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Interesting. I had never seen before that someone from the fbi said it was real. But ya the intel thing I’ve seen.
Which makes Twitter look all the worse, yeah.
Also notice that the FBI guy got "no comment"ed almost immediately. I haven't found any official comments after that, which surprised me.
From what I've seen, the second circle is basically built around that open letter. Despite the fact that they have literally no evidence and are in full legal CYOA mode. It got picked up because the media coordinated or was pushed, or more likely (IMO) it was Too Good To Check.
I'll be honest. I am much more comfortable if there is no overlap in the Venn diagram. Not sure how plausible that actually is.
Hat tip Tyler Cowen for linking this twitter account, because otherwise, I wouldn't have seen this. Not the FBI directly here, but now I'm thinking about comparisons to the Steele dossier. Remember when that story first broke, and the line was that Comey was essentially forced to brief Trump on the matter, because the story had broken? And then, the fact that the FBI briefed Trump on it somehow became public news and was the talking point for a while, all supposedly building up the argument that it was all perfectly true and reliable?
...well, WTF happened here, then? Recall that this story broke in the Post laaaate in the campaign, surely after the point at which the intel community is already briefing both campaigns to some extent, particularly concerning defensive briefs related to foreign intelligence threats, including possible blackmail material (again, this was part of the justification used for the 'need' to brief Trump on the Steele dossier). Did Wray brief the Biden campaign on the possibility of blackmail from Ukrainian or Chinese actors leveraging whatever information was partially-public-knowledge from the laptop? If not, why not? If so, why wasn't that leaked on the news and taken as some sort of confirmation that it was all actually true and reliable?
Every single step of the way, they always treat people differently. Sometimes, it's because there are meaningful differences between situations, and I could imagine explanations being forthcoming for this one, but at some point, when everything keeps constantly breaking in favor of one direction over and over again (that direction being a weighted combination with a heavy weight being pro-FBI-institution and a somewhat smaller weight on anti-Trump/pro-Dem), when it is more and more clear that the rules are made up (or ignored) and consistency is impossible, the less credibility they'll have as an impartial arbiter of lawful activity.
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