@LindseyGrahamSC described the Horowitz report this morning at the Comey hearing as a "thorough examination" - while Bill Barr has done nothing but impugn the conclusion that the FBI investigation was adequately predicated. Graham is a grandstanding ham who is misrepresenting /1
the background and timing related to the information included in the Carter Page FISA applications. Graham is futilely trying to undermine an entire FBI investigation that Horowitz concluded was adequately predicated. Graham says he is trying to insure that what happened to /2
Page never happens again but no one can offer that assurance for an activity that is conducted by humans. Retrospective examination of almost any activity scrutinized as closely as Crossfire Hurricane will reveal things that might have been done differently, perhaps better. /3
No one denies that mistakes were made with the Page applications, but they were clearly outliers in terms of being representative of the FBI's FISA process. Subsequently, the Justice Dept. announced that additional FBI FISA applications identified by Inspector General Horowitz /4
as part of his investigation had been reexamined and all were found to contain sufficient facts tosupport probable cause. So, the Page application is the exception. Otherwise, if anything, the FBI's motivating factors for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation have been /5
corroborated by both the Mueller Investigation and the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Graham, and his ability to influence upcoming FISA renewal legislation, screams out for the Democrats to gain Senate control on Nov. 3./6
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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
I was originally scheduled as a panelist on this edition of The Stream but was bumped as a production decision to accommodate more time for Stella Morris. I write because, as aired, the program presented a decidedly uniform viewpoint on the extradition and prosecution of
/1
Julian Assange. That viewpoint insists that the Assange prosecution represents a grave danger to international press freedom but the argument is always voiced in generalities without any articulation of how a single prosecution in the U.S. applying U.S. law to the unauthorized /2
disclosure of U.S. classified national security information will impact press freedom in, say, India or Ethiopia.
Had I participated in yesterday’s show, my observations would have been in line with those articulated in a May 2019 article I wrote regarding the Assange /3