by Lil Tuttle
The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel discusses the Russia-Trump Collusion story in perhaps one of the best, most concise overviews to date.
“The notion of the federal government surveilling average U.S. folk is anathema to us,” says Strassel, “and for very good reason.”
Strassel explains the difference between a “criminal investigation,” which has very specific, publicly-transparent legal rules and standards that must be observed, and a “counterintelligence investigation,” which is shrouded in secrecy and primarily reserved for foreign terrorists.
“With a CI [counterintelligence] investigation,” says Strassel,” you can do pretty much anything you want to do, which, of course, they did” to people associated with the Trump campaign.
Strassel also discusses the role of the FISA Court – a U.S. federal court authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against foreign spies in the U.S.
We’ve got a FISA Court that is supposed to demand the highest standards of evidence, but what we’ve learned as the course of all of this is that the Court was more than willing to trust anything the FBI put in front of it. And we’ve also learned the FBI didn’t play it straight at Court.
Strassel’s remarks were recorded at the David Horowitz’s West Coast Retreat in Palos Verdes, CA, in April 2019.