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Comment by uguuo_o | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, none of this is actually surprising. When was the last time such crime was actually prosecuted? It is very hard to have any trust in the legal system when there are many that curtail ot through sheer influence.

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It’s unfortunate that it’s not surprising and even more so that administrations feel like this is so accepted that (at best) nothing need be done and (at worst) it can be used to their advantage.

Even when the minimal executive action of firing those involved is taken (for example, firing Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Clinesmith) the media will attack the enforcers and give comfort to the perpetrators. It’s clown world.

Can you remind me again why Comey was fired? What rule did he fall afoul of? I was always under the impression that the FBI is an incredibly conservative institution in every sense of the word, so it's not surprising how the biases play out. What is strange is when they get caught up in intra-conservative-world politics.

  "And in fact when I decided to just do it I said to myself, I said, “You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.”"

Trump told the world that he fired Comey for opening what has now been shown by the IG and SC Durham after a 4 year investigation to be properly predicated, if flawed. Firing Comey was an attempt by Trump to avoid accountability for what he and his campaign did, along with destruction of evidence, lying under oath, and 11 other counts of obstruction of justice by Trump identified by SC Robert Muller.

It turns out Trump's campaign did meet with Russians and lied about it; Trump did had business in Russia he lied about; his campaign manager did meet with a Russian spy to discuss handing over dirt on his opponent; Russians did hack the Democrats and distribute the data; Trump did ask them publicly to hack his opponent in exchange for relaxed sanctions; and his campaign was knowingly sharing data with a Russian intelligence officer. So of course an investigation was opened into his campaign and their ties to Russia.

In what way was it properly predicated? He was briefed by the CIA that it was a campaign stunt.

You'll have to be more specific about what part of my comment you're referring to as "it". Because obviously the investigation wasn't a campaign stunt.

And if you want to read about how the investigation was properly predicated, here's the IG report: https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2019/o20012.pdf

The existence and thoroughness of this report begs the question as to why the Durham investigation was ever needed in the first place.

if you want details, you can read the Senate report about Russian Efforts Against Election Infrastructure [1], Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities [5], and everything in-between.

you may find such things as "The Russian govemment directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure' at the state and local level." and "The Committee found that the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election."

[1] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

[5] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

So someone put an exchange server unsecured on the internet against policy and that's reason to abuse fisa courts for the benefit of the cia war machine?

There’s no need to abuse anything, and there’s ways to improve methods of counterintelligence collection. But the reason the Trump campaign was surveilled cannot be tied to Hillary Clinton. She’s completely irrelevant to the fact that the Trump campaign welcomed and sought foreign interference from Russia in the 2016 election. All the complaining in the world about the predicate for the investigation does not change or erase what was uncovered.

Nowhere does it say that a crime must be surprising in order for the perpetrator(s) to be prosecuted.

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