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Matthew Chapman
@fawfulfan
, 3 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
If there should be any investigation of the FBI, it should be into whether leaks by agents in the New York field office improperly pushed James Comey to release his October letter on Clinton to damage her campaign — and whether Rudy Giuliani played a role in that.
The thing that gets lost in GOP conspiracy theories about the FBI spying on Trump, FISA judges, the dossier etc., is that even if it were true, none of it affected the campaign, because none of it went public until weeks later.

The Comey letter, OTOH, *did* affect the campaign.
We should consider the possibility that Trump's allies have pushed the FBI "spying" narrative not just bc they want to taint the Russia investigation, but maybe also bc they want to head off any discussion of the evidence *they* were the ones manipulating the FBI the whole time.
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Matthew Chapman
@fawfulfan
Uber and Lyft are Ponzi schemes.

There's no way for them to turn a profit at their level of overhead. There's no economy of scale to their network. They're just using money from new investors to absorb losses from operations funded by previous investors.
The only reason no one has noticed the rideshares are Ponzi schemes is that unlike most Ponzi schemes, they're actually providing a useful service. But the way they're providing it is completely unsustainable and is eventually going to wipe out investors.
It's no wonder they're frantically testing self-driving cars. Presumably they don't want to own the cars themselves — the whole point of their business model is that they offload the cost of cars, maintenance, insurance and fuel onto the drivers themselves. What I'm guessing...
Read 4 tweets
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Matthew Chapman
@fawfulfan
I'm just going to come out and say it:

Autonomous, self-driving cars, as they are being pitched to us, would be an environmental disaster.
One of the main benefits of the self-driving era, supposedly, is that it will drastically cut the need for parking, or even ownership of a car. You can just send away a car and summon it at will.

Think about what that actually means.
Imagine millions of cars that, instead of being parked somewhere, are all on the streets, constantly driving, whether or not there's someone in them.

That would make every problem cars currently cause worse.
Read 10 tweets
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Matthew Chapman
@fawfulfan
I'm getting to the point where I actually think the federal government should create a taxpayer-backed "journalism fund" which pays out subsidies to support local papers.

That would create problems of its own. But it increasingly feels better than the alternative.
There are plenty of other industries where the government recognizes that the need for services in some communities exceeds the profit at which the free market could provide it.

We subsidize rural hospitals and rural airports. Maybe we should subsidize rural journalists too.
The challenge would be creating a complete and total firewall between the funding and editorial control of the papers.

We can't have the government dictating content, or even just setting up qualifications for the fund in a way that incentivizes papers to change their content.
Read 4 tweets

Related threads

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Seth Abramson
@SethAbramson
(THREAD) So much disinformation is being spread about the Mueller investigation—in some cases with uncritical repetition by the media—that it's time for some clarifications before the conspiracy theories Trump and Barr are selling become gospel. I hope you'll read on and retweet.
1/ In June 2016, American intelligence received intel from allied intelligence agencies—that is, we received information intended to safeguard U.S. national security from our longtime allies—indicating that Trump aides were having suspicious overseas conversations with Russians.
2/ When we learned CIA director Brennan had gotten such intel, the reports that came to us had plenty of euphemisms—that is, Western intel agencies were likely doing intercepts, so they had *some* sense of the content of such Trump-Russia conversations, not just their occurrence.
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Seth Abramson
@SethAbramson
As I wrote in December 2016, rogue pro-Trump agents in the NYC FBI office did all they could to make FBI leadership fear an illegal leak of confidential information about the Clinton investigation in October of 2016 *so Comey would violate FBI regs and intercede in the election*.
2/ The NEW YORK TIMES reported that Comey feared illegal leaks from the NYC field office. He's saying otherwise now, it's clear, to protect the FBI. The good news: the IG found many other FBI leaders willing to put the good of America above the good of the FBI and tell the truth:
3/ It doesn't matter if Trump's surrogates in the NYC field office of the FBI had a 10% or 50% affect on Comey's decision to interfere with the election in a way that gave Trump the win—Comey says the decision was close and difficult, so 10% would be enough to steal the election.
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Seth Abramson
@SethAbramson
Great Comey interview by Maddow. Comey says he commissioned a probe of leaks to Giuliani by the NYC field office but was fired before he learned the result. Now he needs to explain who told the NYT that the leaks factored into his reasoning—he now says no.
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3/ Comey's reply—leaks were irrelevant to my letter to Congress—echoes him being unwilling to say Clinton would be a better POTUS than Trump and his flailing defenses of the FBI. He may *think* he's being honest; he's playing politics. I don't think he even admits it to himself.
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Seth Abramson
@SethAbramson
(THREAD) BREAKING: Over DOJ and FBI objection, the Nunes Memo—compiled by GOP staffers of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence—has been released by Trump and Nunes. Here's my analysis of it—as an attorney and someone who's researched the Steele Dossier for a year.
1/ First, here's a link to the controversial document—a document whose release required Nunes to invoke a HPSCI rule never used in *40 years*, and required a sitting president to go to war against his FBI for the first time since the FBI was led by Hoover. docs.house.gov/meetings/IG/IG…
2/ Second, understand that it's common practice in the justice system for law enforcement to use informants who have conflicts of interest to secure a warrant. Here, the informant, former MI6 Russia desk chief Chris Steele, didn't know who his client was and had no such conflict.
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Seth Abramson
@SethAbramson
(THREAD) On November 4, 2016—96 hours before the presidential election—Trump advisor Erik Prince went on a radio network controlled by Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon to say that an anti-Clinton cabal at NYPD was conspiring to leak false information about Clinton pre-election.
2/ The facts here are undisputed:

(1) This interview occurred and Prince said what he said.
(2) Prince was in contact with Bannon before and after the election.
(3) Prince was a Trump advisor.
(4) Everything he said was a lie.
(5) What NYPD planned to put out was disinformation.
3/
(6) Prince makes clear NYPD was coercing the FBI by threatening to put out disinformation.
(7) The coercion worked; Comey reopened the Clinton probe to prove the emails did *not* say what NYPD claimed.
(8) Giuliani was receiving leaks from active FBI agents and NYPD officers.
Read 18 tweets
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Seth Abramson
@SethAbramson
(THREAD) This is Part 2 of a thread on "True Pundit," the fake-news website—launched by a former FBI agent—that helped swing the 2016 election to Trump by blackmailing James Comey into reopening the Clinton email investigation just before Election Day. Hope you'll read and share.
1/ In Part 1 of this thread (see below), I discussed how a former FBI agent calling himself "Thomas Paine" launched the fake-news website True Pundit on the same day in June 2016 Don Jr., Kushner, and Manafort met with Kremlin agents at Trump Tower Moscow.
2/ There is ample evidence—beyond his law enforcement past—confirming Paine knew the active (pro-Trump) FBI agents who leaked to True Pundit were violating the federal Hatch Act. Paine on several occasions claimed "Deep State" government agents were coming to arrest or kill him.
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