WTF is the reason for the use of quotes around the third person reference to this “shithole”. Oh wait, maybe that’s what was being “probed”.
The FBI this week expressed “grave concerns” about the memo and called it inaccurate and incomplete. Democrats said it was a set of cherry-picked claims aimed at smearing law enforcement and that releasing the memo would damage law enforcement and intelligence work.
For one, Democrats said it was misleading and incorrect to say a judge was not told of the potential political motivations of the people paying for Steele’s research.
Beyond that, though, the memo confirms the FBI’s counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign began in July 2016, months before the surveillance warrant was sought, and was “triggered” by information concerning campaign aide George Papadopoulos. He pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI.
The confirmation about Papadopoulos is “the most important fact disclosed in this otherwise shoddy memo,” California Rep. Adam Schiff, the House committee’s top Democrat, said in a tweet Saturday in response to Trump’s assertion that the document vindicated him.
[...]
Other details in the memo could also challenge Republican claims of bias. The warrant requested was renewed on three additional occasions, meaning that judges approved it four times.
The memo had been classified because it deals with warrants obtained from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The White House declassified it Friday and sent it to Nunes for immediate release.
That disclosure is extraordinary because it involves details about surveillance of Americans, national security information the government regards as among its most highly classified.
The release is likely to further escalate the conflict between the White House and Trump’s law enforcement leaders. Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray had personally lobbied against the memo’s disclosure, arguing it could set a dangerous precedent.
What if, instead of a louche, undisciplined, boorish, and insulting demagogue, Trump were a smooth, calculating, strategic, and disciplined demagogue? What if it were not Trump who had won the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, but John Kelly — a four-star general who shares many of Trump’s cultural grievances and his xenophobic intuitions but could wrap himself in the flag, in the rhetoric of patriotism, in the dangers that lurk beyond our borders?
Indeed, if I had to rank the most unsettling moments of the past year, high on my list would be press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s rejoinder to a journalist who asked about a baldfaced lie Kelly had told. “If you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that that’s something highly inappropriate,” she said. That is how democracies die.
The fissures in American politics, the anger and fear that we feel toward each other, the cracks that demographic change are opening in our polity, all of that long predates Trump, and all of it will outlast his presidency. I’ll end this with a paragraph from Levitsky and Ziblatt that I’ve not been able to get out of my head, a paragraph that I almost wish I hadn’t read:
The simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality and economies that empower all have been achieved.
Perhaps we will be the first. But if we have learned nothing else from this era, it should be to take seriously the possibility that we could fail. That is the challenge of our immediate future. Nothing less is at stake than American democracy itself.
www.vox.com/...