Truth is stranger than fiction.
Oi! Carter! Do you get a crick in your neck from looking up at that bus chassis?
Carter Page is a hapless putz. Does he even have a lawyer? If so he is not taking the obvious advise to keep his mouth shut. What a bunch of amateurs. Drip, drip.
The FBI is getting closer to documenting real ties between team Trump and Russia - expect more bombings to distract the media.
And the Who’s on First/ American Informants’ve Got Talent continues. Will Friday afternoon be the Big Day? Tune in and see.
Here’s my question: what the fuck are we paying the CIA and the FBI billions of dollars a year to do if they need to rely on the handiwork of a freelance intelligence operative to detect that there have been extensive and conspicuous contacts between Page, Manafort, et al, and Russian parties? Does the CIA not have its own dossier? If they’re not monitoring attacks on American elections what the hell are they doing? (I have my suspicions about the answer: an obsession with high-tech surveillance hardware, no doubt profitable to US corporations, and an idiotic neglect of old-fashioned human spying.)
So this means the said “part” has been corroborated by USIC. This part, that part, one after another…
Is it too late to buy a life insurance policy on Mr. Page? He’s toast…
That’s not Ralph Kramden driving the bus, it’s Lard-ass Donnie…
Chris Steele had been paralleling the FBI and the CIA. He went to the FBI, because he knew people he trusted there. They were apparently astonished that he had captured so much raw intelligence on Trump/Russia, including some new to them.
O.T. but the White house has been sending out press releases praising it’s own E.O. perhaps they came from John Barron.
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/854473314974277632
What’s that old saying? You never hear the bus that hits you?
The FBI used a document containing allegations of ties between President Donald Trump and Russia as part of its justification for obtaining an order in 2016 to monitor the communications of Carter Page, a former adviser to Trump’s campaign, CNN reported on Tuesday.
Which makes you wonder why they wouldn’t get a Fisa warrant against Trump himself. Or maybe they have?
“CNN: FBI Used Trump Dossier Allegations As Part Of Justification To Monitor Ex-Aide.”
So much winning!
@ralph_vonholst My worry is that Steele’s relative success is a symptom of structural flat-footedness on the part of the CIA. There are just not enough multi-lingual, intellectually topnotch, balls-of-steel, human skills types recruited by the CIA, which is disgraceful given the number of Russian-speaking Americans of outstanding academic ability that we have these days. The same applies to Arabic-speaking Americans. White male meatheads from the midwest populate Langley in large lumbering numbers. (Sorry, a glass of wine has brought out my inner, untalented prose-poet.)
Anecdote: I was recently in a small country in francophone West Africa and had a very pleasant evening with our embassy there, including meeting the intelligence guy. These people were very impressive–but it transpired that even finding French speakers was a stretch for the intelligence and state dept., and that in fact nobody at the embassy had been upcountry, ever, because of perceived security risks, with the result that I (a know-nothing visitor) was asked about my impressions of what was going on up there, which impressions would form part of their information-gathering. Absolutely farcical. The US institutions really have to find a way to appeal to the kind of smart, humanities-grounded operative with social-psychological skills that make sense in the modern world. Recruiting hundreds of teetotal Mormon patriots every year doesn’t cut it any more.
Carter Page (sobbing): “I never really wanted to be a spy.”
It could be. As an old HR guy, I know that Friday is the day to deliver the bad news to the newly unemployed.