Jophiel wrote:
In this case, we have a FISA court giving a warrant to conduct surveillance on a Trump associate because the judge felt that there was probable reason to think he was communicating with Russian agents. So all the hand-wringing is more than a little misguided.
Uh huh. Already covered that though:
gbaji, earlier in this thread wrote:
Again, even if there was a FISA warrant obtained (and guess what? We have no evidence or confirmation of that, which you'd think would be the very first thing that would be trotted out if you were trying to justify what you did), It still has a very very negative political connotation. We can't have a system where the party in power uses what should be non-political agencies for political reasons. And if you think that "detecting and preventing some kind of wrongdoing" was remotely as much a motivator for this spying as "finding something we can use against Trump to help Clinton win", you are probably the most naive person on the planet.
And let me point out (again), that a month or so ago, everyone was mocking Trump for claiming that his campaign was even being surveilled
at all.
And let me also point out that whether they obtained a proper warrant for surveillance on one person connected to the Trump campaign back in July does not at all explain or justify the decision by Rice to unmask members of the
Trump transition team many months later. At the point at which Trump has won the election and is transitioning into the office, it's hard to make an argument that *any* communication he or his team has with anyone else (yes, that includes Russians) can be surveilled for any reason other than political ones. Certainly, the bar should be much much higher. Merely "having a conversation" with someone can't possibly be considered suspicious or used to justify surveillance. And even political deal making doesn't work either. You'd need to have evidence that someone was engaged in a direct criminal act as part of the conversations. And even that's tough, since said criminal act would have to be something that could not be "legal" as performed by the executive branch of the US. Remember, we're talking about the part of our government that can do things like order airstrikes, wet ops, toppling of governments, manipulation of currency, make deals, etc.
The whole thing reeks of political desperation on the part of the outgoing Obama administration. They were basically grasping at any straw they could here. The only thing that possibly makes sense (well, legally) is if they thought that maybe they could find something sufficiently illegal, that they could do what? Get the election results undone? Have Obama refuse to give up his office because Trump is unfit or something? Try to charge Trump with a crime before he takes office? The crisis that would have caused is pretty staggering, but it looks like that's what they were trying to do. Well, it's the only thing they could have done legally with the information.
And failing that, it looks like they settled for "gather up whatever we can and try to use it politically later". Which puts us squarely into "abuse of power for political purposes" territory. Which puts us right back into "this is a lot like Watergate".
