We now know that from 2014 through 2016 the FBI had obtained a FISA warrant to surveil Paul Manafort because of his work for the Russia-aligned leader of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and then for his party once he went into exile. They started again at some point in the second half of 2016. The second run was tied to the election. This is in addition to the FISA warrant monitoring Carter Page and the eavesdropping on the Russian Ambassador (fairly standard) which picked up conversations the Ambassador had with Michael Flynn.
That’s a lot of surveillance. But there’s one thing I’ve noticed over recent months. When Hillary Clinton is the subject of an FBI probe, that’s a problem for her. When members of President Trump’s entourage are being investigated by the FBI or surveilled by the FBI that … well, it turns out that’s a problem for the FBI.
There appears to be an asymmetry at work.
Now The Wall Street Journal is sounding the alarm about the need to find out how and why the FBI ‘meddled’ in the 2016 election.
The Journal OpEd page was the lie factory that did as much as any publication in America to manufacture the Whitewater scandal and various associated scandals that grew out of it. The paper’s editorial page has long been the country’s most thoroughly tendentious and dishonest major oped page. But this is worth noting. The Journal had a pretty good run of relative independence after Rupert Murdoch purchased the paper a decade ago. But there’s been a lot of evidence over the last year that the politics and right wing ideology which has long dominated the OpEd page is now getting traction in the news pages as well. That’s too bad. But outside the OpEd page, the Journal was long one of the country’s finest papers.
