FISA expert breaks down Trump's wiretap accusation against Obama

CBS

President Trump on Saturday accused former President Obama of wiretapping his phones at Trump Tower during the election. The unsubstantiated and unprecedented claim is raising eyebrows.

Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), hundreds of warrants are issued each year to allow eavesdropping on a “foreign power or agent of a foreign power.” But according to the Justice Department, the president cannot order a wiretap if the surveillance involves “communication to which a U.S. person is a party.”

CBS News senior national security analyst Fran Townsend, who led the Justice Department’s office of Intelligence Policy and Review that handled the FISA process during the Clinton administration, said Mr. Trump’s claim, if verified, would be unprecedented.

“While all presidents have broad national security authority, once with the passage of FISA in 1978, I know of no president including President Obama that would have directly ordered the surveillance of an individual in the United States,” Townsend said Monday on “CBS This Morning.” “And by the way, Washington is horrible at keeping secrets, so if a president tried to do such a thing, you can be sure that the bureaucracy would have pushed back and would have leaked.”

The former national security adviser to President George W. Bush said there were public reports for a FISA request in July, which was denied. Then there was another in October. But the specifics of the request are unclear.

“I feel confident it’s not of President Trump, but could it have been of one of his associates?” Townsend said. “We’ve heard wide reports of contacts between Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, Carter Page and others. So could it have been one of the associates around him who also during the transition was working in Trump Tower? That’s possible.”

Townsend explained that in order for the FISA court to have approved a warrant to wiretap Mr. Trump, the Obama administration would have had to present an affidavit establishing probable cause that an individual was “an agent” of Russia, in this case, to authorize surveillance.

“That only would have been good for 90 days. So let’s look at the timeline here. If that was granted in October, it would have expired sometime in January, either before or after the inauguration. And if it was an ongoing counterintelligence investigation, that wire if reauthorized is still up right now,” Townsend said.

Meanwhile, the FBI is investigating possible cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russia during the election. FBI director James Comey asked the Justice Department to officially deny Mr. Trump’s wiretap claim, but according to Townsend, the Justice Department would be “reluctant” to get involved.

“Because if you come out and say there was no wiretapping against the president when he was president-elect, the next question from people like us is, ‘Well, is there one on his associates? Which one of the associates?’ And you don’t want to get into a back and forth, especially if there’s an ongoing investigation,” Townsend explained. “I wouldn’t read too much into it. I would not be surprised if the Justice Department does not want to get into this publically, especially if this is ongoing.” [...]

Is sexual abuse recidivism "frighteningly high"(80%) or just "significantly high" (27%)

NY Times  Last week at the Supreme Court, a lawyer made what seemed like an unremarkable point about registered sex offenders.

“This court has recognized that they have a high rate of recidivism and are very likely to do this again,” said the lawyer, Robert C. Montgomery, who was defending a North Carolina statute that bars sex offenders from using Facebook, Twitter and other social media services.

The Supreme Court has indeed said the risk that sex offenders will commit new crimes is “frightening and high.” That phrase, in a 2003 decision upholding Alaska’s sex offender registration law, has been exceptionally influential. It has appeared in more than 100 lower-court opinions, and it has helped justify laws that effectively banish registered sex offenders from many aspects of everyday life.

But there is vanishingly little evidence for the Supreme Court’s assertion that convicted sex offenders commit new offenses at very high rates. The story behind the notion, it turns out, starts with a throwaway line in a glossy magazine.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion in the 2003 case, Smith v. Doe, cited one of his own earlier opinions for support, and that opinion did include a startling statistic. “The rate of recidivism of untreated offenders has been estimated to be as high as 80 percent,” Justice Kennedy wrote in the earlier case, McKune v. Lile.

He cited what seemed to be a good source for the statistic: “A Practitioner’s Guide to Treating the Incarcerated Male Sex Offender,” published in 1988 by the Justice Department.

The guide, a compendium of papers from outside experts, is 231 pages long, and it contains lots of statistics on sex offender recidivism rates. Many of them were in the single digits, some a little higher. Only one source claimed an 80 percent rate, and the guide itself said that number might be exaggerated.

The source of the 80 percent figure was a 1986 article in Psychology Today, a magazine written for a general audience. The article was about a counseling program run by the authors, and they made a statement that could be good for business. “Most untreated sex offenders released from prison go on to commit more offenses — indeed, as many as 80 percent do,” the article said, without evidence or elaboration.

That’s it. The basis for much of American jurisprudence and legislation about sex offenders was rooted in an offhand and unsupported statement in a mass-market magazine, not a peer-reviewed journal.

“Unfortunately,” Melissa Hamilton wrote in a new article in The Boston College Law Review, “the Supreme Court’s scientifically dubious guidance on the actual risk of recidivism that sex offenders pose has been unquestionably repeated by almost all other lower courts that have upheld the public safety need for targeted sex offender restrictions.” [...]

There are many ways to calculate recidivism rates, and they vary depending on a host of distinctions. A 2014 Justice Department report found, for instance, that sex offenders generally have low overall recidivism rates for crimes. But they are more likely to commit additional sex offenses than other criminals.

In the three years after release from prison, 1.3 percent of people convicted of other kinds of crimes were arrested for sex offenses, compared to 5.3 percent of sex offenders. Those findings are broadly consistent with seven reports in various states, which found that people convicted of sex crimes committed new sex offenses at rates of 1.7 percent to 5.7 percent in time periods ranging from three to 10 years.

The Justice Department report said the risk of new sex offenses by convicted sex offenders rises over time, reaching 27 percent over 20 years.

That number is significant, but it is nothing like 80 percent. Perhaps it is sufficient to warrant harsh sex offender registry laws, but judges and lawmakers would have been better served by basing their judgments on the best available data. [...]

Judge Alice M. Batchelder, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, described “the significant doubt cast by recent empirical studies on the pronouncement in Smith that ‘the risk of recidivism posed by sex offenders is “frightening and high.’”

The appeals court struck down a particularly strict Michigan sex-offender law as a violation of the Constitution’s ex post facto clause, saying it retroactively imposed punishment on people who had committed offenses before the law was enacted. The state has asked the Supreme Court to consider the case, Does v. Snyder, No. 16-768. The first paragraph of its petition says that the risk of recidivism “remains ‘frightening and high.’”

The constitutional question in the case is interesting and substantial. And hearing the case would allow the court to consider more fully its casual assertion that sex offenders are especially dangerous.

Footage reveals systematic child abuse in daycare centers

Arutz 7

An investigation of several WIZO, Emunah, and Na'amat childcare centers has revealed systematic abuse, with footage showing caregivers hitting, cursing, and neglecting their young charges, Yediot Ahronot reported on Monday.

The abuse and negligence was discovered after parents found footage and recordings from hidden cameras and voice recording devices.

Hadas' (name has been changed) mother said the story started when she collected her 2.5-year-old daughter from the Jerusalem-area daycare which she attended. When she asked her daughter how the day went, Hadas said, 'the preschool teacher hit me' and demonstrated a stinging slap on the face.

The next morning, Hadas' mother sent her daughter to daycare with a hidden voice recorder, and listened to the recording at the end of the day.

"It sounded like a horror movie," Hadas' mother said. "The caregivers screamed at, insulted, and hit the children."

Hadas' mother is not alone. Several parents have complained the "supervised" daycare centers are not actually supervised, and no inspectors come to check them. This allows daycare workers to do whatever they want, the parents claim.

In a daycare center run by Emunah in a central Israeli city, two daycare workers can be heard arguing about a 3-year-old they once forgot at a public park.

In one daycare center in Israel's north, daycare workers were videotaped repeatedly ignoring children's requests to eat or drink. And in another Jerusalem-area daycare, one of the daycare workers can be seen losing control, screaming at the children, and hitting them.

"Some of these workers would never be allowed to work in a grocery store," Chani (name has been changed), who is a daycare worker herself, told Yediot Ahronot. "They hit the babies, scream at them, then go out to have a smoke and leave the babies unattended."

One Yediot Ahronot reporter tried to get accepted as a daycare worker, and found the daycare manager did not ask about credentials or experience.

"I need someone now, can you be here in another hour?" the manager asked.

An Emunah spokesperson said, "This is a very general statement. If it is true - and I assume it's not imaginary - we have to understand that the exception does not reflect the rule."

"The rule is that every individual problem which has been exposed and proven true has been immediately and properly dealt with. We do not compromise on these things.

"This general accusation harms thousands of preschool teachers and daycare workers who give of themselves every day and work responsibly and lovingly. This accusation also does not make sense when we remember that waiting lists for Emunah daycare centers are hundreds of children long. [...]

At the root of Trump’s new fury: Total contempt for American democracy

Washington Post

President Trump is now wallowing in fury, we are told, because he can’t make the Russia story disappear; he can’t stem the leaks to the media; and he can’t seem to realize his promises. Some reports tell us that unflattering comparisons to Barack Obama’s early accomplishments are “gnawing at Trump,” while others say he went “ballistic” when Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia probe, because it telegraphed capitulation to Trump’s foes.

But all of these things are connected by a common thread: Trump is enraged at being subjected to a system of democratic and institutional constraints, for which he has signaled nothing but absolute, unbridled contempt. The system is pushing back, and he can’t bear it.

On Monday morning, the latest chapter in this tale — Trump’s unsupported accusation that Obama wiretapped his phones — took another turn. Trump’s spokeswoman said on ABC News that Trump does not accept FBI Director James Comey’s claim — which was reported on over the weekend — that no such wiretapping ever happened.

As E.J. Dionne writes, this episode is a “tipping point” in the Trump experiment. Trump leveled the charge based on conservative media. Then, after an internal search for evidence to back it up produced nothing, the White House press secretary called on Congress to investigate it and declared the administration’s work done. While the previous administration did wiretap, the problem is the recklessness and baselessness of Trump’s specific allegations, and the White House’s insistence that the burden of disproving them must fall on others — on Congress and on the FBI. Trump’s allegations must be humored at all costs, simply because he declared them to be true — there can be no admission of error, and worse, the White House has declared itself liberated from the need to even pretend to have evidence to back up even Trump’s most explosive claims.

This is more than disdain for the truth. It represents profound contempt for our democratic and institutional processes. In this sense, it’s only the latest in what has become a broader pattern:

When the media accurately reported on Trump’s inaugural crowd sizes, the White House not only contested this on the substance in a laughably absurd manner. It also accused the press of intentionally diminishing Trump’s crowd count, thus trying to delegitimize the news media’s institutional act of holding Trump accountable to factual reality. 

Trump has tweeted that the media is the “enemy of the American people” and has accused the media of covering up terrorist plots. Stephen K. Bannon has railed against the press as “the opposition party.” Trump gave a recent speech heavily devoted to attacking the media, once again for deliberately and knowingly misleading Americans. All this goes far beyond merely questioning the media’s role as an arbiter of truth. 

After getting elected, Trump continued to repeat the lie that millions voted illegally in the election, undermining faith in American democracy. When the media called out this falsehood, the White House threatened an investigation to prove it true, which hasn’t materialized, in effect using the vow of investigations as nothing more than a tool to obfuscate efforts to hold him accountable. 

After a court blocked Trump’s travel ban, Trump questioned the institutional legitimacy of the “so-called judge” in question. He also cast the stay as a threat to our security, even though the ban has no credible national security rationale, something that has now been demonstrated by leaks from the Department of Homeland Security (exactly the sort of leaking that has Trump in a fury). Senior adviser Stephen Miller flatly declared that the ban would be reintroduced in part to demonstrate that Trump’s national security power “will not be questioned,” thus declaring the explicit goal of sweeping away institutional checks on it. And then the White House delayed introduction of the new ban in order to continue basking in good press from his speech to Congress, thus undercutting its own claim that this is an urgent national security matter. 

Trump continues to hold court at Mar-a-Lago, using the power of the presidency to promote his own resort, whose membership fees sink money into his own pockets. The White House publicly intervened in a business dispute involving Trump’s daughter and even tried to steer customers her way, an act which Kellyanne Conway embellished by cheerfully sticking a rhetorical middle finger in the face of anyone who finds such behavior troubling.[...]

Major sexual harassment scandal in Marine Corp

Washington Post

The Marine Corps is looking into allegations that an unknown number of potential Marines, as well as current and former service members, shared naked and compromising photos of their colleagues on social media, Marine officials said Sunday.

The allegations were first reported by the War Horse and published Saturday through the website Reveal. The author, a Marine veteran and Purple Heart recipient, as well as members of his family, have received numerous death threats since the article was first published. It is unclear how many people are involved in the scandal and how many photos were posted online.

The War Horse’s report focuses on one Facebook group with more than 30,000 members called Marines United. In January, a link to a shared hard drive containing photos of numerous female Marines in various states of undress was posted to the group, according to the War Horse’s report. The hard drive contained images, as well as the names and units of the women pictured. Many of the photos were accompanied by derogatory and harassing comments.[...]

Woytek said she was alerted to the hijacked photos by others on social media and were shown the comments that accompanied them. She said that many of the comments included allusions to sexual assault and rape.

Many of her female colleagues have experienced similar incidents, she said, and added that they been reluctant to speak out for fear of retaliation from the group’s thousands of members. With the War Horse’s report Saturday, Woytek said that she and others “have a voice now.” [...]

“This behavior by Marines and former Marines is degrading, dangerous, and completely unacceptable,” said Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.), the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. “The military men and women who proudly volunteer to serve their country should not have to deal with this kind of reprehensible conduct.

Why the White House defense of Trump wiretap accusation is false

Politifact

President Donald Trump’s White House offered dubious explanations on the Sunday shows to defend Trump’s Twitter accusation that former President Barack Obama wiretapped phones at Trump Tower before the 2016 election.

The president, a spokeswoman said on ABC’s This Week, didn’t come up with the storyline out of thin air. He was echoing reports from "multiple news outlets."

"Everybody acts like President Trump is the one that came up with this idea and just threw it out there," said deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on March 5. "There are multiple news outlets that have reported this."[...]

If the basis of Trump's comment is media reports, he doesn't have a case.

A White House spokesperson sent PolitiFact five articles from the BBC, HeatStreet, the New York Times, the National Review and a transcript from Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier as evidence of Sanders’ claim.

Before we get into those, it’s worth noting that many news outlets have suggested Trump’s remark was inspired by a March 3 post on Breitbart News. The post was not included by Trump’s team as backup, but the Breitbart article links to some of the other reports.

The Breitbart article followed up on comments by Mark Levin on a March 2 segment of his conservative radio show. During the show, Levin claimed Obama’s administration used "police state" tactics in the fall to watch over Trump’s team.

Trump sent his tweet early March 4. As of March 5, he had still not provided evidence.

"How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!" Trump wrote.[...]

The Breitbart article recapped 10 news events of the 2016 campaign that laid the foundation for Obama’s administration to "eavesdrop on the Trump campaign." Among the events included as an example is the Wikileaks release of emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, which the Clinton campaign used to blame "Trump and the Russians.

The Breitbart article also mentions two requests under the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which grants a court the authority to grant (or deny) warrants for electronic surveillance. The reporting about FISA requests is taken from a Nov. 7, 2016, report from the conservative-leaning website called HeatStreet. HeatStreet published an article, it said, based on two unnamed sources.

"The FBI sought, and was granted, a FISA court warrant in October, giving counterintelligence permission to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia," reads a line from the HeatStreet piece.

The story says the FISA warrant was in relation to an investigation to the "Trump campaign, and its alleged links to two banks; SVB Bank and Russia’s Alfa Bank."

Other reports about this FISA requests come from the BBC and the Guardian. (The White House did not send the Guardian over as evidence.) Importantly, these sources do not back up Trump’s accusation that Obama himself ordered the wiretap as part of political sabotage.

On Jan. 12, the BBC reported that lawyers from the National Security Division in the Department of Justice filed applications to the court that handles intelligence matters related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA.

"A lawyer — outside the Department of Justice but familiar with the case — told me that three of Trump's associates were the subject of the inquiry," wrote Paul Wood, a British journalists who wrote the article in first person. The article did not say anything about Trump Tower.

Six months earlier, the Guardian reported that the FBI applied for a warrant to monitor members of Trump’s teams interactions with Russia from the FISA court in June. The story was light on the details. It said the June application was turned down by the court, and briefly mentioned a report that the FBI was granted a warrant in October, but that has yet to be confirmed.

Trump’s team also sent over two articles from the New York Times. These articles are about intelligence probes related to Trump associates and Russian officials. [...]

Trump’s team also cited an article from the National Review as well as a March 3 Fox News interview between host Bret Baier and House Speaker Paul Ryan. The National Review article repeats the same information from HeatStreet. Baier asked Ryan about the report on FISA requests, which Ryan said he had not heard about. To be clear, that isn’t an example of Fox independently confirming the HeatStreet report.

It’s worth noting that Obama's director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, said on NBC’s Meet the Press he was not aware of any wiretaps that Trump alleged. And Obama, through a spokesman, has denied wiretapping Trump Tower. And Obama officials have also said a president cannot unilaterally order a wiretap.

Our ruling

Sanders said "multiple news outlets" have reported that Obama ordered wiretaps on Trump, including high-profile sources such as the New York Times and BBC.

Trump’s team cited multiple reports to back up this claim, but it’s clear only one is at the root of Trump’s claim: a November 2016 blog post based on anonymous sources that has not been corroborated by independent U.S. journalists.

Trump's spokeswoman made it sound as if Trump was merely following a well-documented string of reports, but that is not the case. A few of the reports allude to the White House requesting permission from FISA to eavesdrop on Trump’s administration, but none (minus the anonymously sourced website) definitively said the probes centered on Trump himself or came directly from Obama.

We rate this claim False.

World War Meme - Why postings about Trump's lies are so important

Politico   [This article is about the current problem that it doesn't matter whether a story is true or not - the main thing is to have an impact and fun. This is the post-Truth i.e., Trump philosophy and it needs to be fought even within the frum community.]

Veterans of the Great Meme War brag that they won the election for Trump. Just about everyone else, if they’re aware of these efforts at all, assumes they amounted to little more than entertainment for bored geeks and some unpleasant episodes for the targets of its often racist and sexist harassment campaigns. After all, the idea that a swarm of socially alienated trolls played a meaningful role in a multibillion-dollar presidential campaign by, among other gambits, relentlessly spreading images of a cartoon frog is at least as ridiculous as the idea that a billionaire TV entertainer could win that campaign.

There is no real evidence that memes won the election, but there is little question they changed its tone, especially in the fast-moving and influential currents of social media. The meme battalions created a mass of pro-Trump iconography as powerful as the Obama “Hope” poster and far more adaptable; they relentlessly drew attention to the tawdriest and most sensational accusations against Clinton, forcing mainstream media outlets to address topics—like conspiracy theories about Clinton’s health—that they would otherwise ignore. And they provoked a variety of real-world reactions, from Clinton’s August speech denouncing the alt-right to the Anti-Defamation League’s designation of Pepe as a hate symbol to—after the election—the armed assault on a Washington pizzeria wrongly believed to be hiding sex slaves.

Part of the power of memes has always been their organic, grass-roots quality: They bubble up from the fever swamps of the internet, shrouded in anonymity, as agents of chaos and mockery. But in this election, something seemed to change. They began colliding with a real campaign operation and doing useful work, seemingly always pushing in one direction. Curious about what happened, I tracked down and interviewed a number of veterans of the Great Meme War, along with others who hung out in the same dark corners of the internet and watched it all unfold. It turns out that, as anonymous online pranksters go, they’re surprisingly organized and motivated. It also turns out that the Trump campaign, which spent relatively little on messaging, paid rapt attention to meme culture from the start. They took it seriously, even pushing some memes out to the candidate’s millions of Twitter followers.

Trump’s campaign will not be the last to tap into this subculture. Internet troll Charles Johnson, a self-commissioned general in the Great Meme War with close ties to Trump’s political operation, claimed he has fielded about a dozen post-election phone calls from the Washington area about the political potential of memes. “If you’re trying to win an election and you have a million dollars to spend on political ads or $100,000 to spend on trolling,” he said, “I would advise everyone to spend the hundred thousand on the troll.”

If the soldiers in the Great Meme War are even partly right about their capabilities, then their efforts have profound implications for the future of politics. But before tackling that question, it is worth asking how, in the first place, a community of some of the savviest, most subversive internet users became a hotbed of support for a 70-year-old white billionaire who refers to Apple products as “damn computers and things.” And for that matter, what exactly is a meme, anyway?

The concept of a “meme,” in its broadest sense, has been around for decades. The term was first coined in 1976 by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who defined a meme as “a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation”—essentially, a reproducible bit of the DNA of human culture. He saw the idea expansively; the most effective memes, like religious rituals and catchy melodies, worm their way into people’s brains, spreading across entire societies and shaping human behavior for generations.

The Jesus fish is an ancient meme, and Uncle Sam is an early American meme. The planking fad, in which people lie flat on their fronts in weird places and pose for photographs, is a recent behavioral meme. The term came into popular parlance with the advent of the “internet meme,” usually a photograph with a clever caption that is shared around the Web. Created anonymously, remixed endlessly and shared constantly, the most viral memes seem to materialize out of nowhere.

But the typical internet meme doesn’t exactly come from nowhere. Its very Darwinian life cycle often begins among thousands of other memes on a group of obscure message boards frequented by the internet’s most devoted users, mostly young men, who Photoshop captioned images for their own amusement. The most promising become popular on these boards, as users post their own variations on the theme, and end up crossing over to more mainstream platforms like Reddit and Tumblr, which are used by “normies,” or normal people, and often drive what’s popular on the internet at any given time. From there, the most successful memes start populating platforms that almost everyone uses, like Facebook, and a very select few, like LOLCats and Rickrolling, enter the cultural canon, becoming recognizable even to one’s parents.

The fighters in the Great Meme War took their intimate knowledge of this ecosystem and weaponized it, genetically engineering pro-Trump and anti-Clinton supermemes they designed to gain as much mainstream traction as possible. They juiced the rules on platforms like Reddit and created networks of fake accounts on Twitter to push the memes in front of as many eyeballs as possible as quickly as possible. The staging ground was an anonymous message board called “/pol/”—the “politically incorrect” section of 4Chan, which was founded in 2003 to host discussions about anime and has since evolved into a malignant hive mind with vast influence over online culture. The denizens of /pol/ believe that their efforts memed President Trump into existence, midwifing his presidency from a far-fetched fantasy into our current reality. Memes like “the Trump Train” were popularized by 4Chan, spread to the rest of the Web and then rapidly absorbed into official campaign messaging—sometimes reaching all the way to the candidate himself.[...]

Without a doubt, many participants are genuine Trump supporters. A person close to the Trump campaign introduced me to “Daniel,” a young man who professed to have friends in the White House. A frequent /pol/ and 8Chan poster, he told me he created several fake personas on Reddit and one on Twitter to post anti-Clinton agitprop. “The reason I fought in the meme war is that as Andrew Breitbart said we are at literal war with the left. There is an ideological Cold War going on right now and the victor will determine the fate of Western Civilization,” Daniel wrote in an email.

Other meme warriors simply think there is no greater cosmic joke than electing Trump president. “Most of the people who took part in the Great Meme War hate Trump a lot,” insisted Gregg Housh, a reformed hacker and active 4Chan user who did a stint in federal prison a decade ago and was an early ringleader of Anonymous. (Linking his real-world name to his online activity makes him a “namefag” in the eyes of /pol/, which is populated mostly by “anonfags.” In the world of /pol/, everyone is some sort of fag.)[...]

But its use of memes landed the Trump campaign in some pretty unsavory company. In November 2015, Trump tweeted a virulently racist image titled “USA CRIME STATISTICS ~ 2015” that depicted a menacing black man holding a gun alongside made-up statistics overstating the proportion of murders committed by black Americans. While the source of the chart was traced to a neo-Nazi Twitter account, the image of the gangbanger had been floating around on 4Chan for some time. In July, Trump’s campaign tweeted a picture that had been circulating on 8Chan that superimposed Hillary Clinton’s face on a background of $100 bills with the caption “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” written on a six-sided star that, given the boards’ anti-Semitic proclivities, was almost certainly a Star of David. (The Trump campaign insisted unconvincingly that it was a sheriff’s star.)

Democrats dabbled with memes—the Clinton campaign even built a meme generator that was quickly swarmed by pro-Trump trolls—but they were generally dismissive of these efforts. A former Clinton aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the requirements of a new job, scoffed at the notion that memes played a meaningful role in the campaign. “If you see a Nazi frog glorifying Donald Trump and you’re on the fence and you’re like, ‘OK, now I’m going to vote for Donald Trump,’ you were never going to vote for Hillary Clinton anyways,” said the aide. But the aide conceded that such efforts could have discouraged uncommitted voters from going to the polls, and others on the left view the meme ecosystem as a real asset to Trump.[...]

Like much else on /pol/, it is unclear to what extent posters were trolling and to what extent they genuinely believed they were sleuthing out a child sex ring. “Let’s meme this into reality, it’s too good,” wrote one user on one of the original Pizzagate threads. “It was absolutely a joke and a guy just made it up on the spot,” Housh said. “I was on the thread and people thought it was hilarious and halfway through they were like, ‘How can we get people to take this seriously?’” [...]

Take it seriously people did. Pizzagate quickly supplanted Spirit Cooking as the boards’ closing argument. /Pol/ users combed through Podesta’s emails for other references to pizza and developed an elaborate conspiracy theory positing a Clinton-linked sex ring run out of a D.C. pizzeria owned by Brock’s ex-boyfriend. They created memes and charts and pushed them to broader audiences on The_Donald subreddit. Twitter users with big followings like blogger Mike Cernovich and Pizza Party Ben began tweeting about the theory with the hashtag #PizzaGate.

Trump won the election, and the Chans and The_Donald took their victory laps. But Pizzagate continued to fester, and in December, an impressionable North Carolina man heard about the fake sex ring and began researching it online. Carrying an assault rifle, he stormed the D.C. pizzeria that he believed housed the sex slave ring. Finding only pizza, he surrendered to the police. (“I regret how I handled the situation,” the man told the New York Times from jail.) One other Pizzagate casualty was Michael Flynn Jr., the son of Trump’s since-ousted national security adviser who was fired from the Trump transition team for his role in spreading the bogus story.[...]

Trump’s poor understanding of national security investigations may prove dangerous

NY Daily News

Revealing dangerous paranoia, profound ignorance or both, the President of the United States leveled gravely serious accusations at his predecessor — essentially alleging criminal abuse of power.

That Trump’s claims appear impulsive makes them no less alarming for the republic.

In tweets Saturday morning, Trump asserted that President Obama last year personally ordered Trump Tower wiretaps.

Citing no source, Trump wrote that he “just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory,” calling the former President a “bad (or sick) guy.”

So much for the more presidential, sober Trump who briefly reared his head in a joint address to Congress Tuesday night.

What motivated Trump is, as often, a mystery, but he appears to have been driven by a breathlessly conspiratorial report in, you guessed it, Breitbart News, detailing radio host Mark Levin’s theory that Obama staged a “silent coup” against his successor.

To further elaborate upon the theory is to lend it credibility; no one on Trump’s staff offered up an explanation. Obama, in a statement, flatly rejected Trump’s allegation.

Indeed, a senior U.S. official in a position to know told NBC News’ Pete Williams that Trump’s charges had no merit, and that the President apparently did not consult with others in the government who were in a position to verify, correct or reject the claim.

At the very least, Trump is taking leaps that reveal a profound, perhaps willful failure to understand how national security investigations work.[...]

Professional investigators in the executive branch request a warrant; an independent judge, serving a seven-year term, must then approve it. Foreign surveillance warrants are triggered by probable cause that a particular individual committed a serious crime or acted as an agent of a foreign power.

And tapping a political candidate for political purposes is expressly forbidden.

A President of the United States should know all this. If he doesn’t, he has dozens of people ready, willing and paid to educate him.

Is Trump a Populist Authoritarian?

Why Charles Schumer meeting Vladimir Putin doesn’t give Trump & Co. a pass

Washington Post

To hear President Trump tell it, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other Trump allies are under fire for committing no greater sin than sitting down with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak.

“Just out,” Trump tweeted Saturday morning, “The same Russian Ambassador that met Jeff Sessions visited the Obama White House 22 times, and 4 times last year alone.” The implication? How could it be bad that Sessions met with the ambassador when Barack Obama’s White House had done the same?

e employed a similar strategy in lashing out at Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). He posted a photo of Schumer with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Pelosi with former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev several years ago. Pelosi had denied having met Kislyak but, there he was, across the table from her in that photo.

Fox News and other conservative outlets joined the fun.

There are certainly any number of people in the government who have met with Kislyak at some point in time. This, after all, is his job: He acts as liaison between the Russian government and our own. And that’s why it’s simple to dig up old photos of Kislyak or other Russian leaders with prominent elected officials.

But those photos, and those interactions, are entirely beside the point.[...]

The two questions at issue with Sessions are, first, why he told the Senate that he didn’t have communication with the Russians despite having met Kislyak twice last year and, second, if those meetings involved any discussion of the Trump campaign. That campaign, as you’re likely aware, has been the subject of scrutiny from intelligence officials who believe that Russia was trying to sway the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. The scrutiny has reportedly included monitoring of Trump allies who were involved in the campaign.

Sessions isn’t just Trump’s attorney general. He was one of the earliest elected officials to endorse Trump, and he served in a senior advisory position to Trump beginning in February of last year. There’s a difference between Sessions meeting with Kislyak last year and, say, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson having a professional relationship with Putin. If Sessions met Kislyak during the campaign, and Russia was hoping to ensure that Sessions’s chosen candidate won, that’s significant — particularly if Sessions then withheld information about that meeting. And particularly when he didn’t mention it while under oath.

That’s simply not at all comparable to Schumer meeting Putin a decade ago, or even Pelosi not remembering having met Kislyak in 2010.

For it to be comparable, the following would need to be the case:

Schumer or Pelosi would have had to have been close advisers to the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Those meetings would have had to have occurred in 2016, during the campaign.
U.S. intelligence officials would have had to have thought that the interference Russia intended during that campaign was to see Clinton, not Trump, victorious.
Schumer or Pelosi would have to have offered sworn testimony denying that those meetings in Step 2 took place.
That’s the point at which it becomes comparable.

Trump has two skills that he has deployed to tremendous effect over the past 18 months. The first is that he’s adept at what has been called whattaboutism — bringing up anecdotal they-did-it-too examples to counteract critiques. The second is that he’s a master of social media, and has a large base of support that’s willing to echo the specious analogies he presents.

This isn’t really goalpost-moving so much as it is arguing that everyone’s really playing soccer. That Sessions met with Kislyak doesn’t prove that anything nefarious happened or that the Trump campaign was complicit in Russian interference in the election. But an old photo of Schumer and Putin eating doughnuts doesn’t prove that everything’s copacetic, either.

Trump increasing paranoid and citing no evidence, accuses Obama of ‘Nixon/Watergate’ plot to wiretap Trump Tower

Washington Post

President Trump on Saturday angrily accused former president Barack Obama of orchestrating a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap the phones at his Trump Tower headquarters last fall in the run-up to the election.

While citing no evidence to support his explosive allegation, Trump said in a series of four tweets sent Saturday morning that Obama was “wire tapping” his New York offices before the election in a move he compared to McCarthyism. “Bad (or sick) guy!” he said of his predecessor, adding that the surveillance resulted in “nothing found.”

Trump offered no citations nor did he point to any credible news report to back up his accusation, but he may have been referring to commentary on Breitbart and conservative talk radio suggesting that Obama and his administration used “police state” tactics last fall to monitor the Trump team. The Breitbart story, published Friday, has been circulating among Trump's senior staff, according to a White House official who described it as a useful catalogue of the Obama administration's activities.

Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for Obama, said in a statement early Saturday afternoon: “A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”

Officials at the FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment.[...]