The Goat Pen

Bklyn wrote:This Susan Rice thing is interesting, but I don't know if I'm feeling it's of significant magnitude (based on what I've read about how a redacted "unmasking" happens). More will come to light...but the central question (which even drives the Rice situation) is what was the Russian involvement in our election? This whole thing is a clusterfuck that needs to be sorted out, even the Rice action.

seems kinda straight forward at this point.

Trump knew the Russians were fucking around trying to do whatever they could to make Hillary look like a criminal, plus he isn't a Rusky hater like our democratic friends who apparently still think this 1963 (that's maybe the most surprising part of this to me. You'd think the Dems would be all globalist we want caviar and vodka instead of hating on the Russians..then again, they're still pissed that Putin thinks Obama is a giant douche so there is no getting past that ). Trump had some of his people give a wink and a nod to the Russians about having their cyber punks trick Podesta into giving them his super secret password of asdf1234 and then spread it around.

Once Obama realizes Hillary is on the ropes, he gets his White House Bitches in line - Rice, Lynch, Jarrett to go all Watergate on Trump using the NSA to play the grapevine game. They can't find a smoking gun but since they have 400 people from various branches out there snooping around they just leave a bread crumb trail hoping the loyal lifetime public servants fearing for their jobs will take the bait and drop dime to the press every other day with something about Trump.

After the election, Trump controls his ADD in an intel briefing long enough to catch wind that the White House was doing the Friend of a Friend told me thing as justification to listen in on him. He don't know wiretap from Snapchat , goes on twitter and tells the word he's been attacked.

So you've got people on one side who talked to the Russians about the common good of hating Hillary and you've got the other side listening in on it and neither side is supposed to be doing it, both know they did it and both are trying to accuse the other without implicating themselves. Meanwhile the press all want to be the next John Stewart and start editorializing every piece of news that comes out thinking that Americans hang on the every word of someone who graduates with a degree in journalism from the University of Phoenix (FUCK YOU UNC)

And at the end of the day, none of it amounts to a damn thing.

All this is eating up the news cycle while Jared Kuschner is handling middle east foreign policy on his own.

Heroin...

interesting how the Dem narrative has changed in last 3 days though

Trump is insane for suggesting Obama admin spied on him ---> Susan Rice was just doing her job

Well, Trump is insane.

Saint wrote:Well, Trump is insane.

you dog the guy but you'd be twice as cynical if there was a standard GOPe Karl Rovish type running the country right now.

Let's face it, Trump is a buffoon and a crook. Yeah, I wouldn't like any garden-variety Republican admin, at least not from what we've seen since the ' 70s but Trump isn't the answer to your problems. I've said that all along. He might have put forth some ideas that you agree with but he's not going to be the guy you want him to be.

Of course, I said UK was going to win the tournament so what do I know.

"you dog the guy but you'd be twice as cynical if there was a standard GOPe Karl Rovish type running the country right now."

False. Stu's cynicism remains constant irregardless of the accidents of Fate. He stands steadfast athwart the tide of history and politics, bellowing his timeless "J'accuse" at any hapless passerby...

eCat wrote:interesting how the Dem narrative has changed in last 3 days though

Trump is insane for suggesting Obama admin spied on him ---> Susan Rice was just doing her job

From what I've read today, not much is known. Susan Rice did something totally under the purview of her job, that was approved by an independent court/intel head. Now, she may have then taken that information and did something problematic with the information, but nothing has been proven on that front as of this moment.

One thing that is irrefutable, whoever provided the information that Susan Rice unmasked civilian identities from surveillance of foreign agents broke the law and leaked classified information. I bet that leak came from a familiar place...and I bet there will be no legal repercussions from it.

I think we (mostly) all agree here that the Patriot Act is a shitty piece of legislation, but it is the law. We can complain about the law, but that's not Susan Rice's problem.

I look forward to see what more comes out of this. I do know that Trump won the day because he got a little breathing room from the long list of comrades in the building that keep showing up in the same room with Russian officials before he got into office. Betsy DeVos' brother made it through this news cycle with minimal arrows in his armor.

eCat wrote: seems kinda straight forward at this point.

Trump knew the Russians were fucking around trying to do whatever they could to make Hillary look like a criminal, plus he isn't a Rusky hater like our democratic friends who apparently still think this 1963 (that's maybe the most surprising part of this to me. You'd think the Dems would be all globalist we want caviar and vodka instead of hating on the Russians..then again, they're still pissed that Putin thinks Obama is a giant douche so there is no getting past that ). Trump had some of his people give a wink and a nod to the Russians about having their cyber punks trick Podesta into giving them his super secret password of asdf1234 and then spread it around.

Once Obama realizes Hillary is on the ropes, he gets his White House Bitches in line - Rice, Lynch, Jarrett to go all Watergate on Trump using the NSA to play the grapevine game. They can't find a smoking gun but since they have 400 people from various branches out there snooping around they just leave a bread crumb trail hoping the loyal lifetime public servants fearing for their jobs will take the bait and drop dime to the press every other day with something about Trump.

After the election, Trump controls his ADD in an intel briefing long enough to catch wind that the White House was doing the Friend of a Friend told me thing as justification to listen in on him. He don't know wiretap from Snapchat , goes on twitter and tells the word he's been attacked.

So you've got people on one side who talked to the Russians about the common good of hating Hillary and you've got the other side listening in on it and neither side is supposed to be doing it, both know they did it and both are trying to accuse the other without implicating themselves. Meanwhile the press all want to be the next John Stewart and start editorializing every piece of news that comes out thinking that Americans hang on the every word of someone who graduates with a degree in journalism from the University of Phoenix (FUCK YOU UNC)

And at the end of the day, none of it amounts to a damn thing.

All this is eating up the news cycle while Jared Kuschner is handling middle east foreign policy on his own.

Heh

Bklyn wrote:

eCat wrote:interesting how the Dem narrative has changed in last 3 days though

Trump is insane for suggesting Obama admin spied on him ---> Susan Rice was just doing her job

From what I've read today, not much is known. Susan Rice did something totally under the purview of her job, that was approved by an independent court/intel head. Now, she may have then taken that information and did something problematic with the information, but nothing has been proven on that front as of this moment.

One thing that is irrefutable, whoever provided the information that Susan Rice unmasked civilian identities from surveillance of foreign agents broke the law and leaked classified information. I bet that leak came from a familiar place...and I bet there will be no legal repercussions from it.

I think we (mostly) all agree here that the Patriot Act is a shitty piece of legislation, but it is the law. We can complain about the law, but that's not Susan Rice's problem.

I look forward to see what more comes out of this. I do know that Trump won the day because he got a little breathing room from the long list of comrades in the building that keep showing up in the same room with Russian officials before he got into office. Betsy DeVos' brother made it through this news cycle with minimal arrows in his armor.

principle over party, right?

aTm wrote:

bluetick wrote:Arguably the big story continues because the House, Senate, and FBI are running separate and unprecedented investigations into the known intervention of Russia wrt our last presidential election and whether Russia colluded with U.S. citizens in the effort.

It's an effective smokescreen for all kinds of political bullshit. I'm so totally, like, sure that some kind of report or evidence will turn up on this any day now...any day now. A year from now it'll all be old and tired, and no real information about anything will be out there. It's nonsense. The only story we'll see here looking back from a historical perspective will be as a footnote in the continual rise of "big brother" surveilance in the first half of the 21st century after 9/11

Here's some information from the here and now. The National Security Advisor was fired after 3 weeks, the first true casualty of the russian scandal. You recall that, right? And now he's trying to cut a deal, ostensibly to save his own skin, but there's also speculation that he's butt-hurt about getting cut loose. And the AG recused himself, another Russian casualty, and Manafort is almost surely going to flip when the Treasury people make the case on his 15 Cyprus laundry accounts. Carter Page had a meeting with a Russian intel officer, as well as the ambassador. Kushner, Prince, Sessions...meetings, meetings, and meetings.

All this, yet Trump stepped to a podium in January and stated that none of his people met with any Russians, anytime. Pence went on Face the Nation and said the same thing, as did Priebus. Seems they said that before they became aware of the wide surveillance net that's cast out in the great outdoors.

Today one House investigation committee member said he'd be surprised if somebody(s) in the Trump camp didn't wind up in prison; later in the day another committee member one-upped him and guaranteed people were going to prison.

And it turns out that Michael Cernovich 'broke' the Susan Rice story. The same crank who brought us Pizzagate aka Hillary & Co.-as-pedophiles.

Her interest was not in national security but to advance the political interests of the Democratic party. The thing to bear in mind is that the White House does not do investigations. Not criminal investigations, not intelligence investigations.

Remember that.

Why is that so important in the context of explosive revelations that Susan Rice, President Obama’s national-security adviser, confidant, and chief dissembler, called for the “unmasking” of Trump campaign and transition officials whose identities and communications were captured in the collection of U.S. intelligence on foreign targets? Because we’ve been told for weeks that any unmasking of people in Trump’s circle that may have occurred had two innocent explanations: (1) the FBI’s investigation of Russian meddling in the election and (2) the need to know, for purposes of understanding the communications of foreign intelligence targets, the identities of Americans incidentally intercepted or mentioned.

The unmasking, Obama apologists insist, had nothing to do with targeting Trump or his people.

That won’t wash.

In general, it is the FBI that conducts investigations that bear on American citizens suspected of committing crimes or of acting as agents of foreign powers. In the matter of alleged Russian meddling, the investigative camp also includes the CIA and the NSA. All three agencies conducted a probe and issued a joint report in January. That was after Obama, despite having previously acknowledged that the Russian activity was inconsequential, suddenly made a great show of ordering an inquiry and issuing sanctions. Consequently, if unmasking was relevant to the Russia investigation, it would have been done by those three agencies. And if it had been critical to know the identities of Americans caught up in other foreign intelligence efforts, the agencies that collect the information and conduct investigations would have unmasked it.

Because they are the agencies that collect and refine intelligence “products” for the rest of the “intelligence community,” they are responsible for any unmasking; and they do it under “minimization” standards that FBI Director James Comey, in recent congressional testimony, described as “obsessive” in their determination to protect the identities and privacy of Americans. Understand: There would have been no intelligence need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked. If there had been a real need to reveal the identities — an intelligence need based on American interests — the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies.

The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president’s staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests.

Of course, the consumer doing the asking in this case was not just any government official. We’re talking about Susan Rice. This was Obama’s right hand doing the asking. If she made an unmasking “request,” do you suppose anyone at the FBI, CIA, or NSA was going to say no? That brings us to three interesting points. The first involves political intrusion into law enforcement — something that the White House is supposed to avoid. (You may remember that Democrats ran Bush attorney general Alberto Gonzales out of town over suspicions about it.)

As I have noted repeatedly, in publishing the illegally leaked classified information about former national-security adviser Michael Flynn’s communications with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, the New York Times informs us that “Obama advisers” and “Obama officials” were up to their eyeballs in the investigation: Obama advisers heard separately from the F.B.I. about Mr. Flynn’s conversation with Mr. Kislyak, whose calls were routinely monitored by American intelligence agencies that track Russian diplomats. The Obama advisers grew suspicious that perhaps there had been a secret deal between the incoming team and Moscow, which could violate the rarely enforced, two-century-old Logan Act barring private citizens from negotiating with foreign powers in disputes with the United States.

The Obama officials asked the F.B.I. if a quid pro quo had been discussed on the call, and the answer came back no, according to one of the officials, who like others asked not to be named discussing delicate communications. [Translation: “asked not to be named committing felony unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”] The topic of sanctions came up, they were told, but there was no deal. [Emphasis added.] It appears very likely that Susan Rice was involved in the unmasking of Michael Flynn. Was she also monitoring the FBI’s investigation? Was she involved in the administration’s consideration of (bogus) criminal charges against Flynn? With the subsequent decision to have the FBI interrogate Flynn (or “grill” him, as the Times put it)?

The second point is that, while not a pillar of rectitude, Ms. Rice is not an idiot. Besides being shrewd, she was a highly involved, highly informed consumer of intelligence, and a key Obama political collaborator. Unlike the casual reader, she would have known who the Trump-team players were without needing to have their identities unmasked. Do you really think her purpose in demanding that names be revealed was to enhance her understanding of intelligence about the activities and intentions of foreign targets? Seriously? I’m betting it was so that others down the dissemination chain could see the names of Trump associates — names the investigating agencies that originally collected the information had determined not to unmask.

Third, and finally, let’s consider the dissemination chain Rice had in mind. The most telling remark that former Obama deputy defense secretary Evelyn Farkas made in her now-infamous MSNBC interview was the throw-away line at the end: “That’s why you have all the leaking.” Put this in context: Farkas had left the Obama administration in 2015, subsequently joining the presidential campaign of, yes, Hillary Clinton — Trump’s opponent. She told MSNBC that she had been encouraging her former Obama-administration colleagues and members of Congress to seek “as much information as you can” from the intelligence community. “That’s why you have the leaking.” To summarize: At a high level, officials like Susan Rice had names unmasked that would not ordinarily be unmasked. That information was then being pushed widely throughout the intelligence community in unmasked form . . . particularly after Obama, toward the end of his presidency, suddenly — and seemingly apropos of nothing — changed the rules so that all of the intelligence agencies (not just the collecting agencies) could have access to raw intelligence information.

By the way, have you noticed that there have been lots of intelligence leaks in the press? There’s an old saying in the criminal law: The best evidence of a conspiracy is success. The criminal law also has another good rule of thumb: Consciousness of guilt is best proved by false exculpatory statements. That’s a genre in which Susan Rice has rich experience. Two weeks ago, she was asked in an interview about allegations by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) that the Obama administration had unmasked Trump-team members. “I know nothing about this,” Rice replied. “I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today.”

eCat wrote:

Bklyn wrote:

eCat wrote:interesting how the Dem narrative has changed in last 3 days though

Trump is insane for suggesting Obama admin spied on him ---> Susan Rice was just doing her job

From what I've read today, not much is known. Susan Rice did something totally under the purview of her job, that was approved by an independent court/intel head. Now, she may have then taken that information and did something problematic with the information, but nothing has been proven on that front as of this moment.

One thing that is irrefutable, whoever provided the information that Susan Rice unmasked civilian identities from surveillance of foreign agents broke the law and leaked classified information. I bet that leak came from a familiar place...and I bet there will be no legal repercussions from it.

I think we (mostly) all agree here that the Patriot Act is a shitty piece of legislation, but it is the law. We can complain about the law, but that's not Susan Rice's problem.

I look forward to see what more comes out of this. I do know that Trump won the day because he got a little breathing room from the long list of comrades in the building that keep showing up in the same room with Russian officials before he got into office. Betsy DeVos' brother made it through this news cycle with minimal arrows in his armor.

principle over party, right?

Apologies. I'm not sure what you're pointing to. For real.

Internet privacy just hit the shitter today. Almost missed it wading through the Rice paddies.

Don Lemon helped clear up the distinction last night when he said "lets be clear here, there is absolutely no proof that Susan Rice spied on Trump.....illegally"