The Democrats have lost Rolling Stone on the FBI's war on Trump

To be honest I never expected to see truth in Rolling Stone magazine; especially truth about Trump.

But in a breathtakingly honest piece by Matt Taibbi the Rolling Stone declares that Nunes was right and Schiff was wrong about the whole FBI investigation into Trump.

Taibbi leads off with:

"If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was."

His point is that while the report says it didn't find any political bias it did find example after example of the FBI breaking the rules and always in a way that would hurt Trump.  For example the report cites multiple examples of the FBI withholding evidence from the FISA court which would have led the Court to stop approving the warrants to spy on Trump related individuals.

The report says that an FBI agent deliberately distorted an email to conceal the fact that the person the FBI was claiming might be colluding with Russia was in fact a source for the CIA who had provided valuable intelligence on Russians who had approached him asking him to spy for Russia.

"Officials on the “Crossfire Hurricane” Trump-Russia investigators went to extraordinary, almost comical lengths to seek surveillance authority of figures like Trump aide Carter Page. In one episode, an FBI attorney inserted the words “not a source” in an email he’d received from another government agency. This disguised the fact that Page had been an informant for that agency, and had dutifully told the government in real time about being approached by Russian intelligence. The attorney then passed on the email to an FBI supervisory special agent, who signed a FISA warrant application on Page that held those Russian contacts against Page, without disclosing his informant role."

The fact that the IG report doesn't say that such a deliberate distortion is sign of a political bias shows us that we can't count on the IG report, for whatever reason, to be accurate vis a vis allegations of bias.

Taibbi goes on to say that the media's attacks on the Nunes memo about the whole investigation of alleged collusion were all wrong; just as wrong as their praise for Schiff's memo which we now know was full of lies.

He points out that the IG report says that the principle, effectively only source, that the FBI used to justify turning the entire power of the US spying community against the Republican presidential campaign was a dossier compiled by a Brit, paid for by Hillary, and based on uncorroborated rumors by anonymous sources in Russia.

He also points out that not only didn't the FBI try and confirm the dossiers content; they knew that much of it was made up and didn't mention it to the FISA court.

"At the time the FBI submitted its first FISA application, Horowitz writes, it had “corroborated limited information in Steele’s election reporting, and most of that was publicly available information.” Horowitz says of Steele’s reports: “The CIA viewed it as ‘internet rumor.’”

Worse (and this part of the story should be tattooed on the heads of Russia truthers), the FBI’s interviews of Steele’s sources revealed Steele embellished the most explosive parts of his report.

The “pee tape” story, which inspired countless grave headlines (see this chin-scratching New York Times history of Russian “sexual blackmail”) and plunged the Trump presidency into crisis before it began, was, this source said, based a “conversation that [he/she] had over beers,” with the sexual allegations made… in “jest”!

Steele in his report said the story had been “confirmed” by senior, Western hotel staff, but the actual source said it was all “rumor and speculation,” never confirmed. In fact, charged by Steele to find corroboration, the source could not: corroboration was “zero,” writes Horowitz."

Taibbi concludes by pointing out that because of the FBI's failures the entire news cycle of the US was consumed for two years with a Big Lie about Trump colluding with Russia:

"The impact was greater than just securing a warrant to monitor Page. More significant were the years of headlines that grew out of this process, beginning with the leaking of the meeting with Trump about Steele’s blackmail allegations, the insertion of Steele’s conclusions in the Intelligence Assessment about Russian interference, and the leak of news about the approval of the Page FISA warrant.

As a result, a “well-developed conspiracy” theory based on a report that Comey described as “salacious and unverified material that a responsible journalist wouldn’t report without corroborating,” became the driving news story in a superpower nation for two years. Even the New York Times, which published a lot of these stories, is in the wake of the Horowitz report noting Steele’s role in “unleashing a flood of speculation in the news media about the new president’s relationship with Russia.”

No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed."

When the Rolling Stone says that Trump has been right and the media and Democrats have been wrong for three years it's clear that the wall of resistance that has been built by Democrats and dishonest media figures to keep we the people from seeing the truth is starting to break down.

When the Rolling Stone defends Nunes and condemns the FBI and Schiff that's a big deal.

Not all people who favor more welfare, gay marriage, and abortion are dishonest and don't care if they're lied to.  We have to remember that when working to convince people to vote for Trump and Republicans in 2020.

Most Democrat voters aren't dishonest monsters. Rather they're people who have been lied to about everything.  Like most people when they find out that they've been lied to they won't be happy about it.

When they see that the choice in 2020 isn't between Trump and reasonable honest Democrats but between Trump and fascist leaning Democrat politicians who are willing to weaponize the tools designed to protect us from terrorists for use against their political opponents there's a good chance that many Democrat voters will chose democracy over the Democrat party.