Some who follow me on Twitter have decidedly different views from mine on the current WH inhabitant. I happened to see this link posted in one of their Twitter feeds. I wouldn't ordinarily re-post it, but its absurd commentary is representative of the absurdity of the Far /1
Take particular note of the quoted Tweet stating that "Obama CIA Director John Brennan ran a secret task force out of Langley with its own separate budget to investigate Trump campaign and /2
its alleged ties to Russia." Now, a few weeks back even Fox News reported that Durham had met with Brennan for several hours and Durham told Brennan "he was not a subject or a target of [Durham's] criminal investigation."
I have a lot of problems with Durham's investigation, /3
but I believe Durham is a competent prosecutor who would never give a person "neither subject nor target" assurance if that person had operated an illegal secret task force out of the CIA to investigate the /4
Trump campaign. I mean, actions related to the investigation of the Trump campaign and its alleged ties to Russia is EXACTLY the focus of Durham's investigation. So, if there was a germ of truth to what appears in "American Thinker" (the title has to be an oxymoron), there is /5
absolutely no way that Durham effectively closes off any prosecution of Brennan by assuring him that he is neither a subject nor a target of Durham's investigation.
I think this commentary says all you need to know about "American Thinker," and those who place any credence /6
in what it publishes - at least on this topic. /7
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There really is no reason for professed "bafflement" here. Sacrificing any semblance of principle in favor of crude opportunism, the Brennan Center allied itself with the likes of Gaetz, Boebert, Biggs, Roy, and Taylor Greene - a group that couldn't develop a coherent /1
explanation of the 4th Amendment if you supplied them with a tutor, texts, and 2 weeks of study.
The 4th Amendment is predicated on the concept of reasonableness - it guarantees that Americans will be protected against unreasonable searches and seizures. Federal courts have /2
repeatedly held that the warrant is a law enforcement construct and is not a tolerable proxy for reasonableness in the foreign intelligence context. Instead, the 4th Amd, requires a balancing of the government's interest in protecting the national security against the /3
So, let me understand this line of bulls#it. If Trump carried a document upstairs with his cheeseburger and the information in that document was, just to cite a few examples: (1) derived from NSA having decrypted a complex foreign encryption system used to transmit information /1
unavailable from any other source where disclosure of the document would compromise this critical intelligence source; or (2) derived from a human intelligence source with unique access whose safety would be compromised by disclosure of the document or its information; /2
or (3) derived from an overhead system where disclosure of the document or its contents would compromise the closely guarded capabilities of this overhead system - I'm supposed to believe that there was a standing "order" that the document and its contents were considered /3
We're not writing on tabula rasa here. E.O. 13526 prescribes, at times in excruciating detail, the handling of classified information. Without disappearing into the weeds on whether a president can unilaterally declassify information (yes) without following any of the /1
notification procedures of E.O. 13526 (unlikely w/o amending the E.O.), there is no record of Trump declassifying any of the Mar-a-Lago information while president. Once out of office, his access to classified information is fully under the purview of E.O. 13526. This means /2
he needs to establish a "need to know" as required by §4.1(a)(3) of E.O. 13526. While such a requirement can be waived for former presidents (§4.4(a)(3)), there is no indication he ever asked for a waiver and one almost certainly would not have been granted given Biden's /3
Release of the warrant and property receipt, which are the only documents subject to the DoJ motion, may not provide materially more detail other than the criminal statutes identified in the warrant and, perhaps, a more particularized description of the focus of the search. /1
The guts of the predicate for the search will be in the affidavit(s) that accompanied the government's motion for issuance of a search warrant. There seems to be considerable confusion failing to differentiate between the affidavit(s) (likely signed by one or more FBI /2
Frankly, this is just political posturing. Not cheap political posturing, to be sure, because it would cost a fortune to implement, but posturing. Full disclosure, I gave 17 years of military service to spare my (middle class) parents the cost of college and graduate school /1
debt. I then paid full boat to spend my son to college and law school. Now, you want to take my taxes to relieve millions of the decision THEY made to incur college and graduate school debt. Did all these folks get their degrees and can't find any job? /2
I doubt it. If you finished school with a serviceable major, then there are jobs for you in this economy. If you didn't finish school or pursued a degree in a marginal field, that's on you (with the understanding that provisions can be made for those who /3
If the WAPO report is true, coercion of political activity is only one of the problems with this memo. Unprocessed raw collection resides in multiple data bases at NSA and “unprocessed” means not minimized. If these data bases include FISA collection, /1
especially if collected under a FISA section 106 order, then the approval was predicated upon using specific minimization procedures for USP communications because targeting foreign communications almost inevitably produces /2
incidental collection of USP communications. Ignoring those minimization procedures violates FISA, and FISA carries criminal and civil penalties for willful violations. Additionally, even if the collection activity occurred outside the US so that FISA does not apply /3