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I find the way the FBI acted really puzzling. I find it difficult to believe they evaluated the consequences to the agency of using the FISA court to obtain war
by benmmurphy 7y ago
I find the way the FBI acted really puzzling. I find it difficult to believe they evaluated the consequences to the agency of using the FISA court to obtain warrants on campaign related people during an election. How did they believe this was going to play out? If the investigation ever led to prosecutions they would find it difficult to hide to a court that evidence was procured from FISA warrants. So it seems the only reasonable outcome where this would remain secret was if their investigation was a failure. Also, it is important to note that someone in the government did the completely retarded thing of leaking the FISA warrant on Page. This wasn't done to whistleblow on the warrant but presumably in order to either hurt the Trump campaign or rally public support for an investigation.
Before the election the Republican's held the house and were likely to hold it again. If it became public that there was FISA surveillance related to Republican campaign you would have to expect a House investigation. There was also a chance that Trump would be elected. You would assume if he was elected there would also be an executive investigation into the FISA surveillance which is what we see from the OIG and now the DOJ via Durham.
There are going to be very strong incentives for these investigations to try and dig up anything that would look like foul play. Even if you try and do everything by the book you risk burning what is presumably a useful investigative tool. I can't see how the next best option which would be try and get sealed warrants from a normal court is so much poorer that this loss would offset all the political risk.
- Scramblejams 7y agoMy guess is: They never seriously considered the possibility that they'd get caught. Nobody thought Trump was going to win, the Senate was expected to go blue, and House Republican control notwithstanding, that probably drove a lot of their internal, err, can I call it optimism? And if everyone involved believed there was something there to find, it's easy to understand why they'd just keep pushing, figuring that once they found something concrete, the methods used to get there would get lost in the noise. I'm just speculating, but this may have played out rather differently had Trump had a two-digit lead for most of the run-up to the election. Anyway, if I'm right that they justified their actions because they were never expected to see daylight, that's particularly scary because it suggests that maybe this behavior is standard operating procedure. Invent fake dirt on your perp and hand it to the FISA court, use the FISA warrant to get the real dirt on your perp, do some parallel construction, and you're golden! They've got carte blanche, as long as (a) they get their guy or (b) their guy doesn't have any power to come back at them. Yuck. That sort of thing can be dangerous to a democracy.