Sunday, 5 March 2017

Actual News and Journalism

quote [ Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says that he knew of no FISA-approved wiretap activity against the Trump campaign. ]

Made news a few times in this interview...clarifying...impressive. Says he has faith in the Senate investigation...says the House is a joke.

(It is also not politics its news.)

[SFW] [politics] [+1]
[by bbqkink@5:35pmGMT]

Comments

yunnaf said @ 8:17pm GMT on 5th Mar [Score:1 Underrated]
Clapper testified under oath to Congress that the government wasn't domestically spying on Americans. Then came Snowden.
Clapper is not a reliable news source.
bbqkink said @ 8:24pm GMT on 5th Mar
Oh Quit...
DreamJournalingFS said @ 11:22pm GMT on 5th Mar
"Clapper is not a reliable news source."

... but is Clapper any less reliable than Trump? I ask because it seems to me that Trump is one of the most prolific sources of fake news in America.
bbqkink said[1] @ 11:38pm GMT on 5th Mar
yunnaf said[1] @ 1:47am GMT on 6th Mar
I really don't know.
Just because Trump distorts the truth doesn't make Clapper truthful.
For me, Clapper mislead under oath, I find no grounds to believe he is honest.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/trumps-wiretapping-accusations-heres-what-government-can-actually-do
bbqkink said @ 1:10pm GMT on 6th Mar
Trump distorts the truth...haha
bbqkink said @ 5:57pm GMT on 5th Mar
sanepride said[1] @ 6:16pm GMT on 5th Mar
In truth these particular bills are mostly too extreme to be really 'terrifying'. They have no real chance of passing, it's ideological red meat for the snarling base. It's what they sneak into omnibus spending bills and budgets- specific program defunding etc that's the really dangerous stuff.
But the more relevant point here is all of Trump's unhinged fuming about wiretaps etc is indeed deliberate distraction- from his own Russia scandal and increasingly unpopular policy moves.

For example- people might want to keep their eyes on this-
Pentagon plan to seize Raqqa calls for significant increase in U.S. participation.
The start of Trump's Vietnam? Stay tuned.
bbqkink said @ 6:42pm GMT on 5th Mar
Raqqa was always going to be a tough nut. This situation like all others is made more complicated by our commander in chief. We have no idea of policy or competency or sanity for that mater.

I'm guessing plans for this operation were in place before the change in power. And if past is prologue Trump will leave the nuts and blots to Centcom...maybe
bbqkink said @ 7:52pm GMT on 5th Mar
Case in point Now is he so in tune with the situation he can troll Arnold at the same time make life and death decisions and then have a little extra time to accuse Obama of espionage...or was he Just reading Brietbart and Alex Jones and thought he would poke at his buddy on the TV show?

Somebody is making decisions if it ain't Trump Who TF is it?
sanepride said @ 11:08pm GMT on 5th Mar
Bannon.
sanepride said @ 11:15pm GMT on 5th Mar
Remember it was Trump who made the promise to 'destroy ISIS'. Obama never had much interest in getting directly involved in Syria. No doubt the Pentagon always has a number of potential plans in development, but this deal is Trump all the way.
Except of course if it goes badly, it'll be Obama's fault.
bbqkink said @ 11:46pm GMT on 5th Mar
Oh I think he wants more than anything to be the hero...and that makes him just as dangerous as Bush....Bush with a Mental problem.
captainstubing said @ 12:43pm GMT on 6th Mar
So...Bush?
bbqkink said[1] @ 1:56pm GMT on 6th Mar
Well I said at the time and still believe that Bush was the worst president of modern time. Based mostly but not solely on the taking the country to war in Iraq on known false facts.

That war is still killing people, here and abroad has destabilized the entire region, was fought for nothing and has made every bodies life on all sides worse. He also wrecked the US economy by cutting taxes for the rich and putting the wars he started on the credit card in the process further deregulating the banking industry, bankrupting the country and damn near destroying the whole world economy.

Now Trump has not done anything like that ...yet. but he has only had 45 days.

But as far as insanity, causing distrust of the world. the courts, and the inelegance community...add to that a basic dishonest and racist stench to all things Presidential ....no comparison, Trump is by far the worst thing we have seen.
HoZay said[1] @ 11:46pm GMT on 5th Mar
Comey Asks Justice Dept. to Reject Trump’s Wiretapping Claim

From today's New York Times:

Reveal

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.

Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment. Sarah Isgur Flores, the spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.

Mr. Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump’s truthfulness. The confrontation between the two is the most serious consequence of Mr. Trump’s weekend Twitter outburst, and it underscores the dangers of what the president and his aides have unleashed by accusing the former president of a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump’s young administration.
Continue reading the main story
Recent Comments
Donna 1 minute ago

When will Trump voters begin to notice they don't have any "good paying" new jobs from their President?
Liz 1 minute ago

It would be nice to have a day without something "interesting" from the Trump camp. The only group which is ominously quiet are the GOP...
Vicky H 1 minute ago

I'm sure that Putin and the Russians are very content to see the chaos their interference in our government has made......

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The White House showed no indication that it would back down from Mr. Trump’s claims. On Sunday, the president demanded a congressional inquiry into whether Mr. Obama had abused the power of federal law enforcement agencies before the 2016 presidential election. In a statement from his spokesman, Mr. Trump called “reports” about the wiretapping “very troubling” and said that Congress should examine them as part of its investigations into Russia’s meddling in the election.

Along with concerns about potential attacks on the bureau’s credibility, senior F.B.I. officials are said to be worried that the notion of a court-approved wiretap will raise the public’s expectations that the federal authorities have significant evidence implicating the Trump campaign in colluding with Russia’s efforts to disrupt the presidential election.

One problem Mr. Comey has faced is that there are few senior politically appointed officials at the Justice Department who can make the decision to release a statement, the officials said. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself on Thursday from all matters related to the federal investigation into connections between Mr. Trump, his associates and Russia.

Mr. Comey’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering is certain to invite contrasts to his actions last year, when he spoke publicly about the Hillary Clinton email case and disregarded Justice Department entreaties not to.

It is not clear why Mr. Comey did not issue the statement himself. He is the most senior law enforcement official who was kept on the job as the Obama administration gave way to the Trump administration. And while the Justice Department applies for intelligence-gathering warrants, the F.B.I. keeps its own set of records and is in position to know whether Mr. Trump’s claims are true. While intelligence officials do not normally discuss the existence or nonexistence of surveillance warrants, no law prevents Mr. Comey from issuing the statement.

In his demand for a congressional inquiry, the president, through his press secretary, Sean Spicer, issued a statement on Sunday that said, “President Donald J. Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016.”

Mr. Spicer, who repeated the entire statement in a series of Twitter messages, added that “neither the White House nor the president will comment further until such oversight is conducted.”

A spokesman for Mr. Obama and his former aides have called the accusation by Mr. Trump completely false, saying that Mr. Obama never ordered any wiretapping of a United States citizen.

“A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” Kevin Lewis, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, said in a statement on Saturday.

Mr. Trump’s demand for a congressional investigation appears to be based, at least in part, on unproved claims by Breitbart News and conservative talk radio hosts that secret warrants were issued authorizing the tapping of the phones of Mr. Trump and his aides at Trump Tower in New York.

In a series of Twitter messages on Saturday, the president seemed to be convinced that those claims were true. In one post, Mr. Trump said, “I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!”

On Sunday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy White House press secretary, said the president was determined to find out what had really happened, calling it potentially the “greatest abuse of power” that the country has ever seen.

“Look, I think he’s going off of information that he’s seen that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential,” Ms. Sanders said on ABC’s “This Week” program. “And if it is, this is the greatest overreach and the greatest abuse of power that I think we have ever seen and a huge attack on democracy itself. And the American people have a right to know if this took place.”

The claims about wiretapping appear similar in some ways to the unfounded voter fraud charges that Mr. Trump made during his first days in the Oval Office. Just after Inauguration Day, he reiterated in a series of Twitter posts his belief that millions of voters had cast ballots illegally — claims that also appeared to be based on conspiracy theories from right-wing websites.

As with his demand for a wiretapping inquiry, Mr. Trump also called for a “major investigation” into voter fraud, saying on Twitter that “depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!” No investigation has been started.

Senior law enforcement and intelligence officials who worked in the Obama administration have said there were no secret intelligence warrants regarding Mr. Trump. Asked whether such a warrant existed, James R. Clapper Jr., a former director of national intelligence, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program, “Not to my knowledge, no.”

“There was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time as a candidate or against his campaign,” Mr. Clapper added.

Mr. Trump’s demands for a congressional investigation were initially met with skepticism by lawmakers, including Republicans. Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said he was “not sure what it is that he is talking about.”

“I’m not sure what the genesis of that statement was,” Mr. Rubio said.

Pressed to elaborate on “Meet the Press,” Mr. Rubio said, “I’m not going to be a part of a witch hunt, but I’m also not going to be a part of a cover-up.”


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