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Listen Trump was running a whole lot of policies entirely off the books that wasn’t publicly declared and was entirely inconsistent with the goals of both the U

by mdhb 2y ago

Listen Trump was running a whole lot of policies entirely off the books that wasn’t publicly declared and was entirely inconsistent with the goals of both the US and all of their allies but was entirely consistent with personal enrichment. He had multiple people go down around him that were actively working as Russian agents and then he had Kushner working to set up a secret communications channel out of the Russian embassy that was actively designed so that it couldn’t be intercepted by US intelligence. When you do that kind of thing, no matter if you’re a politician or not, in fact ESPECIALLY if you’re a politician you should absolutely expect people to start asking questions and opening investigations. We don’t need to pretend he was some normal candidate who had a couple of whacky ideas.

roenxi 2y ago
Just to hammer on the point here, the polling is close to wall-to-wall that people prefer him as the next US president - so in that sense he is probably slightly above normal. Are you saying you consider deploying the spying apparatus to monitor domestic political candidates is legitimate? What is the line where you consider it illegitimate? They bought this system in notionally to fight terrorists. It has in short order turned out that "terrorists" include someone who can be described as a relatively popular (!) Republican candidate. Are you contending that this is legitimate use of the foreign intelligence apparatus? Most US presidents have dealings with foreign countries. The Biden family are famously involved in Ukraine (& others), Trump was all over the place including Russia. Obama was probably just domestic but the Bush family have a lot of interest in oil which is going to involve foreign contact and the Clintons are closely involved in US foreign policy. There'd be a case for spying on almost every president in the last 30 years!
- mdhb 2y ago
  You seem to have so many different things mixed up here that I don’t even know where to begin. Being popular has nothing to do with it, being a politician has nothing to do with it, what others may or may not have done has nothing to do with it. There were a whole range of specific actions that occurred that resulted in an investigation as it should.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > There were a whole range of specific actions that occurred that resulted in an investigation as it should. One of the FBI lawyers involved plead guilty to a felony false statement charge. They were literally making up pretexts to spy on the Trump campaign. I think the issue here is when you talk about "legitimate" you mean that you are happy enough to see the FISA system used as an internal political club. There is no way that it is being used legitimately, we're in the opening stages of a process where every single incoming US president is going to have their communications examined by the incumbent's administration. Or at least when the party in power changes. There isn't anything special about Trump here. He turned out not to be doing anything suspicious, or they'd be going after him for it (or have gone after people in his campaign). Ergo, any clean candidate is probably suspicious enough to warrant surveillance.
    - mdhb 2y ago
      This is just total delusional reality stuff.

by mdhb 2y ago

roenxi 2y ago

Just to hammer on the point here, the polling is close to wall-to-wall that people prefer him as the next US president - so in that sense he is probably slightly above normal. Are you saying you consider deploying the spying apparatus to monitor domestic political candidates is legitimate? What is the line where you consider it illegitimate? They bought this system in notionally to fight terrorists. It has in short order turned out that "terrorists" include someone who can be described as a relatively popular (!) Republican candidate. Are you contending that this is legitimate use of the foreign intelligence apparatus? Most US presidents have dealings with foreign countries. The Biden family are famously involved in Ukraine (& others), Trump was all over the place including Russia. Obama was probably just domestic but the Bush family have a lot of interest in oil which is going to involve foreign contact and the Clintons are closely involved in US foreign policy. There'd be a case for spying on almost every president in the last 30 years!

mdhb 2y ago
You seem to have so many different things mixed up here that I don’t even know where to begin. Being popular has nothing to do with it, being a politician has nothing to do with it, what others may or may not have done has nothing to do with it. There were a whole range of specific actions that occurred that resulted in an investigation as it should.
- roenxi 2y ago
  > There were a whole range of specific actions that occurred that resulted in an investigation as it should. One of the FBI lawyers involved plead guilty to a felony false statement charge. They were literally making up pretexts to spy on the Trump campaign. I think the issue here is when you talk about "legitimate" you mean that you are happy enough to see the FISA system used as an internal political club. There is no way that it is being used legitimately, we're in the opening stages of a process where every single incoming US president is going to have their communications examined by the incumbent's administration. Or at least when the party in power changes. There isn't anything special about Trump here. He turned out not to be doing anything suspicious, or they'd be going after him for it (or have gone after people in his campaign). Ergo, any clean candidate is probably suspicious enough to warrant surveillance.
  - mdhb 2y ago
    This is just total delusional reality stuff.