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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day Well, the memo was released. You can read it in full here, and I recommend you do so because, on the evidence of much of Friday’s TV and radio coverage, most commentators only want to talk about it in the most shallow political terms. Whereas the questions it raises about state corruption in an age of round-the-clock technological surveillance are far more profound.
– Mark Steyn
Read the memo.
Holy.Fucking.Shit.
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Modern liberals see no problem in denying their political opponents free speech and freedom of association, and they condone violence too if it is in support of their cause.
And they’ll happily turn a blind eye to sexual abuse and oppression of women and minorities if they consider it is ‘politically correct’ to do so.
So it is hardly surprising that they also seek to corrupt the election process when they think it is necessary to do so.
Nah, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, which is slowly but surely is beginning to be exposed. How much remains to be seen and of what nature only time will tell, but I doubt it will be pretty. Here’s a longish primer on the background, with facts and reasonable speculations (much of the material is classified). And this blog is invaluable with regard to more current info and ongoing analysis.
What Alisa said. All of this is convincing me that the most optimistic of Trump supporters (Scott Adams, Thomas Wictor, Imperator Rex 3, drawandstrike, Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse) are correct: Trump is a student of Sun Tzu, and a showman, and has been misdirecting Democrats into a huge trap. Mueller’s Trump/Russia investigation is bait for Democrats: they cheer him on, demanding he not be fired and be believed, but at the end of the day, what Mueller will find is Democratic Party corruption of the FBI/DOJ and (ironically) collusion with Russia. (Collusion 1: Paying Steele, British leftist from the CND days, to pay Russians for fake dirt on Trump. Collusion 2: Obama’s State Department giving a visa to Natalia Veselnitskaya, Kremlin-linked lawyer, for that set-up meeting with DJT Jr. Collusion 3: Uranium One.)
Meanwhile, the IG report on political corruption of the FBI/DOJ (ironically demanded by Democrats after Hillary lost) is about to come out, the investigations into Hillary’s classified emails and the Clinton Foundation are reopened with Hillary’s fixers running them, plus Uranium One, Operation Cassandra, the Awan IT scandal, and (possibly) Antifa and its connections to Democratic Party figures and funders. As a showman, Trump knows how to build suspense, and so what’s the best time for The Storm to really hit? Sometime between now and the November midterms….
Just a sample of the many trickles:
Note that the Trump optimists think Rosenstein (like Mueller) is a good guy, and so would explain rumors like that as strategic deception. (“The leaks are real, but the news is fake.”) Some even think Comey is a good guy, working with Trump behind the scenes…. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but lots of interesting things are happening secretly, and I expect much of it to surface in the coming months.
All the current (and future) revelations may be interesting and possibly infuriating, but the real test is what happens to the people and institutions involved. If no one does jail time, loses their pensions, and reputations over this, we, the people lose. There MUST be consequences for those involved.
Surely that would be a contempt of the House, which the House may enforce, and use the Capitol Police and/or US Marshalls to do so?
The rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper.
There are huge issues here, and I have no doubt more to emerge. But to me (at the moment, anyway) the most significant is the issue with the FISA Court. Not only does that Court act in secret but it also acts ex parte: with only one party before it. The usual protections of an adversarial system, with each side contesting to convince the court and so exposing the weaknesses and errors in the other’s position, is not present. Thus the Court itself has to (essentially) serve as advocate for the missing side, and as a consequence there is a higher than normal burden on the party which does appear to be completely truthful and offer up all the exculpatory facts. Not only did the FBI/DOJ fail (repeatedly) to do so, it appears to have actively concealed many crucial ones.
If I were one of the judges who had been so deceived I would be extremely unhappy. I would be permanently barring any of the attorneys involved from ever again appearing in my court, and I would probably be filing ethics charges and seeking to have them disbarred. It will be most interesting to see how those judges respond.
One of the arguments Schiff and other Democrats (and their apologists) are offering is that the Steele dossier was only one part of the evidence offered to the Court, and even if it was flawed there was other evidence sufficient to justify the warrant. We don’t know that, and probably won’t; some of that information may be legitimately classified. (Note that there was absolutely nothing in the Nunes memo which came close to justifying its classification; there is nothing in it which discloses sources or methods. Those making that argument were simply lying.) There was allegedly testimony before the House committee to the effect that without the Steele dossier the FBI would never have gone to the FISA Court, so Schiff’s assertion is, at best, questionable. But if the Court itself takes action against the lawyers who appeared before it we will have a definitive answer to that question.
Laird, do we or can we know who those judges were?
Judge Rudolph Contreras granted the warrant. He’s also the judge who took Michael Flynn’s guilty plea, and then “was recused” from the case right around December 4th. All very mysterious.
The summation of the report, i.e. the memo, is just accusations, a summation. Id like to see the actual 100 page report itself. There is a reason Loretta Lynch wrote a “tell-all” book about Clinton corruption. She knows that the super-powerful won’t do prison time, so scape goats will fall. Her apparent objective was to be too high-profile to easily pin things on. That’s my take on it.
Wait…wait…where have I seen this before…..
Put out juuuuuust enough to get the monkeys raging and squeeling,
then,….a LITTLE bit more to INSURE they have chosen their hill, and shown their true Colors.
Only to be followed by the nuance-less coup de gras.
I say….
It doesn’t count THIS time, because, um.. Alan Grayson* was fired before he could expose THE TRUTH!!!!!
(*Absolutely no reason to know who that is unless you’re from the US, OR consistently rely on the oft stumbling Politifact.)
I see this very much as convicting a mafia hitman for one particular murder that they can prove. No one believes that is the only murder he committed, it’s just the one that they can pin on him. The true scale of corruption that must have been going on but for which no hard evidence exists must be staggering. We are only now exposing one little corner after more than a year has passed, there isn’t enough time in two terms to go after everyone who was part of the democrat criminal organisation.
Trump needs to fire the entire top echelon of the government. Every department, every political appointee. Slash and burn until the day he is no longer president. It’s by no means a solution but to leave these people in place would be criminal negligence.
” There is a reason Loretta Lynch wrote a “tell-all” book about Clinton corruption”
Methinks that was Donna Brazille(sp?).
“Donna Brazille”
Yup, my bad.
George Atkisson @ February 3, 2018 at 7:28 pm:
If no one does jail time, loses their pensions, and reputations over this, we, the people lose.
I want to see indictments: Clinton, her top aides, Lynch, and Obama, and anyone else that can be shown to have had knowledge of the illegal private mail server, or participated in the cover-up. There will be screams of outrage, of course. Then Trump issues blanket pardons for Obama and Clinton – perhaps deliberately copying the language used by Ford in 1975. (Or he might pardon the entire crew.)
The evidence presented with the indictments will stick like glue. And if there is no trial or verdict, the targets will never get a chance to refute or obfuscate it.
Apparently there are over 13,000 sealed indictments right now. The equivalent number in 2009 was about 1,000. To Trump optimists, a bunch of those are Storm-related. See #sealedindictments on Twitter.
Note that Jeff Sessions’ nickname as a prosecuting attorney was “the Silent Executioner”….
“Sealed indictments”. I don’t believe it for one second. I think this is crumbs for the masses to deflect attention from the fact that no one, NO ONE, has been charged or punished in any way. The gulf between what should happen and what will happen (little or nothing) is so wide as to make this investigation almost meaningless. It puts the details in order and confirms rumors of things we already suspected but there are apparently zero consequences for the powerful.
I repeat the comment I have already made on the other thread – as this post is about the same matter.
Mark Steyn is correct.
@Laird
Note that there was absolutely nothing in the Nunes memo which came close to justifying its classification;
Yes this is exactly right. The day before it was released the memo was going to destroy the FBI and our ability to collect intelligence, the day after it was a “nothingburger”. Both can’t be true, and that should tell us all we need to know about the people who make any other claims about this memo — that is their claims are entirely unreliable.
BTW. where did this word “nothingburger” come from. It seems to have appeared a couple of years ago out of the blue, and now seems to be the politician and press’s go to word.
Keep in mind that there is no “the memo”. Both Republicans and Democrats are inventing and releasing subsequent memos to confuse the public and to obfuscate the issue. Rats live on both sides of the ship. What SHOULD be relieased is the 100 page report.
Mr. Black: Federal prosecutions can take years to build, and when the subjects are top government officials, you want to build air-tight cases. The slow reveal of information is partly to build public awareness and support. Trump and Sessions would have been foolish to get into office and immediately indict a bunch of Obama officials and Hillary minions, not to mention the big fish themselves. Of course the MSM will flip out in any case, but now, when they do, the majority of the public will not be on their side. The last poll I saw said that 44% of Democrats now want these abuses investigated by a special prosecutor.
Thailover: The Democratic memo is just obfuscation, true, but the Nunes memo was part of the process of building public awareness. The IG report will be released when the timing is right, any day now….
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/03/16/contreras-recusal-conflict-fbi-agent-peter-strzok-friends-with-flynn-judge-ruben-contreras/