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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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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.

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.