You may be unaware, but he had received payments from turkey and Russia for services prior to that, and did not declare them or seek permission for them as he is required as a former military officer. That's a crime for normies.
Rice disseminated the unmasked names to various agencies. Supposedly she had a right to do this. Why? Well I contend it was to offer cover for the leakers. If as Gowdy says there are a hundred people with the knowledge its hard to pin the crime on someone. If you just have 4 people then finding the culprit is easier. The more she spread the info the easier it was to get it out to the press which is where they wanted it for maximum political leverage. If they were spying on Trump a year out when everyone was laughing at his candidacy it is likely they were looking at others like Cruz, Rubio etc. Trump would make an easier target for FISA and sifting through "incidental" info due to Manafort and Stone being part of the campaign. What does incidental really mean? I have heard it means everything is collected and stored. Later they mine that data. So if Trump info was collected by a data bot, not due to an investigation, but as par for the course then Rice merely needed to mine data related to his communications. If its done without a warrant then nothing legal can be done to the target unless its a terrorist overseas. They get droned! Its was reported that they did get a FISA request approved on a second attempt. I doubt that there was any "there" there. It was probably pretext for the FISA and more snooping. Thats probably also why it took 2 requests. The first was likely obvious fishing. Once the election was over and Trump elected there was enough data to cleverly craft a narrative of collusion. Its likely only a case of guilt by association. For people who like to sow chaos in order to further their goals this was a goldmine opportunity. I think they were counting on pubs to throw their own under the bus as this is the usual MO of RINOs. Surprise surprise the pubs are on the hunt for the leakers. The dems did factor this into the mix as Rice disseminate this as far as possible. Farkas admitted to knowing about it. Lets hope that the leakers are found. I wounder if their communications with reporters were "incidentally" collected and if Trumps NSA/AG Sessions can track them down. Maybe not since it appears the collection is between overseas and domestic persons but who really knows whats collected except the spooks. But but without a warrant how can they do anything. Well google "stingray cell phone" and read up on it. How this works is you gather the info on the target. You then go out and work backwards from that data by collecting the data legally until you can go to the court and get a warrant. The court and the target never knew that they were part of extra-4th amendment data collection. But without that extra-legal spying the investigation would not have known how to legally collect the data for a warrant.
If Cruz, and others were also under surveillance, you'll have a case. Just trump and incidentally, and this is just a phony scandal to distract from what led to the incidental surveillance. Am I supposed to believe the administration that just made browsing histories available are big supporters of privacy?
It isn't necessarily Trump, though possible, and I wouldn't be so sure that his people, or some of them, aren't in trouble.
I think that we can all agree that whatever evidences exist should be brought to light, and that any proven wrong-doing should be punished. No exceptions.
Watching a national cable show isn't spying. Though if done with your wife in the room it would constitute spousal abuse.
My wife and I actually had a no holds barred, knock down, drag out over Glenn Beck being on the television not too long ago.
Just some info on Joe DiGenova cited as a source in an above post. Joe is no stranger to accusing Democratic presidents of scandal. 1. Joe first showed up during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He appeared on basically every tv news, he & his wife were quoted or appeared on tv more than 300 times in the first month alone after the story broke, to tell how many crimes Clinton was guilty of committing. Joe "leaked" a scoop to The Dallas Morning News that a secret service agent caught Clinton and Lewinsky in a compromising position. This was a lie that forced the paper to retract the story. As attention turned to Ken Starr, Starr himself started receiving criticism by Dem & Rep congressmen, Joe made an appearance on Meet the Press to make some other claims to take attention off of Ken Starr's tactics and make more accusations toward the White House. He made some unfounded accusations based off of a "phone call from a national weekly magazine" (I'm guessing The National Enquirer) that he (Joe) was being investigated by a PIs hired by Clinton's legal team. The allegations were completely unfounded. During the Benghazi investigations, Joe emerged again to make claims that Obama was intimidating witnesses. During the 2016 diGenova showed up again citing inside sources that 100% Hillary Clinton was being undicted on several felonies over her emails & couldn't finish the race because she was definitely going to jail. Didn't happen. And now, Joe diGenova shows up again with his Susan Rice spreadsheets accusation calling it "illegal activity". Joe diGenova has been wrong on every scandal he's claimed to have indisputable evidince proving 100% guilt. Funny he only shows up to accuse Democrats? Or maybe not? I personally think Joe is a professional partisan scandal maker/scandal distractor based off his track record. He's a shit slinger, nothing more imo. Joe DiGenova is to any potential scandal involving Dems what Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger is to news coverage of plane crashes. Do your own research on the guy and make up your own mind. That's what I did. Tonight to my understanding, The Wall Street Journal is reporting, per Republican sources, that Susan Rice sought to legally unmask 1 person and it was unrelated to Russia. She didn't unmask Flynn, again as I understand the report. I don't have a subscription, so I can't quote or link to the article. I had it for a second, but the subscribe feature kicked in. If you can, read it for yourself & make up your own mind. I'll say that if crimes were committed, people need to answer for them, in this case or the bigger issue that brought this event into being. I'll link one item from a Fox News interview with a WSJ reporter before their new story ran tonight. He alludes to the coming story, but it had yet to be released at the time. http://crooksandliars.com/2017/04/wsj-susan-rice-allegations-core-narrative All these stories that keep coming out, the Trump tweets, the Nunes midnight ride to nothingness, Nunes' sprinting to the White House to brief them about what they told him the night before (but only after a press conference loudly announcing his intentions to go to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.) snd now this umasking thing that isn't illegal to do, as Rice herself could do no unmasking and as the WSJ reporter states that it appears to have been done legally, these scream of throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks to distract from the 280lb elephant in the room, pardon the pun. If every agency from the IC to the Republican congressional leadership has emphatically and repeatedly stated there is no evidence of illegal "wiretapping" of the Trump campaign, I am left with my previously stated opinion. These are desperate attempts to talk about anything other than the investigation FBI Director James Comey publicly announced 2-3 week ago. I'm biased, for sure, but I'm honest. This screams of despiration. I now retire to bed as this pretty much sums up my feelings on this new "bombshell".
I really can't believe you wrote this after all of the Russia linkage silliness. There is almost no chance that Russia collusion happened and even less chance it illegally impacted the outcome of the election, but you're trotting out this smorgasbord of linkages that are absurd. Then, you act like this thing with Obama casting this wide net to impede trump is somehow made up. It just doesn't make sense. To wit: Rice is out on the trail now trying to stop the fire and the hard lefties are in board. Innocent people don't have to do this.
The last point is just silly. Plenty of innocent people have to defend or clarify what's going on because people don't understand the situation or know what she can't or can't do (Much less know what she actually did). Rice hasn't done anything wrong, illegal or unethical, based upon what has been provided thus far. Besides, aren't some Trump people out there trying to put out fires, too? Does that make them automatically guilty?
If innocent people don't have to do that, I guess trump is as guilty as shit. A question I have that hasn't been addressed: How does rice or whoever *know* who they are unmasking before doing so? Isn't the point of unmasking to learn the identity? Seems like a false narrative dependent on a logical and paradoxical leap that she knew an identity before asking to learn the identity.
Steve Bannon removed from NSC. Wonder if the NSC guy that Kushner and Bannon saved over McMaster's objection then later shared info he "came across during routine business" with Nunes on his midnight ride to WH had anything to do with this?
Anything can be or turn into anything, I guess, but the simple answer seems to be "No", Bannon's exit doesn't seem to have anything to do with those things, or is anything other than a standard course of events. First, Bannon's tenure on the NSC was specifically and intentionally short-lived, and his quick departure from it has long been known. Most importantly, even after having left the post, he continues to perform all other WH duties, and enjoys the same security access and privealges as he has always had. That doesn't lend to any belief in the scandalous, IMO.
How un/likely do you believe it is that Rice did anything wrong, Un? If called to testify before Congress, do you think she'd voluntarily agree to testify, or would require a subpoena? If she requires them to compel her testimony, do you think she'll provide it, or would invoke her 5th amendment right? I think she said in her interview with Mitchell that she'd like to be "helpful" in Congress' process of exploring the gathering of data and the unmasking of names, but wonder how sincere that is, once it comes down to it, and think that you probably know a lot more about her, her role in the Obama admin, etc., than I do. So, hence the questions.
