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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.
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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