Spy vs Spy

gee, the deep state/FBI/CIA/NSA etc etc did "wiretap" Trumpie boy. Who wudda thot?

Anne Althouse discusses and parses the issue from a legal standpoint and links to the document that has resulted in the Democratic party with their knickers in a knot. They are saying releasing this information will result in a disaster, because it will shame those white hat spies at the FBI/CIA/whatever.

and one WAPO columnist essentially said don't shame the FBI by exposing their corruption or they will get back at you...

WTF? does he mean don't persecute the FBI for doing their job, or does he mean if you expose wrongdoing you are toast?

Guess they need to refilm The Post, when whistle-blowing on government shenanigans was considered a good thing.

I am so old that I remember when the Democrats were heroic for exposing the uberkill spying by the spooks at the CIA etc.

A 2015 article from the Brookings site:

Chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-ID), the committee held a series of hearings and published 14 reports as it investigated the legality of intelligence operations by the CIA, NSA, and FBI, including attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, spying on Martin Luther King, Jr., and monitoring the political activities of other U.S. citizens. Today, the reforms put in place following the Church Committee hearings are up for discussion in the wake of the Edward Snowden intelligence leaks and the revelation of how much data the government, especially the NSA, was collecting on U.S. citizens.
Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Stuart Taylor, Jr. detailed the history of U.S. government surveillance programs, and the Church Committee’s response, in his Brookings Essay, “The Big Snoop: Life, liberty, and the Pursuit of Terrorists,” 

so is Snowdon a bad guy (he is in Russia today so he won't get arrested) or a good guy?

Of course, the Church reforms are blamed for the US not knowing about the 911 plot, but hey, everyone in the Philippines knew they were discussing this years earlier, after our spies picked up these bozos who at the time were planning to kill the Pope, but were foiled when their hot plate caused a fire. (we also knew rumors about the Philippine link to the OKC bombing but that's another story that is probably just a conspiracy theory,)

But never mind. But 911 did make the public more sympathetic to the need to spy on people. Again from the Brookings paper.

After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, attitudes toward government surveillance changed.

“The emergence of this new menace to America and its allies,” Taylor wrote in his essay, “brought an upsurge in political and public support for aggressive surveillance of potential terrorists, and a muting of the concerns that had arisen in the 1970s about the past sins and excessive zeal of U.S. intelligence agencies.”

so there you have it. Trumpie boy was a potential terrorist working for the evil Russians, so he and his minions deserved to be spied on.

and if you believe that spying on Trumpie was wrong, then you are wrong.

Uh it's one thing to spy on innocent civilians who happen to be friends with anti war protesters in the 1970's, (been there, done that, took the guy spying on us a cup of coffee).

but it's another thing to use information from the political party in power to use the powers of the intelligence community to get dirt on their political opponent.

Wasn't that what Watergate was about?