Steve Bannon.

[Dill]

(04-06-2017, 06:35 PM)JustWinBaby Wrote: Have you already forgotten that ruckus with Eric Holder's DOJ and the AP reporters...and James Rosen...and Sharyl Atkinson?   Then there's that whole IRS thing.  Like I said, the Obama administration has a history of abuse of power here, and used the Espionage Act SEVEN times to go after leakers (that has been done just 4 other times, in HISTORY).

What actual facts on record?  I'm going off of comments from Republican AND Democrat reps on the investigative committees, and Directors of the CIA and FBI, who have said thus far there is no evidence of collusion.  The "smoking" you refer to has all been fake news or incidental contacts (Guccifer2.0 making a public tweet or two to Stone is a nothingburger). 

Where are the warrants giving legal clearance to surveil US citizens?  The wide latitude given for "legality" does not mean there hasn't been a massive abuse of power.

We KNOW there is an investigation, and we KNOW the Trump team was unmasked in incidental collection, and we KNOW that was [illegally] leaked.  We deserve to know the depth of the investigations and the justifications because there is huge potential of abuse and misuse of govt intel to target political opponents (which, by the way, is at least as concerning as any Russian attempts to interfere).

You're being partisan if you think either of these issues are a non-issue, settled or have a conclusion one way or the other.

Let's not worry about who's being partisan. I don't think Obama has a special history of abuse of power, but I don't want to go down that side road at the moment.

I recall that Holder supoened records from Rosen et al. I do not remember wiretapping. Going after leakers is not prima facie abuse of power and another side road.

Back to your question about warrants. As you say, Trump's people were incidental to surveillance of Russian spies. But the intelligence agencies noticed the frequency and pattern of contacts. That is not nothing. The repeated forgetting to mention contacts on the part of Sessions and Flynn and Kuechner is also not a nothing burger. Neither is the fact that a one time advisor was actually recruited as a spy. Nor Trump's curious inability to criticize a dictator whose opponents end up dead. and factor in all this is going on while the Russians are trying to sabotage our election to favor Trump. "Thus far no evidence of collusion" doesn't make any of this fake news, as Trump would have us to believe.

When an investigation begins and the White House stalls and blocks it, pronouncements regarding the evidence "so far" shouldn't be treated as conclusive. People should eventually get the full story from a non-partisan investigation, but at the moment I can see how ongoing surveillance may be easily compromised by too rapid revelations.  Trump's wire-tapping tweet has already compromised much, but from the perspective of the intel community perhaps something is still salvageable.

So it's a bit premature to hint at "massive abuse of power" when we are talking about people pulled into surveillance via intercourse with spies--spies from a country which tried to sabotage our election.