monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The White House and the GOP, of course, have tried to attack Wolff’s credibility. Trump himself, on January 13, called Wolff “mentally deranged” in a tweet (his first public remarks that day, after he finished the round of golf he was playing when Hawaii received a false missile attack alert). Even presumably sympathetic interlocutors like Stephen Colbert have pressed Wolff on why he doesn’t make public the recordings of these conversations he says he has. And some journalists have spotted small mistakes, like a Washington Post reporter placed at a meeting he apparently did not attend.
(...)
The attacks on Wolff haven’t stuck partly because it all rings so true. But I think there is also another reason. Some critics have tried to accuse Wolff of not playing by the standard rules of journalism, by which they mean to insinuate that he’s taken off-the-record material and put it on the record. But no one has produced evidence of this. And in fact, outside of eight or ten salacious quotes, nothing in Fire and Fury seems out of the ordinary. Indeed, for quite long stretches, it reads like any conventional work in the genre. Trump himself disappears for pages at a time. The running theme is the feud between Bannon and “Jarvanka,” Wolff’s portmanteau for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, which is no more inherently interesting than the feuds inside any other White House. At times one can feel Wolff himself getting a little bored.
(...)
However, there is one sense in which he doesn’t play by the usual rules. Wolff doesn’t do “fairness.” He comes to his conclusions, and he lets you know them. He doesn’t tell the other side. No New York Times or Washington Post reporter could have written this book. They follow rules that demand more “balance,” rules under which they might have been more likely to get all the small things absolutely right but would have diluted the larger truth. And so, free from that stricture of straight news reporting, Fire and Fury has performed a great public service: it has forced mainstream Washington to confront and discuss the core issue of this presidency, which is the president’s fitness for office.

A memo that shows alleged government surveillance abuse has been released and includes testimony from a high-ranking government official [McCabe] who says without the infamous Trump dossier, the FBI and DOJ would not have secured surveillance warrants to spy on at least one member of the Trump team.

It also claims the FBI and DOJ used media reporting to lend credibility to the dossier, while the firm behind the dossier, Fusion GPS, briefed major American news outlets to include New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, New Yorker, Yahoo and Mother Jones.

"Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then Candidate Trump, in September of 2016, when Steele told Ohr, that he Steele 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president," the memo reads, according to an excerpt obtained by Fox News.

The memo stated that Comey signed three FISA applications for Page and McCabe signed one. Trump’s current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein also signed at least one FISA application for Page –along with former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and former Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente.

I hope republicans with a straight face do not talk about classified information being leaked anymore. Well sort of, they have taken a leaf from the Russians, taking documents and editing it for propaganda purposes.

Controversial GOP memo criticizing FBI surveillance is released (WP)

Eat up Lash and layman, just the type of garbage ya'll like to eat.

Kinda strange, ain't it?

I haven't followed the issue.

revelette1 wrote:

I haven't followed the issue.

Yeah, we see that. And we see you haven't followed this thread at all either. But, as always, that doesn't stop you from saying that Wolff never made any such insinuation, eh?

A suggestion: It's always better to try to learn the facts BEFORE you undertake to tell everyone what the "facts" are, not after.

The memo points out that (and this was inserted at the insistence of Congress) that

1. A fisa warrant can be good for no more than 90 days.

2. Each subsequent hearing must make an INDEPENDENT showing of the existence of probable cause. In other words, ya can't just say "Yeah, what we done said last time, so just go on ahead an renew it, eh?"

3. The FBI is obligated to disclose all known facts that would call the legitimacy of a warrant into question.