Maggie's Farm

Re: Jussie Smollett

Camala Harris and Cory Booker said the attack on Smollett was a modern day lynching. They were right except Smollett was doing the lynching and he was lynching Trump supporters.

We'll see what the nature of those communications are. Given the dishonesty of Andrew Weissmann, I think it would be wise to take a breath first.

On the other hand, we have documentary evidence of the Hillary campaign and the DNC working with Perkins Coie (a cutout for Russian intelligence sources) to provide a phony dossier on Trump that was used by the FBI to fraudulently obtain FISA warrants on people associated with the Trump campaign in order to spy on it and provide a predicate for a counter-intelligence investigation of Trump culminating with high ranking FBI officers plotting to overthrow the president under the pretense that he was not able to perform his duties - something for which they had no evidence.

Z: Do you find that the tinfoil interferes with your WiFi?

No. Maybe it's yours that does. Maybe you can cite evidence that Wikileaks is a functionary (or "cutout") of the Russian govt. On the other hand, Perkins Coie was hired by the DNC and the Hillary campaign to come up with dirt on Trump. They hired Steele to produce a dossier which was generated at least in part by information from Russian intelligence operatives. If those operatives were subsequently found dead by some nefarious means, that might lend credence to your support for the dossier. Otherwise, maybe you can provide evidence that Trump has been groomed as a Russian operative for decades or whatever else it says.

Z: Please see email to Trump Jr. where he says he would "love" help from the Russian government.

Uh... A functionary of Perkins Coie (the Russian lawyer in the Trump Tower meeting) said she had damaging information on Clinton. Wanting to hear more is not a crime. In fact when anyone says they have dirt on a candidate to the opposition candidate, it is their duty to at least hear it out. Of course, as I've already stated, the fact was that Clinton PAID for dirt on Trump. For some reason, that's not a bad thing in your book. A little intellectual honesty is in order here.

Z: And yet the courts have accepted evidence from those warrants to prosecute people.

Well, nothing to see here! The information in a FISA warrant must be verified and known to be true by those submitting the request as Rosenstein's stated when describing how FISA warrants are obtained. He said that if the information is found to be inaccurate or information was withheld, there would be consequences. So far the first part is obviously true and the second part is not. BTW, it was the Democrats during the debate on the Patriot Act who said that getting FISA warrants were basically a rubber stamp operation. It turns out they were right.

Z: There was reasonable suspicion of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The Special Counsel just informed the court about documentary evidence tying Roger Stone to WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, which Stone lied about.

This really is a good one. You are saying the investigation that began before the election was justified by information they received from Roger Stone (when?). There would be no investigation without the dossier because that was the central part of the FBI case before the FISA judge. The FBI knew it was bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign and did not disclose that to the judge - initiating a fraud on the court. The fact that the judge was not more curious says a lot - see my previous answer.

Z: There was no plot.

There was talk about Rosenstein wearing a wire to record Trump's conversations. There was discussions about who might be on their side or not. He and his cohorts were trying to remove the president by any physically nonviolent means thus the discussion of 25A. But 25A is about a president who is incapacitated. It is not about armchair psychology by untrained partisan civil servants and it's certainly not about removing him because you don't like or disagree with him or think he's bad for the country. In none of the snippets of the 60 Minutes interview have I heard McCabe mention any debilitating disease or psychological impairment. Only that he THOUGHT Trump and the Russians might have colluded and that every day, he thought the news from the White House got worse and worse. Neither of those relate to 25A. If he does mention something pertinent in his full interview, I'll take that as a valid concern but seeing as how he's not qualified to diagnose anything, I doubt that will be forthcoming. As for their deciding not to go that route, we'll have to find out why they decided against it. I suspect it is because they didn't think they could get support from over 1/2 of the cabinet, not because they were wrong to do so.

The dossier was put together from information from Russian intelligence sources (i.e. from the Russian government). Surely those sources knew that what they told Steele would be damaging to Trump's campaign if it were believed. In addition, as you stated, Natalia Veselnitskaya was a Russian government lawyer and a functionary of Fusion GPS (I mistakenly said Perkins Coie earlier. The Clinton campaign paid Perkins who then hired Fusion. That money was improperly labeled as legal expenses by the Clinton campaign which is likely a campaign finance violation). So the Russian lawyer who said she had dirt on Clinton - but only talk about adoptions - was really working for Fusion and by extension, the Clinton campaign.

Your are right that the FISA applications said the dossier was a political document that may contain biases but it did not say it was a product of op-research for the Clinton campaign. That is a very different thing. According to Bruce Ohr, he told the FBI at every instance that the dossier was a product of the Clinton campaign so its origins were known at the time. There was no mention that Steele complied the dossier or that he was fired from FBI service for leaking and lying. The applications are supposed to include exculpatory evidence so leaving this out was a fraud on the court.

There is no evidence that Trump was incapacitated in any way when Rosenstein, McCabe, et al. discussed the possibility of using the 25A to get rid of Trump. The 25A comes from the President or the cabinet, not from a bunch of partisan FBI agents.