If anyone believes that the WH has not been fully apprised of what the Mueller report entails and how it damages Trump pointing out the unethical behavior of his campaign staff and the subsequent attempts to obstruct investigations, that someone is a "card-carrying" member of the Trump cult.
The above stated, what Trump (and his stooges) are NOW doing is an attempt to cover the Mueller report's upcoming damages by shifting attention to the old moronic accusation that the "deep state" was spying on Trump and tried an attempted coup d'etat......
BULLSHIT !!! Bullshit spread by Trump, Barr, Nunes and Graham....
What's the source of this obfuscation???............None other than the hapless CARTER PAGE.
Mr. Page was....for a very short time....tagged to be one of candidate Trump's foreign advisers....the relationship was cut quickly and actually shows just how INEPT the Trump entourage was in vetting who joined the campaign.
Carter Page was under FBI investigation in late 2013 and 2014.
Carter Page came to the attention of the FBI long before he joined the Trump campaign, as the Wall Street Journal and other news outlets have reported. In 2013, Russian spies tried to recruit Page as an intelligence source, and Page passed documents to an agent of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. In discussing the Oct. 2016 FISA warrant, the WSJ says, “It isn’t clear whether the department had previously requested a FISA warrant on Mr. Page.”
Reports: Carter Page Was Subject to FISA Warrant in 2013/2014 - Just Security
Further, in Carter Page’s case, the FBI clearly HAD to investigate and request a FISA warrant...And what should be remembered, is that
a FISA warrant targeting a United States person must be renewed every 90 days, as Page’s was on three separate occasions, by three different FISA Court judges. Those renewal applications would not merely have recited the evidence supporting the initial order: They would have been expected to describe the fruits of previous surveillance, and justify continued monitoring by showing that useful intelligence was being gathered—or, at the very least, that there was good reason to expect some in the future.
Revisiting Carter Page - Just Security
Bottom line: The entire "wait to see how Trump had endured an attempted coup" is BULLSHIT....of the color orange.
I know that for Trump Cult members the above is too long to read......So, let me offer BOTTOM LINE
Carter Page was being recruited by Russian spies going back to 2013
Trump hired him to be one of his "foreign policy advisers"
FISA warrants were issued to surveil Page AFTER he left the Trump campaign
FISA warrants were issued SEVERAL times by FISA judges who were republicans
So......what do idiots like Trump and Barr and Graham "conclude"???.........................."The deep state was spying on poor, defenless Trump...."
What a ******* bunch of morons....cheered on by 35% of American morons. (who are mostly on this forum)
1. The FISA applications were lies based on the Steele Dossier paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Crime #1. See Nunes memo items below.
2. Under the "two hop rule" surveillance of Carter Page can be of anyone he talks to, and anyone they talk to, so there was a wide latitude to spy on anyone in the Trump campaign, including Trump.
The Nunes memo states that a FISA warrant on Carter Page was sought and obtained on October 21, 2016, and that there were three subsequent 90-day renewals. The memo notes that FISA submissions are classified information.
The memo "raise concern as to the legitimacy and legality" of the FISA application process relating to Page, and that
probable cause was not made in the warrant application. It makes five main points. First it alleges that the
Steele dossier "formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application." The memo asserted that
Christopher Steele was paid $160,000 by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
[27] In fact, Perkins Coie, which represented the DNC and Clinton campaign, had no contact with Steele, and never paid him directly. Instead, they paid Fusion GPS $1.02 million in fees and expenses, $168,000 of which was paid to Orbis by Fusion GPS and used by them to produce the dossier. The DNC and Clinton campaign disclosed the total amount paid to Perkins Coie on campaign finance reports.
The memo also alleged that information about the payment was not disclosed in the initial October 2016 FISA application or subsequent renewals. However, the FBI's application for a FISA warrant did describe, in a footnote, the origins and political background of the dossier, a fact conceded by Nunes and other Republican leaders on February 5, after the memo's release.
Second, the memo alleges that the FISA application relied "extensively" on a
Yahoo! News report from September 2016 by
Michael Isikoff, which referenced Page's July 2016 trip to Moscow and used information from Steele.
[32] It asserts that the article was "derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News." Isikoff has stated that the information he got from Steele was actually information that the FBI already had. He also described Steele as serious and credible.
Third, the memo accuses Steele of being biased against the candidacy of Donald Trump, stating he was "desperate" and "passionate" that Trump would lose. It goes on to say
Bruce Ohr knew about this bias and that it was not reflected in the FISA applications. Ohr however did not work on counter intelligence matters and had no role in obtaining the FISA warrants on Page.
The memo's fourth point quotes
Bill Priestap saying that the corroboration of the Steele dossier was in its "infancy" in October 2016 during the FISA application. The memo further alleges that
Andrew McCabe testified that "no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) without the Steele dossier information." Other members of the House Intelligence Committee and sources close to the matter have stated that the Nunes memo "misquoted" and "mischaracterized" McCabe's testimony, which was given in private and has not been made public.
The memo also confirms that the spark for the FBI investigation into potential collusion between Trump's campaign and the Russians was not the Steele dossier, but rather the comments made by Trump adviser
George Papadopoulos, who told an Australian diplomat in May 2016 that the Russians possessed "dirt" on
Hillary Clinton in the form of hacked emails. That confirmation contradicts earlier claims by some that the investigation had been triggered by the Steele dossier. The memo notes that Papadopoulos is mentioned in the Page FISA application, and says "there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos." It also says the FBI's Russia investigation was opened nearly three months before the FISA surveillance application in late July 2016 by
Peter Strzok, who is accused of having "a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton."
The memo also shows that the FISA warrant on Page was renewed three times. In each instance, the FBI had to show the signing judge that the warrant had merit. News accounts in 2017 indicated that because of the nature of his ties to Russia, Page had been under FBI scrutiny and had already been the subject of a
FISA warrant in 2014, at least two years before the Trump campaign.
Finally, the memo asserts that former FBI Director James Comey testified to Congress that the Steele dossier was "salacious and unverified." However, Comey's prepared remarks show that he was referring specifically to "some personally sensitive aspects" of the dossier, not the entire dossier.
On March 28, 2019, after the Mueller memo had been released to Attorney General Barr, but before Congress had received it, Nunes stated that "the FBI-DOJ falsely claimed this [Russia] investigation did not begin until late July. We now know for certain that is not true."
