that those who did it even thought about the ramifications of it. Again, maybe I'm biased (hah maybe!), but I've seen a pattern of the Obama administration using supposedly non-political agencies of the government for political reasons, sometimes quite blatantly. I think they just assumed they could do this because they've gotten away with it so many times already. And frankly, the reaction when it came out that they did spy on the Trump team kinda supports that idea.

If you're confident that the media will side with you if something like this comes out, you're a lot more likely to just go ahead and do it. It's possible that they honestly thought they'd find something so bad that they could maybe 'undo' the election results (dunno, seems absurd, but so is the action itself). Maybe when they didn't find any kind of clear smoking gun they could present to the public, much less our legal system, they scrambled to keep what they could for potential later political use? Again, it's hard to say what they were thinking.

But this is the same group of people (same freaking person in fact) who thought they could just make up a story about an offensive video causing the Benghazi attack and that no one would figure it out. So yeah, "thinking things through" doesn't seem to be a strong suit here. I think they just go so used to skirting the rules for whatever gain they could get that it likely didn't even occur to them that this might just be crossing the line politically speaking.



About one person, who was only tangentially connected to the campaign, and I believe not at all connected to the transition.



They did none of that. They ignored the "tip" for a couple years. It was only when Trump became the GOP frontrunner that suddenly they decided this was important. It looks a lot more like the cart leading the horse to me.



Again though, they did nothing at all for the first couple years after the tip. And it was only one person. They didn't investigate that one person. They investigated a number of people in the campaign, seemingly entire based on a politically drive speculative narrative about "connections and collusion with Russia". There is literally zero evidence, other than simply doing business in the country, that Trump has any such relationship with Russia though. That's the problem here. As far as we can tell from our own external view of the timeline, the government didn't start taking action on this at all, until *after* the political narrative started. And that was driven, not from intelligence sources, but political opposition sources.

I suppose it's possible that we may someday get a clearer picture of what happened, but so far, it certainly looks like the Obama administration basically jumped in with the intelligence apparatus as a means of helping the Clinton campaign beat Trump by trying to find any information that could prop up the existing political narrative. I see nothing to indicate that there was any sort of investigation of Trump or his people prior to the campaign, so it's a bit suspicious for it to start then.



That seems like an amazing coincidence though. An unbelievable coincidence IMO. A political conspiracy isn't necessary to explain it, but given the timing? It's the most likely explanation.

I'm not going to go back and re-read every single thing I've previously posted in a given thread, so as to make sure I don't use a slightly different adjective when describing something somewhat similar to something I previously described. You get that this is what you are doing, right? You're scanning through the thread, and trying to find discrepancies in my word choice and then use that in some kind of silly "gotcha!" response.

It doesn't matter if I said "I think this definitely happened", and later "It seems like this is what happened", and even later "it's possible that this is what happened". None of that matters, unless you're really looking for something to talk about other than "what happened". How about, instead of obsessing about word choice, you actually, maybe, think about the subject itself? We can debate probabilities if you want, but that's really not the issue.

The issue is that we have two competing narratives:

1. Trump and/or his team is secretly in league with the Russians and are putting their interests above those of the US, and in return the Russians helped Trump during the campaign by leaking information stolen from the DNC servers. The Obama administration, out of concern about this potential collusion, and the impact it may have on the election, engaged the intelligence services to spy on Trump's team to find out what was going on. They kept this surveillance secret out of a national security need.

2. Trump is not in league the Russians, isn't putting their interests above the US, and any leaks of information from the DNC were done by a separate party with no collusion with Trump. The Obama administration, seeing an opportunity to take advantage of rumors about collusion during the campaign, used that as an excuse to engage the intelligence services to spy on Trump's team to see if they could dig up dirt that could be used during the campaign (or during his term once he won). They kept this surveillance secret because they knew it would look bad politically if people knew they were doing this.


I happen to think that option 2 is the more likely explanation. For a number of reasons, which I've already explained. And yeah, at least part of that stems from the initial attempt to deny that they were spying in the first place. If you honestly really thought there was a massive national security interest at stake, wouldn't you be up front with it? Wouldn't you openly engage in investigation? I mean, we're talking about assuming the Obama administration really believed that Trump was some kind of Manchurian Candidate here. You'd think they'd do everything they could to expose such a thing, right? And if they had found something, they'd have made sure to release it, very publicly, and very loudly, *before* the election.

That didn't happen though, did it? No one knew that this was going on. Which points to "digging up dirt" as a far more likely explanation. Given that the one and only use of this intelligence gathering and unmasking was the leak about the conversation Flynn had with the Russian Ambassador, there's an example of this data already being used in this manner. That leak was illegal. According to Rice, unmasking is commonly done, and only a small circle of people supposedly had access to the unmasked info (in theory, just Rice herself and whomever she shared that information with). Um... Which puts us with two conclusions: Either more people had the authority to request unmasked intelligence data (and did so), or she shared the unmasked data (either leaked it herself directly, or shared it with someone who did, either one of which is incredibly questionable).

It's not even about whether Flynn did anything wrong (as far as I know, he didn't break any laws though). Someone did break the law with the leak. The only people who could have leaked it would have had to have had access to the unmasked data. So who did it? First obvious answer is Rice, or someone very close to her. And yeah, it was obviously done for political reasons.

So we can proceed down the path that assumes that the purpose to which this information has already been used was the reason it was collected in the first place, or speculate some other completely different reason, for which we have no actual evidence to believe. Well, unless we take the word of the folks who gathered up the intelligence in unmasked form, right?

There's a point where belief gets strained. The Obama administration position on this is well past that now.

Edited, May 2nd 2017 7:54pm by gbaji