What does the future hold for Donald Trump? - threadbans in OP

The report outlines at least 17 “significant errors or omissions” in FISA surveillance applications for Trump campaign aide Carter Page, but does not claim that intentional misconduct occurred.

These errors were so significant that IG Horowitz’s report launched an internal Department of Justice audit into the way the FBI applies for warrants to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens.

It was the release of some of that stolen material by WikiLeaks beginning on July 22, 2016, that triggered the Australian government’s outreach, in fact, as Durham himself notes. That release triggered its concerns about what Papadopoulos had said … but the FBI was overreacting by launching an investigation?

Durham’s report focuses on other aspects of the Russia probe, too. There’s a lengthy look at the dossier of reports compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, a packet of material that’s been thoroughly adjudicated and which was elevated as dubious in Horowitz’s 2019 report.

Durham also considers what he calls “the Clinton Plan,” a theory that has been particularly popular on the political right over the past few years. It centers on something the intelligence community learned “during the summer of 2016”: It had picked up Russian intelligence claiming that Clinton had approved a plan to try to link Trump to Russian interference efforts. In other words, to suggest that Trump was colluding with Russia.

For many of those ideologically sympathetic to Durham, this is all the needed proof. Clinton was planning to imply collusion just as collusion was implied? What more do you need?

We can start with the genesis of the rumor. It originated with the Russians themselves, with Durham admitting that he could not determine “the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”

Then there’s the timeline. The point at which the government picked up this information is unclear, but Durham describes a meeting between senior officials and President Barack Obama on July 28 when the subject is raised, suggesting that the information was received not long before. By this point, you’ll recall, all of the aforementioned factors were already in play: Trump asking the Russians to hack, his hiring Manafort, Page’s Moscow visit, the hack of the DNC and release of material from it, the Australians getting their hackles up.

If Hillary Clinton was behind the plan to link Trump to Russia, she had a lot of very unexpected allies in doing so.

This — that Durham picks out isolated trees as suspicious in an effort to obscure the forest — is the central flaw of his investigation. It has always been the central flaw.

I expected exactly what transpired on the thread, the usual apologists/propagandists trying to deflect and bury a damaging damning report.