>>6135851 (lb)
Interesting! Thank you for posting anon.
https://twitter.com/45_Schedule/status/1116352774864814080
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35m35 minutes ago
Focus on the Leaking, Not Just the Spying.
Focus on the Leaking, Not Just the Spying
Ask not only how the FBI got interested in the Trump campaign, but also how its investigation became public.
By Eli Lake
April 11, 2019, 6:00 AM EDT
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-11/spying-did-occur-but-barr-should-also-focus-on-the-leaking
Attorney General William Barr thinks that U.S. intelligence agencies spied on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday. And as Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, he has assembled a team to review the matter.
He does not know if the spying was improper, Barr emphasized. “The question is whether it was adequately predicated,” he said. He later clarified that he does not think the FBI itself is corrupt. Nonetheless, Barr said, “spying on a political campaign is a big deal.”
Barr is correct on both counts — that there was snooping on the Trump campaign, and that the question of whether it was justified deserves further scrutiny. What also deserves scrutiny is how an ongoing intelligence investigation into that campaign became public.
As far as the spying is concerned, none of this should be a surprise. It has already been reported, for example, that in the summer and fall of 2016 the FBI sent an informant to meet with three Trump advisers and report back. The bureau also received a warrant in October 2016 to eavesdrop on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser (notably, the warrant allowed the FBI to read Page’s past texts, emails and phone logs). The head of the U.K.’s signal intelligence agency briefed former CIA director John Brennan that fall on intercepts that showed communications between Trump’s campaign and Russian officials.
And just because special counsel Robert Mueller did not find evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 election, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the spies and FBI officers probing those claims violated any laws. What’s more, many of these kinds of investigations are predicated on suspicion that a U.S. person has been targeted by a foreign power — even if that individual did not knowingly engage in espionage.
The abuse of power here is what happened after Trump won the election. This is when the investigations themselves and other kinds of surveillance were disclosed to the press. Details about incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition leaked. So did the FBI’s probe of Trump associates and their contacts with Russia, along with the existence of the surveillance warrant on Page himself.
It’s hard to say whether these leaks were coordinated, but there have been some suggestive clues. The New York Times reported in early 2017 that, in the days and weeks leading up to Trump’s inauguration, intelligence and White House officials distributed intelligence on contacts between Russia and Trump associates far and wide. Senator Benjamin Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland, actually received a packet of material marked “secret” from the State Department. The wider such intelligence is circulated, the easier it is to leak it.
Then there is the role of Brennan himself. The Times has reported that in August 2016 Brennan began briefing Congressional leaders that Russia was working to elect Trump and that some of his advisers could be working with the Kremlin on this effort. Among those Brennan briefed was then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who a few days later released a letter to then-FBI director James Comey, urging him to make public intelligence about the Trump campaign and Russia. After the election, Brennan became a TV pundit and used his platform to accuse Trump of treason and claim the Russian government was blackmailing him.
Finally, there is the FBI’s own relationship with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who helped an opposition research firm produce a series of “dossiers” on Trump and his associates that alleged a wide conspiracy. The bureau used these products in its surveillance warrant on Page. Because those dossiers were intended to place negative stories in the press about Trump, it’s understandable that aspects of the FBI investigation would leak to reporters.
Most Washington leaks are neither good nor bad; they can be used to expose official abuse or as cudgels in a bureaucratic turf war. Leaks of ongoing counterintelligence investigations, however, are a different matter. They risk undermining the probes themselves, by making adversaries aware of them. They are also deeply unfair to the targets of such investigations, by tarnishing their reputations without a full airing of the evidence.
“Leaking information about an ongoing intelligence investigation is a classic example of surveillance abuse,” says Tim Edgar, who served as the director of privacy and civil liberties for the National Security Council under President Barack Obama. “It’s what J. Edgar Hoover did.” What happened in early 2017, he says, “clearly appeared to be politically motivated leaking.”
Leaks set the narrative for the first two years of the Trump presidency. Granted, Trump did not help his cause with his haphazard firing of Comey or his frequent and hyperbolic attacks on the intelligence community. But given that Mueller did not find the conspiracy alleged by people such as Brennan, those leaks now deserve scrutiny.
Edgar says he does not think Barr is the best person to conduct that investigation. The Justice Department’s inspector general or the White House’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, he said, would be more credible. Nonetheless, he says, “These are serious questions that need to be answered in a serious way.”
It’s a pity that more Democrats do not see it that way. Many howled in protest at Barr’s comment about spying. As Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, put it: “This type of partisan talking point may please Donald Trump, who rails against a ‘deep state coup,’ but it also strikes another destructive blow to our democratic institutions.”
Schiff should recalibrate his umbrage. Trump will be president until at least 2021. If Democrats see no problem with the anonymous disclosure of elements of ongoing counterintelligence investigations, or the fruits of surveillance, what is to stop Trump from doing it too? To borrow a popular slogan of the moment: This is not normal.
Pelosi says she still sees Trump as potential ally on immigration
By Mike Lillis - 04/11/19 11:21 AM EDT
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/438435-pelosi-says-she-still-sees-trump-as-potential-ally-on-immigration
LEESBURG, Va. — Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that comprehensive immigration reform is "inevitable," and left open the possibility that it may still be possible under President Trump.
"It's complicated, but it isn't hard to do if you have good intentions," Pelosi said during the Democrats' annual issues conference at a golf resort in northern Virginia. "And I'm not giving up on the president on this. … I still say to him, 'We've got to have comprehensive immigration reform.'"
Pelosi noted that Democrats secured new funds for immigration judges and other border measures in the spending bill that ultimately reopened the government, which Trump signed in February. But she accused the president of failing to tap those funds for their intended purpose.
"He has not utilized what is in that, specifically, [for] the border," she said.
Pelosi also warned that the only long-term solution to the border crisis is the adoption of comprehensive immigration reform package, like the bipartisan bill passed by the Senate in 2013.
"We keep saying to the Republicans, 'Let's do that,' but it has to be in a bipartisan way," she said. "We think that there's opportunity to do that."
House Democrats have not introduced such a bill this year, pushing instead for piece-meal immigration reforms that include new protections for so-called "Dreamers" and those under temporary protected status. And Republican leaders in the GOP-controlled Senate have shown little interest in moving on a comprehensive immigration reform bill, instead joining Trump in urging more funding for the border wall as a first order of business.
Trump, meanwhile, has only heightened his attacks on immigrants as the border crisis has worsened in recent weeks.
"Our country is full," he tweeted over the weekend.
Pelosi on Thursday hammered the president for that remark, arguing that the country's economic viability hinges on a healthy influx of new arrivals.
"The constant reinvigoration of America depends on us having comprehensive immigration reform where we respect the value of newcomers to our country," she said.
"When the president said — what did he say? — 'We don't have no room?' My god, I thought it was Mary and Joseph at Christmas. We have no room? There is no room in the inn? What is this?
"Of course there's room, and there's need."
The sides have a long ways to go to bridge the numerous disagreements that divide them on the hot-button issue of immigration. Trump centered his 2016 campaign on a hard-line approach to enforcement, and the 35-day government shutdown that launched the new Congress this year was the result of his demand for billions of dollars for a border wall — a non-starter with Democrats.
Just this week, Trump pushed out the secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, over frustrations that she wasn't aggressive enough in deflecting the waves of migrants arriving at the southwest border. Most of those migrants are asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle countries of Central America, and the growing influx has stretched the nation's border security infrastructure to new limits. Last month, the head of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said his agency has reached “the breaking point."
Pelosi said on Thursday she's hoping public pressure will force Republicans to consider a comprehensive immigration reform bill, an idea that hasn't been adopted into law since the Reagan administration.
She also said that she thinks the Democrats' efforts to improve the financial security of middle-class workers will bring opponents of such reforms to reconsider.
"The president is a fear monger. He fueled the flame of insecurity about globalization, about immigration and all that in the campaign. But if the economy is better for many of these people, I think that that fear tactic would be diminished," she said.
"This has to happen," Pelosi added. "It's inevitable."
The Hill
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Steve Bannon: If Trump is reelected, the country is going to get "pure Trump off the chain" http://hill.cm/KCZEsuw
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