So if we know that all intel dossiers have some inaccurate information and some uncorroborated or unprovable assertions; and Steele told the FBI his was 30% inaccurate; of course if the FBI cited the dossier, it was going to include some inaccuracies.
So perhaps the FBI should never be able to cite any intel in seeking a FISA warrant? Would the USIC be okay with that? DOJ? The FBI? Republicans? No, I don't think so.

The standard of proof in a FISA warrant is probable cause, and they're almost never denied.
In this case the warrant didn't just involve "a former Trump campaign adviser" (Carter Page) but a former Trump campaign adviser repeatedly suspected by the FBI in the past of working with Russian spies (and they had evidence, too!)
The man the FBI sought a warrant for had also been the subject of a prior CI probe.
(As had Trump's top Russia adviser, Dimitri Simes, BTW. Simes has since fled to Moscow, and now works for Putin.)

Then look at Manafort and Derispaska, millions of dollars in debt was forgiven when Manafort became campaign manager
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the guy who put this dossier together, was arrested for lying to the fbi 5 times. the previous arrest was also for lying i think?

i have absolutely zero knowledge of such things, neither do you. maybe it’s standard process to rely on partly fabricated facts, put together as political opposition research, to get FISA warrants, and to fail to mention to the FISA court that you’re supporting data was political opposition research, which we now know involved multiple
lies to the FBI.

Maybe that’s par for the course. And maybe it’s not. I have no clue, and neither do you.

but you’ll assume it is, because the alternative ( that the democrats screwed up) is something you can’t begin to contemplate.
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weird :angel:

Flynn lied to the FBI but that didn’t seem to matter .. and we all know why! So many excuses
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Apparently it does matter to you. But the lies that led to the Carter Page FISA warrant are OK by you.

The damage done by Durham to our intelligence capability will take years to repair.
Intelligence info is not evidence, if you wait for evidence you’ll be sifting thru the rubble from the next World Trade Center.
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The damage done by our intelligence agencies may never be repaired. It may shape us in directions it chooses which may transform our system of government.

Oh yea, the deep state.

Durham actually wants you to believe the Steele Dossier is the basis for Crossfire Hurricane, the Mueller probe, the Page FISA, the Magna Carta, Daylight Saving Time, the tides, and the basis for the strong nuclear force that holds all matter - and therefore reality - together.

I don’t know what kind of propagandist you have to be to fall for the ruse that opposition research Russians exploited does away with the Russian intelligence operation Trump enthusiastically embraced.

Uh . . . Oh yea, the deep state and its sneaky lying methods (including huge doses of persistent propaganda) existed long before Trump and will continue long after unless it's checked.

Was carter page charged NOPE
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Carter Page was not charged because he was not the target and the FBI knew he was not guilty of anything. Which makes the lying to the Court to get the warrant on Page even more deceptive. But it's OK by you to lie in order to get what was in itself an unlawful warrant in order to actually spy on other Americans beyond Page whom the FBI had no legal reason to be spying on which is why a FISA warrant could not have been granted to spy on them.

It was a total distortion of the process that is supposed to protect all of us, not just an isolated case of someone who supposedly lied to the FBI, but actually didn't commit any other crime than that supposed lie and it was known by the FBI that the conversation he supposedly lied about was perfectly legal which made the FBI interrogation as flagrantly corrupt as the lie given to the FISA Court.

It was hard enough to get the FISA process approved because of the grave danger to American citizens if the government was allowed to spy on any of us without extremely solid protection against government abusing our rights and liberties. We were guarantied that the FISA process would protect our rights and liberties from tyrannical invasion of our personal privacy. To so blatantly disregard that protection and get away with it without substantial penalty, and even without loud complaints and demands from the people of this country for the prosecution of all those involved, while at the same time demanding that someone not guilty of a crime for which he was being interrogated, but guilty only of a "process" crime of lying (to interrogators who lied to him) which was not relevant to anything other than that it was false and of no consequence beyond that, be prosecuted to the full extent of the law is all not only an egregiously unbalanced and probably politicized view, but it is even more of a threat to our liberties when the citizens care so little that when government can so easily, without our reproach, trample on those liberties at will. And merely by telling a lie. And when we on the other hand cheer when the government prosecutes a citizen for no other crime than telling it an inconsequential lie.

pete vomits propaganda (as usual).... then calls someone else a propagandist....

this is tooooo funny....

Pete, the Steele dossier was one of the supporting documents provided by the FBI to the FISA court. We now know it was garbage, we now know the FBI knew it was political opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign, and we know the FBI didn’t reveal
any of this to the FISA court.

I don’t know if that’s a big deal or not, and unless you have experience with these FISA courts, neither do you. But if you’re ok with the Justice Department doing this to a conservative, I hope you’re on when it’s done to a liberal.

That Hilary paid for opposition research on trump is no biggie. it’s what they did with it, the media was all over that dossier at first, and not many have apologized for spreading baseless smear. because they’re in the bag for hilary.
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There was and is some correct intelligence in the Steele dossier.
Trump did have deals in Russia and lied about it, plenty more will come out eventually.
You ought to wonder why he pardoned Manafort
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yeah, there's hardly been any attention to or investigation of to this point...maybe they'll find something somewhere

Was Carter Page charged with a Crime? if he wasn't then the system worked as designed.:kewl:

Conservative Website First Funded Anti-Trump Research by Firm That Later Produced Dossier but but Hillary
Representatives for the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online news site, informed congressional investigators Friday the outlet had originally funded the research firm that created the salacious dossier containing allegations of ties between Donald Trump's campaign and Russian operatives, the publication said

why is this always absent in this conversation ?

No, the system was designed so that those applying for a FISA warrant must tell the truth. That they must not lie. And that those who did not follow the systems rules must be prosecuted for breaking the law.

The system was not designed to unlawfully request and get a FISA warrant on someone who was not being investigated, nor was guilty of anything, in order to sneakily use it, AGAINST the system design, as a back door to spy on others who it would not be possible to get FISA warrants to spy on.

The system was totally trashed. The law was egregiously broken. There was insignificant price that the guilty law breakers paid. An innocent person was put through hell, had his reputation destroyed, and it all showed that the rest of us are not protected from abuse of the system. That the system does not, as designed, protect us, you and me, all Americans, who are not guilty, from illegal, unconstitutional government breach of our individual right to privacy and from the personal destruction of our character and financial well being, if the government wishes it to be so.

Either the system did not work as designed, or it was designed with treacherous hidden government fail safes which enable it to do to us what it promised could not be done to us when Congress approved of the FISA process to "safeguard" us from government tyranny.

The FISA warrant was so the FBI could INVESTIGATE him.

Seems like the IG found sufficient justification for the initial warrant and neither the IG or Republican led investigation found no evidence of political bias influencing their behavior, even if mistakes had been made.

^^^^^favorite word

If it helps you just remove the seems like and capitalize The.

There were 4 FISA warrants re Page. The DOJ found the last two were invalid.

The FBI used the Steele Dossier as verified probable cause--none of the Page allegations in the dossier had been validated by the FBI when they were presented to the FISA court as probable cause. It was a lie.

The FBI withheld from the FISA court key details that would have undercut the dossier’s credibility, including a warning from a top Justice Department official that Steele may have been hired by someone associated with presidential candidate Clinton or the Democratic National Committee. The FBI also deceived the FISA court by wrongly claiming that Steele’s prior informant work had been “used in criminal proceedings” by the Justice Department.

They supposedly "investigated" Page for a year, already being aware that he had helped them previously to convict Evgeny Buryakov in a conspiracy to work For Russian Intelligence.

If they were actually "investigating" Page, it would have been easy to find that he had also helped the CIA vs Russia.

FBI Director Christopher Wray agreed that the Justice Department and the FBI illegally surveilled Carter Page.

The FBI, the brilliant Sherlockians they're reputed to be, undoubtedly knew they had no probable cause for surveilling Page and had to fudge there FISA requests to get their warrants.

Unless they were particularly dense in their supposed "investigation" of Carter Page, it wouldn't have taken them a year to find that his connections to Russia were legitimate, and that he was no Russian agent. But they could sure use Carter's association with Trump to secretly surveil the Trump Campaign.

One would think that those concerned with saving "our democracy" would fear that these kind of deep state shenanigans are a threat to it.

A sprawling report released in 2020 by a Republican-controlled Senate panel that spent three years investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Kremlin officials and other Russians, including at least one intelligence officer and others tied to the country’s spy services.

The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, totaling nearly 1,000 pages, drew to a close one of the highest-profile congressional investigations in recent memory and could be the last word from an official government inquiry about the expansive Russian campaign to sabotage the 2016 election.

It provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government disrupted an American election to help Mr. Trump become president, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for the help from an American adversary.

So there were plenty of reasons to investigate the Trump campaign and just why did Trump pardon Manafort who had millions of dollars in debt forgiven by a Russian Oligarch when he became Trump campaign manager
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The FBI lied and misrepresented in order to surveil Carter Page. Carter Page was illegally surveilled. That is not innuendo. That is not conjecture. That is not speculation. That is not propaganda. That is not political posturing. That is not partisan bull$hit. It is the truth.

there were plenty of reasons to investigate the Trump campaign and just why did Trump pardon Manafort who had millions of dollars in debt forgiven by a Russian Oligarch when he became Trump campaign manager
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pete still holding strong to the fairly tale he was sold and continues to read to himself before bed each night.....:read: and mean old orange man went to jail for ever and ever...THE END :happy:

Andy McCarthy has been pretty consistent on this and sums up things...hope they don't find any Democratic Party operative that magically suicides themselves

"Justice Department special counsel John Durham has indicted Igor Danchenko, the principal sub-source for the discredited “Steele dossier,” which was relied on by the FBI to obtain surveillance warrants in its investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign.

Durham alleges that Danchenko falsely denied to the FBI that some of the information he supplied for the dossier came from a long-time Democratic Party operative who is not identified by name in the indictment.


Moreover, Danchenko is also alleged to have falsely claimed that he had been told of a well-developed “conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and Kremlin officials by a man identified in the indictment as president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.

In Ball of Collusion, my 2019 book on the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, I summarized media reports fingering Sergey Millian, who founded this portentous-sounding but sketchy “Chamber.” I pointed out that Millian did not appear to have the kind of relationship with Donald Trump that he would know of such a “conspiracy of cooperation” if it were true, and that Steele himself had confided in friends that he worried Millian was an unreliable “big talker.”

If Durham’s allegations are borne out, it would mean that Millian was not talking at all — at least on this subject. Danchenko was making it up, according to the indictment.

Filed today in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, the indictment charges Danchenko with five counts of lying to federal investigators — specifically in several 2017 interviews by the FBI. Each charge carries a potential term of up to five years’ imprisonment.

Danchenko is a U.S.-based Russian national who, among other things, worked for the Brookings Institution in Washington. In particular, he worked at Brookings with foreign-relations and national-security expert Fiona Hill — who later worked in President Trump’s National Security Council and, coincidentally, was a key witness in the first Trump impeachment (related to the Ukraine controversy, which was unrelated to the Trump/Russia “collusion” investigation). As the Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross observes, it was Hill who introduced Danchenko to Christopher Steele, the former British spy who was retained by the Hillary Clinton campaign to generate the Steele dossier.

The campaign was represented by the Perkins-Coie law firm, which retained Fusion-GPS, an intelligence firm that specializes in political-opposition research. Fusion’s co-founder, Glenn Simpson, recruited Steele for the Clinton campaign’s Trump-Russia research project. Steele got much of the information from Danchenko, with whom he had a preexisting professional relationship (through Steele’s London-based intelligence firm, Orbis).

As I’ve previously detailed, Durham appears to be operating from the premise that the Trump-Russia narrative, in which Trump was framed as a clandestine agent of Vladimir Putin’s regime, was manufactured by the Clinton campaign, which generated the dossier and peddled its information to the media and the government. This enabled the campaign to argue to the electorate not only that Trump was a Putin puppet but that the FBI was investigating him over it.


In September, Durham indicted Perkins-Coie partner Michael Sussmann for allegedly lying to the FBI in connection with an allegation that a major Russian financial institution, Alfa Bank, was a conduit for covert Internet communications between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. Specifically, Durham alleges that Sussmann falsely told the FBI’s general counsel that he was not representing any client in bringing Alfa Bank information to the FBI; in reality, according to the indictment, he was working for the Clinton campaign and for a tech executive who was expecting a job in the anticipated Clinton administration.

Sussmann resigned from Perkins-Coie after he was indicted. His case is separate from Danchenko’s — they are indicted in the same investigation, but they are not co-defendants.

For the next few days, expect the new Washington parlor game to be identifying the Democratic Party operative who was allegedly a source for Danchenko’s dossier claims. The indictment alleges that “PR Executive-1” had strong Russian contacts — organizing events in Moscow and interacting with Russian nationals."

The whole "investigation" was a trip down the conspiracy rabbit hole. With greater consequences to the stability of "our democracy" than any rabbit hole you think I'm tripping down.

And down in that rabbit hole.........

Manafort and Gates being convicted of numerous white collar felonies, many tied to Russian proxies, was not a fraud.

Flynn, Stone and Coffee Boy being convicted of perjury was not a fraud.

Trump conspiring to suborn perjury was not a fraud.

So your concern is that of the Carter Page FISA apps half were within the rules, half were not.

Guess you’re finding out that it’s pretty hard to charge a police officer with a crime in the USA since they could have believed the search constitutionally compliant.
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Which half were within the rules and what about them was actually legitimately probable cause for a warrant? The Steele Dossier was instrumental for all the warrants including the first two. McCabe said that the FISA warrants would not have been granted without the Dossier. The FBI did not validate the information in the Dossier regarding Page. It was only the information re Page that was critical to using the Dossier as probable cause. The rest of the Dossier would not have been cause to determine a warrant on Page. Ergo, the information in the Dossier was not legally usable as probable cause

DOJ said the final two warrants were invalid. At the time they made that claim they had not made a determination on the validity of the first two, so they were not saying they were valid. And even if the DOJ had eventually determined that the first two warrants were valid, the surveillance on Page should have stopped with the last two invalid applications.

My concern, as you put it, is that lying criminals within the FBI should at least face the same consequences as those who lie to the FBI. Actually, lying FBI criminals should face even harsher penalties. Their actions put "our democracy" in greater danger than common criminals who lie to the FBI. Actually, even greater danger than the uncommon criminals who lie to the FBI. If we the people don't demand that the FBI, as well as all government agencies, stay within the rules that we bind them, then we grant them a pass to step all over our rights and lead us into a banana republic "democracy"--or worse.

Facts: The FBI’s surveillance was conducted after Page stopped working for the campaign. The OIG review found that certain factual assertions relied upon in the FISA applications were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed, and the review uncovered unprofessional conduct by a low-level FBI lawyer. However, the DOJ did not determine that leadership or the FISA court would have reached a different decision had they known all relevant information, and did not find that the conduct affected the overall validity of the applications.
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Under questioning from Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe of Texas, Wray, who deflected many questions by referring lawmakers back to Horowitz’s report, agreed that Page was surveilled illegally.


“The report acknowledges that ... this was illegal surveillance with respect to at least several of these FISA applications, because there was not probable cause or proper predication, correct?” Ratcliffe asked.

“Right,” Wray replied.

Ratcliffe was referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court revelation that, in the wake of Horowitz’s report, the DOJ told the FISA court it believed the final two Page FISA warrants were invalid but were still reviewing the first two. The FBI also told the court it was trying to sequester all the information obtained through the Page FISA warrants.

Judge James Boasberg, the FISA court’s presiding judge, quoted the DOJ as saying that by the third and fourth warrants against Page, “if not earlier, there was insufficient predication to establish probable cause to believe that [Carter] Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power.”

Boasberg said that “the Court understands the government to have concluded, in view of the material misstatements and omissions, that the Court's authorizations” related to the April 2017 and June 2017 Page FISA renewals “were not valid.” Thus far, the DOJ has not reached a public decision on the initial October 2016 FISA application or the January 2017 renewal.

Lots of verbiage doesn’t change this
the DOJ did not determine that leadership or the FISA court would have reached a different decision had they known all relevant information, and did not find that the conduct affected the overall validity of the applications.
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And that the Republican led Senate Intelligence Committee found the surveillance to be justified.

i think we should look at everyone who’s in prison. if they are a registered democrats, we should set them free, because it’s not possible they did anything wrong.
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Your above verbiage of "facts" is a 2019 version. Different facts (such as Wray's agreeing that Carter was illegally surveiled) have been uncovered since then. And more are being uncovered by Durham.

Sure, but remember TFG just pardoned Republicans

Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted in 2018 on federal bank and tax fraud charges, pleaded guilty to more federal conspiracy charges, and was sentenced to seven and a half years in federal prison. Trump granted Manafort a full pardon in December 2020.
Former campaign chief Steve Bannon was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in connection with a scheme to defraud donors to fund a wall at the US southern border. Trump pardoned Bannon in January 2021 before he could face trial.
Informal Trump adviser and "fixer" Roger Stone was convicted on seven counts on obstruction, making false statements, and witness tampering in connection to the Mueller probe and was sentenced to three years in prison. Trump commuted Stone's sentence in July 2020 and fully pardoned him in December 2020.
Deputy Trump campaign manager Rick Gates, a longtime top associate of Manafort, pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy and false statements and received only a 45-day sentence thanks to his extensive cooperation with investigators in the Mueller probe. He did not get a presidential pardon.
Trump's short-lived National Security Adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI in connection with the Mueller probe. Flynn, who went on to push conspiracy theories about non-existent fraud in the 2020 election, received a full pardon from Trump in November 2020.
Longtime Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to tax fraud, bank fraud, campaign finance violations, and lying to Congress in 2018, and was sentenced to three years in federal prison. Cohen, who turned on Trump after pleading guilty and cooperated with prosecutors, did not get a pardon.
Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in connection to the Mueller probe and served 14 days in federal prison.
Trump Inaugural Committee chairman Tom Barrack was charged with federal crimes including unlawful lobbying, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to investigators in July 2021.

but the 2019 view paints the democrats in the most favorable light, so we prefer to stick with that.
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