re: Lets Talk Politics

It's a sort of horrific human centipede where the original claim comes from anonymous sources as told by Louise Mensch of Heat Street. Mensch is, bar none, the world's dumbest reporter, she makes Kurt Eichenwald and Chuck Johnson look like Woodward and Bernstein. It's not that she's malevolent, she's just so fricking dumb I wouldn't trust her to get any of the details right. Then the game of telephone goes through National Review, Breitbart, and Trump's Twitter.

I think the odds that the staff with explicit links to Russians like Paul Manafort were tapped is approximately 100%. Since Paul Manafort lives and works out of Trump Tower it's easy to see how this sort of thing mutates from "The IC tapped Manafort in Trump Tower" to "Obama tapped Trump." But Comey doesn't need Obama's blessing to do that kind of thing.

I also don't think people realize how many of these leaks are coming from non-American sources. I'm sure the Western European intel agencies are doing their own investigation since Trump being in hock to Russia would be a big deal to them. And remember we have the FVEY deal with the other Anglo countries specifically as a wink-wink workaround for domestic spying. I don't like that arrangement, and I've complained about it before in Snowden/SIGINT threads, but it's legal (and Trump is so horrific on civil liberties I won't shed a tear if he gets burned).