For folks on the port side of American politics, FISA warrants have a rather checkered history, going back to when FISA was passed in the wake of the CIA horrors revealed by congressional hearings in the late 1970s. When FISA became law in 1978, it was argued that at least there was something resembling due process, even though the proceedings and even the membership of the FISA court were kept secret.

But there was a steady drumbeat from civil libertarians against the FISA process until the Avignon Presidency took over in 2001. Then, when it was revealed that the administration had been wiretapping Americans without any kind of warrant whatsoever, some of the same people who had been decrying the FISA process pointed to it again as a kind of bulwark against an intelligence community gone rogue and an executive branch with demonstrable contempt for the Bill of Rights.

So before we get to the crack in which Paul Manafort and a whole lot of other people find their collective asses in this morning, let me just say that secret courts and secret, no-knock warrants make me as nervous now as they ever have. I don’t trust any president with that kind of power, and that includes the last one.

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That said, the news that not only had Manafort been the subject of search warrants beyond those of which we already have heard, and that he has been the subject of electronic surveillance besides, looks very much as though Robert Mueller is running a very elaborate mob prosecution as much as anything else. He’s looking into money-laundering and international fraud. He looks like he’s chasing the Gambinos and not some Macedonian teenagers in the pay of Vladimir Putin. But he also is clearly working to establish that the Trump relationship with Russia has been and always was corrupt at its core, and that the Russian ratfcking was just another sleazy transaction.

This is truly bad news for everyone involved. Among other things, it removes any possibility of using the national interest or national security as threadbare camouflage for whatever international grifting was behind the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 presidential election. You can’t stick national security between the quid and the quo. From CNN:

US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election, sources tell CNN, an extraordinary step involving a high-ranking campaign official now at the center of the Russia meddling probe. The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump. Some of the intelligence collected includes communications that sparked concerns among investigators that Manafort had encouraged the Russians to help with the campaign, according to three sources familiar with the investigation. Two of these sources, however, cautioned that the evidence is not conclusive.

The OMIGOD TRUMP WAS RIGHT! cries from Breitbart’s Mausoleum For The Chronically Unemployable already have begun and they are very convincing, as long as you don’t know that the surveillance of Manafort apparently began in 2014, when he was a bagma…er…lobbyist for Ukrainian oligarchs, and that the Trump campaign put him in charge two years later anyway. You can almost hear the deals being cut in the minds of people who have any connection to these events. Unobstructed, Mueller seems to be closing the distance between the quid and the quo with increasingly impressive acceleration.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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