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Donald Trump uses the word ‘Spy’….It’s wrong….

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Ask ANY law enforcement person about confidental informants….

They will smile….

They will then move on….

Donald Trump is trying to beat down the FBI, Justice Department and US Intellgence Community by using the word ‘spy’,….

He’s been doing this for almost two years….

He started it as a wedge to use against President Obama going into the 2016 vote…..

Obama was spying on HIM?

There is NO evidence of this statement by Trump being true….

There IS evidence that US intellifgence agencies where listening in to people they HAD been suspicious of having connections to the Russian’s….Those people visited Trump’s building, Trump Tower , from time to time…

We DO have now evidence that SEVERAL people in fact ARE informing the Mueller people of what was going on within Trump’s campaign and admin….

And we seem to also have the information that a certain person DID make contact with some Trump people and report things back to the FBI……

We are talking about a criminal investigation here folks….

‘Spys’ are about government secrets….

Donald Trump, as we have come to see, is trying to drag the Mueller criminal investiagtion into the political arena….

Using the work spy is his latest effort…

It’s just another effort from the guy to escape the prying into his secret’s that the America people have EVERY right to know if those secrets hide criminal actions also….

On Sunday, President Donald Trump called on the Justice Department to open an internal investigation into whether the FBI placed an informant into his 2016 presidential campaign to spy on him. By Sunday night, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had made clear that Justice would investigate whether any wrongdoing was found in the use of the informant, who, according to CNN sources, was never embedded in the campaign.

How solid is the ground Trump is treading on? What’s the difference between a spy and an informant? And how does the FBI go about getting approval for an informant? I asked former FBI special agent Josh Campbell, a CNN contributor, all of these questions — and more!
His answers, lightly edited for flow, are below.
Cillizza: Let’s start basic. Why does the FBI use informants?
Campbell: Informants often serve as the backbone of important investigations, because they take the FBI into places they could never go on their own. If a special agent running a lawfully predicated criminal or counterintelligence investigation wants to learn more about what the targets of the investigation are up to, a logical investigative tool would be the use of an informant who could report back on the inner workings of a network.
While it would be difficult for an FBI special agent to walk into Trump Tower and glean on his or her own whether Russians were attempting to infiltrate the Trump campaign, a confidential informant — with “placement” and “access,” to use the terms of the trade — could be extremely useful in helping mitigate potential threats to US national security.
Cillizza: What is the approval process — if any — for the FBI to get clearance to deploy an informant?
Campbell: While I can’t get into specifics due to the sensitivities surrounding the use of human intelligence sources, I’ll say from vast experience running informants domestically and overseas that this investigative tool is among the most highly scrutinized within the Department of Justice. Not only are there very specific guidelines surrounding the deployment of sources, each source operation is continually and meticulously reviewed in order to ensure the source is operating lawfully and does not present undue risk to the government.
It’s also important to remember that investigations involving political officials receive even greater oversight as they fall within a category deemed Sensitive Investigative Matters, or SIMs. Understanding that certain segments of society — politicians, the press, clergy, etc. — should receive special protections in order to prevent any malfeasance on the part of aggressive investigators, operations involving SIMs would require high-level review and approval.
Cillizza: President Trump has cast this informant as a spy. What’s the technical difference (if any) between those two terms and jobs?
Campbell: The President casting a human intelligence source as a “spy” is pure politics. Although informants and spies both technically gather information covertly, the word “informant” is generally reserved for someone righteously operating on behalf of law enforcement, whereas “spy” conjures up a more sinister mental picture of someone skulking in the shadows with questionable intentions…..

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  1. I’m interacting online with Trumpists today, including our old friend NYC, and I find it amazing that they are willing to have the U.S. military stay in North Korea to prop up and provide security to keep Kim Jong Un in lifelong power as an otherwise dictator, (as long as he disarms)

    Anything to defend anything Trump says, no matter what it is for them…

    • The effect Trump has had on the Republican Party as far as foreign policy, has been ,in my view, the most astounding part of his coopting the party.

      Propping up a Communist Dictator?

        • Yet these same folks will get all aroused about Cuba.

          Cuba which in no conceivable way represents a threat to the United States.

          They even want to interfere in Americans who want to voluntarily visit there.

          I guess there exists some “logic” to all this, but it surely escapes me.

          • As is obvious, I am consistent on these issues and always have been for as long as I have been engaged as a citizen.

            They will say that Cuba doesn’t have nukes and North Korea does and we should be open to doing anything *different* (since Bush and Obama failed) for peace and for Trump to get his Nobel.

  2. Those outside New England should remind themselves that FBI guidelines for using informants in potentially-illegal activities, especially organized ones, were very greatly restricted and specified after the colossal scandal surrounding the use of James “Whitey” Bulger as a confidential informant (or to use the correct terms, not spy but snitch or stool-pigeon) on his criminal (or allegedly-criminal) rivals.

    As such an informant, Bulger was not only able to use the Bureau’s Boston office as a weapon against his targets — both actual criminals and some non-criminals who were inconvenient to his ambitions, leading to their framing and long imprisonment for crimes they hadn’t committed — but also to corrupt many FBI agents with money or gifts and to use the Federal Bureau as a shield against the Massachusetts State Police.

    One agent, John Connolly, who shared a South Boston childhood with Bulger (and his brother State Senate President William “Billy” Bulger) actually became an agent of Bulger’s instead of the other way around. Bulger would have been picked up or thwarted far, far earlier had he not received timely tip-offs from Connolly and other agents in time to make his escape.

    [Connolly is now serving a lengthy prison sentence for complicity in Bulger’s murder of a Florida business.]

    While I’ve forgotten the exact restrictions put into effect on the orders of then-Director Louis Freeh, they limited social interactions with criminal informants, so that an agent could, say, share a drink but not visit for a holiday dinner.

    See Kevin Cullen’s and Shelley Murphy’s book Whitey Bulger (W.W.Norton, 2013) and the (fictional) film Unforgiven (with Jack Nicholson playing a Bulger-like boss in Boston).

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