Complexity

In the criminal world, if you hold up a convenience store, are caught doing it on CCTV, and subsequently arrested by the police, the evidence is both simple and obvious. That's why junior assistant district attorneys love to prosecute such cases. They're a slam dunk -- in fact, they're normally settled with a plea bargin and a light sentence without a trial.

But what if there's a high level white collar conspiracy directed at an opponent of the then-current president and his preferred successor? What if the conspiracy is perpetrated in secret meetings by senior government officials and politicians? What if it's justified using sham evidence of Russian "collusion", or reports derived from clandestine spying?

Things get very complicated very fast. There is no single event that one can point to indicating that a crime has been committed. There is little hard evidence, but copious circumstantial evidence. There is considerable complexity and lack of clarity—and that's what protects the perpetrators.

The Clinton campaign paid a Democrat smear shop, Fusion GPS, to create an opposition research dossier that contained salacious slander that they hoped would destroy the candidacy of Donald trump. Nothing new there—that's Washington hardball politics. But things got very interesting when the phony dossier was used by the FBI as grounds for FISA surveillance on the Trump campaign. Even more interesting, senior FBI officials knew the provenance of the dossier but never let the FISA court know where it came from. As if that weren't bad enough, things get much, much worse.

Andrew McCarthy writes:

Something tells me Glenn Simpson did not make a mistake. Something tells me the co-founder of Fusion GPS was dead-on accurate when he testified that Christopher Steele [author of the Trump dossier] told him the FBI had a “human source” —i.e., a spy — inside the Trump campaign as the 2016 presidential race headed into its stretch run.

When he realized how explosive this revelation was, Simpson walked it back: He had, perhaps, “mischaracterized” what he’d been told by Steele, the former British spy and principal author of the anti-Trump dossier he and Simpson compiled for the Clinton campaign.

Simpson gave his testimony about the FBI’s human source at a closed Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on August 22, 2017. He did not try to retract it until the uproar that followed the publication of his testimony on January 9, 2018. The latter date is significant for reasons we’ll come to.

So ... the FBI had a "source" inside the Trump campaign. Ya think that might be a little bit unethical? Ya think that some of the intel gathered might have been funneled through cutouts to the Clinton Campaign or leaked to the Democrat's trained hamsters in the media? Ya think when the FBI's Peter Strzok texted this:

“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s [McCabe, now disgraced second in command at the FBI) office - that there’s no way he [Trump] gets elected - but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” Strzok texted on Aug. 15, 2016. “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

to his lover, lawyer Lisa Page, he just might be referring to a conspiracy within the FBI. Exactly what "path" and what "insurance policy" was he referring to?

But back to the funneling of the FBI intel to the trained hamsters. McCarthy explains:

Simpson’s testimony was released to the public on January 9, 2018. That was just a few days after the New York Times had published its big New Year’s weekend story claiming, based on anonymous intelligence officials, that the Russia investigation had been opened sometime in July 2016. The catalyzing event, we were told, was a report to the FBI that Papadopoulos, a young Trump- campaign adviser, had alleged that Russia possessed thousands of stolen Hillary Clinton emails. According to the story, Papadopoulos had been informed of this by Joseph Mifsud, a London-based academic who professed to have Kremlin connections. A few weeks later, while drinking in a London bar in May 2016, Papadopoulos blabbed the news to Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat.

McCarthy explains (read the whole thing) that that story falls apart when the time line of events is considered. But never mind.

Here's the thing. This is a complex story, and it's the media's job to unravel the complexity so that the American public better understands what happened, and through its elected representatives, corrects any governmental wrongdoing that did occur. But in this case, the trained hamsters revel in the complexity and make no effort to investigate and simplify it. They smirk and talk about conspiracy theorists.

Why is that? Because if they did investigate and simplify, they just might lead the public to the conclusion that the Obama administration knowingly or unknowingly allowed an FBI operation to be conducted on a candidate for the presidency to provide "an insurance policy" against a win by Donald Trump. That's wrong ... that's big ... that's a MAJOR scandal ... and that's why the Democrats trained hamsters would prefer the complexity to continue.

UPDATE:
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You know something is up when the Democrat smear shops and their trained hamsters in the media go into overdrive in an effort to smear one of the few Washington politicians, Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who has doggedly pursued this complex and growing scandal.

In an article aptly entitled, "The Deep State Mob Targets Nunes", Julie Kelly reports:

The Deep State Mob is continuing to squeeze the California congressman after he again threatened to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for ignoring congressional subpoenas and withholding crucial documents from Congressional investigators. Nunes has minced no words about how the Justice Department and FBI have been “stonewalling” his committee’s investigation for months. And as Nunes inches closer to revealing the stinking core of what is potentially the biggest political corruption scandal in U.S. history, the Deep State Mob is trying to close in on him first.

Nunes and other House Republicans want to find out exactly how and why the FBI’s counterintelligence operation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government began in the summer of 2016, and what intelligence sources either aided or instigated that probe. The latest showdown, according to the Washington Post, is because Nunes has issued a subpoena demanding that the Justice Department provide information about an unnamed individual referenced in a classified letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions last month.

The closer Nunes and his collegaues get to the truth, the more the Dems' smears escalate.

The Dems get so, so angry at any mention that special counsel, Robert Mueller, might be biased and should bring his "investigation" to a conclusion. "Let him do his job!" they proclaim.

But when Nunes gets far closer to the truth that Mueller ever will, the Dems don't seem as inclined to let him do his job. Heh.