What was that premise again? As Andrew McCarthy explains, CNN evidently is not (yet) trying to deny that the criminally faked supporting document could undermine any credible allegation that Carter Page was complicit in any Russian interference. The important fudge here is CNN's startling assertion that "the premise for the FBI's investigation" is Russian election interference. That might be a premise for some kinds of inquiry, but not a FISA warrant.
If an adequate premise for a FISA warrant were a mere suspicion of Russian skullduggery in an election, the Crossfire Hurricane gambit would be golden. That the Russians in fact attempted to interfere is not in controversy. The problem for Clapper, Brennan, McCabe, et al. (and the Obama White House may be included in that "al."), is that a FISA warrant to eavesdrop on a U.S. citizen requires a lot more than a suspicion that Russia is up to no good. It requires a showing that the citizen targeted for eavesdropping, Carter Page, is knowingly engaged in clandestine activities, potentially in violation of federal criminal law, on Russia's behalf.
Page has never been charged with a crime. Nor did the architects of Crossfire Hurricane inform the FISA court that Page had cooperated with the FBI in the past in successful prosecutions against Russian provocateurs. What does the basis for fingering Page as a Russian agent look like if you subtract whatever the fake document said, and add in the FBI's long track record of successful reliance on Page's voluntary assistance reporting on illicit Russian overtures? What's more, might these changes in the FISA presentation have undercut the FBI's and DOJ's showing that intrusive eavesdropping was necessary because other investigative tools were unavailable?
As McCarthy says,
If the narrative taking shape is that there may have been some abuses but it doesn’t change the fact that Russia meddled in the election, that misses the point. The questions are: What was the FBI’s evidence — which it represented as verified information in the warrant application — that the Trump campaign was in a cyberespionage conspiracy with the Kremlin? What evidence led the Bureau and the Justice Department to allege that Carter Page — who as late as spring 2016 was apparently cooperating in a federal prosecution of Russian spies — was a willful agent of the Putin regime engaged in clandestine activities against his own country?When we find out what the fudged evidence was, we'll be better able to issue comforting assurances that it was extraneous to pinning suspicion on Carter Page. It won't be enough for the FBI and CNN to conclude airily that the faked document was extraneous to the general idea that the Kremlin was trying to stir up trouble in a U.S. election.
10 comments:
Actually, the fact of Russian interference is in dispute. A few tweets or even a few thousand tweets does not constitute interference, not when there are billions of tweets out there. Certainly, the bigger deal is voter fraud, which might have provided Hillary’s majority.
And, as usual, no one in the NLMSM (or in the Republican Party or DoJ, come to that) is the least bit concerned with the fact of the leak, the unethical or dishonest nature of the leak, or the possible criminality of the leak.
Eric Hines
They have long succeeded in disguising unfortunate news in a variety of ways. In this case, stalling and misdirection are likely to work on a populace which is tired of the whole affair. It is frustrating and saddening that so many are fooled for so long. However, I am reading encouraging things that independents are less and less fooled, so the fact that the Believers are even Truer may matter less.
"Actually, the fact of Russian interference is in dispute."
The US government has abandoned the claim in open court, and is under a court order to stop making that claim. Mueller's report didn't prove, and in fact doesn't claim to prove, that the Russian government directed the hacking and/or the FB/Social Media campaigns.
Personally, I'd be surprised if Russia didn't try to interfere. But we also interfere with them, and they're hardly alone in it; Ukraine did also, as by leaking the Manafort prosecution documents at a critical moment; China does constantly, in myriad ways.
There's a difference between Russia trying to interfere, and that interference actually affecting the outcome.
One of the most disheartening developments in the past few years has been seeing how vulnerable people are to suggestion. No one has to prove a claim - it's just "asserted" (often, without supporting evidence of any kind, or if evidence exists - without serious analysis of said evidence).
I had lunch with an old friend (Dem) and we were discussing the impeachment. She asserted that the Russians had interfered with the election, and said that's alarming.
I said, "Why?" What evidence is there that anything they did had any effect? Looking at the supposed social media stuff, it's literally a drop in the bucket compared to what the parties and PACs spend... and supposedly they were posting the same kinds of stuff posted by Americans.
Why on earth would *slightly more of the same* have a definitive effect on voters? If only it were that easy to influence likely voters (who are the only ones that count)!
Her response: "We'll never know it *didn't* affect the outcome."
Mine: "True, but shouldn't we require a *bit* more evidence than that before losing our minds and sending the country into a 3 year tailspin?"
*sigh*
I always thought the basic claim -- that Trump's team was in league with the Russians -- was strongly contraindicated by the very evidence that was used to establish it. Mike Flynn had a call with the Russian ambassador after the election in which the possibility of a quid pro quo was discussed? That means that a quid pro quo probably wasn't already in place before the election. Erik Prince met with Russians secretly in the Seychelles after the election to explore the terms of a potential relationship? Then that kind of groundwork to a relationship probably hadn't already been done.
Plus, no intelligence officer in his (or her) right mind would recruit a man like Donald Trump to be an agent. You might as well just go on over to Counterintelligence and hand yourself in.
What's bothered me is less the willingness of people to believe things might be true on little evidence, but the insistence of people on believing even when evidence strongly points the other way. OK, we had the Mueller investigation; not one American ended up charged with any working with the Russians. Yet whose mind has changed as to whether or not Trump and his team are Putin's toys?
I never doubted that someone in the Russian power structure tried to dabble in this election, and probably all the others we can remember. As you say, it's not at all the same as saying that the dabbling had an effect, or that I should worry about it. We need to have public debates robust enough to deal with anyone, domestic or foreign, trying to play dirty tricks with public opinion.
I'd put big money on the proposition that domestic party operatives routinely do a lot worse than anything Russia is suspected of. I don't care how many BS Facebook posts someone puts out there, as long as no one is diddling ballots. On that front, I'll continue to support the party that isn't trying to obstruct reasonable voter I.D. laws.
Meanwhile, in other news, Science has spoken:
The study, led by researchers from Duke University and published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to directly measure how tweets from Russian agents affected the political views of the Americans who encountered them. The researchers gave a panel of U.S. Twitter users a survey on their political attitudes in October 2017, then asked them the same questions again a month later. Next they looked at which of those users had interacted with accounts controlled by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, or IRA, in between taking the two surveys. They found that those who encountered IRA tweets showed no significant, discernible change in their political opinions, attitudes, or degree of political engagement as a result.
Gosh, I sure hope the Science Deniers!!!! will take heed.
Reminds me of the polling before and after the impeachment.
Interesting take: https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/26/new-fusion-gps-info-confirms-the-special-counsel-probe-was-a-hit-job/
It's a good question: Why didn't Mueller spend so much as a nanosecond wondering whether the Steele dossier was either a Russian disinformation campaign or a deliberate hit job by GPS Fusion? It's getting hard to imagine that it wasn't one or the other.
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