Parallel Construction

Parallel construction is the term used by law enforcement - first revealed by Reuters in 2013 - for the tactic of conducting two simultaneous investigations against a target. One appears to be a standard, lawfully executed investigation, and the other is a covert operation that skirts around constitutional civil protections. For instance, if federal eavesdroppers hear in a phone conversation that you have drugs in the house, police cannot use that as probable cause to raid your house and arrest you. It would be thrown out in court, because no one should have been listening to your phone call to begin with. Instead, police may get the tip and then just happen to be walking by on patrol, and just happen to smell weed, and they're certain it's coming from your house. Parallel construction is nothing but illegal police work with plausible deniability sprinkled in.

The left is generally opposed to parallel construction. The Intercept - one of the only outlets from the left that is honest and does real journalism - recently wrote on the subject. The ACLU of Massachusetts was very critical of parallel construction two years ago.

Information the NSA collects for purposes of so-called “national security” will be used by police to lock up ordinary Americans for routine crimes. And we don’t have to guess who’s going to suffer this unconstitutional indignity the most brutally. It’ll be Black, Brown, poor, immigrant, Muslim, and dissident Americans: the same people who are always targeted by law enforcement for extra “special” attention.

This is the normal liberal take on the matter. Parallel construction is bad and aversely affects their vassal demographics. Of course, we don't expect them to be particularly concerned when the victim is white or a conservative. The writers at The Intercept may be genuinely principled, but they are the exception to the rule. Liberals certainly don't care that the IRS targeted Tea Party supporters and leaked their identities to a secretive operation at the DOJ. They're glad it happened. but it's just the same principle.

The two facets of parallel construction are collection and laundering. First data is improperly collected against a target, then [steps are taken to make the data appear] legal and legitimate. What is unfolding in front of us appears to be the grandest parallel construction ever seen.  Let's look at the ways law enforcement has used parallel construction in their quest to overturn the most recent federal election.

• The FBI sought the FISA-I warrant many months after abusing its special FISA-702 powers. The FISA-I warrant was essential to legitimize the intel that had already been collected, and to provide cover for that illegal operation.
• The FBI misled the FISA court about the legitimacy of Hillary's Dossier by not revealing it was funded by Hillary, by not disclosing their own disciplinary actions against its author, and by - in a truly conniving act - leaking the contents to a media outlet, and using the resulting article to substantiate the dossier in court.
• They crafted the narrative that McCain received the dossier from Steele, who handed if off to the FBI in December 2016. McCain acknowledge the claim in January 2017, and in his recent book recounted that he handed the dossier off directly to Comey. The same dossier that the FBI had funded since at least June of 2016, and used to obtain a secret surveillance warrant against Trump's team in October of 2016. The only thing we can't be sure about is whether McCain was complicit in the ruse, or just the world's biggest stooge.
• DNI Clapper leaked the dossier to CNN, compelled Comey to brief the president elect on a small portion of it, then leaked to CNN that the briefing had occurred. This was all to grant the dossier legitimacy. It was now a sensitive intelligence product considered important by the president, the FBI director, and a high-ranking senator, instead of Democratic opposition research picked up by Never Trumpers in the FBI.
• The dossier itself was a tool for laundering intel. The evidence for this is that it describes evidence that Michael Cohen traveled to Prague during the election to meet secretly with Russian agents. The only problem is they got the wrong guy. It was a different Michael Cohen, who probably wasn't on a clandestine mission. See how they can attribute malice to any random act? The Prague Michael Cohen was a completely random guy on a completely random trip, who only happened to bear a fairly common name. And yet that was deemed to be serious evidence of collusion. Prague, liberals don't know it's not Russian! The point of this is that it doesn't make sense for Steele to have gotten wind of the Cohen trip to Prague from Russian sources. The random Michael Cohen would have been on no one's radar. The reason he came up was because, most plausibly, his name came up in a intel query for the name Michael Cohen. The result then filtered its way into the dossier, which was used to justify a Title-I warrant which was used to justify the initial data collection itself.

Parallel construction - the improper gathering & laundering of intel - is pervasive in this timeline, and is very intentional. It is not something that is used incidentally in the dragnet against Trump or only by a few rogue agents. It is the entirety of the operation. Lie, cheat, and steal to get all possible data on Trump, craft an appearance of legitimacy, and then use the data in whatever way may be damaging, from media leaks all the way up to impeachment hearings.