Government Spying on US Persons is allowed, even of rival Political Campaigns, but only in cases of National Security based on unimpeachable verified evidence of the highest quality. The Obama State Department and an Australian diplomat grossly exaggerated Papadopoulos’s claims — which were probably false anyway.
Chicanery was the force behind the formal opening of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. There was a false premise, namely: The Trump campaign must have known that Russia possessed emails related to Hillary Clinton. From there, through either intentional deception or incompetence, the foreign ministries of Australia and the United States erected a fraudulent story tying the Trump campaign’s purported knowledge to the publication of hacked Democratic National Committee emails.
That is what we learn from the saga of George Papadopoulos, as fleshed out by the
Mueller report.
The investigative theory on which the FBI formally opened the foreign-counterintelligence probe code-named “Crossfire Hurricane” on July 31, 2016, held that the Trump campaign knew about, and was potentially complicit in, Russia’s possession of hacked emails that would compromise Hillary Clinton; and that, in order to help Donald Trump, the Kremlin planned to disseminate these emails anonymously (through a third party) at a time maximally damaging to Clinton’s campaign.
There are thus two components to this theory: the emails and Russia’s intentions.
I. Papadopoulos Knew Nothing about the DNC Emails — and Probably Nothing about Any Emails
II. Papadopoulos Had No Knowledge of Russia’s Intentions
Mueller carefully describes
not what Papadopoulos said to Downer, but
what Downer understood Papadopoulos had “suggested,” namely that
the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton.
In Mueller's sleight of hand the “Trump Campaign” here is just Papadopoulos; the “Russian government” is Mifsud. But Papadopoulos was as low-ranking as it got in the Trump campaign, and Mifsud — the source of the “indications” — was not part of the Russian government at all. If Mifsud is an agent of any government, it's Britain.
FBI Used False Premise to Open Trump-Russia Investigation | National Review
We need to keep digging until we get to the bottom of why an incumbent Administration spied on a rival Presidential Political Campaign.
Where felonies were committed by high ranking individuals, indictments need to be brought.
The spying was on Carter Page and his involvement with Russia, not the campaign. Trump-Russia came later when the FBI warned Clinton and Trump that Russia may be trying to infiltrate the campaign. Clinton listened to the warning while Trump tried to use it to his advantage. Even Clinton herself knew it at the time. After that, everyone knew it,, and realized that the center of the Russian involvement was to get Trump elected. The investigation was totally warranted, and would have been derelict of duty to ignore it. This OP is totally fos.
That simply isn't true. “Crossfire Hurricane” was opened on July 31, 2016. The Page warrant was even after that. Months earlier they were investigating Papadopoulos in January of 2016 and Mifsud in Feb of 2016. This was long before the Page warrants. Following the DOJ and FBI's ever evolving story of how they came to spy on Trump and even try to plant spies in his campaign at one point started with Page but the story starts well earlier than that, currently with Papadopoulos, but as Barr notes, we are still getting to the bottom of what caused the FBI and DOJ to start this investigation and what was the involvement by Crapper, Brennan and The State Department?
Those that began to spy on Trump did so on a false premise, namely: The Trump campaign must have known that Russia possessed emails related to Hillary Clinton. From there, through either intentional deception or incompetence, the foreign ministries of Australia and the United States erected a fraudulent story tying the Trump campaign’s purported knowledge to the publication of hacked Democratic National Committee emails.
The saga of George Papadopoulos, is fleshed out by the
Mueller report.
The FBI's working theory held that the Trump campaign knew about, and was potentially complicit in, Russia’s possession of hacked emails that would compromise Hillary Clinton; and that, in order to help Donald Trump, the Kremlin planned to disseminate these emails anonymously (through a third party) at a time maximally damaging to Clinton’s campaign.
There are thus two components to this theory: the emails and Russia’s intentions and the FBI/DOJ/State Department and likely Crapper and Brennan had them both wrong.
I. Papadopoulos Knew Nothing about the DNC Emails — and Probably Nothing about Any Emails
II. Papadopoulos Had No Knowledge of Russia’s Intentions
I covered the email component extensively in an earlier recent post and that is only half the concocted story. The second thing the FBI's contrived working theory had no basis for was the assumption that 27 year old Papadopoulos had any knowledge of Russia's intentions.
There is no evidence whatsoever, including in the 448-page Mueller report, that Papadopoulos was ever told that Russia intended, through an intermediary, to disseminate damaging information about Clinton in a manner designed to hurt Clinton’s candidacy and help Trump’s. There is no evidence that Papadopoulos ever said such a thing to anyone else — including Downer, whom he met at the Kensington Wine Rooms in London on May 6, 2016.
The claim that Papadopoulos made such a statement is a fabrication by Downer, the Australian diplomat.
On July 22, 2016, the eve of the Democratic National Convention and two months after Downer met with Papadopoulos, WikiLeaks began disseminating to the press the hacked DNC emails. From this fact, Downer drew the unfounded inference that
the hacked emails must have been what Papadopoulos was talking about when he said Russia had damaging information about Clinton.
Downer’s assumption was specious, for at least three reasons.
1) In speaking with Downer, Papadopoulos never mentioned emails. Neither Downer nor Papadopoulos has ever claimed that Papadopoulos spoke of emails.
2) Papadopoulos did not tell Downer that Russia was planning
to publish damaging information about Clinton through an intermediary. There is no allegation in the Mueller report that Mifsud ever told Papadopoulos any such thing, much less that Papadopoulos relayed it to Downer.
In neither the Mueller report nor the “
Statement of the Offense” that Mueller filed in connection with Papadopoulos’s plea (pp. 6–7) have prosecutors claimed that Mifsud told Papadopoulos what Russia was planning to do with the “dirt,” much less why. And Mifsud denied telling Papadopoulos anything about emails; Mueller never alleged that Mifsud’s denial was false.
3) Papadopoulos says the emails he claims Mifsud referred to
were not the DNC emails; they were
Clinton’s own emails. That is, when Papadopoulos claims that Mifsud told him that Russia had “dirt” in the form of “thousands” of “emails of Clinton,” he understood Mifsud to be alluding to the thousands of State Department and Clinton Foundation emails that Clinton had stored on a private server. These, of course, were the emails that were being intensively covered in the media (including speculation that they might have been hacked by hostile foreign intelligence services) at the time Mifsud and Papadopoulos spoke – i.e., April 2016, when neither Mifsud nor Papadopoulos had any basis to know anything about hacked DNC emails.
FBI Used False Premise to Open Trump-Russia Investigation
