(02-02-2018, 03:22 PM)StroudCrowd1 Wrote: [ -> ] (02-02-2018, 03:21 PM)TJBender Wrote: [ -> ]There's nothing new in here. It's the same old political football that Trump has been kicking around to try and kill the Mueller probe for over a year now. Even the details on how the FISA courts work are really nothing new or shocking in the slightest.
To borrow a phrase from 90% of this forum, it's a "nothing burger". It's only sufficient if you're a far left looney and it hurts your feelings, or if you're a far right looney still butthurt about 66% of America thinking your Fuhrer isn't the savior.
Even you know this is a little more than a nothing burger. Did you see how badly the FBI and democrats were trying to fight the release of this memo? That type of thing isn't done for "nothing burgers".
I'm highly skeptical of both sides. The Republicans released this memo over the screaming objections of Democrats and the FBI, which suggests one or more of three things:
1. The Democrats know it makes them look bad
2. The FBI knows it makes them look bad
3. National security is compromised
After seeing the memo, it's pretty obvious that 1 and 2 carry some measure of truth, but I don't see the damage to national security here at all. Which kind of makes 1 and 2 more plausible yet.
Now, the wild card here remains the Mueller probe that Trump has been trying to kill for a year. Why is he trying so hard to kill it? Well, probably for the same reason that Democrats and the FBI tried to kill this memo. He knows there are details there yet to come out that will ruin him or members of his inner circle, and Bannon going in for an interview has him scared turdless. I think that's a very fair statement, regardless of how you view Trump. If he had truly done nothing wrong, he'd be encouraging Mueller to carry on and have fun finding nothing. I don't recall Clinton trying so hard to discredit and get rid of Ken Starr, but I do recall Nixon famously firing the top two Justice Department officials in one night, and only keeping the third man on because he agreed to fire the investigator looking into Watergate.
There's a lot of smoke all over the place here. Either the Republicans will release the actual court documents to back this up (and
really [BLEEP] over the FISA system in the process), or they'll release more documents that are either unverifiable with the facts we have or hearsay. If they have the FISA documents, please, please release them. My general disdain for Trump does not mean that I discredit the conduct of Hillary Clinton's campaign. I find it comedic how many pro-Bernie individuals are now fiercely defending the same Clinton campaign that blatantly rigged the primaries against their candidate. If there was collusion between the Clinton campaign, the FBI and the FISA courts to initiate a criminal inquiry against Trump using false evidence, then there are lots of felonies to be handed out.
But here's the kicker for me: the conduct of Democrats during and after the election does not excuse the conduct of Trump during and after. To be perfectly, brutally honest, the release of this memo, authored by a pro-Trump member of Congress, at this particular moment in time suggests that Trump knows what Bannon, Comey and Flynn said to Mueller, he knows who Mueller is coming for next, and he knows that things end badly for him if he doesn't get rid of Mueller once and for all by shifting the spotlight to the transgressions of the other side. I don't know if I'm right about that, but I do know these two things for sure: the Republicans rushed to release a memo making the Clinton campaign and the FBI look bad, and the Democrats and FBI fought tooth and nail to prevent its release. From those two facts, we can pretty safely guess that the rabbit holes opened up by Mueller's investigation into Trump and this memo both lead to roughly the same place, and it's a race between all parties involved to see who can get there first and rearrange the evidence to make the other guys the dirty ones.
How pathetic would it be if both sides were colluding with the same foreign power? And when we would start up the firing squads for treason?