Liberal Forum

#ShePersisted » 04 Mar 2017 8:49 am » wrote:He's really losing it now.

Is he?:

In June, an initial FISA affidavit (obviously prepared by the FBI and the Justice Department’s National Security Division) was submitted to the FISA court. It is said to have “named Trump” — but we don’t know whether that means (a) his name merely came up somewhere in the text of the affidavit or (b) he was an actual target whom the government wanted to investigate under FISA (meaning eavesdrop, read e-mail, and the like).

Even though the FISA standard is generally thought to be less demanding than the traditional wiretap standard (it is easier to show that someone may be colluding in some way with a foreign government than that he has committed a crime), the FISA court rejected the application that “named Trump.”

Five months later, the Justice Department and FBI submitted a second, more “narrowly” drawn affidavit to the FISA court. The way the Heat Street report is written intimates that Trump is not named in this October application for FISA surveillance. The tie to Trump also appears weak: Heat Street says the FISA court was presented with evidence of a server “possibly related” to the Trump campaign and its “alleged links” to two Russian banks.

To summarize, it appears there were no grounds for a criminal investigation of banking violations against Trump. Presumably based on the fact that the bank or banks at issue were Russian, the Justice Department and the FBI decided to continue investigating on national-security grounds. A FISA application in which Trump was “named” was rejected by the FISA court as overbroad, notwithstanding that the FISA court usually looks kindly on government surveillance requests. A second, more narrow application, apparently not naming Trump, may have been granted five months later; the best the media can say about it, however, is that the server on which the application centers is “possibly” related to the Trump campaign’s “alleged” links to two Russian banks — under circumstances in which the FBI has previously found no “nefarious purpose” in some (undescribed) connection between Trump Tower and at least one Russian bank (whose connection to Putin’s regime is not described).

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 ... mp-wiretap