I searched this article on reddit to see how the usual left leaning subreddits are reacting to it and was surprised to see it is nowhere to be found. Truly both sides are living in their own echo chambers
/r/politics - 155 karma
/r/libertarian - 49 karma
/r/conservative - 34 karma
I'm not trying to make any case for any side here. Just providing some numbers.
IMO, pro-Trump/anti-Trump news is keeping many other important topics off the front page.
/r/politics is default sub-reddit, so every user is subscribed to it unless manually opted out.
r/politics/ - 5.6M members
r/conservative/ - 275K members
r/libertarian/ - 349K members
That said, there are dozens of FISA posts on many of the political subreddits, typically linking to others sites, not the NYT article. The T_D has been very vocal about the FISA abuses, as they should be. Apparently T_D can't link to this specific article due to subreddit specific rules. So I can't really compare this specific NYT article. Plus comparing the # of upvotes across subreddits has a lot of other issues.
IMO, this recent abuse is due to the lack of transparency in the entire FISA process. There shouldn't be secret courts ordering secret wiretaps on Americans with no oversight. The whole program should be scrapped. Tell your reps to vote it down next time.
So I doubt “the left” is suppressing this issue. The IG report is pretty clear that these issues had little relevance in the investigation of Russian hacking. And if our discourse can no longer achieve this (rather low) level of nuance, we are truly lost.
On the other hand, as an advocate for civil liberties I'm kind of glad that this is becoming a partisan issue since Patriot Act votes in the past were unanimously supported by Republicans and by half of Democrats. Maybe now we'll get momentum to get rid of secret courts.
Because the right has been complaining about these specific FBI agents biased conduct in this investigation for years now and trying to turn this into a 'we all know fisa is bad' comes off as epic gaslighting.
>The IG report did not find any evidence of political partisan spying, it only faulted the process of getting the warrant.
This is beyond a white washing. He absolutely found evidence that line agents were biased. He did not find clear 'evidence' that the outcome and leadership was biased. The key part is that confessions and a paper trail were not found to lead him to make that conclusion. He stated he made numerous referrals to the doj/fbi about misconduct. If you actually listen to his hearing statements on the 'evidence' for bias he is walking a fine line.
'we did not have documentary or testimonial evidence that (the mistakes) were intentional, but also make note the lack of satisfactory explanations (for the mistakes), from there i cannot draw any further conclusions' - this is during a line of questions from senator whitehouse, but there are many others like it.
Horowitz was asked in the hearing if his report vindicated Comey. He was adamant that his report vindicated no one.
There is definitely a concerted effort to completely mischaracterize the report's contents, mainly because it has proven that the complaining from the Republicans has actually been correct all along.