Much like with the FBI's report on the handling of the Clinton Email investigation, I don't care what the mainstream outlets will have to say about the FISA Report. This report is over 400 pages long and not a word of it leaked to the press ahead of time, and on top of that they're all window-licking idiots so I couldn't give half of a rat's ass what they have to say about it. I'm sure that at some point one of them will manage to push out a good article about it, but I want this thread to be a repository and a page-by-page examination of the report and its contents independent from journalistic vomit.
If you need a primer on what exactly FISA surveillance even means, there's an excellent primer for it over here, and the same author also wrote a long article concerning the oddities in Carter Page's FISA warrant over here. In the event that you're just curious about how we got to this point or want an overall history of the entire debacle, there's a summary for all of that over here.
The gist of it is that FISA Title I and Title III surveillance require there be probable cause to believe the proposed target is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power. They're explicitly designed for foreign spies. These warrants are not supposed to be used against U.S. citizens without a goddamned good reason, and yet that's exactly what happened, and it happened multiple times. It also conveniently just happened to be people in Trump's campaign that were campaign managers who got hit with these FISA warrants, meaning that because of the Three-Hop Rule, the Obama administration was essentially given free reign to spy on literally everyone in Trump's campaign, including Trump himself.
If you were wondering why Horowitz' investigation had to dip so far back to the point where it completely predated all of the Russiagate crap then congratulations, you're asking yourself a smart question. It all had to be rewound to the very beginning because at the very start of this, the entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was predicated on a hoax, and then everything that came after that hoax just piled onto the lies. Every breathless second the media screamed about Russian collusion, every politician screaming about impeaching "Trump, the Russian Asset", all of it was built on top of this one, original lie, and without it the entire house of cards just falls to pieces.
The reason that Horowitz dug all the way back into the FISA warrants is because one man proved beyond any shadow of any doubt that these warrants could not have been obtained legally. Mueller's Special Counsel proved beyond a doubt that the entire Trump-Russia collusion story was nothing more than a wild conspiracy theory. There has never been evidence put forward to prove that a word of it was real, and because of that, there clearly was not probable cause to allow for FISA warrants to be obtained against Trump campaign members. Despite what so many people were expecting Mueller to do, the only thing that Mueller's S.C. succeeded at doing was stripping away the cover story for the spying on the Trump campaign.
Whether or not that was intentional is anyone's guess and you're likely never going to be able to prove the Mueller "White hat/Black hat" theory one way or the other anyways, so it's a bit of a moot point. The fact remains that at the very end of his investigation, it was proven that there was no definitive evidence or probable cause to assume that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia. Now you know why it was Rod Rosenstein's job to give these frantic, desperate bloodhounds the wider and ever-widening scope they kept asking of him. At the end of this, when Mueller himself was going to be forced to admit he couldn't find any evidence, it was game over for the Collusion Narrative.
Thank you, Robert Mueller.
The only real questions left are as to how the Steele Dossier (Remember that one? It's been awhile.) wound up being shoved ass-first into these FISA warrants even though the Steele Dossier was a remarkably flawed piece of opposition research, and how the FISA warrants were renewed four times in the absence of any legitimate evidence. I'm expecting to hear quite a bit about Rudolph Contreras and the FISC court somewhere in this report, because there were a lot of questions surrounding that whole mess that are in desperate need of an answer.
Either way, I don't want to write a preamble longer than the fucking report itself, so let's see how idiotic our government was with the FISA warrants.
If you need a primer on what exactly FISA surveillance even means, there's an excellent primer for it over here, and the same author also wrote a long article concerning the oddities in Carter Page's FISA warrant over here. In the event that you're just curious about how we got to this point or want an overall history of the entire debacle, there's a summary for all of that over here.
The gist of it is that FISA Title I and Title III surveillance require there be probable cause to believe the proposed target is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power. They're explicitly designed for foreign spies. These warrants are not supposed to be used against U.S. citizens without a goddamned good reason, and yet that's exactly what happened, and it happened multiple times. It also conveniently just happened to be people in Trump's campaign that were campaign managers who got hit with these FISA warrants, meaning that because of the Three-Hop Rule, the Obama administration was essentially given free reign to spy on literally everyone in Trump's campaign, including Trump himself.
If you were wondering why Horowitz' investigation had to dip so far back to the point where it completely predated all of the Russiagate crap then congratulations, you're asking yourself a smart question. It all had to be rewound to the very beginning because at the very start of this, the entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was predicated on a hoax, and then everything that came after that hoax just piled onto the lies. Every breathless second the media screamed about Russian collusion, every politician screaming about impeaching "Trump, the Russian Asset", all of it was built on top of this one, original lie, and without it the entire house of cards just falls to pieces.
The reason that Horowitz dug all the way back into the FISA warrants is because one man proved beyond any shadow of any doubt that these warrants could not have been obtained legally. Mueller's Special Counsel proved beyond a doubt that the entire Trump-Russia collusion story was nothing more than a wild conspiracy theory. There has never been evidence put forward to prove that a word of it was real, and because of that, there clearly was not probable cause to allow for FISA warrants to be obtained against Trump campaign members. Despite what so many people were expecting Mueller to do, the only thing that Mueller's S.C. succeeded at doing was stripping away the cover story for the spying on the Trump campaign.
Whether or not that was intentional is anyone's guess and you're likely never going to be able to prove the Mueller "White hat/Black hat" theory one way or the other anyways, so it's a bit of a moot point. The fact remains that at the very end of his investigation, it was proven that there was no definitive evidence or probable cause to assume that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia. Now you know why it was Rod Rosenstein's job to give these frantic, desperate bloodhounds the wider and ever-widening scope they kept asking of him. At the end of this, when Mueller himself was going to be forced to admit he couldn't find any evidence, it was game over for the Collusion Narrative.
Thank you, Robert Mueller.
The only real questions left are as to how the Steele Dossier (Remember that one? It's been awhile.) wound up being shoved ass-first into these FISA warrants even though the Steele Dossier was a remarkably flawed piece of opposition research, and how the FISA warrants were renewed four times in the absence of any legitimate evidence. I'm expecting to hear quite a bit about Rudolph Contreras and the FISC court somewhere in this report, because there were a lot of questions surrounding that whole mess that are in desperate need of an answer.
Either way, I don't want to write a preamble longer than the fucking report itself, so let's see how idiotic our government was with the FISA warrants.
