@dystopian Corruption? Is that like when you make a hefty donation to the Clinton Foundation, and get a meeting afterwards with the Secretary of State?

By jove, I think you have got it! The outrage by the Dems, media, and deep state says it all. And Hillary's tweet is beyond the pale...

"refuses to be subject to the law" - Is that like willfully mis-handling classified data?

" The legitimacy of our elections is in doubt." Does she mean the millions of purged or provisional ballots here?

"The president is waging war on the truth." - What was hiding the e-mails and DNC server?
Where was Obama?

"The administration is undermining the national unity that makes democracy possible."
I hate to break it to her, but she undermined national unity with her teams election shenanigans, besides showing us it is not really a democracy anymore.

"And then there's the breathtaking corruption." - like the Uranium deal and no doubt countless others...

For her to go off like this shows she is back in the ring swinging for the fences, and the media just gives her all the time she wants, Rachel, you name it... is just plain scary.

They are just showing how guilty they are. And that they haven't learned anything.

@jim p

The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, hired Fusion to help them with opposition research on certain Republican candidates, one of which was Donald Trump. It was paid for by Paul Singer, a hedge fund manager. The Republican Party did not pay for this.

When Trump won the nomination, the research with Fusion was halted.

The Democratic Party picked up the Fusion contract, paid for by the Clinton Campaign.

Michael Steele was not hired until after the Democrats got involved.

The Steel Dossier was entirely a Democratic creation.

Don't forget that Republicans
originally funded Fusion's "research" and the Dems took it up after Trump was certain to win the Repub nomination.

Important to remember it's the establishment all together that has no loyalty to Democracy.

@Linda Wood
Why doesn't Trump blow the lid on this? Is he that stupid?

A couple of articles intrigue me lately, one by Reuters, and one by Jeff Carlson.

Two years ago, in August 2016, a Reuters article reported that the FBI had warned the DNC three years ago, in fall 2015, that their communications were not secure. This assertion was confirmed by DNI Clapper in testimony before Congress and written about by Donna Brazile in her book, Hacks. Clapper and Brazile both blame DNC staff incompetence for not acting to secure their communications during the approximately eight months of FBI urgings and warnings.

But the Reuters article says that,

… in months of follow-up conversations about the DNC’s network security, the FBI did not warn party officials that the attack was being investigated as Russian espionage, the sources said.

and that,

… In its initial contact with the DNC last fall, the FBI instructed DNC personnel to look for signs of unusual activity on the group’s computer network, one person familiar with the matter said. DNC staff examined their logs and files without finding anything suspicious, that person said.

When DNC staffers requested further information from the FBI to help them track the incursion, they said the agency declined to provide it. In the months that followed, FBI officials spoke with DNC staffers on several other occasions but did not mention the suspicion of Russian involvement in an attack, sources said.

This article is very straightforward, but every assertion that Russia was hacking the DNC is supported by no evidence, no foundation, and every description of what happened, according to the sources, says the FBI warned the DNC to look for vulnerabilities or intrusions, but didn't mention Russia.

So I'm wondering if someone in law enforcement was monitoring the DNC, and if someone in the FBI was warning them.

The second article, by Jeff Carlson at themarketswork, is from August 22, 2018. Carlson keeps a monumental chronology of documents and articles about Russiagate. His most impressive focus has been on NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers' discovery that the FBI was allowing private contractors illegal access to surveillance data and Rogers' subsequent shutting down of that access.

The last part of his recent article is stunning:

… The DNC lawsuit states that their systems were hacked by Russians on April 18, 2016, following Russian phishing attempts in March 2016. Around the same time, a number of significant coinciding events took place. Which could, or could not, have been related to each other.

On March 9, 2016, one day before the first phishing attempts were reportedly made on the Clinton Campaign, then-NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers became aware of potential problems when he discovered the FBI was using independent contractors who were allowed improper access to surveillance data.

A declassified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) document released in April 2017 showed that the FBI had provided private contractors access to raw Section 702 surveillance data. This access wasn’t controlled or monitored. These private contractors have never been disclosed by the government.

“Their access was not limited to raw information for which the FBI sought assistance and access continued even after they had completed work in response to an FBI request,” wrote the FISC in its report.

On the same day as Rogers’s discovery, FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was the lead agent on both the Clinton email investigation and the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, sent a text referencing a “HUGE f-up.”

FBI agents would visit the Clinton campaign later that same month.

On April 18, 2016, Rogers shut down the FBI’s outside contractor access to the FISA search system. On that same day, the DNC was officially hacked by Russia, according to their lawsuit.

Is it possible the private contractor surveillance was suddenly attributed to Russia as soon as illegal access was exposed?

The 2 articles:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cyber-democrats-reconstruct/fbi-t...

August 3, 2016
FBI took months to warn Democrats of suspected Russian role in hack: sources
Mark Hosenball, John Walcott, Joseph Menn

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-many-questions-remaining-in-the-hackin...

Many Unanswered Questions Remain About the DNC Server Hacking
BY JEFF CARLSON
August 22, 2018 Updated: August 22, 2018

@leveymg
I meant this response to be to snoopydawg upthread, so I've replaced it.

Carter Page was an active FBI informant since 2013 when he played a role in handing bugged materials to the SVR in New York, resulting in the arrest and expulsion of a number of alleged intelligence officers working out of the Russian residence at the UN, and its closure. It will be interesting to see what the warrant application has to say about that.

Page met again with his Bureau handlers in March 2016 just weeks after he was planted into the Trump campaign where he acted as an agent provocateur pushing Manafort and others to accept the bait of "dirt" on Clinton dangled by Fusion-GPS. That role is masked in the Steele Dossier and altered to portray Pager as a Russian agent, which in light of the above, he obviously wasn't.

If Page's role as an FBI informant and agent provocateur aren't clearly spelled out in the Warrant application, the FBI and US Attorney's office committed perjury. If they are, the FISA Court judge who signed off on this fourth application in October was complicit in a political dirty tricks operation involving not only British Intelligence but the Ukrainian Embassy that worked with Steele and Isikoff to provide content to the warrant application.
This is foreign election interference of a far more serious type than anything the Trump crew are even suggested to have carried out.

Keep in mind that Carter Page was an agent provocateur for the FBI. Then, think about what that implies.

@wendy davis

In the life cycle of every investigator comes that time when a case so consumes them that their cheese slips completely off their cracker and falls on their shoe.

Marcy is in the midst of such a spectacle, with no one wiser to hold her back.

for your acumen, memories, analyses, and spidey senses as to the illegality/criminality of so much of it. i haven't kept up with almost any of it, i don't even know all the names of the wide cast of characters, admittedly.

i'll preface this link once again in saying that the mueller investigation is emptywheel's raison d'etre, and oh she and her commentariat are exhibit one as to the partisan nature of it all, including epic hatred of julian assange. i peek in now and again for assange news/views, etc. but the other day i'd found this, and of course she believes that trump and his attorneys are too cagey for words, but this:

'Trump Wants Voters — and Russia — to Know What the Russia Investigation Looked Like on August 1, 2017, not September 14, 2018' September 17, 2018

she cuts to the chase here:

"Depending on how much the various parties put into these texts (I doubt Comey was much of a texter, for example), this will show unbelievable detail on how FBI runs counterintelligence investigations.

But it will also show voters what the investigation looked like before some key evidence came in, such as the communications surrounding the June 9 meeting and whatever the FBI seized from Paul Manafort’s home. Andrew McCabe was the last person in a key role on this investigation, and Christopher Wray took over that role on August 1.
It’s a desperate gambit, I think, throwing the last of the Steele dossier details out there, plus a picture of what the investigation looked like before the FBI learned that the President’s son entered into a conspiracy with Russians exchanging Hillary emails for sanction relief.

Which I take as yet more confirmation that that conspiracy — and whatever Manafort just gave the government — would (will, eventually) utterly damn the President.”

FWIW, of course, but the site wants him Gone, not just marcy herself, so she loves the charges, indictments, convictions, deals for 'flipping' potential evidence against trump. given that manafort received a plea deal for his convictions, bmaz had noted that what he'd proffered as testimony against...whomever, i don't even know that, must be worthwhile.

@leveymg

now i'm catchin' on. 'what he won't find' and why that is.

as a conspiracy. There is nothing about it or any previous meeting two days earlier that amounts to a crime that Mueller can charge anyone in Trump's circle unless he also prosecutes Hillary and the DNC for the same, only hers was an actual, competed conspiracy.

As I have explained at length, https://caucus99percent.com/content/even-if-true-lanny-davis-accusations...

On July 26, CNN dropped its “bombshell” story that Michael Cohen was going to testify to Robert Mueller that he was present when Donald Trump was told his son would meet with various Russians. The Washington Post and the NY Post claimed they had “confirmed” the CNN account. Now, both papers have retracted their confirmation and admitted that the anonymous source was Cohen’s own attorney, former Clinton lawyer, Lanny Davis. https://theintercept.com/2018/08/28/cnn-credibly-accused-of-lying-to-its...

All these corporate media have left out a much bigger side of the story from their coverage. Mueller can’t use what Michael Cohen has to say to indict Trump, even if it were true, for two reasons:

First, what Davis describes — a meeting between Russians and Don Jr. — is not, in itself, a crime. Without anything further, there is nothing about the Trump Tower meeting to form a criminal indictment.

Second, and specifically, evidence already obtained does not show the materials handed over by the Lady Lawyer were represented to have been illegally obtained. This point is important, but has been obscured so many times in the media that much of the public now believes that the Russians gave Trump Hillary’s emails. That may actually be the point. In fact, a copy of stolen emails — or anything else stolen or illegally obtained — wasn’t even promised. On another level, the documentary record related to the Trump Tower meeting simply doesn’t contain proof of “collusion,” a much murkier term, or even sustain a conclusion that there is irrefutable evidence of intent to collude.

Here's the kicker. There's yet a third reason why Mueller won't, even if he could prosecute such a conspiracy to receive information from the Russian Lady Lawyer:

POST-SCRIPT

The Steele Dossier Violated Campaign Laws

It has also been conjectured that the Trump Tower meeting might have violated federal campaign laws. However, that charge is even less viable than the Conspiracy to Defraud the U.S. allegation, above. Here's why.

If Mueller raises the Trump Tower meeting as evidence that Trump campaign conspired with foreigners to violate Campaign Laws, he will have to also accuse Hillary Clinton and the DNC of the same federal offense. Indeed, the campaign finance violation case that can be made against the DNC for its actual funding of former MI-6 operative Chris Steele — a UK national who authored the notorious “Pee Pee Dossier” — is far stronger than what might be pieced together conjecturally against Donald Trump, Jr. for his meeting with the Russian Lady lawyer on June 9, 2016.

As I wrote here recently, there is much stronger evidence that the Clinton Campaign actively worked with Ukraine (and other foreign governments) before the election and actually received some “thing of value” for its money, namely foreign intelligence on Trump. In addition, the DNC actually used that intelligence against the opposition, which makes this an actual completed conspiracy. Indeed, the DNC’s funding of the Steele Dossier closely fits the description of a conspiracy to violate the same federal campaign law. (52 USC § 30121)

Mueller isn't going to go there, because it will raise the obvious red-hot issue of selective prosecution, further inflaming the partisan divisions over electoral malfeasance and dirty-tricks by both camps. To inflame tensions would be a fail for Mueller, who's a fixer. Provoking a gang war in D.C. that kills the bosses, simply isn't what he's tasked to do.

@EdMass

‘NYT Admits That Its "Mountain of Evidence" For Russian Collusion Is Smaller Than A Molehill; The New York Times spends 10,000 words in some 199 paragraphs on the alleged 'Russian influence' in the U.S. election.’, b at Moon of Alabama Sept. 20

'The Plot to Subvert an Election - Unraveling the Russia Story So Far'

"“One-hundred-and-seventy-eight paragraphs later, near the end of the piece, we read the opposite and learn that Trump is indeed right:
Mr. Trump’s frustration with the Russian investigation is not surprising. He is right that no public evidence has emerged showing that his campaign conspired with Russia in the election interference or accepted Russian money.

The "mountain of evidence" claimed in paragraph 5 turns out to be "no public evidence" in paragraph 183 near the end of the piece. But 99% of the readers will not walk through the whole mess and the 1% that do will likely miss the contradiction.
As Aaron Maté notes:

This is a pattern: ample words for Trump-Russia innuendo; quiet acknowledgment of no evidence. And 0 words on what has been debunked.

The 'Russian influence' and 'collusion' between Russia and Trump are still what they were two years ago, when the campaign started - they are fake news. Unfortunately the anti-Russian and anti-Trump propaganda campaign has had serious consequences. Censorship in social media increased drastically and international relations with Russia were seriously damaged. The main stream media though, will never take responsibility for that."

and right-clicking to open a private window on his link worked. on edit: i hadn't meant to direct that to EdMass, but the room at large.

to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"