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The FBI Didn’t Persecute Hillary. It Protected Her. (Eli Lake @Tablet).
The gist is in the title, a longer gist is:
I urge you to read the article itself, as it's about details and evidence for the claim above. It did also finally clue me in about why the secret services might be supporting the left. Before Trump was elected they were:
[EDIT: _I wrongly thought my original referred to the FBI. That confused reading did in fact solve the puzzle that I had been wondering about, but is nonethless confused. I should have quoted: _]
This is very plausible. I hail from a longstanding 3rd wold democracy, and this is pretty typical behaviour. None of the elections are fair because the authorities tip them in favour of whichever side looks more likely to win. Usually this is the government of the day, but not always. In Australia, Rupert Murdoch behaved this way too with his media coverage.
Once Trump was elected, you would expect the FBI to quietly switch sides. But they might have accidentally burned their bridges. Or you might blame Trump for being too volatile and sour-minded to be worth sucking up to.
The other angle is topical: is prosecuting Trump and not Clinton a double standard? There's an argument (ping @ymeskhout) that the difference is that Trump has so brazzenly admitted guilt. Well if there's videotape Clinton also bragging about how her sever was illegal but she's above the law, then we are less likely to know about it because she really is above the law.
If the Tablet article is accurate, this casts light on this and every other putative distinction between the Trump and Hillary cases. Whatever distinction there is, it has (at least if the article is accurate) been brought out under circumstances where investigating authorities have bent over backwards to find ways to protect Hillary.
I mean there’s a double standard between trump and establishment figures, but that’s partly because establishment figures listen to their lawyers after committing crimes.
People who do listen to their lawyers don't thus get have senior policemen covering up their crimes for them.
Now that article might be wrong about accusing the FBI of covering for Hillary, but then your comment doesn't address that at all.
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It's hilarious (and by that I of course mean: pathetic) that revealing things like blatantly cheating at a presidential debate means that Hilary Clinton (the cheater) is somehow the victim.
"Oh no, you've revealed what a corrupt person I am. I am the victim here!"
It's actually sortof incredible how well they framed that one to their advantage.
Here's the hard truth that will be difficult to stomach - Donald Trump was also a victim of the crimes carried about by Russia. He was a victim of their foreign influence attempts. A victim of their attempt to recruit members of his circle. A victim of the fact that their crimes tainted, put an asterisk on, his election in the minds of millions of people. A victim of the resultant investigation that hamstrung his administration for years. While he benefited by having the crimes of Manafort/Cohen discovered and prosecuted before putting them in any real positions of power, he was a victim of the process in that it removed his National Security Advisor for utterly bullshit reasons that ultimately stemmed from the investigation into Russia's crimes.
It's only because of our screwed up partisanship that essentially no one is okay with saying both of these true things. Some folks on the right can't bring themselves to acknowledge that Hilary was genuinely a victim of Russia's crimes. Some folks on the left can't bring themselves to acknowledge that Trump was, too. We could have had a moment of all acknowledging that Russia victimized Hilary, Trump, and America... and maybe, we could have gotten our shit together in order to actually do something real about it, but instead, we get partisan pissing matches.
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Well, you’d have to establish some reasons for thinking he, specifically was behind it. In any election of the most powerful office in the most powerful country on the planet, there is goin* to be foreign influence. It’s simply too important to the rest of the world for other countries to ignore it. While i can see a country like Russia (who didn’t like Hillary) trying to tip the scales, I never saw anything that unequivocally pointed to Russia or anyone else working with Trump specifically.
Wikileaks and the contents of Wikileaks were well known ten years before Trump descended the golden escalator. His very online fan base was talking about Wikileaks nonstop. Trump might well have gotten wind of things released on Wikileaks because it was on social media and he used social media a lot during both his campaign and his presidency. The “Russia if you’re listening” quip was in response specifically to a reporter questioning his involvement in the hacks by Russia. It was a joke, and unless you were already predisposed to think he’s involved, it’s a reach. Someone makes an accusation like “people are saying that Russia is hacking Hillary and releasing information to help you,” if you don’t take that claim seriously might well be played off with a joke.
Even if Russia is trying to make Trump win (which is probably true) they didn’t investigate Russia they investigated Trump. That’s not the same. An investigation into Russia that leads through six degrees of Kevin Bacon and into the senior members of the Trump campaign would make sense. It starts with the crime at hand — the data breaches and releases — and moves toward figuring out who’s releasing them, why, and if there’s anyone calling the shots.
Jokes have elements of truth in them. And to take a holistic view is important. Most politicians would make the joke, and then clarify at some point. However Trump to my knowledge never ever released nor spoke about how he thought the email hacking was bad and shouldn't happen, nor warned against foreign interference. Thus I think we're justified at taking the "joke" at face value. We all know that one guy in our lives who makes mean jokes and then when called out on it goes "JK bro why so serious". It's a similar thing.
To be clear, I don't think the conclusion that Trump colluded in some way is correct. That's also what the investigations concluded, rightly. Justice was served in the end. But starting the investigation isn't out of the question, and people who are super outraged about the start of things ignore that politically, it seems to have helped him, if anything. So I fail to see the cause for outrage.
They did investigate Russia. They did a lot, and still do all the time. We just don't see the results of that sort of investigation because it's CIA business and not something that's usually public.
Except the problem here isn't just that they started the investigation - they helped create the circumstances which justified the investigation and knowingly lied in order to justify the surveillance which was performed. They knew that the contents of the Steele Dossier were unreliable, and they then went and leaked information to the media, in order to create media attention which was then used to back up the need for the investigation. That's the reason why there's so much outrage - not that they dared to investigate Trump at all, but that they did so under false pretences, knowingly, and then shared the information they gained with his political opponent in an important election.
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The investigations that ultimately ended up clearing Trump were treated as de facto proof of guilt by the media, Dem politicians, members of their investigative committees, and various NatSec officials in positions of seniority. Even with the Mueller report, the common refrain in its aftermath was "Trump may not have been proven guilty, but he wasn't proven innocent either". Even today, it is nigh impossible to get any plurality of Trump opponents to admit the accusations were bupkis, and there remains a substantial minority that still believes them outright.
As many here are fond of saying, "the process was the punishment". The investigations were blatantly weaponized, leaving a stench even if the shit didn't stick.
The CIA and its affiliates may be totally sqeaky clean and above-board behind closed doors. But since nobody has visibility into that apparatus, and history would indicate that's not particularly likely, I'm giving them zero deference.
Then wouldn't it be wise for Trump to take steps to avoid being investigated? It seems at every opportunity he acts guilty enough to get investigated but is actually clean enough to get out clean. I don't think it's out of the question to think he benefits from the image of the establish going after him, and he knows it.
In the end you get a bunch of people complaining about how he was treated, and that's what he wants. That's why he acts the way he does, anything to make him look like more of a victim.
Why? It was a political persecution, not Justice. It’s like asking why blacks don’t just stop doing whatever it is that makes the cops shoot them more often. If the answer is “just stop being you and the cops leave,” it’s more like victim blaming than advice. And this was politically motivated, so the advice would have been “have you tried not having any platform positions Hillary doesn’t have? Maybe if you just stopped trying to drain the swamp and end wars the swamp would leave you alone.”
The point is Trump doesn't want to stop, and if he knows what's good for him he won't stop trying to get investigated, because they improve his political prospects.
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Trump is being investigated because of the same political positions that allowed him to gain power. The steps he'd have to take to stop being investigated would mean completely reworking all of his policy positions to be the same as the Bush/Obama consensus - more support for forever wars, infinite immigration, corporate welfare, etc. The moment he does that he'll lose all of his political power, because those positions were what earned him his initial support.
The moment he stops being investigated he also loses his political power. He's powerful because his actions feed the collective persecution complex of him and his supporters. It's not just political. He also always creates the appearance he is doing something shady behind the scenes, to bait investigations because they are good for him and his political prospects.
I disagree - I think that these investigations are actual, earnest and serious attempts by the Establishment to tank his administration and demonstrate to his followers that they have no say in the administration of the country. They're only "good" for him in the sense that a lot of people understand the attack on him to be a proxy attack on their own ability to influence the direction of their country, and hence get motivated to support him. He'd be doing better without the investigations, in my opinion at least.
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This is 100% not probable cause or legitimate grounds on which to premise an investigation into the Trump campaign. That is why none of the reports from the "investigations into the investigation" found that any of the investigations were predicated on this... it would be literally illegal to do such a thing. Instead, they relied on other grounds.
Probable cause is not needed to begin an investigation. Probable cause is the amount of evidence needed for an arrest, so obviously investigations are begun on less than probable cause.
"or" is the word you're looking for.
What I am looking for is someone who doesn't try to legitimate his personal opinion ("legitimate grounds") by making an incorrect reference to a legal principle.
Bullshit. What you are actually doing is just failing to read and then trying to act tough when it's pointed out that you failed reading comprehension.
Try to do something other than legitimate your own personal opinion. Perhaps reference one of the public reports from one of the special counsels or OIG. Or perhaps reference the DOIG. Or even case law. Show me a single example where, "Whelp, we just randomly praxxxed out who we think would benefit from this crime (bonus points if it's something as diffuse as benefiting electorally), and that's clearly sufficient grounds on which to predicate a wide-ranging investigation into everything about them."
But seriously, dude. You know that it's OBVIOUSLY not PC. Like, not even in the same universe. I'm pointing out that not only is it not that, it's not even grounds for starting an investigation. No serious person thinks it is, and you can't find such a thing in any gov't document. They had something else that they believed was predication for an investigation, and at various points, believed they had PC for various things.
I haven't expressed an opinion. I merely noted that your reference to the alleged lack of probable cause is irrelevant. "The Constitution does not require evidence of wrongdoing or reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing by a suspect before the government can begin investigating that suspect." Rehberg v. Paulk, 611 F. 3d 828, 850 fn 24 (11th Cir 2010).
Why don't you, instead of resorting to infantile ad hominem attacks, provide actual evidence regarding what is or is not considered "legitimate grounds" for a law enforcement agency initiating an investigation. A court case, perhaps. Or ethical standards for law enforcement agencies. Or Justice Department regulations and policies. Anything at all that supports an inference that you are just rendering your uninformed opinion.
Again, that is irrelevant, because law enforcement does not need probable cause to start an investigation.
Like I said above, check out the DOIG.
Your own personal opinion is that "or" is not a word with meaning.
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Not of the Trump campaign.
This is not probable cause or grounds for an investigation. (Notice I said "or", which responds to your second paragraph.) It's wayyyy too subjective. One could legitimately believe there was probable cause to investigate, say, the release of Trump's tax records. Very possibly a crime was committed. Very possibly not (that's the nature of PC/investigations). If they had something specifically pointing to a particular individual for an actual crime, they could go about investigating them, with the level of what they're able to do being dependent on the nature of the evidence in question. It would be insane to say, "Whelp, law enforcement can just willy-nilly decide 'who benefits' from the release of Trump's tax returns and use that as a predicate for a far-reaching investigation into them."
Bullshit. Page five is just facts and narrative. Page 11 is where they describe why they were doing what they were doing. Nowhere in this document do they ever say that any investigation was predicated on anything as ridiculous as, "We picked who benefited and started investigating them."
Check out the DOIG.
This is where the real battleground is, and probably where reasonable minds could disagree. Of course, some unreasonable minds are going to be super partisan about the whole thing, tipping every subjective factor one way when it comes to politicians they like, but the other way when it comes to politicians they don't like. Regardless, this is a far cry from, "We looked to see who benefited and opened an investigation into them."
Section 5 covers assessments, Section 6 covers preliminary investigations, and Section 7 covers full investigations. These are the areas where this current battle is being waged.
Sure. A lot of people think that. The key question is what kind of investigation, what kind of investigative steps. There's a huge transition to:
They had basically nothing here. You could easily take such minimal indication seriously by, for example, going and interviewing the source of that indication, seeing what's there. If there was something worthwhile, that could justify some additional steps. Instead, we pretty much just had fever dreams of a Manchurian candidate. Those dreams were crossbred with wet dreams of getting The Donald and preventing him from becoming president. It was irresistible to them politically, and the response to the same set of facts would have been completely different if the ox being gored was tinted blue instead.
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If I've kept my Trump-drama details straight, what happened was that:
The Australian High Commissioner to the UK Alexander Downer had drinks with George Papadopoulos, a member of Trumps foreign policy advisory panel. Papadopoulos reportedly told Downer that Russia had dirt on Clinton. Downer then passed on his account of this conversation to Elizabeth Dibble, the US Charge d'Affaires in London.
I think it's pretty arguable that this is the sort of event that can either be used as the pretext for launching an investigation (as it was) or ignored as baseless shit-talk (as it turned out to be). Which way it goes is not unlikely to be politically influenced.
To be clear, my position is that both sides regularly conduct politically motivated investigations of the other, whether over Russia collusion, Benghazi, Ukraine bribery, Whitewater, or whatever. Both sides engage in some level of illegal/unethical behaviour, so sometimes these politically motivated investigations actually find something even if it wasn't the thing they were exactly looking for.
I think this is a good and proper state of affairs.
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I think there’s a clear double standard between Trump and Clinton. However, I’m also convinced that Trump is retarded enough to show the papers to some honeytrap ‘friend’ or ‘investor’ brought to him by China / Russia in a way Clinton isn’t, if only because the CIA could warn both and Trump would tell them to go fuck themselves or otherwise wouldn’t listen.
Agreed. If you're going to do crimes, at least be smart about it.
Actually you don't even need to be smart - you can not just do crimes but record yourself doing them (even a few extra photos of you smoking crack for fun), write lengthy messages about them and even have your partners in crime record lengthy messages detailing the crimes you're committing, including the fig leaves you're using to disguise them. You can leave all this incriminating evidence in the hands of random civilians and not give a shit, either, as long as you're on the right side of politics (the establishment side that is, not left vs right).
I, too, wish high-class drug use were pursued as viciously as rando losers doing drugs were, but until the day the lawyers and executives of this world touch no cocaine for fear of going to jail we just aren't there.
This isn't about cocaine - I actually wish influence-peddling and corruption were pursued at all rather than encouraged and enabled by the ironically named intelligence community that is meant to stop that kind of behavior.
That emphatically is not what the three-letter agencies are supposed to be doing though.
Are you saying that the FBI should not be involved with foreign nationals purchasing influence from and bribing high-ranking members of the government? If, for example, the president's son is involved in shady dealings and getting blackmailed by people with footage of him smoking crack and banging prostitutes, should the FBI just completely ignore this as non-important? I was under the impression that the FBI would get involved if an important member of the executive branch became beholden to foreign interests, whether Chinese or Russian, and it absolutely seems to be within their remit. They certainly acted as if it was during Crossfire Hurricane.
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Well, yeah, obviously. I don't think I have a better example of the whole two movies thing that the way people see Clinton's emails. While there are admittedly some blank spots that I can't fill in with details, the outline of the story is so incredibly damning, so plainly the acts of someone engaging in corruption that I have a very difficult time understanding how anyone could believe otherwise. The act of setting up a private server rather than just using legitimate State Department resources should straightaway result in adverse inference regarding any follow-up action; perhaps not legally, but certainly from a political understanding of motives and behavior. Likewise for the deletion of approximately 32,000 emails that putatively were just personal emails. What, exactly, was she hiding? I don't know and that part barely even matters to my evaluation that her behavior was the behavior of someone that's trying to hide what she's doing.
That other people don't just disagree, but think the whole thing is so made-up that it should just be flippantly mocked is wild to me. Accusations of "whataboutism" aside, I just think it's plainly obvious that she acted like a guilty person trying to cover-up their actions. I can't even imagine someone behaving this way in my personal or professional life and being able to just say, "no, I checked them and they were just personal emails, we're all set". Everyone would assume the worst!
The legality probably hinges on technical details that I frankly don't care about very much. The obvious wrongdoing does not hinge on anything other than the weirdness of a government employee diverting their emails to a private server and deleting them when they're requested by the government.
I shouldn't have to tell you this but most people—including major public figures—have some expectation of privacy when it comes to their private lives, even if it isn't anything that most people would find embarrassing or inappropriate. Once when I was younger a cop who wanted to search my car gave me the classic line about "why do you have a problem with it if you have nothing to hide", to which I shot back that when we were done maybe we'd go to his house so I could go through his stuff since after all, he presumably has nothing to hide either. On a more down to earth note, I serve on the board of directors of a small nonprofit and we deal regularly with state government officials, outside contractors, and other interested parties, and we often speak candidly about them, or express our frustration with them, or talk about how to strategically deal with them. You don't think that Hillary Clinton speaking candidly about a high-level official or venting frustration to a friend might not be something she wants bandied about the public square, especially if it deals more with a personal relationship than official business? You can, of course, make the argument that as a Secretary of State and presidential candidate she should be subject to greater scrutiny than your average Joe, but that doesn't mean that the desire for privacy isn't there, and it's a pretty slippery slope if we decide that certain government officials effectively have no privacy at all. It's the same thing with Trump's tax returns; every left-wing pundit thought that Trump was hiding something, but no one considered that the real reason he didn't release them was because he thinks it's none of our damn business.
None of this applies to emails sent from a State Department address.
If she had been using a State Department address there wouldn't have been any controversy and her IT guy wouldn't have been able to delete anything. The whole scandal was based on the fact that she was using a clintonemail.com address and server for official State Department business, which was intermingled with her personal email.
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Because State Dept officials never speak candidly and critically about high ranking officials in official communications? Obviously you are forgetting the documents released by Chelsea Manning. And, no one ever speaks negatively of colleagues in work emails?
I would consider it ill-advised and I behave accordingly in my own work emails.
In any case, the whole point is that there is no legitimate basis to hide and delete those work emails - the whole setup was an obvious attempt to workaround the norms and legal requirements for State Department emails. If the only things they were trying to hide were candid discussions, so be it, but that's still not a legitimate practice.
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So here the facts specific to the case matter a lot. Investigations showed that the emails were sorted through and set to be deleted PRIOR to the public blowup and it becoming a campaign issue. The sysadmin in charge of the deletion seemed to have followed through on the deletion as a way to cover their own butt (fearing Clinton's retribution more than others, apparently). Given this information, what can we conclude or assume about intent? The presumption is of course that the private emails were in fact private and not "oh this looks illegal better get rid of it". Because at that time, it was still a FOIA-type, "avoid something embarrassing" concern, not a "let's hide illegal behavior" thing. Clinton wasn't even involved in this process directly.
Who asked for the emails to be deleted in the first place?
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Except for the whole part where conducting official government through a private to avoid FOIA is itself a violation of federal records keeping laws and at the end of the day she or someone on her staff still removed compartmentalized material form its compartment and put it out on the internet, yet we won't be seeing Huma Abedin's perp walk because the FBI doesn't go after Democrats.
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So what? That might sound flippant but it's truly not. What is the implication or application to politics here? What are we supposed to do with this information/what is the logical call to action? I think that's almost as important as discussing the actual contents.
Example. A lot might read your post and linked article, and let's say for the sake of argument it's all true. Some might say, "well this means Trump shouldn't be charged for the crimes he's currently accused of." Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Because at the end of the day, intent does matter. While Hillary is certainly guilty of thinking she's above the law, used to be coddled by the media, and having her wishes fulfilled by government bureaucrats, and being dishonest on top, she didn't intend to expose confidential or classified information and most of the email saga came down to a mixture of negligence and pride. Contrast Trump in the most recent classified docs saga. It's NOT an issue of over-classification (though it does exist). It's NOT a case of negligence, as he was given a number of chances to cooperate. It was WILLFUL retention of government secrets. It's not like he couldn't access these secrets -- I'm almost certain former presidents are given access to these materials if they are writing their memoirs, for example. It was the pride of "owning" them, though they manifestly weren't his. It doesn't matter how the investigation started, only how it ends.
Vague gestures at other would-be conspiracies sound much like the Steele Dossier inspired ones. Hunter Biden has gone through at least one GOP led congressional investigation. So far, not a whole lot to show.
They both willfully retained government documents. The only intent difference that makes any real sense is the audio of Trump talking to the media figure, which I think is totally overblown. We use circumstantial evidence to ascribe intent in almost all criminal cases, and Hillary had mountains of that showing willfulness and intent. If we use the Comey standard, only people who confess the intent element to the police would ever be charged with murder. Every man who stabbed his wife would be charged with manslaughter because well, perhaps he did fall over 17 times with a knife in his hand in the direction of his wife's chest.
Hillary had mountains of intent/willfulness in doing what, exactly? Please state exactly what you're implying because it isn't at all obvious to me.
All I can tell is she was trying to hide embarrassing stuff from becoming plastered over the front page of the NYT, stuff like "yeah I secretly hate Obama" or whatever, not "oh I embezzled some money". Stuff like the DNC leaks, maybe a Hatch act violation or two. The private vs public line is always a bit fuzzy when it comes to FOIA type record keeping, this isn't anything new. The fact she had her own email SERVER (with accompanying insecurities and non-cleared IT guy), not merely her own private email (which others did do before her), is not exactly "retention", though it is criminally negligent IMO (my whole point is that negligence is technically illegal but not worth prosecuting as a precedent, but willful commission of an illegal act is).
Great point about circumstantial evidence, though.
The construction of the server demonstrates deliberate intent to mishandle documents. It served no other purpose (other than evading FOIA laws).
She obviously showed willfulness when she directed subordinates to use specialized software and literal physical destruction to destroy the server when it was under subpoena.
The only thing we don't have is a literal confession of her state of mind.
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No, she intended to keep it very secret indeed, so secret not even the government was allowed to see it, which is why she wiped it "with a cloth". It also seems ironic to see an argument that the foolish pride driven imbecile is Hillary Clinton and the nefarious master manipulator is Donald Trump.
I don't think you read my comment closely enough. I claimed both of them were due to shortsighted pride but one of them was a lesser, "omission" type deal and the other is a much more brazen "commission" type, which I do think should be treated differently. I think most people agree the intent of the server was to avoid embarrassing FOIA type revelations rather than a deliberate and insecure discussion of top secret stuff.
This framing would make sense if you were going harder on Clinton than Trump.
Storing documents in a shower that you want is an omission. Sending documents over an unsecured internet line and then deleting them while you know an investigation is happening is commission. Somehow I don't think the FBI would have gone easy on Trump if when they conducted the raid all they found was a burning pile of papers and some cans of petrol in the toilet.
See my other responses in this thread -- deletions did not happen by Clinton or on her orders and evidence about the process that was investigated by the FBI found nothing strange or odd about the process of marking private emails nor the actual deletion by a panicked subordinate. Sure the deletion sounds nefarious but this turned out not to be the case. You are mischaracterizing this deletion entirely and I encourage you to re-check your sources about it, as we now know much more than we did initially. Her crime was being told "your setup is insecure" and her going "well no I like it the way it is and don't want to break things" like an old tech-illiterate person in a position of power frequently does. That's akin to omission because the email server was one she had been using for eight-ish years as a senator and didn't want to change. It's not like she made a big deal about setting it up that way, just that no one relevant knew about it or if they knew, they were a junior person who didn't raise a stink about it.
Trump's timeline is different. He's literally pestered both formally and informally to give stuff back, doesn't give back the majority of it, and then is on record as taking action to hide or move other stuff. The search warrant was an unusual step, I agree -- one that proved to be wholly valid as they found classified stuff in new unexpected locations. There are elements of obstruction and admission of guilt and of lying to the government. It was a crime of omission initially, as there were admittedly a LOT of documents and I'm sure a lot WERE personal, but as soon as the official requests are coming in Trump has a duty and legal obligation to do his due diligence and return stuff. But what, at that juncture, was his response? Not just ignoring the requests, but deliberately doing the opposite. Right at that moment, it becomes a crime of commission.
You actually think this is true? Or is it what the FBI wanted to conclude so it structured its investigation to not probe that question too much?
I am not mischaracterizing what happened. I got all the information from the IG report that is one of the most pro-FBI sources.
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I read your comment fine. I may have misunderstood your point, probably because you claimed Clinton was so much lesser that nobody should give a shit and it has zero relevance to politics(!) and Trump was NOT negligence, NOT over-classification, but WILLFUL retention of government secrets. But I think your goal was to defend Clinton by bringing Trump into it based on an argument nobody here had made, which this follow up only solidifies. What exactly do you think were the embarrassing foia type revelations that "most people agree" she wiped the server to avoid, and how specifically do they differ from a deliberate and insecure discussion of top secret stuff?
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I always assumed it was an attempt to evade FOIA requests.
I agree, she had no reason to fear the government, but she knew the government would have to comply with foia requests, which would allow her opponents to look into the cavalcade of highly suspicious coincidences that followed in the wake of her political career, which would tank her run for president regardless of how many were actionable.
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The President is the Constitutional, ultimate classifying authority. If Trump wanted to maintain those documents, as president, that suffices.
Anyways your post just reads like an elaborate rationalization. Hillary's crimes aren't so bad because reason-reason-reason, Hunter Biden's crimes aren't so bad because reason-reason-reason, but Trump's crimes are bad because... How do you know that Hillary Clinton didn't "intend" to expose materials? How do you know that the documents manifestly aren't Trump's, when we don't know what the documents even are? You can fill in the blanks however you want, I guess, but it won't make a very rigorous argument.
Investigate Trump over Russia, investigate Trump's business records, investigate Trump's campaign, investigate Trump's sexual relations, investigate Trump's administration... wow, after eight years of manufacturing pretexts to spy on him, he finally committed a crime after we picked a fight. He waved classified documents in front of a reporter's face and everything. Guess we have to charge him now, everyone is equal before the law, justice and democracy and liberty and freedom prevail. What, charge other politicians? Hahahaha
Well the Clintons had undergone multiple decades of scrutiny before the election so it makes sense there's only so much "new" stuff. Whitewater, for example. If she had been new to politics like Trump, you'd see a similar level of scrutiny. And in fact if you sum up all the investigations on the Clintons over the years you probably get a similar scope. Trump has so many investigations because he was a businessman in a famously shady business (real estate and show business both tend to be full of obfuscation and do often hide real crime), not because of being a "threat" to the "establishment". And note that Justice was indeed served at the end of the day, most of the investigations didn't turn up too much and the one that did (impeachment) went through the normal process and he was found not guilty. End of story. I know people were bitter about investigations starting but in the end he wasn't actually harmed all that much?
It also makes zero sense that Hillary would deliberately allow her personal email to be hacked. That's an insane suggestion and you should feel bad for making it. Note that I never accused Trump of actually cooperating with a foreign power or anything. Just like in Hillary's case, it's a pride thing, but manifested a different way. When you're no longer the President, you are no longer the President! You can't just make your own rules, much less retroactively, you have to "declare" them and then follow them. That's what the whole presidential order system is for. Trump even himself admitted that he could have but did NOT declassify these things in order to keep them. And either you're being disingenuous or are misinformed when you say we don't know what's in the documents. We have a decent idea of at least a few articles, and they are most definitely classified. And remember, the classification system exists to protect harmful secrets from becoming public. It defeats the whole purpose if you arbitrarily declare manifestly harmful secrets to be declassified (read: non-harmful) when they clearly still have the same potential for harm.
Don't get me wrong, I DO think Hillary should have been charged with a lesser crime of negligence and maybe obstruction, but in terms of setting a precedent it's more important to convey to future leaders Cabinet level and up that negligence is bad and will hurt you politically but willful disobedience will result in criminal charges. That's a reasonable precedent in my opinion. After all we don't want to make a habit of charging former officials left and right, it leads to a cycle of retribution. You might ask, well won't this Trump thing lead to it? It wouldn't have if there wasn't WILLFUL lawbreaking involved.
This is not what I said or what I implied. It sounds like you don't know what you're talking about.
Hillary didn't put classified documents on a private email; she put them on a private email server. This is a big difference. This is the difference between opening a private bank account at Fort Knox, and opening your own Fort Knox. The US government maintains a vast infrastructure of classified networks. Thousands of technicians work to keep those networks safe and secure. There is a classified email network, that runs on its own servers, that runs on its own devices, totally in parallel to the regular internet. Some of the best security in the world is applied to it. China can't hack into it, Russia can't hack into it. It would be a big deal if they could. Breaking into the US's encrypted networks would be like cracking the Enigma Cipher.
When you work on a classified system, there is literally, on every monitor, a big bar running across the top that says something like:
<<[[THIS IS A CLASSIFIED SYSTEM. CONTROL OF THIS MATERIAL IS AUTHORIZED BY THE US GOVERNMENT]]>>
It's not embedded in the web page of your browser. It's part of the screen. Every single device has a label saying that it is a machine designed for the classified network. This is before documents are even marked with classification markings.
Hillary didn't take some emails from one bucket and move them to another. Politicians maintain private email accounts all the time, and naturally sometimes conduct official business on personal time. That's normal. That's not what Hillary did. It would be meaningless if she had.
Hillary made her own private email server. She replaced the thousands of technical workers, the parallel infrastructure, the monitor warnings, everything. Her server, as I understand it, was basically maintained by one guy. Imagine if I tried spinning up a competitor to gmail, and I ran it out of my basement. It's a small operation, so it's just me maintaining everything. I've borrowed whatever code and servers I need to make it work. That's how secure her server was.
This is so monumentally stupid, and illegal, that either Hillary knew exactly what she was doing, or someone would have told her that what she was doing is wrong. There are no accidents about this. There is no legitimate reason for her to have made a private email server. Perhaps it's not so nefarious, and she wasn't trying to sell state secrets but was, say, annoyed by some technical restrictions and wanted to get around them. She wanted to run it off her Blackberry, whatever. In any event, it's stupid. She made a very stupid decision. It's a stupid decision because there is no possible way she can guarantee the technical safety of those documents running on that server. It's eminently possible that Russia, or China, or, for that matter, some scriptkiddie could have hacked her server. A private server has exactly as much protection as you put on it. She put one or a few guys on it. That's it.
I spun up a private server for testing one time and within 24 hours some hacker in Russia sent me an email saying that he'd found an open port on my server. I turned the server off, and within 5 minutes I had a reply from him saying he'd noticed I'd turned the server off and would I please send him some money since he "warned" me of my mistake. There are guys and groups like that, they go around sniffing every device on the internet to see if it's something they could exploit. National governments have guys like that too.
So:
Hillary didn't deliberately allow her personal emails to be hacked. She just created the exact conditions in which, if it's not inevitable, it was extremely likely. She had no legitimate reason to do this. She would have had no permission to do this. She had no Constitutional authority to do this. Her best excuse is that she was inconvenienced by the rules. Other excuses could be worse. I wouldn't know what her excuse would be, the only answers the press ever made her give were that it was a mistake and she regretted it and let's move on.
I know you said you think she should have been charged, but I want to make it very clear what the nature of her offense did. What Trump did or is accused of doing is not in the same universe as what Hillary did. She is not going to get charged. The FBI, in fact, actively tried to cover up what she did, and gave all her subordinates immunity in exchange for "cooperating" with their investigation. Trump, meanwhile, is being charged. Because he's Trump, and they hate him. You can argue that they should charge Trump and Hillary too. But that's not how this system works. Charity only goes one way. They are going to invent new rules to prosecute Trump and then turn around and say that nobody else needs to worry, their crimes don't actually account, everybody is fair and equal before the law... They'll invent all sorts of rationalizations and reasons. There will be reasons for everything. They will ask you to believe them.
Except for the instances when they can. Remember the OPM hack, aka Chinese getting the personal data of every government worker in the US, and everybody who ever undergone a security check, and their friends and relatives? I am still fascinated of the absolute absence of interest to this from pretty much everybody - like China having all private information of all US government is no big deal at all.
I disagree. She made a very smart decision - to circumvent every and all disclosure rules, created to supervise government workers, and she was successful in this. Of course, full success would be if nobody ever found about it at all, and the materials she wanted to hide just disappeared without a trace, but the second best was actually what happened - what she wanted to delete was deleted, what she wanted to hide was hidden, and she did not suffer any prosecution for it. If anything, she made it into a PR campaign - she is as brazen as to sell merchandise with "but her emails" written on it - she literally is marketing her own criminal behavior. This is not a behavior of a stupid person, this is a behavior of a brazen and arrogant criminal secure in her knowledge that she is untouchable.
There is very little similarity between Hillary and Trump cases. Hillary created a system to hide information from legitimate oversight - one crime (or, rather, one set of crimes), and that system likely also was insecure - second crime. The first crime had clear intent, while the second can be argued as criminal negligence (which does not require intent), since she did not specifically intend for the documents to be disclosed.
With Trump, there's a disagreement between whether or not the documents that Trump possessed are allowed for him to possess or not. While the President is supposed to be the ultimate authority in what is secret or not, I am not a lawyer, so I could imagine there are some technicalities that he should have gone through and he didn't, because he's Trump. It is, however, very clear that he did not intend to hide these documents from oversight or destroy them because they contained information he wanted to hide, and neither he did it in a manner that would be criminally negligent (despite all the photos with the boxes next to the toilet - the question is not about the toilet, but about who gets to be there and handle the boxes. There's nothing inherently insecure in the presence of the toilet, however bizarre it may look out of context) and expose them to disclosure. Very little in common between the two cases except they are both concerning documents.
And we know how it works because for example they said FISA surveillance would only be used in extreme cases against violent foreign terrorists, and they kept their promise. Oh wait, they didn't eve try...
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I think the FBI basically concluded something very similar to what you and I are both saying, in fact, which is not actually that far apart.
A few key quotes from the actual statement:
Was there deliberate deletion? Seems not (they also reviewed the attorney process and found that basically it was just lazy and not very particular, using mostly header searches, thus not consistent with behavior trying to hide specific stuff)
Was the rule-breaking willful? No, but "extremely careless".
Should she have known better for certain conversations? Yes. I think your comment is right on the money about this point!!!
But let's take a step back. I am in total agreement that it was monumentally stupid of her. But Hillary used a freaking BlackBerry. She wasn't that tech savvy. She ignored warnings about it being insecure. And as far as I can tell, they just discussed classified topics, with occasional lower level (confidential) copy-pasting going on, they weren't attaching fully marked documents.. I also don't think she really did the majority of her regular work via email either, like most of us do. It's not like 100% of her communications were through email like today they might be.
Was it hacked ever? No direct evidence, but didn't expect any, so hard to say. They use the phrase "possible":
So does it meet the standard I propose, of "willful"? What about similar cases? The FBI here outlines four key areas that can help decide. THIS is the critical paragraph. Emphasis mine:
While Hillary lied to the public a lot about the facts, she didn't lie to investigators about it. Thus no obstruction allegation. This is a key difference when comparing the Trump case, in addition to the "willful" aspect which is applicable to his actions after the Archives directly asked for the classified stuff back. That's why I made a comparison to "criminal negligence", which you seem to think is grounds for prosecution. I think that's a fair opinion to have, but ultimately a bad idea. Like in plane crashes, it's often best to allow immunity in these cases and focus on improving processes to learn from the mistakes and make sure it doesn't happen again. Which would have been the case if Trump had not been so incredibly prideful so as to refuse to return things and attempt to hide them when officially
askedtold to. She gave bad excuses, but not horrible ones. Avoiding FOIA requests is borderline illegal to illegal but not as severe a violation. Personal convenience was cited (she didn't want to give up her BlackBerry or use several phones).The above just lays out explicitly what we already know: A run of the mill employee might be charged, but civilian heads of department and top leaders get a bit more leeway. That's not super great, but also understandable. Also, it's important to ask-- were the people around her careful (i.e. was she an anomaly? No. She wasn't too abnormal. Just an old person who hates change and dislikes personal convenience.
In summary: None of these reasons apply to Trump. I think it's totally appropriate and also consistent with the past to have him charged, found guilty, and then given a slap on the wrist type of sentence (or have the current President pardon him, only at that stage, similar to what happened with Nixon.)
Uh... I'll point to here. At best, Clinton's contractor willfully deleted e-mails three weeks after receiving a document retention request, and her chief of staff issued a deletion policy that violated the Federal Records Act. Which would only be a problem for this unnamed Platte River Networks employee and and Clinton's Chief of Staff. But they weren't prosecuted, either.
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There are different types of plane crashes. There are crashes caused by a malfunction in the plane systems, there are crashes caused by human error, and there are crashes caused by somebody deliberately directing a plane into the World Trade Center. Arguing that the latter should be handled by "improving the processes" and the direct perpetrators should be excused because with better planes and better buildings we could avoid all that would be insane. The behavior of Clinton was very deliberate and deliberately aimed at circumventing established laws and procedures. There's no "improving processes" that can deal with a person that deliberately chooses to not use the existing processes. You could claim "she did it just for convenience" (though the BleachBit part reveals it to be a lie, deleting anything on a server under data preservation request is a crime per se, but even without that it requires very motivated credulity to believe) but a crime made for one's convenience does not become less crime, it is still deliberate behavior to violate the law, not an accident.
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This is delusional. The people prosecuting Donald Trump are not going through all this trouble just to give him a slap on the wrist. You have a seriously warped perspective about what is going on.
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The FBI spied on Trump's political campaign and his employees using, as a pretext, a political document of misinformation that the FBI itself knew to be full of lies. They didn't investigate Trump because he was a businessman, they investigated him because he threatened them. If they wanted to investigate Trump because he participated in shady business deals, they'd investigate Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell. (How did Diane Finestein become so wealthy? Who was Trump conducting shady deals with if not, at times, other politicians? How many of them are being investigated?)
I want to repeat this because this is key to repudiating your argument: the investigations against Trump were not normal and they were not lawful. We have the documents and records. There was a cadre of top officials at the FBI, like Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, who wanted to do everything they could to impede Trump. People like Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe ordered investigations against Trump on pretexts they knew to be lies. Lies about Trump were deliberately leaked to the press, so that those news reports could be used as justifications in a FISA court. The Durham Report tracks this. There was nothing normal about any of this.
You specify one specific investigation that the Durham report rightly concludes was founded on bogus grounds. However, this is not the only investigation against Trump and those in his orbit, and is not sufficient by itself to generalize. You're implying that all investigations against Trump follow this form, but that's incorrect. Rather, you should also consider the people in Trump's orbit that were indeed found guilty beyond reasonable doubt of various crimes (or admitted to such), including Flynn (lying), Stone (lying, threatening a witness), Manafort (conspiracy, obstruction), not to mention several financial related crimes (Cohen, Trump Org, Gates, Barrack, etc.)
Manafort and Cohen deserve to go to jail for what they did. That said, their crimes were totally unrelated. That is in absolutely no way justification for the particular way this investigation played out. It's the definition of a fishing expedition, and fishing expeditions certainly catch some guilty fish from time to time. One can justifiably hope that their crimes had been discovered, investigated, and prosecuted, but via other means. I don't think anyone on the right thinks, "Oh, maybe there's something worth investigating concerning China and the Bidens, so that's justification for the FBI to start rooting around in every single prominent democrat's business, and the whole expedition will be justified so long as we catch a couple folks doing random, unrelated, dirty shit. I hope the specific folks who are doing random, unrelated, dirty shit get caught specifically for what they're doing.
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You're joking, surely.
Flynn "lied" after being set up under an investigation for a Hatch Act violation, ambushed by FBI interviewers, made to answer all sorts of questions, and then misremembering the answer to a particular point. Before he "lied" the underlying crime was that, before Trump was officially sworn in, he talked to the Russian ambassador and briefly discussed the prospect of sanctions. Not illegal in the slightest, but blow it up into a big controversy because of the spectre of "Russian collusion" (which, again, the FBI already knew to be bullshit) and then harass the victim until they commit some sort of process crime.
This is what all these "crimes" were like: unprecedent levels of investigative harassment against Trump and his people, with the underlying investigations based on completely made-up accusations, and then charging them with process crimes committed during the investigation. "I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you. ... Mom, Flynn just attacked my fist with his face!"
This is a ridiculous argument. All the examples you cite are proof of exactly the dynamic I've been describing. It's as if you took the fact of prosecution of witches at Salem as proof that there must have been witches after all.
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This is something that frustrates me to no end about this conversation. The moment you pay the slightest bit of attention to the corrupt origination of Crossfire Hurricane it becomes immediately obvious that all the horseshit about this not being a political operation is exactly that - horseshit. The FBI knew that the Russian allegations were bogus, shopped the story around to the media, then used those own media reports as justification. I don't think even the most disingenuous of commenters could make the sequence of events outlined in those reports look good, and the only way they can even try in comment threads like this is to just ignore huge elements of what happened (like the FBI knowing in advance that there's actually no Trump/Russia collusion at all).
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if we accept for the sake of argument that what Trump did is no worse than hat Hillary did, how am I supposed to see Trump as anything more than a rank hypocrite? Trump excoriated Hillary for mishandling documents. He tore her to pieces. He wanted her locked up. Given how close 2016 was it's probably not an exaggeration to say that Hillary's emails won Trump the election. and then at the end of his term he stashes a garage full of classified documents in his house? and then lies to investigators about it? Why on earth should I care that he's getting a taste of his own medicine? Crooked Trump.
If it is true that Trump can psychically declassify documents then I'm sure that Trumps very competent, very well paid lawyers will put together an extremely convincing argument to that effect and get the case dismissed. I'm not holding my breath.
Well, for one, that is rhetoric. He actually let her off the hook.
For two a bathroom or garage with Secret Service protection is orders of magnitude more secure than an email server set up in 2008 with 1980 level protections.
Third they both lied. But at least he didn't attempt to destroy the evidence and only get found out because the spouse of his top aid was caught up in a child porn investigation.
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Come on, really? The whole argument is about political persecution against Donald Trump, and unprecedented levels of scrutiny against him. It doesn't matter how well-paid or competent Trump's lawyers are (and surely they're both, wisecracking aside) -- the federal government is bigger and has more resources than Donald Trump. Yeah, sure, if Trump were in the right, the case would be dismissed, because the law is never unfair, that's a crazy accusation, I can't imagine anyone in this conversation alleging that. Be real. This argument is beneath me, even if it's not beneath you.
McDonalds had more resources than Stella Liebeck
I wasn't being sarcastic. I'm sure they are very competent. Which is why I don't really believe your legal theory. If what you are saying is correct, and it is uncomplicatedly true that Trump axiomatically cannot mishandle documents, then why aren't his lawyers screaming it from the rooftops? Why haven't they made that argument in court? why aren’t there droves of grumbling articles from the New York Times about how 'this is all BS but unfortunately his lawyers do kinda have a point'? Why did his previous lawyers appear to quit over this? Why did Trump try and hide evidence from investigators if what he did wasn't even illegal? It's all very weird.
unless, of course, you're wrong.
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I think what Hillary did is worse than what Trump did. Presidents have ultimate classifying authority, and storing government secrets in a box in your bathroom is much better than storing them on a private server spun up by a small-time IT guy. Maybe Trump should have burned the boxes with a hammer?
You keep mixing legal arguments with moral ones. Even if we accept that what Trump did was legal (not conceded) you have conspicuously avoided the argument that it was deeply irresponsible. there is no law of physics which says that a former president cannot injure the nation by mishandling such documents. Even if a box in a garage is not as bad as an email on a server (not conceded) you still have to admit that a box in a garage is pretty goddamn bad. And after all that shit he gave Hillary, too. Is it really such a terrible thing to hold Trump to his own standards?
If we're going with moral arguments, I'd unfortunately have to say that the verdict almost certainly rests with a set of currently unknowable facts - the exact content of the various documents in question. Given the problems of overclassification, it's actually quite tricky to determine whether, and to what extent, each of the documents really was a danger to national security. Obviously, no one is going to come out and make a public appeal in the form of, "Oh come on, all the real content of Document A was already long past sensitive, even broadly published in the NYT already," or whatever. But frankly, if we're thinking about the moral standpoint, such considerations would actually be super important, and we just don't have a clue which way that goes.
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A box in a garage is certainly worse than an email server with regards to security (and this was a particularly insecure server, we'd be better off if she had used AOL, as a country). And even that is merely Biden. A private bathroom in a residence is even more secure. Even moreso when that residence has Secret Service security forces on the premises.
There is not even a slight implication that the US was harmed by Trump's document hoarding. There are multiple experts who believe that it is implausible that multiple foreign nations do not have mirrors of Hillary's server.
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Who cares if it was irresponsible if it was legal? Are we really going to break open Pandora's Box and start indicting presidents for doing things that are irresponsible? If so, great, because I have a long list of politicians who "injured the nation"...
Come on, don't lecture me about boxes in garages when Joe Biden has the same. Maybe if you start by admitting that this whole prosecution is made-up double standards over nonsense no one really cares about, in a long line of same, all directed against Trump, I'll concede that sometimes he acts stupidly.
I'll agree that if what he did was legal, he shouldn't have been indicted. I'm not at all convinced by your argument that what he did was legal, and even if you're correct, people sometimes get indicted for doing legal things; it's just a thing that happens sometimes.
He cared about it. That's what really gets my back up. 'Crooked Hillary's emails' was like his #1 talking point back in 2016. The man is the king of double standards.
As for unfairness, I think if Trump had done what any other politician would have done, and just handed over the documents when they asked instead of being deceitful, then this whole saga ends with Trump getting a sternly worded letter and a half-dozen news articles written about him. The way Trump acted makes this a very different situation. Of course, I'll admit it's possible that in my counterfactual he gets prosecuted anyway. But then your unfairness argument would be far easier to make, wouldn't it?
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My rules > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly.
Your rules, fairly would imply either arresting Hillary or letting Trump go, and I don't think arresting Hillary is in the cards.
And where do "My rules, unfairly" sit on that spectrum? Trump made an absolutely massive deal out of Hillary mishandling documents and the injury to Hillary was huge (probable cause of losing the election). And now it turns out he's also been mishandling documents and people are making a massive deal out of it and suddenly Mr. "lock her up" is all about forbearance and even application of the law? Even if the basic argument about fairness is true, can you explain to me why I should feel one jot of sympathy for this massive hypocrite?
If politician X in state Y gets prosecuted for smoking weed even though in state Y almost no-one ever gets prosecuted on straight possession, then yeah I would be upset at what I would see as a politically motivated prosecution. If, however, politician X also campaigned like mad to keep weed illegal and made tons of political hay by pointing out that his opponent smoked weed in college? Man, fuck that guy with a stick.
This is the kind of distortion that the news media often makes: giving two separately true statements and implying that there's a connection between them. (Actually, I'm not even sure the injury was huge, but let's assume it was). To the extent that Hillary was injured, it wasn't because Trump specifically complained about what she did.
Trump may have talked about Hillary's documents, but he didn't get her jailed or even arrested and, in fact, had no power to do so. So you don't get to invoke unfairness if you want Trump to be jailed. You can invoke it if you think that Trump is talking about Hillary's crimes but Democrats aren't talking about Trump's crimes, but that's obviously absurd.
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Obstruction to me seems like a much bigger issue.
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Declassification is not like art in the White House. The President has Constitutional authority over declassification. Classification doesn't derive from Congress, or any particular law, or the Executive Orders in general. It issues from the President.
The theories and scope of what, exactly, that encompasses, have never been properly challenged or defined in court. But that's a simple matter, new legal theories have been invented before in order to target Donald Trump, and will be again.
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The Clintons stripped tens of thousands of dollars of furniture and artwork out of the Whitehouse when they left, though they later returned some of it after it turned into a scandal.
There was a much longer timeframe for a lot of it...
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What Trump did is worse but it's not immediately obvious to me why we should draw the line at exactly what Trump did and not an inch less. If the point is that stealing is wrong then we usually don't let thieves walk free if they offer to return what they stole months later after being caught.
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And, to note, this is understating how much trump shot him self in the foot.
Trump didn’t say ‘no’ when he got the letter. He told his lawyers he didn’t have any, got raided over it, was caught, and now is charged.
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I mean this alone should mean the next administration, R or D, should dissolve the FBI with extreme prejudice. It's not even the best reason to do it, but you can't run a liberal democracy with a partisan secret police. That said, I'm not holding my breath.
Your apologia about intent whilst admitting that the benefactor of the double standard is guilty even of the hypothetical other standard is nonsensical though. Hilldawg's actually destroyed evidence, remember? How's that for malice aforethought?
With this level of contorting what we should judge things upon, why even bother thinking of a standard?
Here's the most concrete plan I've seen along those lines:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/06/13/exclusive_the_desantis_plan_to_wage_war_on_weaponized_doj.html
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Um, your justification seems to apply equally to both Hillary and Trump, even by your own words. So far as I know, nobody is accusing Trump of actually intending to expose the information.
First of all, Clinton seemed genuinely surprised that classified info was found on the server. After all, investigations showed that nothing was clearly marked as such. There was no moment where she was told by the government officially, "hey, shut this down" and then she said no. Intent was all about FOIA and disclosure avoidance (not appropriation of government secrets), which is bad and sorta illegal but nothing super new in government and she was punished appropriately (politically, by the public - hell she lost an election in part because of it).
Contrast Trump. He clearly has explicitly labeled classified stuff. He knows it's classified. The government very officially says "give it back" and he says "no". That's as plain as the nose on your face.
The penalties for FOIA violations run to single-digit prison terms and being barred from holding office, so if she'd been prosecuted for that instead of the classified docs found on Weiners laptop I don't think the red-hats would have been too disappointed.
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Just noting, this line:
was referring to the foreign government looking to donate to the clinton campaign or maybe clinton foundation, not the FBI. Meanwhile in durham's reporting, apparently the FBI were intentionally 'tippy-toeing' based on the chance clinton would be the next president. So it's not quite as strong as you're describing. But an interesting takeaway from the Durham report regardless.
You are correct, mea culpa, I should have quoted the later part of that paragraph instead.
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