US taxpayer funded FBI and Foreign Intelligence Court worked together for almost a year to influence 2016 US election and its aftermath, Oct. 2016-Oct. 2017. Incredibly, a Yahoo News article was used to obtain Court warrant. FBI knew Democrat campaign operative was source of Yahoo article: FBI cited Democrat operative Steele to corroborate Democrat operative Steele. FBI didn't mention in 3 spy court renewals that it was still working with Steele-Wall St. Journal Editorial Board, 2/2/18

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FISA warrant was in effect for almost a year beginning Oct. 21, 2016 through Oct. 2017. Initial warrant was renewed 3 times. Total of 4 warrants at 90 days each. "Former FBI director James Comey signed one of the three renewal applications on behalf of the FBI, and McCabe signed one. Then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, then-acting-DAG Dana Beonte, and DAG Rod Rosenstein each signed at least one or more of these renewal applications on behalf of the DOJ." 

Feb. 2, 2018, "A Reckoning for the FBI," Wall St. Journal Editorial Board (Feb. 3 print ed.)

"The House memo reveals disturbing facts about the misuse of FISA."

"Now we know why the FBI tried so hard to block release of the House Intelligence Committee memo. And why Democrats and the media want to change the subject to Republican motivations. The four-page memo released Friday reports disturbing facts about how the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court appear to have been used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath. 

The White House declassified the memo Friday, and you don’t have to be a civil libertarian to be shocked by the details. The memo confirms that the FBI and Justice Department on Oct. 21, 2016 obtained a FISA order to surveil Carter Page, an American citizen who was a relatively minor volunteer adviser to the Trump presidential campaign.

The memo says an “essential” part of the FISA application was the “dossier” assembled by former British spy Christopher Steele and the research firm Fusion GPS that was hired by a law firm attached to the Clinton campaign. The memo adds that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told the committee in December 2017 that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought” without the dossier.

This is troubling enough, but the memo also discloses that the FBI failed to inform the FISA court that the Clinton campaign had funded the dossier. The memo says the FBI supported its FISA application by “extensively” citing a September 2016 article in Yahoo News that contained allegations against Mr. Page. But the FBI failed to tell the court that Mr. Steele and Fusion were the main sources for that Yahoo article. 

In essence the FBI was citing Mr. Steele to corroborate Mr. Steele.

Unlike a normal court, FISA doesn’t have competing pleaders. The FBI and Justice appear ex parte as applicants, and thus the judges depend on candor from both. Yet the FBI never informed the court that Mr. Steele was in effect working for the Clinton campaign. The FBI retained Mr. Steele as a source, and in October 2016 he talked to Mother Jones magazine without authorization about the FBI investigation and his dossier alleging collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. The FBI then fired Mr. Steele, but it never told the FISA judges about that either. Nor did it tell the court any of this as it sought three subsequent renewals of the order on Mr. Page.

We don’t know the political motives of the FBI and Justice officials, but the facts are damaging enough. The FBI in essence let itself and the FISA court be used to promote a major theme of the Clinton campaign. Mr. Steele and Fusion then leaked the fact of the investigation to friendly reporters to try to defeat Mr. Trump before the election. And afterward they continued to leak all this to the press to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s victory.

No matter its motives, the FBI became a tool of anti-Trump political actors. This is unacceptable in a democracy and ought to alarm anyone who wants the FBI to be a nonpartisan enforcer of the law.

We also know the FBI wasn’t straight with Congress, as it hid most of these facts from investigators in a briefing on the dossier in January 2017. The FBI did not tell Congress about Mr. Steele’s connection to the Clinton campaign, and the House had to issue subpoenas for Fusion bank records to discover the truth. Nor did the FBI tell investigators that it continued receiving information from Mr. Steele and Fusion even after it had terminated him. The memo says the bureau’s intermediary was Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, incredibly, worked for Fusion
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Democrats are howling that the memo, produced by Republican staff, is misleading and leaves out essential details. They are producing their own summary of the evidence, and by all means let’s see that too. President Trump should declassify it promptly, along with Senator Chuck Grassley’s referral for criminal investigation of Mr. Steele. But note that Democrats aren’t challenging the core facts that the FBI used the dossier to gain a FISA order or the bureau’s lack of disclosure to the FISA judges.

The details of Friday’s memo also rebut most of the criticisms of its release. The details betray no intelligence sources and methods. As to the claim that the release tarnishes the FBI and FISA court, exposing abuses is the essence of accountability in a democracy.

Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes is doing a service by forcing these facts into the public domain where the American people can examine them, hold people accountable, and then Congress can determine how to prevent them in the future. The U.S. has weathered institutional crises before—Iran-Contra, the 9/11 intelligence failure, even Senator Dianne Feinstein’s campaign against the CIA and enhanced interrogation.

The other political misdirection is that the memo is designed to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into possible Trump collusion with Russia. We doubt Mr. Mueller will be deterred by any of this. The question of FISA abuse is independent of Mr. Mueller’s work, and one that Congress takes up amid a larger debate about surveillance and national security. Mr. Trump would do well to knock off the tweets lambasting the Mueller probe, and let House and Senate Republicans focus public attention on these FISA abuses.
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If all of this is damaging to the reputation of the FBI and Justice Department, then that damage is self-inflicted. We recognize the need for the FBI to sometimes spy on Americans to keep the country safe, but this is a power that should never be abused. Its apparent misuse during the presidential campaign needs to be fully investigated. 

Toward that end, the public should see more of the documents that are behind the competing intelligence memos to judge who is telling the truth. Mr. Trump and the White House should consider the remedy of radical transparency."


"Appeared in the February 3, 2018, print edition." 



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Contrary to assurances from intel agency leaders and Obama admin., FISA Court is unable to oversee government spy agencies, must rely on government to self-report violations-Washington Post, 8/15/2013

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FISA Court Judge: Contrary to assurances, no oversight exists for US spy operations. NSA oversteps legal authority thousands of times each year-Washington Post 

August 15, 2013, "Court: Ability to police U.S. spying program limited," Washington Post, Carol Leonnig 

"The leader of the secret court [FISA] that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the government’s vast spying programs said that its ability to do so is limited and that it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans. 

The chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often the government’s surveillance breaks the court’s rules that aim to protect Americans’ privacy. Without taking drastic steps, it also cannot check the veracity of the government’s assertions that the violations its staff members report are unintentional mistakes.

“The FISC is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court,” its chief, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, said in a written statement to The Washington Post. 

“The FISC does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance, and in that respect the FISC is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders.” 

Walton’s comments came in response to internal government records obtained by The Post showing that National Security Agency staff members in Washington overstepped their authority on spy programs thousands of times per year. The records also show that the number of violations has been on the rise.

The court’s description of its practical limitations contrasts with repeated assurances from the Obama administration and intelligence agency leaders that the court provides central checks and balances on the government’s broad spying efforts."...

............ 

Added: Six weeks after the above article was written, ownership of the Washington Post changed hands: 

10/1/2013, "Washington Post closes sale to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos," Washington Post, Paul Farhi





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Hundreds of FBI rule violations on Comey's watch per declassified FISA ruling. FBI admitted to FISA judge illegally sharing raw intelligence about Americans with unauthorized third parties. FBI has access to NSA data collected without a warrant. FBI 'self-policing' doesn't work per 2015 IG-May 26, 2017 report

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"Section 702 of the Foreign Surveillance Act, last updated by Congress in 2008, allowed the NSA to share with the FBI spy data collected without a warrant that includes the communications of Americans with “foreign targets.”" ................................ 

May 26, 2017, "Declassified memos show FBI illegally shared spy data on Americans with private parties," Circa.com, John Solomon and Sara Carter

"The FBI has illegally shared raw intelligence about Americans with unauthorized third parties and violated other constitutional privacy protections, according to newly declassified government documents that undercut the bureau’s public assurances about how carefully it handles warrantless spy data to avoid abuses or leaks.... 
..........
Then-FBI Director James Comey unequivocally told lawmakers his agency used sensitive espionage data gathered about Americans without a warrant only when it was “lawfully collected, carefully overseen and checked.”

Once-top secret U.S. intelligence community memos reviewed by Circa tell a different story, citing instances of “disregard” for rules, inadequate training and “deficient” oversight and even one case of deliberately sharing spy data with a forbidden party.

For instance, a ruling declassified this month by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) chronicles nearly 10 pages listing hundreds of violations of the FBI’s privacy-protecting minimization rules that occurred on Comey’s watch.

The behavior the FBI admitted to a FISA judge just last month [April 2017] ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight the bureau promised was in place years ago.

The court also opined aloud that it fears the violations are more extensive than already disclosed. 

“The Court is nonetheless concerned about the FBI’s apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI is engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported,” the April 2017 ruling declared.

The court isn’t the only oversight body to disclose recent concerns that the FBI’s voluntary system for policing its behavior and self-disclosing mistakes hasn’t been working.

The Justice Department inspector general’s office declassified a report in 2015 that reveals the internal watchdog had concerns as early as 2012 that the FBI was submitting ‘deficient” reports indicating it had a clean record complying with spy data gathered on Americans without a warrant.

The FBI normally is forbidden from surveilling an American without a warrant. But Section 702 of the Foreign Surveillance Act, last updated by Congress in 2008, allowed the NSA to share with the FBI spy data collected without a warrant that includes the communications of Americans with “foreign targets.”

But the FISA court watchdogs suggest FBI compliance problems began months after Section 702 was implemented.

The FBI’s very first compliance report in 2009 declared it had not found any instances in which agents accessed NSA intercepts supposedly gathered overseas about an American who in fact was on U.S. soil.

But the IG said it reviewed the same data and easily found evidence that the FBI accessed NSA data gathered on a person who likely was in the United States, making it illegal to review without a warrant.

“We found several instances in which the FBI acquired communications on the same day that the NSA determined through analysis of intercepted communications that the person was in the United States,” the declassified report revealed.

It called the FBI’s first oversight report “deficient” and urged better oversight.

FBI officials acknowledged there have been violations but insist they are a small percentage of the total counterterrorism and counterintelligence work its agents perform.

Almost all are unintentional human errors by good-intentioned agents and analysts under enormous pressure to stop the next major terror attack, the officials said.

Others fear these blunders call into the question the bureau’s rosy assessment that it can still police itself when it comes to protecting Americans’ privacy 17 years after the war on terror began....

“No one on the Hill wants to look like we are soft on terrorism when you have increasing threats like Manchester-style attacks. But the evidence of abuse or sloppiness and the unending leaks of sensitive intelligence in the last year has emboldened enough of us to pursue some reforms,” a senior congressional aide told Circa, speaking only on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the media. “Where that new line between privacy and security is drawn will depend on how many more shoes fall before the 702 renewal happens.”...

One of the biggest concerns involves so-called backdoor searches in which the FBI can mine NSA intercept data for information that may have been incidentally collected about an American. No warrant or court approval is required, and the FBI insists these searches are one of the most essential tools in combating terrorist plots.

But a respected former Justice Department national security prosecutor questions if the searching has gotten too cavalier. Amy Jeffress, the former top security adviser to former Attorney General Eric Holder, was appointed by the intelligence court in 2015 to give an independent assessment of the FBI’s record of compliance. 

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article152948259.html#storylink=cpMay 26, 2017, "Declassified memos show FBI illegally shared spy data on Americans with private parties," Circa.com, by John Solomon and Sara Carter"The FBI has illegally shared raw intelligence about Americans with unauthorized third parties and violated other constitutional privacy protections, according to newly declassified government documents that undercut the bureau’s public assurances about how carefully it handles warrantless spy data to avoid abuses or leaks....
Then-FBI Director James Comey unequivocally told lawmakers his agency used sensitive espionage data gathered about Americans without a warrant only when it was “lawfully collected, carefully overseen and checked.”

Once-top secret U.S. intelligence community memos reviewed by Circa tell a different story, citing instances of “disregard” for rules, inadequate training and “deficient” oversight and even one case of deliberately sharing spy data with a forbidden party.

For instance, a ruling declassified this month by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) chronicles nearly 10 pages listing hundreds of violations of the FBI’s privacy-protecting minimization rules that occurred on Comey’s watch.

The behavior the FBI admitted to a FISA judge just last month [April 2017]ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight the bureau promised was in place years ago.

The court also opined aloud that it fears the violations are more extensive than already disclosed. 

“The Court is nonetheless concerned about the FBI’s apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI is engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported,” the April 2017 ruling declared.

The court isn’t the only oversight body to disclose recent concerns that the FBI’s voluntary system for policing its behavior and self-disclosing mistakes hasn’t been working.

The Justice Department inspector general’s office declassified a report in 2015 that reveals the internal watchdog had concerns as early as 2012 that the FBI was submitting ‘deficient” reports indicating it had a clean record complying with spy data gathered on Americans without a warrant.

The FBI normally is forbidden from surveilling an American without a warrant. But Section 702 of the Foreign Surveillance Act, last updated by Congress in 2008, allowed the NSA to share with the FBI spy data collected without a warrant that includes the communications of Americans with “foreign targets.”

But the FISA court watchdogs suggest FBI compliance problems began months after Section 702 was implemented.

The FBI’s very first compliance report in 2009 declared it had not found any instances in which agents accessed NSA intercepts supposedly gathered overseas about an American who in fact was on U.S. soil.

But the IG said it reviewed the same data and easily found evidence that the FBI accessed NSA data gathered on a person who likely was in the United States, making it illegal to review without a warrant.

“We found several instances in which the FBI acquired communications on the same day that the NSA determined through analysis of intercepted communications that the person was in the United States,” the declassified report revealed.

It called the FBI’s first oversight report “deficient” and urged better oversight.

FBI officials acknowledged there have been violations but insist they are a small percentage of the total counterterrorism and counterintelligence work its agents perform.

Almost all are unintentional human errors by good-intentioned agents and analysts under enormous pressure to stop the next major terror attack, the officials said.

Others fear these blunders call into the question the bureau’s rosy assessment that it can still police itself when it comes to protecting Americans’ privacy 17 years after the war on terror began....

“No one on the Hill wants to look like we are soft on terrorism when you have increasing threats like Manchester-style attacks. But the evidence of abuse or sloppiness and the unending leaks of sensitive intelligence in the last year has emboldened enough of us to pursue some reforms,” a senior congressional aide told Circa, speaking only on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the media....

One of the biggest concerns involves so-called backdoor searches in which the FBI can mine NSA intercept data for information that may have been incidentally collected about an American. No warrant or court approval is required, and the FBI insists these searches are one of the most essential tools in combating terrorist plots.

But a respected former Justice Department national security prosecutor questions if the searching has gotten too cavalier. Amy Jeffress, the former top security adviser to former Attorney General Eric Holder, was appointed by the intelligence court in 2015 to give an independent assessment of the FBI’s record of compliance.

Jeffress concluded agents’ searches of NSA data now extend far beyond national security issues and thus were “overstepping” the constitutional protections designed to ensure the bureau isn’t violating Americans’ 4th Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.
........
“The FBI procedures allow for really virtually unrestricted querying of the Section 702 data in a way the NSA and CIA have restrained it through their procedures,” she argued before the court in a sealed 2015 proceeding.

 
“I think that in this case the procedures could be tighter and more restrictive, and should be in order to comply with the Fourth Amendment,” she added.

The court thanked Jeffress for her thoughtful analysis but ultimately rejected her recommendation to impose on the FBI a requirement of creating a written justification why each search would help pursue a national security or criminal matter....

That was late in 2015. But by early 2017, the court became more concerned after the Obama administration disclosed significant violations of privacy protections at two separate intelligence agencies involved in the Section 702 program.

The most serious involved the NSA searching for American data it was forbidden to search. But the FBI also was forced to admit its agents and analysts shared espionage data with prohibited third parties, ranging from a federal contractor to a private entity that did not have the legal right to see the intelligence....

The court’s memo suggested the FBI’s sharing of raw intelligence to third parties, at the time, had good law enforcement intentions but bad judgment and inadequate training.

“Nonetheless, the above described practices violated the governing minimization procedures,” the court chided.

A footnote in the ruling stated one instance of improper sharing was likely intentional. 

“Improper access” to NSA spy data for FBI contractors “seems to have been the result of deliberate decision-making,” the court noted.

The recently unsealed ruling also revealed the FBI is investigating more cases of possible improper sharing with private parties that recently have come to light.

The government “is investigating whether there have been similar cases in which the FBI improperly afforded non-FBI personnel access to raw FISA-acquired information on FBI systems,” the court warned. 

The ruling cited other FBI failures in handling Section 702 intel, including retaining data on computer storage systems “in violation of applicable minimization requirements.” 

Among the most serious additional concerns was the FBI’s failure for more than two years to establish review teams to ensure intercepts between targets and their lawyers aren’t violating the attorney-client privilege.“Failures of the FBI to comply with this ‘review team’ requirement for particular targets have been focus of the FISC’s concerns since 2014,” the court noted.

The FBI said it is trying to resolve the deficiencies with aggressive training of agents.

That admission of inadequate training directly undercut Comey’s testimony earlier this month when questioned by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

“Nobody gets to see FISA information of any kind unless they've had the appropriate training and have the appropriate oversight,” the soon-to-be-fired FBI director assured lawmakers.

The struggle for the intelligence court and lawmakers in providing future oversight will be where to set more limits without hampering counterterrorism effort.

The FBI told Circa in a statement, "As indicated in its opinion, the Court determined that the past and current standard minimization procedures are consistent with the Fourth Amendment and met the statutory definition of those procedures under Section 702."

Jeffress, however, warned in her 2015 brief of another dynamic that will pose a challenge too, an FBI culture to use a tool more just because it can.

 
“These scenarios suggest a potentially very large and broad scope of incidental collection of communications between a lawful target and U.S. persons that are not the type of communications Section 702 was designed to collect,” she told the court in a written memo.

And when questioned at a subsequent hearing, Jeffress observed: “I don’t think that the FBI will voluntarily set limits on its querying procedures, because law enforcement agencies tend not to take steps to restrict or limit what they can do, for obvious reasons.”"

....................... 

Additional source, McClatchy:

May 26, 2017, "Secret [FISA] court rebukes NSA for 5-year illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens," McClatchy, Tim Johnson, via Miami Herald

"The court document also criticized the FBI’s distribution of intelligence data, saying it had disclosed raw surveillance data to sectors of its bureaucracy “largely staffed by private contractors.” 

The “contractors had access to raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to the FBI’s requests,” it said, adding that the bureau discontinued the practice on April 18, 2016." [End of article]



 


.......................

Apparently unsupervised Daily Beast guys claim Putin mobilized Americans to attend Aug. 2016 Idaho rally via Facebook. In 10th paragraph they admit no proof exists the rally happened or that anyone attended--possibly because the rally was scheduled for a Saturday at a government location that's closed Saturdays-Daily Beast, 9/11/2017

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"It is also possible to claim attendance on Facebook at an event that didn’t exist."... 
 
9/11/2017, "Exclusive: Russia Used Facebook Events to Organize Anti-Immigrant Rallies on U.S. Soil," Daily Beast, Ben Collins, Kevin Poulsen, Spencer Ackerman

"Russian operatives hiding behind false identities used Facebook’s event-management tool to remotely organize and promote political protests in the U.S., including an August 2016 anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rally in Idaho, The Daily Beast has learned.... 

The three-hour protest was titled “Citizens before refugees,” and would be held at the City Council Chambers beginning at 11 a.m. The notice provided the street address and ended with a fiery exhortation....

[parag. 10] Although 48 people clicked that they were “interested” in the protest, only four said they went to City Council Chambers that day, according to the event page, possibly because it was a Saturday and the Council was not in session."... 

Daily Beast admits there's no way to tell from Facebook pages if anyone attended alleged events or if events even took place: 

"It is also possible to claim attendance on Facebook at an event that didn’t exist."... 


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Map: Where Donald Trump outperformed Mitt Romney-NY Times, 11/9/2016

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Map from AP via NY Times, 11/9/2016 article below:

Nov. 9, 2016, "Donald Trump’s Victory Was Built on Unique Coalition of White Voters," NY Times, By Nicholas Confessore and Nate Cohn (Print ed: "White Voters in Broad Bloc Shaped Upset.")

"Donald Trump's America flowered through the old union strongholds of the Midwest, along rivers and rail lines that once moved coal from southern Ohio and the hollows of West Virginia to the smelters of Pennsylvania.

It flowed south along the Mississippi River, through the rural Iowa counties that gave Barack Obama more votes than any Democrat in decades, and to the Northeast, through a corner of Connecticut and deep into Maine."...

[Ed. note: 6.7 to 9.2 million Obama voters became Trump voters, "far more than enough to provide Trump his electoral College victory."..."The biggest common denominator among Obama-Trump voters is a view that the political system is corrupt and doesn’t work for people like them."... 6/8/17, "The Democratic Party Is in Worse Shape Than You Thought," NY Times, Thomas B. Edsall]

(continuing): "And it extended through the suburbs of Cleveland and Minneapolis, of Manchester, N.H., and the sprawl north of Tampa, Fla., where middle-class white voters chose Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton.

One of the biggest upsets in American political history was built on a coalition of white voters unlike that of any other previous Republican candidate, according to election results and interviews with voters and demographic experts. 

Mr. Trump’s coalition comprised not just staunchly conservative Republicans in the South and West. They were joined by millions of voters in the onetime heartlands of 20th-century liberal populism — the Upper and Lower Midwest — where white Americans without a college degree voted decisively to reject the more diverse, educated and cosmopolitan Democratic Party of the 21st century, making Republicans the country’s dominant political party at every level of government.

Mr. Trump spoke to their aspirations and fears more directly than any Republican candidate in decades, attacking illegal immigrants and Muslims and promising early Wednesday to return “the forgotten men and women of our country” to the symbolic and political forefront of American life. He electrified the country’s white majority and mustered its full strength against long-term demographic decay."...

[Ed. note: Rushing the "decay" of these voters was a racist mistake. "Non-college white voters" aren't exactly a fringe group:

Maps above from Dec. 2017, "Party Hoppers: Understanding Voters Who Switched Partisan Affiliation," Democracy Fund Voter Study Group]

(continuing): "“A lot of stuff he’s talking about is just God-given common sense, which I think both parties have lost,” said Tom Kirkpatrick, 51, a Trump supporter who used to work in an industrial laundry plant and is now on disability. He stood near the Florida State Capitol on Tuesday, holding an American flag. “Let’s put him in. And if he doesn’t do what he says, I’ll help you vote him out.”

But Mr. Trump also won over millions of voters who had once flocked to President Obama’s promise of hope and change, and who on Tuesday saw in Mr. Trump their best chance to dampen the most painful blows of globalization and trade, to fight special interests, and to be heard and protected. Twelve percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters approved of Mr. Obama, according to the exit polls. 

Mrs. Clinton won by a greater margin than Mr. Obama among affluent whites, particularly those living in the Democratic Party’s prosperous coastal strongholds: Washington and Boston, Seattle and New York. In Manhattan, where Mr. Trump lives and works — and where his fellow citizens mocked and jeered him as he voted on Tuesday — Mrs. Clinton won by a record margin, amassing 87 percent of the vote to Mr. Trump’s 10 percent.

Around the country, she won a majority of voters over all, harvesting the country’s growing and densely packed big cities and a plurality of the suburbs.

But Mr. Trump won low-income white voters to the Republican ticket, reversing a partisan divide along class lines that is as old as the Democratic and Republican Parties — a replay of the “Brexit” vote in June, when the old bastions of England’s Labor-left voted decisively to leave the European Union. His breakthrough among white working-class voters in the North not only erased the Democratic advantage but reversed it, giving him a victory in the Electoral College while he lost the national popular vote.

Most strikingly, Mr. Trump won his biggest margins among middle-income white voters, according to exit polls, a revolt not only of the white working class but of the country’s vast white middle class. He did better than past Republicans in the sprawling suburbs along Florida’s central coasts, overwhelming Mrs. Clinton’s gains among Hispanic voters. He held down Mrs. Clinton’s margins in the Philadelphia suburbs, defying expectations that Mrs. Clinton would outperform Mr. Obama by a wide margin.

Magnified by the constitutional design of the Electoral College, and aided by Republican-led efforts to dampen black and Latino voting in states like North Carolina [no link provided for this claim], Mr. Trump’s America proved the larger on Election Day. It smashed through the Democrats’ supposed electoral “blue wall” — the 18 states carried by Democrats in every election since 1992, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, plus the diverse and well-educated parts of the country that Mr. Obama attracted in his two races, like New Mexico, Nevada, Virginia and Colorado.

Starting Wednesday, you could walk from the Vermont border through Appalachian coal country to the outskirts of St. Louis without crossing a county Mr. Trump did not win decisively. You could head south through rural and suburban Georgia all the way to South Florida, or northwest through the Upper Midwest, or make a beeline for the West Coast, skirting only the rising Democratic communities of Colorado and the booming multicultural sprawl of Las Vegas before finally reaching Mrs. Clinton’s part of the country.

“It’s not that he was the most polished of politicians,” said Justin Channell, 36, of Brewer, Me., who works at a health insurance company. “I liked the message of the anti-establishment, that corruption in D.C. is so prevalent.”

Mrs. Clinton won the America of big, racially diverse cities and centers of the new economy, from Silicon Valley to the Silicon Slopes of Utah, where many traditionally Republican voters rejected Mr. Trump. But lining up for Mr. Trump was a parallel urban America of smaller cities — places like Scranton, Pa.; Youngstown, Ohio; and Dubuque, Iowa — that boomed during the industrial era, and are still connected by the arteries of the old American economy.

She had hoped for a surge of voting by Latinos, immigrants and African-Americans, a manifestation of the rising American electorate long predicted by liberal strategists and feared by the Republican elite in Washington."...

[Ed. note: As noted above, this was wishful thinking. "Non-college white voters" aren't exactly a fringe group:

Maps above from Dec. 2017, "Party Hoppers: Understanding Voters Who Switched Partisan Affiliation," Democracy Fund Voter Study Group] 

(continuing): "But exit polls suggest that Mr. Trump — despite his attacks on immigrants, Muslims and Mexicans, and his clumsy invocation of black neighborhoods mired in chaos and decay — did not fare worse among the African-American and Latino voters who showed up to the polls than Mitt Romney did four years ago."...

[Source: "Trump Did Better With Blacks, Hispanics Than Romney in '12: Exit" ...https://www.nbcnews.com/.../trump-did better-blacks-hispanics-romney-12-exit-polls-...Nov 9, 2016-Donald Trump performed stronger among black and Hispanic voters than Mitt Romney did as the Republican nominee in 2012, according to NBC Exit Polls. Tuesday's exit poll results have not yet been finalized but so far they show Trump outmatching Romney by two points in each voting bloc."]

(continuing): "In Miami-Dade County, where Mr. Trump had more room to lose ground among Hispanic voters than anywhere else in the country, Mrs. Clinton inched up to only 64 percent from Mr. Obama’s 62 percent of the Hispanic vote. Turnout dropped considerably in black communities across the country, from the rural South to Cleveland, Milwaukee and Detroit. 

By Wednesday, the notion of a Democratic electoral map advantage bolstered by rising Hispanic power seemed distant. Even if Mrs. Clinton had won Florida, Mr. Trump would have powered to victory through the new Republican heartland, in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, where Hispanic voters represent just a fraction of the electorate. 

Nor was the growing Hispanic vote — and Mrs. Clinton’s strength among well-educated voters — enough to pull her especially close in either Arizona or Texas, the only two heavily Hispanic states that could have plausibly joined Florida to put her over the top.

Even where Democratic-leaning Hispanics are growing as a force, Mr. Trump’s supporters were waiting on Tuesday.

Anthony Brdar, 42, stood in front of his West Miami polling station, holding a handmade “Vote Trump” sign, and waved a T-shirt of Mr. Obama’s face made to look like the Joker. It called him a tyrant. An out-of-work lawyer who lives in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood in Miami, Mr. Brdar said he had never felt so compelled to vote. 

“I feel like our country is on the verge of becoming a third world country,” he said. “Our children are not going to have a future. We are not going to have a future.”"

"A version of this article appears in print on November 10, 2016, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: White Voters in Broad Bloc Shaped Upset."

============

Map source, AP via NY Times

........................

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/us/politics/donald-trump-voters.html




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From The Onion but true about taxpayer funded US intel employees: FBI Warns Memo Could Undermine Faith In Massive, Unaccountable Secret Agencies exempt from consequences, a rogue group of unelected persons carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of occasionally personal reasons-The Onion

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2/1/18, "FBI Warns Republican Memo Could Undermine Faith In Massive, Unaccountable Government Secret Agencies," politics.theonion.com, Washington

"Stressing that such an action would be highly reckless, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that releasing the “Nunes Memo” could potentially undermine faith in the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States.

“Making this memo public will almost certainly impede our ability to conduct clandestine activities operating outside any legal or judicial system on an international scale,” said Wray, noting that it was essential that mutual trust exist between the American people and the vast, mysterious cabal given free rein to use any tactics necessary to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens or subvert religious and political groups. “If we take away the people’s faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that’s left is an extensive network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally personal, reasons.” 

At press time, Wray confirmed the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies were unaware of any wrongdoing for violating constitutional rights."


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Fracking paper retracted after overstating size of methane leak from Marcellus Shale: leakage is only half initial claim. Published in Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres-Retraction Watch, 1/22/18

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Paper first published April 20, 2017. Funded by taxpayers via: National Science Foundation, Maryland Dept. of Environment, National Institute of Science and Technology, NOAA, NASA

1/22/18, "Fracking paper overstated size of methane leak from Marcellus Shale, earning retraction," Retraction Watch

"Last spring, a group of environmental scientists reported an impressive finding: Hydraulic fracturing (better known as fracking) in the Marcellus Shale region of the eastern United States was leaking enough methane to power a city twice the size of Washington, D.C. (We didn’t come up with that comparison, apt though it may be.) Turns out that wasn’t true.

The researchers have retracted their paper, “Methane emissions from the Marcellus Shale in southwestern Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia based on airborne measurements,” which appeared in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres. The reason: Further analysis revealed a mistake in a key measurement that, once corrected, shows the leakage to be roughly half as large as they initially calculated. 

And that means one of the paper’s main conclusions-that fracking was worse for climate change in the region than using coal-is more than likely wrong.

Although it’s not clear how much of an impact, if any, the article has had — beyond some traffic on Twitter and a news article that was apparently retracted yesterday — its conclusions painted a bleak picture for fracking. (The paper has not yet been cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.) The authors, led by Xinrong Ren, of the University of Maryland, write: 

"Although recent regulations requiring capture of gas from the completion venting step of the hydraulic fracturing appear to have reduced losses, our study suggests that for a 20  year time scale, energy derived from the combustion of natural gas extracted from this region will require further controls before it can exert a net climate benefit compared to coal."

But the retraction notice tells a different story: 

"The article, Ren, X., et al. (2017), “Methane emissions from the Marcellus Shale in southwestern Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia based on airborne measurements,” has been retracted by the authors because of an error in wind measurements used to calculate methane emissions in the southwestern Marcellus Shale region. The error was discovered by the authors in October 2017 upon their installation of an improved, differential GPS, wind measurement system onto the aircraft used in this study. The original wind measurements led to an overestimate of methane emissions from oil and natural gas operations. A reanalysis with corrected winds reduced the total estimated emissions by about a factor of 1.7, with a correspondingly larger reduction in emissions of methane attributed to oil and natural gas in the southwestern Marcellus Shale area. This is expected to reverse a conclusion of the paper, which had asserted that leakage from oil and natural gas extraction in this region results in a climate penalty compared to the use of coal. The authors are in the process of submitting a new manuscript based on an updated analysis that will describe the process to correct the erroneous wind measurements used in the original manuscript, provide a more accurate estimate of the methane emissions, and assess the implications of the fossil fuel production from the Marcellus Shale."

The authors did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Update, 2240 UTC, 1/22/18: Last author Russ Dickerson tells Retraction Watch: 

"The retraction is based on a technical correction. Measuring winds from a moving airplane is difficult; the mean winds were good, but through rigorous testing we found that there can be a substantive error for certain aircraft headings. The rest of the measurements and previous papers are sound. We have replaced the instrument and corrected the prior data. The total estimated emission rate for methane will go down, so just a “smaller effect.”" 

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US government has only 3 branches, not 4. US intelligence agencies such as DOJ and FBI aren't a 4th branch of government, as much as totalitarian types wish that were so. Intelligence agencies are within the Executive Branch and subordinate to the President of the United States-tcth

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"The memo itself is not the biggest benefit to exposing the corruption. The real goal will be reviewing the underlying documents and evidence that support the memo."... 

2/1/18, "Today Should Be “Memo Release Day”," tcth, sundance

"In the back-and-forth it becomes evident why we stated last week to pay attention to the process. The memo is classified legislative work product of the legislative branch. The legislative branch is asking the executive branch to declassify the memo. When Devin Nunes invited FBI Director Christopher Wray to review the memo on Sunday night he was inviting the executive branch to preview the work-product prior to submission.

It would be ordinary for any minor executive-branch-requested adjustments to be made, prior to submission/approval for executive declassification. That’s exactly what happened.

Minor adjustments were made at the request of the FBI Director prior to submission for declassification approval. Majority Chairman Devin Nunes shared those adjustments with Minority Chair Adam Schiff.

Schiff tried, and failed, to make a political issue out of a simple process.

Additionally, Minority Chair Adam Schiff, along with most corporate media, are trying to present the intelligence community (DOJ/FBI) as a fourth branch of government. As silly as it sounds, former DNI James Clapper attempted the same argument on Wednesday night during a CNN appearance. They’re not. All of the intelligence community resides under the executive branch and the Chief Executive is President Donald Trump.

The normal review for any declassification request is a review by the National Security Council, the Office of Legal Counsel (all depts); all impacted cabinet officials; all heads of potentially impacted national security departments (DOJ-NSD, FBI Counterintelligence, NSA, CIA, State, DoD etc.); along with the White House Chief-of-Staff (General Kelly).

That review complete, it’s now up to the Chief Executive, President Trump, to sign off and release. This is the formal process, and this is the process that has been followed.

As much as the formal and appropriate process annoys Representative Adam Schiff, all of the correct procedures have been followed. Additionally, the memo itself is not the biggest benefit to exposing the corruption. The real goal will be reviewing the underlying documents and evidence that support the memo."...



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