Sunday, December 31, 2017

When it all began

Because I am seeing all over the place claims that the FBI opened l'affaire Trump on the basis of the Steele dossier, I thought I'd link to this story that documents that it began before there was a Steele dossier.

UPDATE

Although the Times report was unsourced, Australia is confirming its accuracy:

The Australian government has not taken any opportunity to deny the reports citing Downer’s involvement, instead pointing to the investigation that is under way. Labor has also declined to comment.

10 comments:

  1. You see Harry, Australia is also the Deep State and was giving a hand to Clinton, they are part of the Grand DNC collision, or whatever.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The conspiracy theories among the rightwingers were even crazier in the McCarthy era. And some are still entrenched in American society: fluoride in the water as a commie plot, for example.

    My county does not fluoridate because of hysterical rightwing nuts and our children have the worst teeth in the country.

    ReplyDelete
  3. George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

    About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.


    Really, that's it? That's the basis of this whole collusion fantasy?

    YGBSM.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Read the story's comment thread to see just how completely unhinged the left has become.

    [Harry:] My county does not fluoridate ...

    Your dentists don't do flouride treatments?

    ... our children have the worst teeth in the country.

    No, they don't. Not by a long shot.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I have read it, you can pass if you wish, Harry, it is a lot of blah blah blah.

    In real life, what is apparent is that there were enough talk and gossip among the IC to justify the FBI taking a look at it. And they did. Maybe they would have concluded there was nothing to this whole Russia thing after all, but Trump interrupted due process by firing Comey after asking him to let Flynn go, and the mess got messier.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Many investigations have started from a lot less than a drunken boast to a diplomat. I am not a police investigator but I did do investigations. The most productive I ever did started with nothing more than a notice of incorporation. It uncovered a series of frauds, rapes and (perhaps) poisonings (never could pin that down) that stretched back for years.

    ReplyDelete
  7. [Clovis:]I have read it, you can pass if you wish, Harry, it is a lot of blah blah blah.

    Typical incisive comment, Clovis. What part did the article get wrong?

    Towards the end, the author calls on Trump to declassify all the FISA warrants, among other things, in order to show that this whole thing is a bodge job. That's what Trump should do. But so long as the left continues to act like a mob of electrified chimps every time he yanks their chain on this, he's going to keep doing it.

    Remember -- there is an information asymmetry here.

    Further, the NYT missed the obvious: Papadapolous had that conversation in May 2016. More than a year earlier, it became public knowledge that Hillary had used an illegal -- and badly setup -- server.

    So saying the Russians had email dirt on Clinton was nothing more than a statement of the obvious: anyone who knows anything about IT assumed long since that the only people who didn't know what was in Hillary's emails were Americans.

    Statements of the blindingly obvious are enough to start an investigation?

    ReplyDelete
  8. It is probably more bla bla bla, but thankfully it is behind a paywall, so I do not need to lose more time on that one.

    ReplyDelete