Not a thread, but a one tweet summary by @FranTownsend who not only knows a ton about FISA from her career at DOJ, but was reportedly also shortlisted to become Dir FBI after Comey.
So many, many problems with the past few weeks. But folks intentionally blurring FBI special background checks--which are always for and whose terms are always set by the WH--from the rest of the FBI's work is going to suuuuuuck so bad for everyone.
Here's the thing: when you say "the FBI is a partisan political organization", that makes it easier for politicians to say "the things it does that I don't like are just partisan, and we should make it do more partisan things I do want, and that's fine because it was always thus"
It's really a White House check, with FBI people on loan to do it. And even that's weird, because for advice and consent, it's really the Senate who should be doing the investigation; they are just outsourcing it to WH who are then getting FBI to do the groundwork.
Former NSA Employee Nghia Hoang Pho, 68, Sentenced to 5½ Years in Prison After Pleading Guilty to Willful Removal and Retention of Classified National Defense Information justice.gov/opa/pr/former-…
According to the plea agreement, Pho was a developer at NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) hacking group from April 2006, and began unlawfully removing and retaining TS/SCI material from 2010 thru March 2015 including tools and documents in both hardcopy and digital form.
It has been widely alleged in the media (tho not confirmed or alleged by USG) that the Shadow Brokers tools—repurposed in the 2017 WannaCry mass-ransomware incident—were NSA tools lost as a consequence of Pho's removal of them from NSA to his unsecured internet-connected computer
So let's get this straight: Rosenstein sarcastically shoots down Andy McCabe's plan to "investigate the president" and that's a pretext to fire Rosenstein? Really? That's where we are?