Interfering with US Elections

[beagle9]

Utter nonsense.

If President Trump does not think he should report Russian outreach to the FBI, or if the next Democratic candidate thinks it’s worth retaining foreign spies to scour the far corners of the world for dirt on Trump, voters should factor that in for what it’s worth.

Whether it is 18 months from now or five and a half years from now, Donald Trump will no longer be president, but the United States will still need both to have lines of open information exchange with foreign governments and to be able to influence events in foreign countries.

‘Foreign Interference’: Trump's Comments and Democrats' Hypocrisy | National Review

HOGWASH!

Opposition research is not a crime. GPS hiring Chistopher Steele for that research on Trump's Business connections or any connections in Russia is not a crime.

Hiring Steele as a Private Investigator does NOT give Steele leverage over Clinton in foreign affairs that affect his Nation's government, where Clinton might choose to put Great Britain's wishes over America's best interest....due to the help she got from that foreign nation in getting elected.....

WHICH is the PURPOSE of the law on taking foreign gvt help..

and as it was or could have been, with the Russian gvt help given to Trump and all Trump campaign lying to us about it.... that gave the Russians leverage and a possible IOU over the Trump campaign... they knew Trump and team was lying to us about it...

Chalk it up to them all being too naive and ignorant of the law to know any better, and ignorant on the Russian's talent on getting American kompromat and using it

You are so full of shit to say that Hillary accepts dirt on Trump via proxy Steele who got it from Russia because someone called it “opposition research” yet you nail Trump because he too says he’s willing to accept it????

He accepted the help in the 2016 election, the help of stolen goods by the Russians, the help of stolen private emails of a political opponent in an election, he accepted the help of an enemy nation who got those hacked emails by using their Russian Military intelligence, to illegally hack the DNC in order to obtain them.

Now, IF YOU THINK that hiring a US firm to investigate Trump, what is called opposition research, is the gosh darn same....

THEN THERE IS NO HOPE FOR YOU, or your traitorous, sorry, ass!

the end.

There is no evidence to support your claims, but, there is a great deal of evidence that Obama illegally spied on the Trump campaign.

There is ZERO evidence that Obama illegally spied on the Trump Campaign. There is your made up CONSPIRACY that they did, but ZERO evidence has been acquired to prove such... at least so far...

What, like Samantha Fox in the Smollett case ??? Nothing to see here eh ??

 

[Care4all]

There is ZERO evidence that Obama illegally spied on the Trump Campaign. There is your made up CONSPIRACY that they did, but ZERO evidence has been acquired to prove such... at least so far...

They submitted claims to FISC as "verified" that were not.
They concealed from FISC that the unverified claims were oppo research purchased by Hillary.
They repeated vouched for Steele's integrity even after they fired him for lying.
They presented news accounts as "corroboration" of Steele's information even though he was the source for both.

They told these lies and concealed this information because had they told the whole truth, they spying warrants would not have been granted.

When you lie to get spying authority, the spying is illegal. Is this really lost on you?

The dossier part that was submitted to the court Judge was NOT submitted as verified information..

Each application was stamped VERIFIED

... the Judge was told that it was opposition research acquired that the opponent Candidate paid for...

They concealed that it was purchased by the Hillary Campaign.

...No one told the Judge it was verified information, unless it was verified information...

Oh yes they did. Even though when Steele was under oath and his balls were on the line, he testified that his claims were UNVERIFIED.

The Steele Dossier and the ‘Verified Application’ That Wasn’t

Former officials are fighting over who deserves blame.

Here’s what you need to know: In rushing out their assessment of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Obama-administration officials chose not to include the risible Steele-dossier allegations that they had put in their “VERIFIED APPLICATION” for warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) because . . . wait for it . . . the allegations weren’t verified.

And now, the officials are squabbling over who pushed the dossier. Why? Because the dossier — a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed, based on anonymous Russian sources peddling farcical hearsay, compiled by a well-paid foreign operative (former British spy Christopher Steele) — is crumbling by the day.

It was long ago acknowledged that dossier information was “salacious and unverified,” to quote congressional testimony by former FBI director James Comey.

If dossier claims were still unverified when Comey testified to Congress in mid 2017 (and thereafter), then those claims could not have been verified when the Obama Justice Department and FBI submitted it to the FISC as a “VERIFIED APPLICATION” in October 2016. It also had to have been unverified on January 6, 2017, when the Obama administration chose to include a sliver of the dossier in the briefing of President-elect Trump — the day after intelligence chiefs met with President Obama in the Oval Office and discussed what Russia information should be shared with the incoming Trump team.

Then-director Comey conceded that there was no meaningful corroboration of the dossier. Despite that, the FBI and Justice Department included it in the “VERIFIED APPLICATION”.

Moreover, FBI and Justice Department procedures require that information be vetted for factual accuracy before it is submitted to the FISC. The rules of the FISC require the Justice Department to notify the court promptly if misstatements or inaccuracies have been discovered. Far from alerting the FISC that information in what it boldly labeled the “VERIFIED APPLICATION” was actually unverified, the Justice Department and the FBI kept reaffirming the dossier allegations to the court — in January, April, and June of 2017.

A dispute between the camps of Comey and Obama CIA director John Brennan broke out into the open — a dispute over which of them tried to force the dossier findings into the aforementioned intelligence-community assessment (ICA). This is a remarkable rift given that the dossier allegations in fact were not included in the ICA (though, again, the infamous “pee tape” claim was included in the briefing of then-president-elect Trump).

But, be of good cheer, all of this will be sorted out now that Attorney General Bill Barr has appointed John Durham, the excellent U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to investigate the investigation.

For now, though, the telling thing is that no one wants to be associated with the dossier. Even if former director Comey is right that it was Brennan, not he, who was trying to slide the dossier into the ICA, Comey’s FBI still used it in the FISC. Plus, Comey himself did agree to brief Trump on it, though in a very incomplete way — alerting the president-elect to the lurid story about prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, but studiously omitting the tiny detail about how the FBI had used the “salacious and unverified” dossier in the FISC to contend that Trump’s campaign was in a conspiracy with Russia to undermine the election.

The urge to run from the dossier is understandable. In Washington, about ten days before the FISC authorized spying on Page, Steele was interviewed by the State Department official Kathleen Kavalec, who took notes that were passed along to the FBI. With very little effort (probably two minutes on Google), Kavalec was able to figure out that one of Steele’s major allegations was a complete invention.

Steele claimed that the Trump-Russia conspiracy involved exploitation of the Russian consulate in Miami to transfer money and information. But there is no Russian consulate in Miami. As the Twitter investigative wiz Undercover Huber details, Steele’s source for this allegation (unidentified Source E) is also the source for the pee-tape story, as well as the foundational allegation that Donald Trump and the Kremlin were in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation.”

None of these allegations has ever been verified, and the Mueller report rejects the claim of a Trump-Russia conspiracy.

In the “VERIFIED APPLICATION” that the Obama Justice Department and the FBI submitted, the FISC was led to believe Steele was reliable and that there was no known “derogatory information pertaining to” him — no mention was made of the known errors in his dossier reporting.

The first VERIFIED APPLICATION included a laborious footnote (here, pages 15 to 16) vaguely “speculating” that Steele “likely” had a political motivation to discredit Trump’s campaign; the FBI and Justice Department concealed from the court that, far from speculation, they had certain knowledge — from Steele himself — that he was passionately opposed to Trump’s election, and they further failed to disclose that the dossier allegations had been sponsored by the campaign of the opposition candidate (Hillary Clinton).

Moreover, the court was told that the FBI did not believe Steele was the “direct” source of dossier information leaked to the media. Yet it not only seemed highly likely Steele was a direct media source; Steele had told Kavalec that he was managing relationships with media outlets, some of which “have” his information (he mentioned “NYT and WP” — the New York Times and the Washington Post).

No mention of Steele’s State Department interview was made to the court. In fact, the court was informed that the only government agency to which Steele had provided information was the FBI (here, page 23). The State Department interview was likely withheld from FISC because revealing this damage to Steele’s credibility would doom the “VERIFIED APPLICATION.”

Steele identified two of his sources for Kavalec: Russia’s former spy chief Vyacheslav Trubnikov and top Kremlin adviser Vladislav Surkov. Trubnikov has intriguing ties to Stefan Halper, whom the FBI used as a confidential informant to approach Trump campaign figures Page, George Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis.

Steele himself did private-eye work for Oleg Deripaska, the aluminum oligarch known to be a close Putin confidant. Steele was also pushing his U.S. government contacts — such as Justice Department official Bruce Ohr — to accommodate Deripaska’s desire to travel to the U.S. The idea was that Deripaska could be a valuable informant. Evidently, the FBI lost interest when Deripaska told agents that Steele’s Trump-Russia conspiracy theory was preposterous.

Steele Dossier: The ‘Verified Application’ That Wasn’t | National Review

Not to worry, Barr and Durham are digging all the way to the bottom of this mess on behalf of the American People.

What exactly does the term, verified application, suppose to mean?

I gave you a hyperlink so you could double check this yourself.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4614708/Carter-Page-FISA-Application.pdf

Because the Judge clearly knew the Dossier was not verified, or at least parts of it were not.

Your argument is that even though the application is stamped VERIFIED that it is understood to contain UNVERIFIED INFORMATION?

... Courts are given testimony of "Rats" all the time, inside sources squealing, ex-partners plea dealing, jailbirds singing like canaries on other jailbirds,etc etc etc.... THOSE are not verified sources or from people who do not have an axe to grind, or even reputable people in many cases...

A courtroom is not an ex parte proceeding. The accused has representation and the opportunity to challenge and cross examine. In these secret ex parte proceedings the only thing guaranteeing our due process is the integrity of the FBI and DOJ and they clearly took full Liberty of their advantage to perpetuate a fraud on the court.

Read Point 3 on page 67:

"On the basis of the facts submitted in the VERIFIED application there is probable cause to belief that:"​

These are powerful authorities that allow secret spying of all your communications, to research the memory of all your email and electronic devices and with the three hop rule to do the same everyone you communicate with, and everyone they communicate with, effectively throwing a spying blanket over an immense number of people, and you think these awesome authorities can be granted based on rumor and innuendo stamped with VERIFIED as window dressing?

...If they had verifiable proof on everything before the warrant request, then they would not need the warrant request...?

I have no idea what you are trying to say here. A secret spying warrant on an American Citizen requires verified indisputable facts that an American is KNOWINGLY acting as an agent of foreign power engaged in a espionage conspiracy against the US.

Don't worry, Barr and Durham will get to the bottom of all this.[/QUOTE]
-They suspected that Page was an agent for a foreign power

-Hearsay, as long as it is noted as such, can be used in a warrant application, i.e. like what a Jailbird tells them or a scorned wife tells them about a suspect... confessing to them... but it would never be the WHOLE or ENTIRE application evidence that they have, is my understanding. I think the dossier would fit in to this category?

- Verified Application: Could mean the Application's I's are dotted, T's are crossed, and all the proper signatures are on it?

-Carter Page has never spoken to or met Donald Trump, and the surveillance did not begin on him until AFTER he had left the campaign. If this was done to spy on Trump or the Trump campaign in some kind of back door coup de tat as your conspiracy theory claims, then why in the heck would the FBI pick Carter Page of all people, to do that...??? And then wait until after he left the Trump campaign? To me, that part just doesn't fit.

 

[Care4all]

HOGWASH!

Opposition research is not a crime. GPS hiring Chistopher Steele for that research on Trump's Business connections or any connections in Russia is not a crime.

Hiring Steele as a Private Investigator does NOT give Steele leverage over Clinton in foreign affairs that affect his Nation's government, where Clinton might choose to put Great Britain's wishes over America's best interest....due to the help she got from that foreign nation in getting elected.....

WHICH is the PURPOSE of the law on taking foreign gvt help..

and as it was or could have been, with the Russian gvt help given to Trump and all Trump campaign lying to us about it.... that gave the Russians leverage and a possible IOU over the Trump campaign... they knew Trump and team was lying to us about it...

Chalk it up to them all being too naive and ignorant of the law to know any better, and ignorant on the Russian's talent on getting American kompromat and using it

You are so full of shit to say that Hillary accepts dirt on Trump via proxy Steele who got it from Russia because someone called it “opposition research” yet you nail Trump because he too says he’s willing to accept it????

He accepted the help in the 2016 election, the help of stolen goods by the Russians, the help of stolen private emails of a political opponent in an election, he accepted the help of an enemy nation who got those hacked emails by using their Russian Military intelligence, to illegally hack the DNC in order to obtain them.

Now, IF YOU THINK that hiring a US firm to investigate Trump, what is called opposition research, is the gosh darn same....

THEN THERE IS NO HOPE FOR YOU, or your traitorous, sorry, ass!

the end.

There is no evidence to support your claims, but, there is a great deal of evidence that Obama illegally spied on the Trump campaign.

There is ZERO evidence that Obama illegally spied on the Trump Campaign. There is your made up CONSPIRACY that they did, but ZERO evidence has been acquired to prove such... at least so far...

What, like Samantha Fox in the Smollett case ??? Nothing to see here eh ??

I have not followed the Smoilett case..... it's just a side show, to distract from the big things, imho.

 

[Zorro!]

They submitted claims to FISC as "verified" that were not.
They concealed from FISC that the unverified claims were oppo research purchased by Hillary.
They repeated vouched for Steele's integrity even after they fired him for lying.
They presented news accounts as "corroboration" of Steele's information even though he was the source for both.

They told these lies and concealed this information because had they told the whole truth, they spying warrants would not have been granted.

When you lie to get spying authority, the spying is illegal. Is this really lost on you?

The dossier part that was submitted to the court Judge was NOT submitted as verified information..

Each application was stamped VERIFIED

... the Judge was told that it was opposition research acquired that the opponent Candidate paid for...

They concealed that it was purchased by the Hillary Campaign.

...No one told the Judge it was verified information, unless it was verified information...

Oh yes they did. Even though when Steele was under oath and his balls were on the line, he testified that his claims were UNVERIFIED.

The Steele Dossier and the ‘Verified Application’ That Wasn’t

Former officials are fighting over who deserves blame.

Here’s what you need to know: In rushing out their assessment of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Obama-administration officials chose not to include the risible Steele-dossier allegations that they had put in their “VERIFIED APPLICATION” for warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) because . . . wait for it . . . the allegations weren’t verified.

And now, the officials are squabbling over who pushed the dossier. Why? Because the dossier — a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed, based on anonymous Russian sources peddling farcical hearsay, compiled by a well-paid foreign operative (former British spy Christopher Steele) — is crumbling by the day.

It was long ago acknowledged that dossier information was “salacious and unverified,” to quote congressional testimony by former FBI director James Comey.

If dossier claims were still unverified when Comey testified to Congress in mid 2017 (and thereafter), then those claims could not have been verified when the Obama Justice Department and FBI submitted it to the FISC as a “VERIFIED APPLICATION” in October 2016. It also had to have been unverified on January 6, 2017, when the Obama administration chose to include a sliver of the dossier in the briefing of President-elect Trump — the day after intelligence chiefs met with President Obama in the Oval Office and discussed what Russia information should be shared with the incoming Trump team.

Then-director Comey conceded that there was no meaningful corroboration of the dossier. Despite that, the FBI and Justice Department included it in the “VERIFIED APPLICATION”.

Moreover, FBI and Justice Department procedures require that information be vetted for factual accuracy before it is submitted to the FISC. The rules of the FISC require the Justice Department to notify the court promptly if misstatements or inaccuracies have been discovered. Far from alerting the FISC that information in what it boldly labeled the “VERIFIED APPLICATION” was actually unverified, the Justice Department and the FBI kept reaffirming the dossier allegations to the court — in January, April, and June of 2017.

A dispute between the camps of Comey and Obama CIA director John Brennan broke out into the open — a dispute over which of them tried to force the dossier findings into the aforementioned intelligence-community assessment (ICA). This is a remarkable rift given that the dossier allegations in fact were not included in the ICA (though, again, the infamous “pee tape” claim was included in the briefing of then-president-elect Trump).

But, be of good cheer, all of this will be sorted out now that Attorney General Bill Barr has appointed John Durham, the excellent U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to investigate the investigation.

For now, though, the telling thing is that no one wants to be associated with the dossier. Even if former director Comey is right that it was Brennan, not he, who was trying to slide the dossier into the ICA, Comey’s FBI still used it in the FISC. Plus, Comey himself did agree to brief Trump on it, though in a very incomplete way — alerting the president-elect to the lurid story about prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, but studiously omitting the tiny detail about how the FBI had used the “salacious and unverified” dossier in the FISC to contend that Trump’s campaign was in a conspiracy with Russia to undermine the election.

The urge to run from the dossier is understandable. In Washington, about ten days before the FISC authorized spying on Page, Steele was interviewed by the State Department official Kathleen Kavalec, who took notes that were passed along to the FBI. With very little effort (probably two minutes on Google), Kavalec was able to figure out that one of Steele’s major allegations was a complete invention.

Steele claimed that the Trump-Russia conspiracy involved exploitation of the Russian consulate in Miami to transfer money and information. But there is no Russian consulate in Miami. As the Twitter investigative wiz Undercover Huber details, Steele’s source for this allegation (unidentified Source E) is also the source for the pee-tape story, as well as the foundational allegation that Donald Trump and the Kremlin were in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation.”

None of these allegations has ever been verified, and the Mueller report rejects the claim of a Trump-Russia conspiracy.

In the “VERIFIED APPLICATION” that the Obama Justice Department and the FBI submitted, the FISC was led to believe Steele was reliable and that there was no known “derogatory information pertaining to” him — no mention was made of the known errors in his dossier reporting.

The first VERIFIED APPLICATION included a laborious footnote (here, pages 15 to 16) vaguely “speculating” that Steele “likely” had a political motivation to discredit Trump’s campaign; the FBI and Justice Department concealed from the court that, far from speculation, they had certain knowledge — from Steele himself — that he was passionately opposed to Trump’s election, and they further failed to disclose that the dossier allegations had been sponsored by the campaign of the opposition candidate (Hillary Clinton).

Moreover, the court was told that the FBI did not believe Steele was the “direct” source of dossier information leaked to the media. Yet it not only seemed highly likely Steele was a direct media source; Steele had told Kavalec that he was managing relationships with media outlets, some of which “have” his information (he mentioned “NYT and WP” — the New York Times and the Washington Post).

No mention of Steele’s State Department interview was made to the court. In fact, the court was informed that the only government agency to which Steele had provided information was the FBI (here, page 23). The State Department interview was likely withheld from FISC because revealing this damage to Steele’s credibility would doom the “VERIFIED APPLICATION.”

Steele identified two of his sources for Kavalec: Russia’s former spy chief Vyacheslav Trubnikov and top Kremlin adviser Vladislav Surkov. Trubnikov has intriguing ties to Stefan Halper, whom the FBI used as a confidential informant to approach Trump campaign figures Page, George Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis.

Steele himself did private-eye work for Oleg Deripaska, the aluminum oligarch known to be a close Putin confidant. Steele was also pushing his U.S. government contacts — such as Justice Department official Bruce Ohr — to accommodate Deripaska’s desire to travel to the U.S. The idea was that Deripaska could be a valuable informant. Evidently, the FBI lost interest when Deripaska told agents that Steele’s Trump-Russia conspiracy theory was preposterous.

Steele Dossier: The ‘Verified Application’ That Wasn’t | National Review

Not to worry, Barr and Durham are digging all the way to the bottom of this mess on behalf of the American People.

What exactly does the term, verified application, suppose to mean?

I gave you a hyperlink so you could double check this yourself.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4614708/Carter-Page-FISA-Application.pdf

Because the Judge clearly knew the Dossier was not verified, or at least parts of it were not.

Your argument is that even though the application is stamped VERIFIED that it is understood to contain UNVERIFIED INFORMATION?

... Courts are given testimony of "Rats" all the time, inside sources squealing, ex-partners plea dealing, jailbirds singing like canaries on other jailbirds,etc etc etc.... THOSE are not verified sources or from people who do not have an axe to grind, or even reputable people in many cases...

A courtroom is not an ex parte proceeding. The accused has representation and the opportunity to challenge and cross examine. In these secret ex parte proceedings the only thing guaranteeing our due process is the integrity of the FBI and DOJ and they clearly took full Liberty of their advantage to perpetuate a fraud on the court.

Read Point 3 on page 67:

"On the basis of the facts submitted in the VERIFIED application there is probable cause to belief that:"​

These are powerful authorities that allow secret spying of all your communications, to research the memory of all your email and electronic devices and with the three hop rule to do the same everyone you communicate with, and everyone they communicate with, effectively throwing a spying blanket over an immense number of people, and you think these awesome authorities can be granted based on rumor and innuendo stamped with VERIFIED as window dressing?

...If they had verifiable proof on everything before the warrant request, then they would not need the warrant request...?

I have no idea what you are trying to say here. A secret spying warrant on an American Citizen requires verified indisputable facts that an American is KNOWINGLY acting as an agent of foreign power engaged in a espionage conspiracy against the US.

Don't worry, Barr and Durham will get to the bottom of all this.

[/quote]

...-They suspected that Page was an agent for a foreign power...

Based on rumor and unverified innuendo, that isn't sufficient for a FISC warrant, thst is why the FBI and DOJ lied and concealed information from the Court.

...-Carter Page has never spoken to or met Donald Trump, and the surveillance did not begin on him until AFTER he had left the campaign. If this was done to spy on Trump or the Trump campaign in some kind of back door coup de tat as your conspiracy theory claims, then why in the heck would the FBI pick Carter Page of all people, to do that...??? And then wait until after he left the Trump campaign? To me, that part just doesn't fit.

Sure it does because of the memory of electronic devices. It's not uncommon for stored email, and so forth to back months, if not years, on devices.

 

[Care4all]

The dossier part that was submitted to the court Judge was NOT submitted as verified information..

Each application was stamped VERIFIED

... the Judge was told that it was opposition research acquired that the opponent Candidate paid for...

They concealed that it was purchased by the Hillary Campaign.

...No one told the Judge it was verified information, unless it was verified information...

Oh yes they did. Even though when Steele was under oath and his balls were on the line, he testified that his claims were UNVERIFIED.

The Steele Dossier and the ‘Verified Application’ That Wasn’t

Former officials are fighting over who deserves blame.

Here’s what you need to know: In rushing out their assessment of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Obama-administration officials chose not to include the risible Steele-dossier allegations that they had put in their “VERIFIED APPLICATION” for warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) because . . . wait for it . . . the allegations weren’t verified.

And now, the officials are squabbling over who pushed the dossier. Why? Because the dossier — a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed, based on anonymous Russian sources peddling farcical hearsay, compiled by a well-paid foreign operative (former British spy Christopher Steele) — is crumbling by the day.

It was long ago acknowledged that dossier information was “salacious and unverified,” to quote congressional testimony by former FBI director James Comey.

If dossier claims were still unverified when Comey testified to Congress in mid 2017 (and thereafter), then those claims could not have been verified when the Obama Justice Department and FBI submitted it to the FISC as a “VERIFIED APPLICATION” in October 2016. It also had to have been unverified on January 6, 2017, when the Obama administration chose to include a sliver of the dossier in the briefing of President-elect Trump — the day after intelligence chiefs met with President Obama in the Oval Office and discussed what Russia information should be shared with the incoming Trump team.

Then-director Comey conceded that there was no meaningful corroboration of the dossier. Despite that, the FBI and Justice Department included it in the “VERIFIED APPLICATION”.

Moreover, FBI and Justice Department procedures require that information be vetted for factual accuracy before it is submitted to the FISC. The rules of the FISC require the Justice Department to notify the court promptly if misstatements or inaccuracies have been discovered. Far from alerting the FISC that information in what it boldly labeled the “VERIFIED APPLICATION” was actually unverified, the Justice Department and the FBI kept reaffirming the dossier allegations to the court — in January, April, and June of 2017.

A dispute between the camps of Comey and Obama CIA director John Brennan broke out into the open — a dispute over which of them tried to force the dossier findings into the aforementioned intelligence-community assessment (ICA). This is a remarkable rift given that the dossier allegations in fact were not included in the ICA (though, again, the infamous “pee tape” claim was included in the briefing of then-president-elect Trump).

But, be of good cheer, all of this will be sorted out now that Attorney General Bill Barr has appointed John Durham, the excellent U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to investigate the investigation.

For now, though, the telling thing is that no one wants to be associated with the dossier. Even if former director Comey is right that it was Brennan, not he, who was trying to slide the dossier into the ICA, Comey’s FBI still used it in the FISC. Plus, Comey himself did agree to brief Trump on it, though in a very incomplete way — alerting the president-elect to the lurid story about prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, but studiously omitting the tiny detail about how the FBI had used the “salacious and unverified” dossier in the FISC to contend that Trump’s campaign was in a conspiracy with Russia to undermine the election.

The urge to run from the dossier is understandable. In Washington, about ten days before the FISC authorized spying on Page, Steele was interviewed by the State Department official Kathleen Kavalec, who took notes that were passed along to the FBI. With very little effort (probably two minutes on Google), Kavalec was able to figure out that one of Steele’s major allegations was a complete invention.

Steele claimed that the Trump-Russia conspiracy involved exploitation of the Russian consulate in Miami to transfer money and information. But there is no Russian consulate in Miami. As the Twitter investigative wiz Undercover Huber details, Steele’s source for this allegation (unidentified Source E) is also the source for the pee-tape story, as well as the foundational allegation that Donald Trump and the Kremlin were in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation.”

None of these allegations has ever been verified, and the Mueller report rejects the claim of a Trump-Russia conspiracy.

In the “VERIFIED APPLICATION” that the Obama Justice Department and the FBI submitted, the FISC was led to believe Steele was reliable and that there was no known “derogatory information pertaining to” him — no mention was made of the known errors in his dossier reporting.

The first VERIFIED APPLICATION included a laborious footnote (here, pages 15 to 16) vaguely “speculating” that Steele “likely” had a political motivation to discredit Trump’s campaign; the FBI and Justice Department concealed from the court that, far from speculation, they had certain knowledge — from Steele himself — that he was passionately opposed to Trump’s election, and they further failed to disclose that the dossier allegations had been sponsored by the campaign of the opposition candidate (Hillary Clinton).

Moreover, the court was told that the FBI did not believe Steele was the “direct” source of dossier information leaked to the media. Yet it not only seemed highly likely Steele was a direct media source; Steele had told Kavalec that he was managing relationships with media outlets, some of which “have” his information (he mentioned “NYT and WP” — the New York Times and the Washington Post).

No mention of Steele’s State Department interview was made to the court. In fact, the court was informed that the only government agency to which Steele had provided information was the FBI (here, page 23). The State Department interview was likely withheld from FISC because revealing this damage to Steele’s credibility would doom the “VERIFIED APPLICATION.”

Steele identified two of his sources for Kavalec: Russia’s former spy chief Vyacheslav Trubnikov and top Kremlin adviser Vladislav Surkov. Trubnikov has intriguing ties to Stefan Halper, whom the FBI used as a confidential informant to approach Trump campaign figures Page, George Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis.

Steele himself did private-eye work for Oleg Deripaska, the aluminum oligarch known to be a close Putin confidant. Steele was also pushing his U.S. government contacts — such as Justice Department official Bruce Ohr — to accommodate Deripaska’s desire to travel to the U.S. The idea was that Deripaska could be a valuable informant. Evidently, the FBI lost interest when Deripaska told agents that Steele’s Trump-Russia conspiracy theory was preposterous.

Steele Dossier: The ‘Verified Application’ That Wasn’t | National Review

Not to worry, Barr and Durham are digging all the way to the bottom of this mess on behalf of the American People.

What exactly does the term, verified application, suppose to mean?

I gave you a hyperlink so you could double check this yourself.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4614708/Carter-Page-FISA-Application.pdf

Because the Judge clearly knew the Dossier was not verified, or at least parts of it were not.

Your argument is that even though the application is stamped VERIFIED that it is understood to contain UNVERIFIED INFORMATION?

... Courts are given testimony of "Rats" all the time, inside sources squealing, ex-partners plea dealing, jailbirds singing like canaries on other jailbirds,etc etc etc.... THOSE are not verified sources or from people who do not have an axe to grind, or even reputable people in many cases...

A courtroom is not an ex parte proceeding. The accused has representation and the opportunity to challenge and cross examine. In these secret ex parte proceedings the only thing guaranteeing our due process is the integrity of the FBI and DOJ and they clearly took full Liberty of their advantage to perpetuate a fraud on the court.

Read Point 3 on page 67:

"On the basis of the facts submitted in the VERIFIED application there is probable cause to belief that:"​

These are powerful authorities that allow secret spying of all your communications, to research the memory of all your email and electronic devices and with the three hop rule to do the same everyone you communicate with, and everyone they communicate with, effectively throwing a spying blanket over an immense number of people, and you think these awesome authorities can be granted based on rumor and innuendo stamped with VERIFIED as window dressing?

...If they had verifiable proof on everything before the warrant request, then they would not need the warrant request...?

I have no idea what you are trying to say here. A secret spying warrant on an American Citizen requires verified indisputable facts that an American is KNOWINGLY acting as an agent of foreign power engaged in a espionage conspiracy against the US.

Don't worry, Barr and Durham will get to the bottom of all this.

...-They suspected that Page was an agent for a foreign power...

Based on rumor and unverified innuendo, that isn't sufficient for a FISC warrant, thst is why the FBI and DOJ lied and concealed information from the Court.

...-Carter Page has never spoken to or met Donald Trump, and the surveillance did not begin on him until AFTER he had left the campaign. If this was done to spy on Trump or the Trump campaign in some kind of back door coup de tat as your conspiracy theory claims, then why in the heck would the FBI pick Carter Page of all people, to do that...??? And then wait until after he left the Trump campaign? To me, that part just doesn't fit.

Sure it does because of the memory of electronic devices. It's not uncommon for stored email, and so forth to back months, if not years, on devices.[/QUOTE]



That's true about the devices stored information, but the warrant was for secret surveillance on Page and not a subpoena for his devices.

 

[Zorro!]

Each application was stamped VERIFIED
They concealed that it was purchased by the Hillary Campaign.
Oh yes they did. Even though when Steele was under oath and his balls were on the line, he testified that his claims were UNVERIFIED.

The Steele Dossier and the ‘Verified Application’ That Wasn’t

Former officials are fighting over who deserves blame.

Here’s what you need to know: In rushing out their assessment of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Obama-administration officials chose not to include the risible Steele-dossier allegations that they had put in their “VERIFIED APPLICATION” for warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) because . . . wait for it . . . the allegations weren’t verified.

And now, the officials are squabbling over who pushed the dossier. Why? Because the dossier — a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed, based on anonymous Russian sources peddling farcical hearsay, compiled by a well-paid foreign operative (former British spy Christopher Steele) — is crumbling by the day.

It was long ago acknowledged that dossier information was “salacious and unverified,” to quote congressional testimony by former FBI director James Comey.

If dossier claims were still unverified when Comey testified to Congress in mid 2017 (and thereafter), then those claims could not have been verified when the Obama Justice Department and FBI submitted it to the FISC as a “VERIFIED APPLICATION” in October 2016. It also had to have been unverified on January 6, 2017, when the Obama administration chose to include a sliver of the dossier in the briefing of President-elect Trump — the day after intelligence chiefs met with President Obama in the Oval Office and discussed what Russia information should be shared with the incoming Trump team.

Then-director Comey conceded that there was no meaningful corroboration of the dossier. Despite that, the FBI and Justice Department included it in the “VERIFIED APPLICATION”.

Moreover, FBI and Justice Department procedures require that information be vetted for factual accuracy before it is submitted to the FISC. The rules of the FISC require the Justice Department to notify the court promptly if misstatements or inaccuracies have been discovered. Far from alerting the FISC that information in what it boldly labeled the “VERIFIED APPLICATION” was actually unverified, the Justice Department and the FBI kept reaffirming the dossier allegations to the court — in January, April, and June of 2017.

A dispute between the camps of Comey and Obama CIA director John Brennan broke out into the open — a dispute over which of them tried to force the dossier findings into the aforementioned intelligence-community assessment (ICA). This is a remarkable rift given that the dossier allegations in fact were not included in the ICA (though, again, the infamous “pee tape” claim was included in the briefing of then-president-elect Trump).

But, be of good cheer, all of this will be sorted out now that Attorney General Bill Barr has appointed John Durham, the excellent U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to investigate the investigation.

For now, though, the telling thing is that no one wants to be associated with the dossier. Even if former director Comey is right that it was Brennan, not he, who was trying to slide the dossier into the ICA, Comey’s FBI still used it in the FISC. Plus, Comey himself did agree to brief Trump on it, though in a very incomplete way — alerting the president-elect to the lurid story about prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, but studiously omitting the tiny detail about how the FBI had used the “salacious and unverified” dossier in the FISC to contend that Trump’s campaign was in a conspiracy with Russia to undermine the election.

The urge to run from the dossier is understandable. In Washington, about ten days before the FISC authorized spying on Page, Steele was interviewed by the State Department official Kathleen Kavalec, who took notes that were passed along to the FBI. With very little effort (probably two minutes on Google), Kavalec was able to figure out that one of Steele’s major allegations was a complete invention.

Steele claimed that the Trump-Russia conspiracy involved exploitation of the Russian consulate in Miami to transfer money and information. But there is no Russian consulate in Miami. As the Twitter investigative wiz Undercover Huber details, Steele’s source for this allegation (unidentified Source E) is also the source for the pee-tape story, as well as the foundational allegation that Donald Trump and the Kremlin were in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation.”

None of these allegations has ever been verified, and the Mueller report rejects the claim of a Trump-Russia conspiracy.

In the “VERIFIED APPLICATION” that the Obama Justice Department and the FBI submitted, the FISC was led to believe Steele was reliable and that there was no known “derogatory information pertaining to” him — no mention was made of the known errors in his dossier reporting.

The first VERIFIED APPLICATION included a laborious footnote (here, pages 15 to 16) vaguely “speculating” that Steele “likely” had a political motivation to discredit Trump’s campaign; the FBI and Justice Department concealed from the court that, far from speculation, they had certain knowledge — from Steele himself — that he was passionately opposed to Trump’s election, and they further failed to disclose that the dossier allegations had been sponsored by the campaign of the opposition candidate (Hillary Clinton).

Moreover, the court was told that the FBI did not believe Steele was the “direct” source of dossier information leaked to the media. Yet it not only seemed highly likely Steele was a direct media source; Steele had told Kavalec that he was managing relationships with media outlets, some of which “have” his information (he mentioned “NYT and WP” — the New York Times and the Washington Post).

No mention of Steele’s State Department interview was made to the court. In fact, the court was informed that the only government agency to which Steele had provided information was the FBI (here, page 23). The State Department interview was likely withheld from FISC because revealing this damage to Steele’s credibility would doom the “VERIFIED APPLICATION.”

Steele identified two of his sources for Kavalec: Russia’s former spy chief Vyacheslav Trubnikov and top Kremlin adviser Vladislav Surkov. Trubnikov has intriguing ties to Stefan Halper, whom the FBI used as a confidential informant to approach Trump campaign figures Page, George Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis.

Steele himself did private-eye work for Oleg Deripaska, the aluminum oligarch known to be a close Putin confidant. Steele was also pushing his U.S. government contacts — such as Justice Department official Bruce Ohr — to accommodate Deripaska’s desire to travel to the U.S. The idea was that Deripaska could be a valuable informant. Evidently, the FBI lost interest when Deripaska told agents that Steele’s Trump-Russia conspiracy theory was preposterous.

Steele Dossier: The ‘Verified Application’ That Wasn’t | National Review

Not to worry, Barr and Durham are digging all the way to the bottom of this mess on behalf of the American People.

What exactly does the term, verified application, suppose to mean?

I gave you a hyperlink so you could double check this yourself.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4614708/Carter-Page-FISA-Application.pdf

Because the Judge clearly knew the Dossier was not verified, or at least parts of it were not.

Your argument is that even though the application is stamped VERIFIED that it is understood to contain UNVERIFIED INFORMATION?

... Courts are given testimony of "Rats" all the time, inside sources squealing, ex-partners plea dealing, jailbirds singing like canaries on other jailbirds,etc etc etc.... THOSE are not verified sources or from people who do not have an axe to grind, or even reputable people in many cases...

A courtroom is not an ex parte proceeding. The accused has representation and the opportunity to challenge and cross examine. In these secret ex parte proceedings the only thing guaranteeing our due process is the integrity of the FBI and DOJ and they clearly took full Liberty of their advantage to perpetuate a fraud on the court.

Read Point 3 on page 67:

"On the basis of the facts submitted in the VERIFIED application there is probable cause to belief that:"​

These are powerful authorities that allow secret spying of all your communications, to research the memory of all your email and electronic devices and with the three hop rule to do the same everyone you communicate with, and everyone they communicate with, effectively throwing a spying blanket over an immense number of people, and you think these awesome authorities can be granted based on rumor and innuendo stamped with VERIFIED as window dressing?

...If they had verifiable proof on everything before the warrant request, then they would not need the warrant request...?

I have no idea what you are trying to say here. A secret spying warrant on an American Citizen requires verified indisputable facts that an American is KNOWINGLY acting as an agent of foreign power engaged in a espionage conspiracy against the US.

Don't worry, Barr and Durham will get to the bottom of all this.

...-They suspected that Page was an agent for a foreign power...

Based on rumor and unverified innuendo, that isn't sufficient for a FISC warrant, thst is why the FBI and DOJ lied and concealed information from the Court.

...-Carter Page has never spoken to or met Donald Trump, and the surveillance did not begin on him until AFTER he had left the campaign. If this was done to spy on Trump or the Trump campaign in some kind of back door coup de tat as your conspiracy theory claims, then why in the heck would the FBI pick Carter Page of all people, to do that...??? And then wait until after he left the Trump campaign? To me, that part just doesn't fit.

Sure it does because of the memory of electronic devices. It's not uncommon for stored email, and so forth to back months, if not years, on devices.

That's true about the devices stored information, but the warrant was for secret surveillance on Page and not a subpoena for his devices.[/QUOTE]
Obama Justice Department and FBI had obtained warrants to eavesdrop on Page’s communications, beginning about three weeks before the 2016 election.

The dossier, a Clinton campaign opposition research project (a fact deliberately concealed from the FISA court), was essential to the required probable-cause showing; the FBI’s former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, testified that without the dossier there would have been no warrant.

FISA’s Section 702

To understand the extent of what the FBI was empowered to do by the FISA warrant for Carter Page, we must add another factor: the type of surveillance available for exploitation, and the breadth of data involved in it.

Some of the surveillance done under “warrant” approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) may be current surveillance, which may entail watching a subject’s texts, emails, phone calls, etc. as they occur in real time. But a great deal of what we call “surveillance” today is actually data-mining—using the fabled NSA database—or direct requests from federal agencies for customer data stored by telecoms and internet service providers.

Data-mining is inherently about hunting through data that’s already there, because it is routinely collected, or stored under legal requirements and made available to the US intelligence community on demand. For some types of communications data, it is possible to retrieve information from as much as five years back in the relevant database.

In the case of a subject like Carter Page, that means investigators who obtain a warrant in October 2016 can hunt through his communications going back several years before that date—and can use their “license to hop” to probe the first and second order of correspondents linked to him at any point during that period in the same fashion.

Under a single warrant, anyone Page had a text or phone call with in the Trump campaign during the brief months of his association with it in 2016, was fair game, as a direct connection, all the way through the end of the last warrant-extension period on Page in October 2017. The second-hop connections of those initial contacts—meaning everyone that those people had contact with—are also fair game. In other words, it’s likely that almost everyone on the Trump campaign staff was included in the universe of first- and second-order contacts of Carter Page. The entirety of their correspondence is therefore also covered by the initial warrant, regardless of whether or not they ever met or corresponded with Carter Page, or whether that correspondence referred to him in any way, directly or indirectly.

We got a glimpse of that reality from the recent report that Carter Page was in contact with Trump adviser Steve Bannon in January 2017, which could have allowed the FBI to look further into Bannon’s communications through October 2017. But it also allowed a probe of Bannon’s communications going back years before January 2017—as well as a probe of anyone Bannon was in contact with throughout that same period.

Think that over for a moment, and you can see why the Carter Page warrant is important. The possible abuse of that warrant for partisan political purposes would likely be a violation not just of Page’s rights, but of the rights of thousands of other Americans—and by extension, of the right of all Americans to be free from warrantless surveillance.

I look forward to Barr and Durham getting to the bottom of all this Obama's illegal spying on political rivals.

 

[Care4all]

What exactly does the term, verified application, suppose to mean?

I gave you a hyperlink so you could double check this yourself.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4614708/Carter-Page-FISA-Application.pdf

Because the Judge clearly knew the Dossier was not verified, or at least parts of it were not.

Your argument is that even though the application is stamped VERIFIED that it is understood to contain UNVERIFIED INFORMATION?

... Courts are given testimony of "Rats" all the time, inside sources squealing, ex-partners plea dealing, jailbirds singing like canaries on other jailbirds,etc etc etc.... THOSE are not verified sources or from people who do not have an axe to grind, or even reputable people in many cases...

A courtroom is not an ex parte proceeding. The accused has representation and the opportunity to challenge and cross examine. In these secret ex parte proceedings the only thing guaranteeing our due process is the integrity of the FBI and DOJ and they clearly took full Liberty of their advantage to perpetuate a fraud on the court.

Read Point 3 on page 67:

"On the basis of the facts submitted in the VERIFIED application there is probable cause to belief that:"​

These are powerful authorities that allow secret spying of all your communications, to research the memory of all your email and electronic devices and with the three hop rule to do the same everyone you communicate with, and everyone they communicate with, effectively throwing a spying blanket over an immense number of people, and you think these awesome authorities can be granted based on rumor and innuendo stamped with VERIFIED as window dressing?

...If they had verifiable proof on everything before the warrant request, then they would not need the warrant request...?

I have no idea what you are trying to say here. A secret spying warrant on an American Citizen requires verified indisputable facts that an American is KNOWINGLY acting as an agent of foreign power engaged in a espionage conspiracy against the US.

Don't worry, Barr and Durham will get to the bottom of all this.

...-They suspected that Page was an agent for a foreign power...

Based on rumor and unverified innuendo, that isn't sufficient for a FISC warrant, thst is why the FBI and DOJ lied and concealed information from the Court.

...-Carter Page has never spoken to or met Donald Trump, and the surveillance did not begin on him until AFTER he had left the campaign. If this was done to spy on Trump or the Trump campaign in some kind of back door coup de tat as your conspiracy theory claims, then why in the heck would the FBI pick Carter Page of all people, to do that...??? And then wait until after he left the Trump campaign? To me, that part just doesn't fit.

Sure it does because of the memory of electronic devices. It's not uncommon for stored email, and so forth to back months, if not years, on devices.

That's true about the devices stored information, but the warrant was for secret surveillance on Page and not a subpoena for his devices.

Obama Justice Department and FBI had obtained warrants to eavesdrop on Page’s communications, beginning about three weeks before the 2016 election.

The dossier, a Clinton campaign opposition research project (a fact deliberately concealed from the FISA court), was essential to the required probable-cause showing; the FBI’s former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, testified that without the dossier there would have been no warrant.

FISA’s Section 702

To understand the extent of what the FBI was empowered to do by the FISA warrant for Carter Page, we must add another factor: the type of surveillance available for exploitation, and the breadth of data involved in it.

Some of the surveillance done under “warrant” approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) may be current surveillance, which may entail watching a subject’s texts, emails, phone calls, etc. as they occur in real time. But a great deal of what we call “surveillance” today is actually data-mining—using the fabled NSA database—or direct requests from federal agencies for customer data stored by telecoms and internet service providers.

Data-mining is inherently about hunting through data that’s already there, because it is routinely collected, or stored under legal requirements and made available to the US intelligence community on demand. For some types of communications data, it is possible to retrieve information from as much as five years back in the relevant database.

In the case of a subject like Carter Page, that means investigators who obtain a warrant in October 2016 can hunt through his communications going back several years before that date—and can use their “license to hop” to probe the first and second order of correspondents linked to him at any point during that period in the same fashion.

Under a single warrant, anyone Page had a text or phone call with in the Trump campaign during the brief months of his association with it in 2016, was fair game, as a direct connection, all the way through the end of the last warrant-extension period on Page in October 2017. The second-hop connections of those initial contacts—meaning everyone that those people had contact with—are also fair game. In other words, it’s likely that almost everyone on the Trump campaign staff was included in the universe of first- and second-order contacts of Carter Page. The entirety of their correspondence is therefore also covered by the initial warrant, regardless of whether or not they ever met or corresponded with Carter Page, or whether that correspondence referred to him in any way, directly or indirectly.

We got a glimpse of that reality from the recent report that Carter Page was in contact with Trump adviser Steve Bannon in January 2017, which could have allowed the FBI to look further into Bannon’s communications through October 2017. But it also allowed a probe of Bannon’s communications going back years before January 2017—as well as a probe of anyone Bannon was in contact with throughout that same period.

Think that over for a moment, and you can see why the Carter Page warrant is important. The possible abuse of that warrant for partisan political purposes would likely be a violation not just of Page’s rights, but of the rights of thousands of other Americans—and by extension, of the right of all Americans to be free from warrantless surveillance.

I look forward to Barr and Durham getting to the bottom of all this Obama's illegal spying on political rivals.

[/QUOTE]
do you have a link to the article? please...

 

[Zorro!]

I gave you a hyperlink so you could double check this yourself.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4614708/Carter-Page-FISA-Application.pdf

Because the Judge clearly knew the Dossier was not verified, or at least parts of it were not.

Your argument is that even though the application is stamped VERIFIED that it is understood to contain UNVERIFIED INFORMATION?

... Courts are given testimony of "Rats" all the time, inside sources squealing, ex-partners plea dealing, jailbirds singing like canaries on other jailbirds,etc etc etc.... THOSE are not verified sources or from people who do not have an axe to grind, or even reputable people in many cases...

A courtroom is not an ex parte proceeding. The accused has representation and the opportunity to challenge and cross examine. In these secret ex parte proceedings the only thing guaranteeing our due process is the integrity of the FBI and DOJ and they clearly took full Liberty of their advantage to perpetuate a fraud on the court.

Read Point 3 on page 67:

"On the basis of the facts submitted in the VERIFIED application there is probable cause to belief that:"​

These are powerful authorities that allow secret spying of all your communications, to research the memory of all your email and electronic devices and with the three hop rule to do the same everyone you communicate with, and everyone they communicate with, effectively throwing a spying blanket over an immense number of people, and you think these awesome authorities can be granted based on rumor and innuendo stamped with VERIFIED as window dressing?

...If they had verifiable proof on everything before the warrant request, then they would not need the warrant request...?

I have no idea what you are trying to say here. A secret spying warrant on an American Citizen requires verified indisputable facts that an American is KNOWINGLY acting as an agent of foreign power engaged in a espionage conspiracy against the US.

Don't worry, Barr and Durham will get to the bottom of all this.

...-They suspected that Page was an agent for a foreign power...

Based on rumor and unverified innuendo, that isn't sufficient for a FISC warrant, thst is why the FBI and DOJ lied and concealed information from the Court.

...-Carter Page has never spoken to or met Donald Trump, and the surveillance did not begin on him until AFTER he had left the campaign. If this was done to spy on Trump or the Trump campaign in some kind of back door coup de tat as your conspiracy theory claims, then why in the heck would the FBI pick Carter Page of all people, to do that...??? And then wait until after he left the Trump campaign? To me, that part just doesn't fit.

Sure it does because of the memory of electronic devices. It's not uncommon for stored email, and so forth to back months, if not years, on devices.

That's true about the devices stored information, but the warrant was for secret surveillance on Page and not a subpoena for his devices.

Obama Justice Department and FBI had obtained warrants to eavesdrop on Page’s communications, beginning about three weeks before the 2016 election.

The dossier, a Clinton campaign opposition research project (a fact deliberately concealed from the FISA court), was essential to the required probable-cause showing; the FBI’s former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, testified that without the dossier there would have been no warrant.

FISA’s Section 702

To understand the extent of what the FBI was empowered to do by the FISA warrant for Carter Page, we must add another factor: the type of surveillance available for exploitation, and the breadth of data involved in it.

Some of the surveillance done under “warrant” approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) may be current surveillance, which may entail watching a subject’s texts, emails, phone calls, etc. as they occur in real time. But a great deal of what we call “surveillance” today is actually data-mining—using the fabled NSA database—or direct requests from federal agencies for customer data stored by telecoms and internet service providers.

Data-mining is inherently about hunting through data that’s already there, because it is routinely collected, or stored under legal requirements and made available to the US intelligence community on demand. For some types of communications data, it is possible to retrieve information from as much as five years back in the relevant database.

In the case of a subject like Carter Page, that means investigators who obtain a warrant in October 2016 can hunt through his communications going back several years before that date—and can use their “license to hop” to probe the first and second order of correspondents linked to him at any point during that period in the same fashion.

Under a single warrant, anyone Page had a text or phone call with in the Trump campaign during the brief months of his association with it in 2016, was fair game, as a direct connection, all the way through the end of the last warrant-extension period on Page in October 2017. The second-hop connections of those initial contacts—meaning everyone that those people had contact with—are also fair game. In other words, it’s likely that almost everyone on the Trump campaign staff was included in the universe of first- and second-order contacts of Carter Page. The entirety of their correspondence is therefore also covered by the initial warrant, regardless of whether or not they ever met or corresponded with Carter Page, or whether that correspondence referred to him in any way, directly or indirectly.

We got a glimpse of that reality from the recent report that Carter Page was in contact with Trump adviser Steve Bannon in January 2017, which could have allowed the FBI to look further into Bannon’s communications through October 2017. But it also allowed a probe of Bannon’s communications going back years before January 2017—as well as a probe of anyone Bannon was in contact with throughout that same period.

Think that over for a moment, and you can see why the Carter Page warrant is important. The possible abuse of that warrant for partisan political purposes would likely be a violation not just of Page’s rights, but of the rights of thousands of other Americans—and by extension, of the right of all Americans to be free from warrantless surveillance.

I look forward to Barr and Durham getting to the bottom of all this Obama's illegal spying on political rivals.

do you have a link to the article? please... [/QUOTE]
Why Civil Libertarians Should Be Worried about the FISA Warrant on Carter Page