The most invasive tool in their arsenal is snooping without a warrant, no notice to courts, etc. "Unmasking" in the vernacular. The government was snooping on Trump without a warrant for years. That is criminal conduct. The FISA warrant immunizes those who engaged in illegal snooping.
Point being, all the FISA abuse is not the beginning of the snooping, nor is it the beginning of abuse of power. Basically, the FISA judge gave a thumbs up to years of illegal conduct, by granting a FISA warrant.
Sauce? Colyer's FISC opinion of April 2017.
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/icotr/51117/2016_Cert_FISC_Memo_Opin_Order_Apr_2017.pdf
Sauce for "its a crime, unless the judge blesses it" …
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1809
50 USC 1809
(a) states the offense, (b) states the legal defense to being charged (I refer to this as immunity by the judge)
No arguing that RR is /ourguy/ but he did fire Comey, and wrote a stand-up justification for that; and he set up a honey-trap shop for 13 angry DEMs, keeping them preoccupied and in one corral.
It's all relative. We won't know what the pain would have been like without Mueller, but pain there would have been.
I was merely offering the counterargument. The argument on your side is obvious, for many reasons. SC on a counterintelligence op? Bogus right out of the gate, and (bogosity) stated in black and white right on the appointment papers.
My point is that it is error to see no argument in favor of RR-established witch-hunt. Not saying those are winning arguments, but they aren't void of substance.
FISC is a rubber stamp. If the formalities are in order, they approve. The supposed "check" on substance is at the Woods procedure level.
FISC is make work and expensive. We got along fine without it until the 1970's, and what FISC does now (the purpose for its existence) is trick people into a false belief that the government respects the 4th amendment.
See the Keith case for a view of how we got along before FISC.
United States v. U.S. District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972)
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/407/297/
The charter to Mueller was to go after Trump and his people. They were the only subjects of investigation. Somehow the charter was misrepresented as "going after Russia, but it was never about Russia. Plus, if we have an issue with foreign interference in our elections, why use a SC for THAT? Use Congress and the whole of the DOJ, States AG, etc.
Yep. Baseless accusation and insinuation, "Trump is bad." The only shift in the narrative is "really bad, just not to the level of criminal … YET."
The evidence to justify endless accusation is nothing more than manufactured outrage.
J'accuse