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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.
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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