someproteinguy wrote:
gbaji wrote:
They didn't do that. They denied it at first. So it sounds like they realized that it looked "bad" for them to have been doing that, right? Which kinda suggests, quite strongly, that this isn't normal.
TBH it seems like they were just completely caught off guard by it.
Sure. But it wasn't just the Obama administration folks. It was also the news media. The prevailing response to Trumps claim was that it was a ridiculous conspiratorial thing, because of course, no US president would actually do this to an incoming president during the transition. It's unthinkable! Unconstitutional. Probably totally illegal. And certainly unethical.
And then, when it turned out that this is precisely what was done, suddenly... silence. Or, the narrative changed from "there's no way that could happen", to "there's nothing unusual about this happening", or "well, if it happened, there must have been a good reason". All of which I find to be wishful thinking after the fact. The first and pretty universal reaction was that this was something that should not be done. Period. It was only after it was discovered that this wasn't just some unfounded rumors floating around some fringe conservative sites, but had actually happened, that the excuses started flowing.
So yeah. I find that problematic. It's a somewhat obvious and extreme partisan circling of wagons IMO.
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Really am kind of curious how the wire-tap got discovered, or if they told Trump about it at some point and he didn't take it well, or what. Trump tweeting about something like this is the most surprising thing to me out of everything that's happened.
Honestly? I'm not sure that those who did it even thought about the ramifications of it. Again, maybe I'm biased (hah maybe!), but I've seen a pattern of the Obama administration using supposedly non-political agencies of the government for political reasons, sometimes quite blatantly. I think they just assumed they could do this because they've gotten away with it so many times already. And frankly, the reaction when it came out that they did spy on the Trump team kinda supports that idea.
If you're confident that the media will side with you if something like this comes out, you're a lot more likely to just go ahead and do it. It's possible that they honestly thought they'd find something so bad that they could maybe 'undo' the election results (dunno, seems absurd, but so is the action itself). Maybe when they didn't find any kind of clear smoking gun they could present to the public, much less our legal system, they scrambled to keep what they could for potential later political use? Again, it's hard to say what they were thinking.
But this is the same group of people (same freaking person in fact) who thought they could just make up a story about an offensive video causing the Benghazi attack and that no one would figure it out. So yeah, "thinking things through" doesn't seem to be a strong suit here. I think they just go so used to skirting the rules for whatever gain they could get that it likely didn't even occur to them that this might just be crossing the line politically speaking.
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They got a tip from their foreign friends.
About one person, who was only tangentially connected to the campaign, and I believe not at all connected to the transition.
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Then they did basic stuff, a decent amount of which any private investigator could probably do: looked up what they could publicity about them, followed them around with a camera, checked contacts, probably requested information from the Trump campaign to fill in some gaps, etc (these are also many of the same things I'd assume they're doing to everyone noteworthy, would have done to the Clintons and their notable contacts, etc).
They did none of that. They ignored the "tip" for a couple years. It was only when Trump became the GOP frontrunner that suddenly they decided this was important. It looks a lot more like the cart leading the horse to me.
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In the course of doing that they noticed some things that were weird, informed the president, got a judge to sign off on doing more, and proceeded with the follow-up. If they did receive the initial tip 2(?) years ago, that's plenty of time to build a case for a judge.
Again though, they did nothing at all for the first couple years after the tip. And it was only one person. They didn't investigate that one person. They investigated a number of people in the campaign, seemingly entire based on a politically drive speculative narrative about "connections and collusion with Russia". There is literally zero evidence, other than simply doing business in the country, that Trump has any such relationship with Russia though. That's the problem here. As far as we can tell from our own external view of the timeline, the government didn't start taking action on this at all, until *after* the political narrative started. And that was driven, not from intelligence sources, but political opposition sources.
I suppose it's possible that we may someday get a clearer picture of what happened, but so far, it certainly looks like the Obama administration basically jumped in with the intelligence apparatus as a means of helping the Clinton campaign beat Trump by trying to find any information that could prop up the existing political narrative. I see nothing to indicate that there was any sort of investigation of Trump or his people prior to the campaign, so it's a bit suspicious for it to start then.
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gbaji wrote:
Um... What if they did just spy on them to dig up political dirt? What if there was never any actual justification for the spying?
Then that's bad; but I'm still not convinced a political conspiracy is necessary to explain something that could have easily come about by routine means.
That seems like an amazing coincidence though. An unbelievable coincidence IMO. A political conspiracy isn't necessary to explain it, but given the timing? It's the most likely explanation.