> Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) also asked for consent to pass legislation that would require candidates, campaign officials and their family members to notify the FBI of assistance offers from foreign governments.

> McConnell also objected to that bill.

Make up your own mind.

Which would make it trivial to set up a candidate so that he/she could be investigated (“legally”!) by the FBI under the guise of “protecting democracy”. I’m old enough to remember when Democrats didn’t want to empower the FBI/CIA/etc any further for fear of a police state.

I might be in the minority on this issue, but I personally think it is reasonable for a political candidate to be investigated prior to running for office once they publicly announce that they are running. Tax returns, felonies, misdemeanors, credit reports, the whole kit and kaboodle. There are professions where interview candidates already go through varying levels of background checks, and I've gone through a few myself. Running for political office is very much a personal choice, and obtaining that office unlocks varying amounts of power and control over the lives of fellow citizens. If the candidate runs through that investigative gauntlet and comes out clean, then the corresponding voters have a much better idea of who is on the election night ticket.

If this is real, there would be a corresponding amendment with actual text of proposed legislation.

That's the full bill, not the claimed amendment.

100% chance it wasn't the only thing in that bill. It also opens up any candidate, democratic or republican, to FISA surveillance down the line, which is something that I can guarantee will be abused at some point. In fact it already _was_ abused against Trump. FISA warrants to spy on his campaign were obtained by misleading the FISA court with what we now know was fake evidence. There's also a strong possibility that McConell wants voter ID, which is something the Democrats are strangely reluctant to introduce even though it's quite a popular thing to require: Mexico, for instance, does have voter ID.

I'm hypothesizing here, I haven't read the bill, but then neither have you, so you're "making up your own mind" based on a shallow regurgitation of democrat talking points and without any critical thinking.

I have read the bill.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s1247/text

It sounds reasonable to me.

Would the Clinton campaign have to report its (indirect) $1.02M payment for the Steele (who, let's not forget, is a foreign agent) "dossier" under this law? If not, it's not worth the paper it's written on.

I'm not a lawyer but upon cursory reading it looks like it would not, unless you were solicited by a foreign agent in the first place. If you go out and have your PAC hire Perkins Coie to pay for kompromat without explicit solicitation, it'd seem you don't have to report it.

Then there's a question of what happens after you report. Is your campaign then put under counterintelligence surveillance? How difficult is it to direct a foreign agent to solicit a payment from e.g. a dem campaign to lawfully trigger this? This is something that doesn't even have to be done by a campaign, some idiot from 4-chan could do it.

I am not sure tbh, I don't know enough about the situation you speak of. The text of the amendment is pretty straightforward though, I would give it a read and it should be pretty clear what situations it would apply to!

Section 2 Reporting to the FEC b) Reporting meetings with foreign governments or their agents doesn't specify who had to have initiated the meeting, only that a meeting took place.

>In fact it already _was_ abused against Trump. FISA warrants to spy on his campaign were obtained by misleading the FISA court with what we now know was fake evidence.

Source? Carter Page had a FISA warrant against him after he left the Trump campaign. And none of it was based on fake evidence. Sounds like you're just regurgitating Republican and Fox News talking points without any critical thinking.

>There's also a strong possibility that McConell wants voter ID, which is something the Democrats are strangely reluctant to introduce even though it's quite a popular thing to require

Republicans are strangely against giving voting IDs or state IDs for free to low income people. They also restrict early voting to make poor people choose between losing pay and voting, and are also against making election day a national holiday. They are also on record stating that the voter ID laws will help them win.

>Republicans are strangely against giving voting IDs or state IDs for free to low income people. They also restrict early voting to make poor people choose between losing pay and voting, and are also against making election day a national holiday. They are also on record stating that the voter ID laws will help them win.

In the United States, we have 50 sovereign states that are responsible for election systems/laws. Distributing power was a key feature in the founding of the USA, and shitting on the design in order meet a goal (I personally happen to appreciate) does not justify the means.

Mis-characterizing your opponent's argument is not helpful.

I seem to recall the voter ID laws that Democrats at the state level worked so hard to kill did include free ID provisions for low income and disadvantaged. Republicans certainly aren't against it.

There's a reason Democrats don't like voter ID laws:

https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/teachinger/glossary/tammany-h...

https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2016/10/27/2-investigators-chic...

Dead voters (who magically cast ballots) and social strong-arming and vote-buying like Tammany Hall (over two different periods in New York's history) all tend to vote Democrat.

We've had to ask you repeatedly to stop breaking the site guidelines. If you keep doing it we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to do that, so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended?

The FBI has been filing inaccurate FISA warrants for nearly two decades (the article on the Hill refers to incidents dating back to 2002/2003). Not really surprising in the post-9/11 era, where procedural abuses and law-enforcement power creep are tolerated if the justification is to "catch terrorists".

I didn't read anything suggesting that the FBI abused FISA warrants specifically against Trump people.

Knowingly? Against presidential campaigns? While setting up "insurance policy" in case he gets elected? The "Russian collusion" hoax was invented the day after Clinton lost. It has served democrats well, but it's now time to retire those talking points and come up with some new ones.

This is the same FBI that dealt a devastating blow to Clinton's campaign with the re-opening (and later re-closing, again with no charges) of the emails investigation shortly before the election.

Are you really suggesting that right after the election they "turned around" and started undermining the Trump presidency? What kind of sense does it make?

That "devastating blow" was an undesired side effect.

By reopening the investigation, the FBI was able to seize control of Anthony Weiner's laptop, which was being held by the NYPD.

Had info about that been released, as it was going to be, it would have been immediately devastating. Reopening the investigation must have seemed less harmful to Clinton.

What?

The problem was not the re-opening of the investigation (which the FBI could've done without informing or asking anyone), it was the fact that Comey decided on his own to inform the public (via congress, and against established department policy) that the investigation was being re-opened.

Weiner laptop was seized because of the underage sexting, what makes you think that this information would have been immediately devastating for Clinton? Weiner's sexcapades were well known before that, it was just another chapter in that saga.

Sorry but what you are implying just does not make any logical sense.

The laptop was seized due to his sexcapades, then discovered to have much more interesting data.

Anthony Weiner's wife is Huma Abedin. She was deputy chief of staff to Clinton. Somehow, his laptop had come to contain lots of classified emails to/from Clinton. It is simply not believable that those emails were adequately studied in the available time. This has even been admitted in responses to FOIA requests, with the government claiming in court that more time is needed.

> The laptop was seized due to his sexcapades, then discovered to have much more interesting data. > Anthony Weiner's wife is Huma Abedin. She was deputy chief of staff to Clinton. Somehow, his laptop had come to contain lots of classified emails to/from Clinton.

I am aware of the facts (and Abedin "was" his wife). The FBI eventually established that the "new" emails were either personal or duplicate of already known emails.

You seem to be implying (correct me if I am wrong) that:

- Abedin was using Weiner's laptop to write the most "damaging" and "interesting" emails to Clinton,

- somehow, the emails sent to/from Weiner's laptop escaped months of extensive investigations by the FBI,

- somehow, the emails got erased from everywhere else apart from from Weiner's laptop and could be found only there (that's not how email works),

- somehow, in their criminal conspiracy, Clinton/Abedin forgot that Abedin had 650'000 (according to official reports) emails from the Clinton campaign on her husband's laptop - they erased all the damaging information from everywhere else but somehow forgot Wiener's computer (which she must have used extensively to accumulate that number of messages),

- 10 days of "around the clock" work by FBI agents couldn't have possibly established that most of 650k message where either "personal or duplicative" in nature[0].

Sorry, but that's just way too much mental gymnastic for my taste.

Again, the idea that Comey's public re-opening of the official investigation was somehow less damaging, from the point of view of public perception, than unsupported and unsubstantiated leaks from NYPD just does not hold water.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/fbi-director-comey-s...

>Knowingly? Against presidential campaigns?

How many times does one have to repeat before its clear to you Trump campaign wasn't spied on?

Carter Page left the Trump Campaign by the time there was a FISA warrant against him.

The Trump campaign was not spied on.

During the investigation into the Trump campaign, they didn’t have other warrants?