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On 3 March 2017 at 20:00, MONKMAN said:

The most puzzling thing out of all this in my opinion. Why does a right wing, Chinese delivery driver from the states, spend so much of his life on a Scottish football forum?

The most puzzling thing for me is why do folk on here keep encouraging him by responding to his posts?

53 minutes ago, dorlomin said:

Surely Trump's presidency is histories most epic online meltdown.

I'm sure there must be a question for political philosophy students where they are asked to outline the pros and cons of liberal Western democracy as a form of government.  Trump's victory and subsequent circus will be a huge assist in balancing the pros.

 

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9 hours ago, Deplorable said:

They went through the FISA courts, which are separate. FISA courts grant warrants 99.9999999% of the time and are in general never used to gather evidence which will be used in criminal cases. They turned down the initial request. Another warrant was granted a few months later.

Speculation on whether the Obama administration was spying on Trump has been around since just after the election. I can't say what's true, but it's been suggested that the military people involved in the intelligence community gave Trump the heads up about what was going on.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-and-intelligence-community-chiefs-have-urged-obama-to-remove-the-head-of-the-nsa/2016/11/19/44de6ea6-adff-11e6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html?utm_term=.8fb2bc693bbd

Here's an article from former federal terrorism prosecutor Andrew McCarthy in January. It was written in the Never Trump National Review.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443768/obama-fisa-trump-wiretap

FISA and the Trump Team

The idea that FISA could be used against political enemies always seemed far-fetched. Now it might not be.

Which then boils to two things.  Either there was a legitimate case presented by the FBI to the judge (FISA courts still require evidence and due diligence)  that somebody within Trump Towers was acting as an agent for, presumably, Moscow, or Obama has corrupted all of the judicial processes in order to try and corrupt the democratic process.  I suppose, given he's Kenyan, it doesn't matter much to him, but which of these is more likely?

If the Obama government was so hell bent on preventing Trump, and had the FBI doing his bidding (as is the only way a supposedly illegal FISA warrant could be granted, unless you are accusing everyone on those courts as being pro-Obama as well) - and let's be honest, the first month has given plenty of grounds as to why that might have been a good idea - why did Comey illegally leak only one piece of tapped information - the Clinton emails?  

It could just be the case that Trump is utterly unfit to be president, and that he's just taken an insane Breitbart scandal piece (based on Louise Mensch!) and run with it.

Given that, Trump has either 1. flat out lied.  or 2. Compromised any current or previous investigation, and in either case 3. given Moscow heads up that any discussions they have had concerning the Trump administration are likely to be intercepted.  

William F Buckley's National Review is anything but a bastion of Obama/idealist politics, as you well know.  But of course, that's now been corrupted by the omnipotent former president.

 

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It's interesting that they went through the FISA courts. If they had evidence they would have gone through the regular courts. We don't know if they tried and were told no. According to the Guardian FISA courts approved 1,457 / 1,457 warrant requests in 2015. 1,379 / 1,379 in 2014. That they turned down the first warrant request on Trump is amazing there must have been something seriously off. Reports in the media say the second request was granted. If they found something criminal I'd assume charges would have been brought rather than letting him become President.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I am cynical about government spying. A bunch of weird stuff happened at the end of the Obama administration.

1. In the last weeks of his administration Obama relaxed the strict rules by which the NSA could share raw intelligence with other agencies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/nsa-gets-more-latitude-to-share-intercepted-communications.html?_r=0

2. The Mike Flynn situation. How did the subject matter of a private phone call leak? Either he was under surveillance, the NSA (who would be surveilling the Russian ambassador) themselves leaked the call, or the NSA did not properly redact the comments made by a private US citizen before sharing the data with other government entities. See no. 1.

3. There have been recent reports that the Obama administration worked to distribute information about Russian involvement in the election as widely as possible within the US government and across allied governments. This included lowering classification standards.  

               https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/us/politics/obama-trump-russia-election-hacking.html

They are of course portraying this as preserving evidence and warning allies. If there was actual wrongdoing, why not bring charges? A cynic might say that they were trying to disseminate as widely as possible information which could be used at a later date against the Trump administration. Back to Flynn. He did nothing illegal. But someone with access to the transcript of Flynn's phone call heard Pence on tv say that Flynn had not talked to Russia about sanctions. Boom, a man with a bunch of enemies in the intelligence agencies is damaged goods.

Now we have these "backdoor" warrants issued for Trump, but nothing worth criminal charges was found.

There's smoke floating around.

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Here's the potential case that could be made against Obama, assuming the reports in places like the Guardian and NY Times over the past few months about the warrants against Trump are true, presented from a conservative lawyer if anybody here is interested in seeing what the other side is saying.

http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/yes-obama-could-be-prosecuted-if-involved-with-illegal-surveillance/

Interestingly, it claims that only 12 out of 35,000+ FISA warrant requests have been turned down by the FISA court judges. That should take care of Savage Henry's speculation that the FISA courts would have to be on Obama's side. These courts serve as rubber stamps.

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http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2-republicans-join-democratic-effort-demanding-trump-tax-returns-article-1.2988453

Pressure mounting to force Trump to release his tax returns.

He always said he would release them, just another lie I suppose.

 

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http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2-republicans-join-democratic-effort-demanding-trump-tax-returns-article-1.2988453
Pressure mounting to force Trump to release his tax returns.
He always said he would release them, just another lie I suppose.
 


I think Lindsay Graham was speaking for a significant proportion of the Republican Party when he said he was "very worried" about Trump. This tax return thing might show a relationship with Russia when Trump said he had no relations . That said, it's quite clear that plenty of people have no problem with Trump lying.
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25 minutes ago, Savage Henry said:

 


I think Lindsay Graham was speaking for a significant proportion of the Republican Party when he said he was "very worried" about Trump. This tax return thing might show a relationship with Russia when Trump said he had no relations . That said, it's quite clear that plenty of people have no problem with Trump lying.

 

Yeah, I said the same thing on here recently.  The idea that we all want honesty and transparency from our politicians, including those we personally support, is nonsense.  Trump has already contradicted himself on so many occasions about so many issues that any objective supporters would already be distancing themselves from him.

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Yeah, I said the same thing on here recently.  The idea that we all want honesty and transparency from our politicians, including those we personally support, is nonsense.  Trump has already contradicted himself on so many occasions about so many issues that any objective supporters would already be distancing themselves from him.

 

Going by the Twitter feed, they already are. The soft right are deserting Trumpers all over the place, as it were.

 

This is why our American friend seems to be protesting too much. There's nothing wrong with admitting you were wrong about your political choice. Or even in standing by your vote and removing your support for him. It takes a stronger, wiser man to say I no longer support Trump, Much of the Trump vote has become entrenched in a position which has long since become counterproductive, but they are too invested to change.

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He's up early again.
Tweeting.

The only justification for these Tweets can be that it's Bannon, not Trumpers, typing them out. He's just taking Breitbart headlines and throwing them around, seemingly oblivious to the fact that, if any of them are true, the are bringing his administration closer to collapse.
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Roger Stone - official paid advisor to the president - is Tweeting himself out of a job, and at this rate into a courtroom, with some quite batshit mental attacks on, well, anyone female.


I follow someone who's monitored Stone's politics and economics and should be writing up something soon exploring how it's influenced Trump's push for the presidency. It should be a good read when he posts it.
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