The standards used to wiretap known drug-deals, organized crime, bank fraud, counterfeiting, racketeers, and street thugs all are much higher than that which was employed to investigate Mr.; Page, and by extension, the Trump campaign. We suspect that, if a warrant predicated on such flimsy grounds had been issued in the course of an investigation of any of those other crimes, any information thus gleaned would be dismissed as improperly obtained. That’s because the drug dealers, criminals, racketeers etc. all have the presumption of innocence and the protections of due process. In this investigation, however, the Trump Campaign had the presumption of guilt and due process was effectively chucked out of the window. Investigate first, and find something that can be used against the subject of the investigation. The FBI and the Obama Administration may not have known what the Trump campaign was guilty of, but by gosh, it must have been guilty of something!
Apparenty, the most important piece of “evidence” in the FISA warrant application was the “Steele Dossier,” which was bought and paid for by the Clinton Campaign and, nearly two years later, remains unverified. The application is worded in a very circuitous manner: The FISA judge was told the FBI “speculates” an “identified US person” was looking for intelligence that might “discredit” the Trump Campaign. Translation:“The Clinton Campaign and the Democratic National Committee had suborned the dossier in order to smear Donald Trump,” because that is a much more straight-forward way of describing what happened – and believe us when we declare that had the roles been reversed, and if the FBI in a Republican administration had concocted a dossier full of salacious allegations against a Democrat candidate for President, the scandal would have been immediate and would have made Watergate look like a second grader’s tea party. Christopher Steele, the collector and compiler of the fabricated dossier, then leaked some information about it to a journalist, and those subsequent stories were used in the FISA application as supportive of the warrant. How handy and convenient. Not only that, but the warrant also was based on the “fact” that Carter Page was “a Russian agent.” Interesting that Mr. Page was not charged and has not been charged with being a Russian agent. That, of course, is because he is not a Russian agent, but, if we may mix a few metaphors, was a shoehorn to get the camel’s nose under the investigative tent. Also interesting is that none of the “crimes” thus far charged by Special Counsel Robert Mueller have anything at all to do with the Trump campaign or the 2016 election. They all predate it by a number of years.
Were there some unsavory folks circling around the Trump campaign? Probably – but there also were more than a few circling around at least one of the other campaigns, and they weren’t investigated at all, let alone by the highest echelons of power in America's top intelligence and law enforcement agencies.. But you know what, they shouldn’t have been, and neither should those around Mr. Trump. In neither case do their associations a crime make. Especially a political crime on the eve of the presidential election. And here is the topper, which most everybody seems to have forgotten. Barack Obama was President when all this went on; Loretta Lynch was Attorney General; James Comey was FBI Director; James Clapper Director of National Intelligence and John Brennan CIA Director. None of them, nor anyon