So I was ruminating about RICO, the mafia, FARA, Russian sanctions/expulsions, and Spygate

In the 70s and 80s the mafia basically ran NYC. Entire unions, and industries. Hotels and hospitals. All the carting and hauling business. Every labor union. All the restaurants. Even the supply chains.

it was impossible to do business in NYC without bumping into the mafia

The RICO law was on the books, but the FBI and the DOJ weren’t using it. Didn’t know how to use it. For 10 years they didn’t use the RICO law.

a law professor from Cornell, who wrote the law, finally conducted a seminar strictly for the FBI and the DOJ on how to use RICO

Things started finally happening. The FBI and the DOJ understood what they needed to do to build a case under RICO

They started with surveillance. They watched them, filmed and photographed them, catalogued their associates.

sound familiar?

So surveillance, confidential human sources, informants who didn’t know they were informants, they whole thing

these were the bits of evidence they had to collect to justify a warrant so they could bug their homes, phones, cars, business, restaurants, you name it

Sounds very familiar right? They were treating the Trump campaign, transition team and administration like a criminal enterprise. And they used the exact same tools they used against the mafia

but they had a problem

The mafia was suspected of specific and notorious crimes and they talked about them

the Trump team had been surveilled ALL of 2016, ran CHS at them, ran informants and the FBI had .....nothing

just old transgressions of some aging swamp dwellers

What to do? All that surveillance and nothing. No underlying crimes. And certainly nothing that would justify a series of wire taps

so like the mafia prosecutions, they resorted to a little used law like RICO (in Spygate, FARA) to justify wiretaps

@Techno_Fog knew it

So they used FARA for wiretaps of all kinds

but even that didn’t work. They didn’t find any agents of foreign governments that they could prosecute under FARA

so then the Obama administration started changing the rules

They exploded who got the PDB (intel meant for the president), they exploded unmaskings, they changed the rules for the intel IG reporting, and in the last month of his presidency, they finally looked at sanctions/expulsions against Russia

Obama admin had found no criminal enterprise,

no counter intelligence issue,

no prosecutable FARA violations

they only found policy differences and so they had to criminalize that

so after the election, thats what they set out to do