***Official Political Discussion Thread***

http://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...s-waive-privilege-on-cohens-secret-recordings
Trump attorneys waive privilege on Cohen's secret recordings: report
Attorneys for President Trump have reportedly waived attorney-client privilege on a tape recording made by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, in which the two discuss payments regarding an ex-Playboy model who claims to have had an affair with Trump.
CNN reported that although the special master overseeing evidence provided to the government in Cohen's case had marked the recording as privileged information, Trump's attorneys waived the designation. That allows it to be used as evidence in potential legal proceedings.
Cohen's team was surprised by the news, the report continued, as Cohen has publicly suggested that the recording could be harmful to the president.

But his attorney, Lanny Davis, dismissed any notion that Cohen could be put in legal jeopardy due to the recording.

"When the recording is heard, it will not hurt Michael Cohen. Any attempt at spin cannot change what is on the tape," Davis said in a statement on Friday. Davis is a columnist for The Hill.

Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani has maintained that the tape will prove that Trump did not know about the nature of any payment to Karen McDougal or for her story. There are conflicting reports about what is on the tape, but Giuliani has confirmed its existence and the fact that it is a discussion of a payment.

“Nothing in that conversation suggests that he had any knowledge of it in advance,” Giuliani told The New York Times.

“In the big scheme of things, it’s powerful exculpatory evidence,” he added.

The tape was reportedly seized by the FBI as part of a raid of Cohen's home and offices earlier this year, and reportedly contains a conversation between Trump and Cohen two months before the 2016 election about a payment to McDougal.

McDougal is alleging a yearlong extramarital affair with Trump in 2006.

Cohen is under federal investigation for alleged financial crimes.
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Document link:
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4614708/Carter-Page-FISA-Application.pdf

Unsurprisingly it appears that the application(s) refute at least one key argument raised by House Republicans in the 'Nunes memo'.
Nunes argued that the FBI did not disclose the dossier's political origins to the court but the actual applications refute that claim.

The documents also declare in no uncertain terms that Page is a Russian agent. The applications repeatedly flatly refer to Page a Russian agent. Examples:
"The target of of this application is an agent of a foreign power”
“The following describes the foreign power and sets forth in detail a description of the target and the target’s activities for or on behalf of this foreign power.”

Excerpt:
In particular, whole sections in the application detailing the FBI’s justification for believing Page was a Russian agent are blacked out. Some of the unredacted material refers to news articles. But FISA applications typically rely on classified and other sensitive information, according to officials with knowledge of the process.

The application identifies Page by name and says that he engaged in “clandestine intelligence activities” on behalf of Russia and had been the target of Russian government recruitment. The application describes Russia as having interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...ory.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b6ae378b16e6
Administration releases application to wiretap Trump campaign adviser
The Justice Department on Saturday released a previously classified application to wiretap former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who was under suspicion by the FBI of being a Russian agent.
The government had monitored Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the heavily redacted documents were made public after media organizations sued for their release under the Freedom of Information Act.
The release of the document, along with three subsequent applications to renew the surveillance, was extraordinary and historic. In the four decades that FISA has been in effect, it’s not clear that any application for surveillance has ever been released. Materials related to FISA operations and legal process are among the most highly classified and closely guarded in the government.

The publication is also sure to fuel the political fight between Republicans and Democrats over the propriety of the surveillance and how it was legally justified.

Republican lawmakers have accused the Obama administration, which sought the surveillance order in October 2016, of relying on a controversial dossier of then-candidate Donald Trump’s alleged connections to Russia to support the surveillance order. The document, compiled by a former British intelligence officer, was used as political opposition research by Democrats. But the author, Christopher Steele, also shared his findings with the FBI because he was concerned that Trump may have been compromised by Russia.

Members of the House Intelligence Committee have sparred for months over the Page surveillance. Republicans, who previously released some details about the application, had accused the FBI of relying too much on the Steele dossier, which they painted as politically motivated and uncorroborated.

But Democrats countered that the FISA application relied on more information than what Steele provided. And they said Steele had been a reliable source of information to the FBI in the past.

The application shows that the FBI portrayed Steele to the court as a trusted source. The FBI also disclosed that his work was on behalf of a client who was likely looking for politically damaging information about Trump. Republicans had accused the bureau of failing to notify the court of the dossier’s political origins.

Much of the more than 400 pages of applications is redacted, making it impossible to know all the evidence that the FBI presented to a judge in seeking the wiretap order.

In particular, whole sections in the application detailing the FBI’s justification for believing Page was a Russian agent are blacked out. Some of the unredacted material refers to news articles. But FISA applications typically rely on classified and other sensitive information, according to officials with knowledge of the process.

The application identifies Page by name and says that he engaged in “clandestine intelligence activities” on behalf of Russia and had been the target of Russian government recruitment. The application describes Russia as having interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

Page has denied that he was a Russian agent.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
https://www.apnews.com/3ea406469d34...campaign=SocialFlow&__twitter_impression=true
Kavanaugh: Watergate tapes decision may have been wrong
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh suggested several years ago that the unanimous high court ruling in 1974 that forced President Richard Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes, leading to the end of his presidency, may have been wrongly decided.
Kavanaugh was taking part in a roundtable discussion with other lawyers when he said at three different points that the decision in U.S. v. Nixon, which marked limits on a president’s ability to withhold information needed for a criminal prosecution, may have come out the wrong way.
A 1999 magazine article about the roundtable was part of thousands of pages of documents that Kavanaugh has provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of the confirmation process. The committee released the documents on Saturday.

Kavanaugh’s belief in robust executive authority already is front and center in his nomination by President Donald Trump to replace the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. The issue could assume even greater importance if special counsel Robert Mueller seeks to force Trump to testify in the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“But maybe Nixon was wrongly decided — heresy though it is to say so. Nixon took away the power of the president to control information in the executive branch by holding that the courts had power and jurisdiction to order the president to disclose information in response to a subpoena sought by a subordinate executive branch official. That was a huge step with implications to this day that most people do not appreciate sufficiently...Maybe the tension of the time led to an erroneous decision,” Kavanaugh said in a transcript of the discussion that was published in the January-February 1999 issue of the Washington Lawyer.

At another point in the discussion, Kavanaugh said the court might have been wise to stay out of the tapes dispute. “Should U.S. v. Nixon be overruled on the ground that the case was a nonjusticiable intrabranch dispute? Maybe so,” he said.

Kavanaugh was among six lawyers who took part in the discussion in the aftermath of independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Kavanaugh had been a member of Starr’s team.

The discussion was focused on the privacy of discussions between government lawyers and their clients.

Philip Lacovara, who argued the Watergate tapes case against Nixon and moderated the discussion, said Kavanaugh has long believed in a strong presidency. “That was Brett staking out what has been his basic jurisprudential approach since law school,” Lacovara said in a telephone interview Saturday.

Still, Lacovara said, “it was surprising even as of 1999 that the unanimous decision in the Nixon tapes case might have been wrongly decided.”

Kavanaugh allies pointed to a recent, more favorable assessment of the Nixon case. “Whether it was Marbury, or Youngstown, or Brown, or Nixon, some of the greatest moments in American judicial history have been when judges stood up to the other branches, were not cowed, and enforced the law. That takes backbone, or what some call judicial engagement,” Kavanaugh wrote in a 2016 law review article in which he referred to several landmark Supreme Court cases.

The 1999 article was among a pile of material released in response to the committee’s questionnaire. Kavanaugh was asked to provide information about his career as an attorney and jurist, his service in the executive branch, education, society memberships and more.

It’s an opening look at a long paper trail that lawmakers will consider as they decide whether to confirm him. The high court appointment could shift the court rightward for years to come.

A longtime figure in the Washington establishment, Kavanaugh acknowledged in the questionnaire that he had joined clubs that he said once had discriminatory membership policies.

“Years before I became a member of the Congressional Country Club and the Chevy Chase Club, it is my understanding that those clubs, like most similar clubs around the country, may have excluded members on discriminatory bases that should not have been acceptable to people then and would not be acceptable now,” he wrote.

Asked to list the 10 most significant cases for which he sat as a judge, Kavanaugh cited nine in which “the position expressed in my opinion (either for the court or in a separate writing) was later adopted by the Supreme Court.”

The 10th regarded a man fired by mortgage giant Fannie Mae after he filed a discrimination complaint that alleged a company executive had created a hostile work environment by calling the worker “the n-word.” Kavanaugh said he included it “because of what it says about anti-discrimination law and American history.”

Kavanaugh said an appeals court panel on which he sat reversed a lower court’s ruling in favor of Fannie Mae. He said he joined the majority opinion in 2013 and wrote a separate concurrence “to explain that calling someone the n-word, even once, creates a hostile work environment.”

In the questionnaire, Kavanaugh cited his opinion in that case: “No other word in the English language so powerfully or instantly calls to mind our country’s long and brutal struggle to overcome racism and discrimination against African-Americans.’” But it was one of the relatively few discrimination cases in which Kavanaugh sided with a complaining employee.

Offering a timeline leading to his nomination, he said White House counsel Don McGahn called him the day Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement, June 27, and they met the next day. Trump interviewed him July 2, with McGahn present, and Vice President Mike Pence interviewed him July 4. Kavanaugh spoke by phone with the president on July 8 and that evening met at the White House with Trump and his wife, Melania, where he said he was offered and accepted the nomination.

Asked whether anyone sought assurances from him about the stand he might take on a specific case or issue, he answered “No.” He also said he had not offered any indication how he might rule as a justice.

Kavanaugh has written some 300 rulings as an appeals court judge and has a record in the George W. Bush White House as well as in Starr’s probe of Clinton.

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the committee chairman, said the questionnaire was “the broadest and most comprehensive” ever sent by the committee and he welcomed “Judge Kavanaugh’s diligent and timely response.”

The nominee told lawmakers he registered for the Selective Service in his younger days but did not serve in the armed forces.

Years before he became a judge and compiled a solidly conservative record, Kavanaugh also reflected on how past nominees have sometimes disappointed partisans who wanted a more liberal or conservative justice. Speaking on CNN in 2000, he was responding to a question about whether the next president could “pack the court” with like-minded justices.

Presidents often prefer to avoid bloody confirmation fights, he said in a transcript that was released Saturday. “We’ve seen that time and again, to pick the consensus pick who turns out to be more moderate and thus less predictable, that’s what’s happened,” Kavanaugh said.
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It appears that Carter Page also lied under oath to the House Intel committee. Page was asked about meeting Igor Diveykin but denied any such meeting taking place.
The FISA application says he did meet with Diveykin, who oversees the GRU officials in Mueller’s latest indictments.
 
The Democratic Party Apologizes to Black Voters
The DNC’s bid to energize African American turnout this fall began with these words from Chairman Tom Perez in Atlanta: “I am sorry.”

lead_720_405.jpg

The Democrat Stacey Abrams is vying to be the first African American woman governor in U.S. history.JOHN BAZEMORE / AP

https://www.theatlantic.com/politic...atic-party-apologizes-to-black-voters/565697/

ATLANTA—Swanky fund-raisers don’t often begin with an apology to the well-heeled donors who shelled out thousands of dollars to sip wine, eat steak, and listen to pep-rally speeches. But as he looked out over a predominantly black crowd gathered at the Georgia Aquarium on Thursday night, Tom Perez, the Democratic National Committee chairman, felt compelled to issue a mea culpa.

“I am sorry,” Perez said.

At first, it seemed like Perez was voicing one more generalized regret for the 2016 election that put Donald Trump in the White House—the squandered opportunity that abruptly ended the Democrats’ hold on the presidency and immediately put at risk its policy gains of the previous eight years.

Perez, however, soon made clear that his apology was much more specific. “We lost elections not only in November 2016, but we lost elections in the run-up because we stopped organizing,” he said. “We stopped talking to people.

“We took too many people for granted,” Perez continued, “and African Americans—our most loyal constituency—we all too frequently took for granted. That is a shame on us, folks, and for that I apologize. And for that I say, it will never happen again!”

Applause broke out before Perez could even finish his apology, heads nodding in acknowledgment and appreciation.

That he would choose this event, and this city, to try to make amends with black voters was significant. Thursday’s gala was the party’s first major 2018 fund-raiser to be held outside Washington, D.C., and the I Will Vote initiative it supported aims to bolster DNC efforts to register new voters; fight voter-suppression efforts in the United States; and, ultimately, turn out Democrats across the country in November.

High turnout among black voters was key to Barack Obama’s two presidential victories, and dips in participation when he was not on the ballot contributed to the Democratic wipeouts in 2010 and 2014, and to Hillary Clinton’s narrow losses in states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in 2016. But there are signs of a revival, not only in response to Republican efforts to reverse Obama’s legacy, but also in response to efforts to erect barriers to voting that disproportionately affect African Americans. In Virginia, strong black turnout helped elect Governor Ralph Northam and the state’s second black lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, last November. A month later, black voters—and black women in particular—powered Doug Jones to victory over Roy Moore in Alabama’s special Senate election.

This year, nowhere will black turnout be more crucial to Democratic hopes than in Georgia, where Stacey Abrams is vying to become the first African American woman elected governor of any state. Her nomination over Stacey Evans, a white woman, in May drew a surge of national attention, and the DNC’s decision to hold Thursday’s gala alongside an African American leadership summit in Atlanta brought major party donors to Abrams’s home base.

“Welcome to Georgia,” Abrams told the DNC donors on Thursday, before adding a gentle dig of her own at the party: “It’s about time.”

“Georgia is not a red state,” she continued, setting up one of her signature campaign lines. “We’re just blue and confused.”

Abrams will find out her general-election opponent on Tuesday, when Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle and Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, face off in a Republican primary runoff. Cagle, endorsed by the outgoing Republican Governor Nathan Deal, had been the favorite. But Kemp has caught up to him with a campaign targeting Trump voters, sometimes in an over-the-top fashion. He ran one ad in which he points a shotgun at a fictitious teenage suitor of his daughter. In another, he notes he’s got “a big truck, in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take ‘em home myself.

“Yep, I just said that,” Kemp says in the latter spot. “If you want a politically incorrect conservative, that’s me.”

Trump rewarded Kemp with a tweeted endorsement on Wednesday, and Vice President Mike Pence is headed to Georgia on Saturday to campaign with him. To defeat either candidate, Abrams will need the support of the white Democrats and disaffected Republicans who in 2016 kept Trump to the lowest share of the statewide vote, 51 percent, for any Republican presidential candidate in 20 years. But she’ll also need supercharged turnout from black voters. That was, in part, the goal of Thursday’s event, which featured a speakers lineup of prominent black Democrats, including Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, former Attorney General Eric Holder, and Georgia’s own Representative John Lewis.

“We have to get out and vote like we’ve never voted before,” Lewis said in an off-the-cuff address that fired up the crowd more than any of the speeches from the party’s younger stars.“If Doug Jones can win in Alabama, Stacey Abrams can win here in Georgia.”

Throughout the night, speakers paid tribute to civil-rights icons such as Lewis; Martin Luther King Jr., a son of Atlanta; and Fannie Lou Hamer. But despite the presence of two of his former Cabinet members, there was curiously little mention of Obama. His name wasn’t uttered at all until Booker, the evening’s final speaker, invoked his memory by way of a joke.

“I want to tell you the truth: I miss Obama,” said the senator and potential presidential aspirant. “And,” he quickly added to laughs, “I miss her husband, too.”

Indeed, the evening’s themes were, in some ways, an implicit critique of the first black president and the shortcomings of his tenure, beginning with Perez’s apology to the very voters who twice put him in office. Obama has long faced criticism that, under his leadership, Democrats neglected voter mobilization and were unable to extend the president’s personal brand to candidates up and down the ballot. The party lost the House and Senate, governors’ races, and hundreds of state legislative seats during his two terms.

Representative Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, chided Democratic politicians for not talking to black voters “in a language they can understand.”

“We can’t talk to them in these Ivy League terms,” Richmond added. He went on to rib the Yale-educated Booker, but he could also have been referring to the often high-minded, Harvard-educated former president.

Booker, possibly testing out a stump speech for his own White House run, listed an array of problems facing the country, from economic inequality to mass incarceration. “Everything I mention,” he said pointedly, “was going on before Donald Trump got elected.”

A year and a half after Obama left office, the Democratic Party seems finally to be moving on from his presidency. Gone were the tributes to his legacy so common in 2016 and the first months of the Trump presidency, along with ritual campaign-trail exhortations to “build on” the progress he had made. For the DNC, and for the party more broadly, Thursday’s event was aimed at promoting a new generation of black leaders—Abrams and Atlanta’s new mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, in Georgia and, perhaps, Booker on a national level. From the underappreciated black electorate—first with an apology and then with a rallying cry—Democrats hope they can earn a fresh start.
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I saw the news about Carter Page and read the entire FISA document. Wow! This is some crazy stuff and it erases any doubts that I had about this investigation and the FBI. We now know the following for sure:




Dems are toast! This looks BAD for Hillary and Obummer. Trump 2020!
 
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