Infiltraitors!

Infiltraitors, or surveillance?

OMG! The FBI infiltrated the Trump campaign! They hid a mole on the inside! They are using the power of the state to subvert the political system and democracy! It's a constitutional crisis!!

Well, no.

After days of rabid idiocy from the WSJ, and Fox about "deep states" and conspiracies, from what we now know there was NO infiltration of the Trump campaign. There was an apparent attempt at surveillance from the outside. 

Specifically, AFTER Papadopalous revealed to an Australian diplomat that he knew that the Russians had Hillary’s 30,000 lost e-mails, the FBI may have approached Stephan Halper, a long time national security bureaucrat under Reagan and Bush Sr., and now academic in Britain, to approach Papadopolous to gain more intelligence concerning this accusation. Get it? This guy was not a mole that the FBI “hid” in the campaign…he wasn’t even part of the campaign. The Right Wing media has lost its mind…and its way.

The key point here is “AFTER”. Because all of this happened after the revelations by Papadopoulos to the diplomat, it shows the FBI had probable cause for launching surveillance. Why? Because to any reasonable person it would have seemed likely that the only way Papadopoulos could have known that the Russians had those e-mails would be if he was in contact with those same Russians, one way or another, and the only way that those Russians could have those e-mails would be if they had hacked them.   

This matters even now, and would have mattered to the FBI then, because Clinton NEVER used the secure government e-mail system. If the Russians were hacking her, then they would likely have access to all the secret and top secret e-mails that she was sending and receiving when she was the Secretary of State. The reasonable thing for the FBI to have done when information came to light that someone knew that the Russians may have had this information was to put them under surveillance in an attempt to get more information, especially to attempt to ascertain the extent of what could have been a massive breach of US national security courtesy of Hillary Clinton.

Ironically enough then, the obvious interest that the FBI may have had in Papodopoulos would extend not from Trump’s activities but ultimately from Clinton’s.

But what matters to Trump is any possible negative result for Trump. And so, Trump has ordered an investigation by the Department of Justice into the possible political motivations behind their surveillance (...see previous blog.) It may make more sense to just order a second special investigation into Clinton’s shinanigans. One wonders why he has not done this already.

Post Script - It its "Mole" article, the WSJ made the claim that the FBI purposely neglected to tell the congressional enquiry into possible Russian collusion that they had put Papadopolous under surveillance. If true, this is serious as it suggests that the FBI is keeping information from the people's elected representatives, and that is how this was spun by the WSJ. The WSJ later printed a short retraction stating that, in fact, the FBI did tell congress about the surveillance, they only withheld documents the release of which they deemed a risk. 

So, we now know that there was no mole in the campaign, and that the FBI did actually tell congress about the surveillance. The level of absolute shit that this journalism represents is equivalent to reporting that the Titanic survived its encounter with the iceberg, then printing a one line retraction saying, "oh, sorry, no it didn't." SHAME!