White House has settled in

777,843 Views | 4703 Replies | Last: 2 yr ago by cbbass1
NYCGOBEARS
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okaydo said:

bearister said:

How do Evangelicals reconcile the marginalization of empathy and compassion with their Bible thumping holier than thou alleged strict adherence to the teachings of Christ? Did they forget about that rich man, eye of the needle, getting into Heaven parable?

The same people who decry snowflakes become instantly become victims when they are offended.

The same people who denounce poltical correctness are quick to be outraged when people do something politically incorrect that offends them.

The same people who vehemently denounce immorality are quick to quickly forgive immorality and request that we move on when it's somebody that holds their interests who's being immoral.

Blah..blah...blah.


It's called hypocrisy, and we're seeing it in epic doses.
mikecohen
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Unit2Sucks said:

Well at least Trump finally provide a nothingburger by releasing the Nunes memo. I'm not sure what he hoped to prove by releasing a memo that if taken at its word impugns the grant of a FISA warrant 2 weeks before the election to surveil a former volunteer advisor to Trump's campaign. Instead of distancing himself from Page (who the FBI notified in 2013 was a target of Russian intelligence operatives who were trying to cultivate him), Trump is essentially telling the world that Page was a meaningful contributor to his campaign and that the surveillance was designed to get at Trump's campaign.

Will be interesting to see how opinion of this memo changes over the next few months as Mueller begins to unveil more charges against Trump operatives and ultimately releases a report on (or indicts?) Trump.
At this moment (at least), I truly believe that you have posed the central question.
Unit2Sucks
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Trump continues to prove his critics right. After the Trump campaign officially disavowed Carter Page and Trump himself has said he never even met the guy, Trump is now claiming that this memo totally vindicates him. CNN also reporting that Trump told people he released the memo to interfere with Mueller's investigation. I'm not surprised that Trump's mental faculties preclude him from understanding how irrelevant this memo is, but where are his advisors on all this? It's embarrassing if he actually thinks what he claims. Bonus points for putting his own name in quotation marks.

oski003
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1) The Russian Dossier, the creation of Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele, is a political document namely, opposition research, created for the Democrat National Committee and Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

2) Using what it knew was opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign, in October of 2016, the FBI and DOJ obtained a FISA warrant from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to install a wiretap to spy on Hillary Clinton's opponent the Trump campaign, specifically Carter Page. This spying would last for a year.

3) it should be noted that the FISA court was set up to stop foreign terrorists. The fact that the FBI and DOJ would use this court to not only wiretap an American but to wiretap a presidential campaign belies belief. Why Obama's FBI and DOJ used this court as opposed to a normal court is obvious. As you will see below, a normal court probably would have denied the wiretap.

4) Worse still, in the summer of 2016, Obama's DOJ had already opened a counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. The fact that nothing from that months-old partisan investigation was used to obtain the Page wiretap is revealing.

5) According to the Nunes memo, an "essential" part of the FISA wiretap application was the Steele dossier, which again is a partisan political document created for the Clinton campaign.

6) So essential was this partisan dossier, Andrew McCabe, the disgraced former-Deputy Director of the FBI, admitted in December that "no surveillance warrant would have been sought" without the dossier.

7) Not only did the FBI knowingly use a document from a partisan campaign to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on the competing campaign, the FBI knew the dossier was mostly "salacious and unverified." We know this because disgraced former-FBI Director James Comey told us so in June of 2017.

8) According to the Nunes memo, "Steele told [former FBI official Bruce] Ohr, he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.'"

9) Ohr, who was part of the FBI's anti-Trump Russian investigation, was not only friendly with Steele, Ohr's own wife worked with Steele at Fusion GPS doing opposition research (the dossier) against Trump for the Clinton campaign.

10) Despite a) knowing the dossier was opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign b) knowing the dossier was "salacious and unverified" c) knowing Steele was desperate to destroy Trump d) the breathtaking conflict of interest in having an investigator's own wife working on the dossier, the FBI still went to the FISA court to obtain permission to spy on Hillary Clinton's opponent.

11) in order to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, all of the conflicts of interest above were withheld from the FISA court an indefensible (and possibly illegal) lie of omission.

12) Even worse, in order to legitimize a warrant request based on a piece of partisan opposition research they knew was "salacious and unverified," the FBI and DOJ used a media report to bolster the findings in the phony dossier. The FBI and DOJ told the court that the media report was independent verification of the dossier. But this was not true, and, according to the Nunes memo, the FBI and DOJ knew this was not true. The truth is that the phony dossier was the source of this media report.

13) Also hidden from the FISA court was the fact that the FBI obtained Steele as a source but had to fire him in October of 2016 when, in a bid to use his phony dossier to derail the Trump campaign, he leaked his information to the far-left Mother Jones.

14) "Although the FBI and DOJ were willing participants in pushing a "salacious and unverified" narrative against a presidential candidate (primarily through media leaks), this was all hidden from congressional investigators. To begin with, for months, while under oath, Comey said he did not know where the dossier came from meaning from the Clinton campaign. The Wall Street Journal explains:
We also know the FBI wasn't straight with Congress, as it hid most of these facts from investigators in a briefing on the dossier in January 2017. The FBI did not tell Congress about Mr. Steele's connection to the Clinton campaign, and the House had to issue subpoenas for Fusion bank records to discover the truth. Nor did the FBI tell investigators that it continued receiving information from Mr. Steele and Fusion even after it had terminated him. The memo says the bureau's intermediary was Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, incredibly, worked for Fusion.

15) all of this occurred under Comey, the man our media now holds up as a living saint, a man so desperate to destroy Trump, he not only oversaw those committing the above abuses, he leaked classified information to the news media in order to see a Special Prosecutor appointed against Trump, which his pal, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, immediately did.
And finally

16. Much of the "salacious and unverified" material in the dossier came from the Russians. In other words, those disgusting dossier lies about Trump's personal behavior came from Russian operatives. So there is no question that it was the Clinton campaign, Democrats, Steele, the FBI, and DOJ who colluded with the Russians to rig a presidential election.

Yes, there was collusion with the Russians, and those in our government currently investigating Trump in the hopes of overturning a presidential election are the colluders.
BearChemist
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oski003 said:

1) The creation of Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele, is a political document namely, opposition research, created for the Democrat National Committee and Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

Unsurprisingly, your first point is already wrong. Full stop.
Unit2Sucks
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BearChemist said:

oski003 said:

1) The creation of Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele, is a political document namely, opposition research, created for the Democrat National Committee and Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

Unsurprisingly, your first point is already wrong. Full stop.


LOL apparently he knows more than the Trump campaign and "Trump" himself each of which has said that Page was unaffiliated with the campaign and didn't contribute anything to it.

If this was a partisan attack against a campaign, it would have been a pretty weak one seeing as how it could not have possibly had any impact on the election.

Oski003 will never acknowledge it, but I'm pretty sure everything he wrote will be proven incorrect over time.
oski003
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Try to use facts that prove your case. How is statement #1 wrong? How does Trump distancing himself from Page disprove any of the above?
BearChemist
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Check Glenn Simpson's sworn testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, it begins with what Fusion GPS does and how the opposition research on Trump started. I think sworn testimony is more close to fact than whatever opinions you absorbed from talking heads.

Teaser: Fusion GPS was NOT created by DNC and the opposition research was NOT initiated by DNC.
oski003
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Statement 1 is about the creation of the Russian Dossier, not the creation of Fusion GPS itself.

The Dossier was created for Clinton's campaign and the DNC.
Unit2Sucks
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I'm not a deep state mastermind but if I wanted to spy on a presidential campaign I probably wouldn't wait to do so until 2 weeks before the end of the campaign and would choose someone who is actually involved in the campaign, not someone who according to the campaign was not involved and never contributed.

Oski003 - are you challenging Trump's and his campaigns multiple disavowals of Carter Page?

I don't have enough patience to go through the rest of your fantasy talking points but as I said earlier I am confident that you will be proven wrong. Please don't delete your post because it will serve as a great record for us to evaluate your judgment.
BearChemist
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oski003 said:

Statement 1 is about the creation of the Russian Dossier, not the creation of Fusion GPS itself.

The Dossier was created for Clinton's campaign and the DNC.
Again, if you have read the testimony you would know your statement is incorrect.
oski003
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But according to an official cited in The Washington Post on Friday, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity, the Justice Department presented "ample disclosure of relevant, material facts," to the FISA court, including that "the research was being paid for by a political entity."

This is from CNN today. The above would contradict a statement from what I copied. This seems to be a disputed fact.
oski003
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Unit2Sucks said:

I'm not a deep state mastermind but if I wanted to spy on a presidential campaign I probably wouldn't wait to do so until 2 weeks before the end of the campaign and would choose someone who is actually involved in the campaign, not someone who according to the campaign was not involved and never contributed.

Oski003 - are you challenging Trump's and his campaigns multiple disavowals of Carter Page?

I don't have enough patience to go through the rest of your fantasy talking points but as I said earlier I am confident that you will be proven wrong. Please don't delete your post because it will serve as a great record for us to evaluate your judgment.


Just quote me and you will have my post up at your inconvenience. Also, your last statement is unnecessarily mean and judgmental. Can someone disagree with you without being looked down upon?
Unit2Sucks
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oski003 said:



Just quote me and you will have my post up at your inconvenience. Also, your last statement is unnecessarily mean and judgmental. Can someone disagree with you without being looked down upon?
You can spare us the outrage. Your post was Trump's wishful thinking masquerading as factual statements and to be honest I have a hard time believing it was made in good faith. I think you're smarter than that.

Still waiting for you to explain why you consider surveillance of Carter Page beginning 2 weeks before the election to relate to the Trump campaign.
oski003
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Quick Google search result is from CBS news:

Carter Page is a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser whose surveillance by the FBI is at the center of a declassified Republican memo released by House Intelligence Committee Republicans Friday. He's one of several Trump campaign associates who have been under scrutiny by the FBI and by lawmakers probing Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
oski003
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The Nov 8 or 14 transcript? Which page? Can you just quote it? I think we are talking 200+ pages of testimony.
Unit2Sucks
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oski003 said:

Quick Google search result is from CBS news:

Carter Page is a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser whose surveillance by the FBI is at the center of a declassified Republican memo released by House Intelligence Committee Republicans Friday. He's one of several Trump campaign associates who have been under scrutiny by the FBI and by lawmakers probing Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Cool, so let me know if this changes your opinion.

In September 2016, Hope Hicks is quoted by a reporter working on a profile of Page saying that "he has no formal role in the campaign."

Also in September 2016, Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said "Mr. Page is not an advisor and has made no contribution to the campaign. He's never been part of our campaign. Period."

In December 2016, Don McGahn wrote Page to "immediately cease" saying he is a Trump advisor. "You were merely one of the many people named to a foreign policy advisory committee in March of 2016 a committee that met one time," McGahn writes. "You never met Mr. Trump, nor did you ever 'advise' Mr. Trump about anything. You are thus not an 'advisor' to Mr. Trump in any sense of the word."

In a February 2017 news conference, Trump himself said "I don't think I've ever spoken to him. I don't think I've ever met him. And he actually said he was a very low-level member of I think a committee for a short period of time. I don't think I ever met him. Now, it's possible that I walked into a room and he was sitting there, but I don't think I ever met him."

So tell us what you really think about Carter Page and whether he was affiliated with the Trump campaign and why anyone would want to spy on him to get to Trump.


oski003
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I believe that Carter Page is a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser. Trump has lied to the media several times
sycasey
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oski003 said:

I believe that Carter Page is a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser. Trump has lied to the media several times


And people affiliated with his campaign have also lied to the FBI several times. That is why they are under investigation, not because of some massive political conspiracy. It's because they are shady as hell.
BearChemist
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oski003 said:

The Nov 8 or 14 transcript? Which page? Can you just quote it? I think we are talking 200+ pages of testimony.
Nov 14. Page 6-30 between Simpson and Trey Gowdy.
Anarchistbear
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The bigger crisis here is this whole post
9/11 bi-partisan security mob that is in charge. Democrats and Republicans both voted to extend this whole FISA charade then they both leak "top secret" excerpts to bolster their positions while condemning Snowden and others who want to bring some transparency. Release the whole FISA document: why are Americans being spied on? Unfortunately Trump doesn't go further than his own self interest; nobody does.
Another Bear
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Tinfoil hats are on sale on Amazon, right now! Okay seriously, everyone following this saga knows the key is Papadopoulos, not the Fusion GPS Steele oppo bit. In fact, Nunes shot himself in the foot by mentioning Papadopoulos in the memo. Serious incompetence if you're trying to score points and win.
B.A. Bearacus
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oski003
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Read those pages of the transcript. The below statement is still true.

The Russian Dossier, the creation of Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele, is a political document namely, opposition research, created for the Democrat National Committee and Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.
okaydo
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oski003 said:

Read those pages of the transcript. The below statement is still true.

The Russian Dossier, the creation of Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele, is a political document namely, opposition research, created for the Democrat National Committee and Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

But it's been reported that Republicans ordered and initially paid for the dossier.
bearister
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At this stage of the game I would say people that still support tRump fall into 1 of 3 categories: Stupid, racist or wealthy.
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iwantwinners
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bearister said:

At this stage of the game I would say people that still support tRump fall into 1 of 3 categories: Stupid, racist or wealthy.
These are great arguments. Ascribing identifying labels to those who support a politician as some sort of monolith is always a sign of profound moral perspective and intellectual faculties.

At any stage, anybody who couldn't acknowledge Shillary as a political and ideological pragmatist, nothing more than a social and political climber, a rape apologist, habitual liar, is either stupid, sexist, or poor.

What an easy but stupid game to play that could go on forever. Let's not.
drizzlybears brother
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oski003 said:

1) The Russian Dossier, the creation of Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele, is a political document namely, opposition research, created for the Democrat National Committee and Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

2) Using what it knew was opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign, in October of 2016, the FBI and DOJ obtained a FISA warrant from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to install a wiretap to spy on Hillary Clinton's opponent the Trump campaign, specifically Carter Page. This spying would last for a year.

3) it should be noted that the FISA court was set up to stop foreign terrorists. The fact that the FBI and DOJ would use this court to not only wiretap an American but to wiretap a presidential campaign belies belief. Why Obama's FBI and DOJ used this court as opposed to a normal court is obvious. As you will see below, a normal court probably would have denied the wiretap.

4) Worse still, in the summer of 2016, Obama's DOJ had already opened a counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. The fact that nothing from that months-old partisan investigation was used to obtain the Page wiretap is revealing.

5) According to the Nunes memo, an "essential" part of the FISA wiretap application was the Steele dossier, which again is a partisan political document created for the Clinton campaign.

6) So essential was this partisan dossier, Andrew McCabe, the disgraced former-Deputy Director of the FBI, admitted in December that "no surveillance warrant would have been sought" without the dossier.

7) Not only did the FBI knowingly use a document from a partisan campaign to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on the competing campaign, the FBI knew the dossier was mostly "salacious and unverified." We know this because disgraced former-FBI Director James Comey told us so in June of 2017.

8) According to the Nunes memo, "Steele told [former FBI official Bruce] Ohr, he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.'"

9) Ohr, who was part of the FBI's anti-Trump Russian investigation, was not only friendly with Steele, Ohr's own wife worked with Steele at Fusion GPS doing opposition research (the dossier) against Trump for the Clinton campaign.

10) Despite a) knowing the dossier was opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign b) knowing the dossier was "salacious and unverified" c) knowing Steele was desperate to destroy Trump d) the breathtaking conflict of interest in having an investigator's own wife working on the dossier, the FBI still went to the FISA court to obtain permission to spy on Hillary Clinton's opponent.

11) in order to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, all of the conflicts of interest above were withheld from the FISA court an indefensible (and possibly illegal) lie of omission.

12) Even worse, in order to legitimize a warrant request based on a piece of partisan opposition research they knew was "salacious and unverified," the FBI and DOJ used a media report to bolster the findings in the phony dossier. The FBI and DOJ told the court that the media report was independent verification of the dossier. But this was not true, and, according to the Nunes memo, the FBI and DOJ knew this was not true. The truth is that the phony dossier was the source of this media report.

13) Also hidden from the FISA court was the fact that the FBI obtained Steele as a source but had to fire him in October of 2016 when, in a bid to use his phony dossier to derail the Trump campaign, he leaked his information to the far-left Mother Jones.

14) "Although the FBI and DOJ were willing participants in pushing a "salacious and unverified" narrative against a presidential candidate (primarily through media leaks), this was all hidden from congressional investigators. To begin with, for months, while under oath, Comey said he did not know where the dossier came from meaning from the Clinton campaign. The Wall Street Journal explains:
We also know the FBI wasn't straight with Congress, as it hid most of these facts from investigators in a briefing on the dossier in January 2017. The FBI did not tell Congress about Mr. Steele's connection to the Clinton campaign, and the House had to issue subpoenas for Fusion bank records to discover the truth. Nor did the FBI tell investigators that it continued receiving information from Mr. Steele and Fusion even after it had terminated him. The memo says the bureau's intermediary was Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, incredibly, worked for Fusion.

15) all of this occurred under Comey, the man our media now holds up as a living saint, a man so desperate to destroy Trump, he not only oversaw those committing the above abuses, he leaked classified information to the news media in order to see a Special Prosecutor appointed against Trump, which his pal, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, immediately did.
And finally

16. Much of the "salacious and unverified" material in the dossier came from the Russians. In other words, those disgusting dossier lies about Trump's personal behavior came from Russian operatives. So there is no question that it was the Clinton campaign, Democrats, Steele, the FBI, and DOJ who colluded with the Russians to rig a presidential election.

Yes, there was collusion with the Russians, and those in our government currently investigating Trump in the hopes of overturning a presidential election are the colluders.

Gun to your head - more likely or less likely that Trump is the type who parties with prostitutes - golden showers or otherwise?

On this memo, we've got our hair on fire because we believe the Feds have got it in for Trump. The same Feds who despite investigating Trump for months before the election, never once revealed any hint of this investigation publicly, while being exceedingly public about its investigation of his opponent throughout the height of the campaign including during the immediate days before the vote?
How desperate to believe does one have to be to regurgitate this crap? Have a little dignity.
bearister
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iwantwinners said:

bearister said:

At this stage of the game I would say people that still support tRump fall into 1 of 3 categories: Stupid, racist or wealthy.
These are great arguments. Ascribing identifying labels to those who support a politician as some sort of monolith is always a sign of profound moral perspective and intellectual faculties.

At any stage, anybody who couldn't acknowledge Shillary as a political and ideological pragmatist, nothing more than a social and political climber, a rape apologist, habitual liar, is either stupid, sexist, or poor.

What an easy but stupid game to play that could go on forever. Let's not.


..I forgot the 4th category: traitor.
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oski003
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Fusion GPS was paid by Republican Group for 2 months work to do financial research on Trump. This ended in April 2016. No dossier was leaked to the media nor given to feds. Steele was not involved.

Democrat group secretly through a law firm paid Fusion GPS to investigate further. It is unknown if Fusion recruited Democrats or Democrats recruited Fusion. Fusion claims client privilege and Democrats claimed they didn't hire Fusion until later caught. Democrats through Fusion paid Steele, outside of Fusions fees, to create Steele Dossier, the basis of the Carter Page FISA warrant requests. Fusion GPS neither corroborates or has found information that contradicts the findings Steele gave to the FBI. The Dossiers findings were leaked to the press to hurt Trump.

Signed, Oski003
Stupid, racist, wealthy, or traitorous
Unit2Sucks
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So why Carter Page? Still haven't heard a single substantive argument about what would make him an interesting entry point to Trump. He never went to Trump Tower and had no communications with the Trump campaign. He was an "idiot" according to Russian operatives. They could have gone after Trump Jr, Michael Cohen, Kushner or any other number of people who were actually connected to Trump and met multiple times with Russian operatives. But instead they surveilled Carter Page.

This is the question you Trump fans refuse to answer because there is no plausible scenario which fits the narrative you are pursuing.
Anarchistbear
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Steele was a paid FBI informant. Why wouldn't they use him? As far as bias goes, when hasn't the FBI been politically biased? The only good thing about this sham is this whole FISA process and it's benefactors-both parties and the intelligence community are exposed as the steaming hypocrites they are.
bearister
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I think the LAPD were biased against Charles Manson.
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BearChemist
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It was part of the application for Carter Page's FISA warrant renewal. But of course there is a need to downplay how first warrant was issued, what were other evidences presented to the FISC, and the fact that the warrant has been renewed three times. Otherwise how do you plant the impression that "DNC paid Chris Steele dirty money and asked him to make up stories that could damage Donald Trump" into FOX viewers heads?

Oh wait, are you saying DNC acquired the dossier so that FBI could spy on Carter Page, who had left the Trump campaign for two months? That doesn't make much sense but maybe I should not use my brain too much.

p.s. Fusion GPS worked for Washington Free Beacon for six months, from October 2015 to April 2016. And without those initial findings Chris Steele, who is a former British spy with expertise in Russian organized crime, wouldn't be subcontracted.
bearister
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https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/5132126/carter-page-russia-2013-letter
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