{"id":33465,"date":"2018-05-21T11:01:43","date_gmt":"2018-05-21T15:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=33465"},"modified":"2018-05-21T11:01:43","modified_gmt":"2018-05-21T15:01:43","slug":"sometimes-the-media-spin-is-simply-pathetic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=33465","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes The Media Spin Is Simply Pathetic"},"content":{"rendered":"

On May 10, The Gateway Pundit<\/a> quoted a Wall Street Journal article by Kimberley Strassel (The Wall Street Journal article is not linked because it is behind the subscriber wall):<\/p>\n

Thanks to the Washington Post\u2019s unnamed law-enforcement leakers, we know Mr. Nunes\u2019s request deals with a \u201ctop secret intelligence source\u201d of the FBI and CIA, who is a U.S. citizen and who was involved in the Russia collusion probe. When government agencies refer to sources, they mean people who appear to be average citizens but use their profession or contacts to spy for the agency. Ergo, we might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This would amount to spying, and it is hugely disconcerting. It would also be a major escalation from the electronic surveillance we already knew about, which was bad enough. Obama political appointees rampantly \u201cunmasked\u201d Trump campaign officials to monitor their conversations, while the FBI played dirty with its surveillance warrant against Carter Page, failing to tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that its supporting information came from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Now we find it may have also been rolling out human intelligence, John Le Carr\u00e9 style, to infiltrate the Trump campaign.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We now know the identity of this person, and it has been confirmed that he was in the Trump campaign working for the FBI. So how does the media spin this?<\/p>\n

On Friday, The Washington Post<\/a> reported:<\/p>\n

…But Trump and his backers are wrong about what it means that the FBI reportedly was using a confidential source<\/a> to gather information early in its investigation of possible campaign ties to Russia. The investigation started out as a counterintelligence probe, not a criminal one. And relying on a covert source rather than a more intrusive method of gathering information suggests that the FBI may have been acting cautiously \u2014 perhaps too cautiously \u2014 to protect the campaign, not undermine it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a former FBI counterintelligence agent, I know what Trump apparently does not: Counterintelligence investigations have a different purpose than their criminal counterparts. Rather than trying to find evidence of a crime, the FBI\u2019s counterintelligence goal is to identify, monitor and neutralize foreign intelligence activity in the United States. In short, this entails identifying foreign intelligence officers and their network of agents; uncovering their motives and methods; and ultimately rendering their operations ineffective \u2014 either by clandestinely thwarting them (say, by feeding back misinformation or \u201cflipping\u201d their sources into double agents) or by exposing them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Was there an FBI spy in the Hillary Clinton campaign to make sure the Russians did not influence the campaign?<\/p>\n

If American voters fall for this spin, we probably do deserve to lose our republic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On May 10, The Gateway Pundit quoted a Wall Street Journal article by Kimberley Strassel (The Wall Street Journal article is not linked because it is behind the subscriber wall): Thanks to the Washington Post\u2019s unnamed law-enforcement leakers, we know … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9245,790,2340,7592,4050,1083,8401,8367,11114],"class_list":["post-33465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-clinton-campaign","tag-fbi","tag-gateway-pundit","tag-kimberley-strassel","tag-media-spin","tag-russia","tag-the-wall-street-journal","tag-the-washington-post","tag-trump-campaign"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33465"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33466,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33465\/revisions\/33466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}