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There are problems in the enforcement of justice, but it's not nearly as bad as you're making it out to be. I presume you're referring to the Hunter Biden stuff? Well, that's largely symmetrical to Trump's Russia investigation: Lots of smoke, not much actual fire (at least by the president himself), yet partisans whip themselves into a frenzy over the issue since they're getting a maximally damning picture due to their filtered media consumption. Biden could very well face a frivolous impeachment trial like Trump did as well.
This is extremely wrong and a sign that you haven't done the required research to talk authoritatively about this topic. There's absolutely no symmetry to the Carter Page warrant, Crossfire Hurricane, Mueller panel etc, and vice versa with the Hunter Art shows or Laptop photos.
I've done quite a bit of research of both. Not as much as many extreme partisans who keep track of daily updates, but more than enough to get a good picture. I stand by what I said: if you want to find bias or wrongdoing then it exists in both investigations. If you want to find crimes by people merely involved in the scandal that aren't the president, you can do it. If you want to actually get to wrongdoing by the president himself, that's a lot harder. There's morally grey stuff, but not much that's technically illegal.
Are you sure? The things I listed there specifically in my post are what I feel distinguish the two cases. There's absolutely no equivalence to Crossfire Hurricane or the Carter Page FISA warrant in the Biden cases, and I feel it is dishonest to even imply it. There's a huge world of difference there and collapsing the distinction makes your thinking lazier and less clear.
The Carter Page stuff was bad, but ultimately more as a factor against the FBI than to the broader investigation as a whole. Carter Page was not indicted, nor did he feature particularly prominently in the final report compared to people like Papadopoulos or Manafort. Then there's the issue of whether that stuff meant the investigation was started from partisan motives, but similar accusations have been levelled in the reverse direction for Hunter. It's also pretty easy to point to Giuliani, who was one of the leading proponents of the Hunter stuff since it's inception, as Giuliani isn't exactly the cleanest guy himself. Or heck, even the recent deposition stuff, where House Republicans initially said they'd accept any type of deposition with Hunter, before reneging and saying they'd only accept a closed deposition, something Hunter specifically wanted to avoid due to the likelihood of the Republicans selectively leaking testimony to present a skewed picture.
Of course he wasn't indicted! That's the entire point I was bringing up - the Carter Page warrant was transparently a figleaf designed to let the intelligence agencies surveil Trump and his entire campaign while delivering intelligence reports based on that surveillance to his political opposition. Again, I struggle to believe that you've got a real understanding of the situation if you think the problem with the Carter Page warrant was that he wasn't actually indicted. The problem was that the Trump campaign and early days of his presidency were under hostile surveillance by the intelligence agencies, and the fruits of that surveillance were given to his political opposition... and all of it was based on a document that everyone involved knew was fraudulent.
No, this isn't an issue at all. The investigation was started from partisan motives, and if you're familiar with the documents in question and the outcome of the Durham investigation, there's not really any debate to be had on this subject.
In order for this equivocation to be valid, the republicans would have had to have manufactured Hunter's laptop and all the evidence on it, selectively leaked portions of it to the media, used it to get a FISA court warrant to surveil Biden's whitehouse, then given regular copies of the intelligence summaries based on the information they gained to the Trump campaign. Hunter Biden's laptop became an issue because he took a lot of photos of himself committing crimes, along with a bunch of records of him selling influence and access to his father, then got super blitzed and forgot about dropping his laptop off to be repaired, then ignored the repeated messages saying "please come pick up your laptop or it becomes our property".
The problem with this line of thinking is that Carter Page certainly wasn't the only reason the investigation started, as Papadopoulos was also an early target and would eventually be convicted. After it started, it was clear there actually was quite a bit of wrongdoing by Trump's campaign, including even the chair of the campaign, Manafort. Not sure what "fruits of surveillance given to his political opposition" is specifically referring to here, so I'll let you clarify before I address it.
The Durham Report (which itself was created/elevated at the behest of Trump to discredit what he saw as the "Russia hoax") didn't even explicitly accuse the FBI of bias, since that's a fairly difficult bar to reach. The final report actually discusses more about confirmation bias than on political bias. It's personally pretty clear to me that political bias was probably a factor, but again it's hard to prove definitively.
If you zoom in too closely then obviously there are object-level differences between the two "scandals", but I never said they were identical. Giuliani's involvement still allows Democrats to point to the blatantly (biased) political nature of how the investigation started, from a man who is verging on lunacy, who claimed the election was stolen by the heckin Commies, and who likely committed crimes himself for which he is now being charged. The laptop stuff has long been his personal project, and the fishing expedition ultimately failed to prove anything related to the president himself. You'll obviously say that's a ridiculous interpretation, but plenty of leftists use something along those lines to dismiss the Hunter story, while seeing the Russia stuff as far more damaging. Again, there's clear symmetry there.
Also, while I'm enjoying the more substantive parts of this discussion, I'd urge you to drop the high and mighty attitude you've been displaying so far. I've discussed this topic with several other people on the Pro Trump side, and each one comes at it from a different angle which makes it difficult to have a single uniform rebuttal. Saying things like "I struggle to believe that you've got a real understanding of the situation" or "you haven't done the required research" or "dishonest to even imply it" or "lazy thinking" or any of that obnoxious crap is not helpful and makes me not want to engage with you. Again, I have done quite a bit of research on this, maybe not as much as you, but enough to know a fair deal. Keeping that in mind would be helpful so that you might ask for clarification if you've misunderstood the argument I was making, instead of leaping to ad hominems that I'm some foolish idiot who "hasn't done the research".
My apologies - I was dealing with a rather annoying issue at work and that most likely bled through to my posting on here.
I said you hadn't done the research not because I thought you were an idiot but because I thought there were gaps in your knowledge. I don't blame anyone for not keeping up to date with this story because it has gone on for more than half a decade and involved copious amounts of misdirection, legal wrangling and media perfidy. But if you're going to try and make authoritative statements on the matter, you owe it to yourself to go and do that research. I actually made sure to ask you if you were sure, because I was politely giving you a chance to back down and go do the research before we progressed and I had to say you hadn't done it.
Trump's initial crime was becoming the GOP candidate while espousing a set of policies that were in direct opposition to the DC Consensus/wishes of the deep state/etc. The Clinton campaign then had the Steele dossier manufactured, and that dossier was then selectively leaked to the media in order to retroactively add enough credibility to the claims contained within that it could be used to get a FISA warrant (Kevin Clinesmith, one of the lawyers involved, was prosecuted for fabricating evidence that was used in the warrant application). The surveillance of Trump's campaign, and the intelligence product produced as a result, went to Obama's whitehouse in the PDB (this is what I meant when I said "fruits of surveillance given to his political opposition"). Trump's campaign was actively surveilled by the intelligence community on the basis of a document that they knew to be fraudulent (the steele dossier), and even publicly stated had not been corroborated when they got that warrant!
This is why the two situations are just fundamentally not comparable. The Russia connection was fictional from the start, and known to be fictional by the government as it was used as the basis of a surveillance operation that continued even after Trump became the president-elect. The people involved in this surveillance are the exact same people who were then assigned to the Mueller special counsel in order to both clean up their mess and do their best to hamstring the Trump administration's ability to hire staff and function. The Hunter Biden laptop story, in contrast, is a case where the government simply did not want to investigate obvious corruption and wrong-doing. The FBI totally ignored the reports of the computer store owner, and it was only after he gave the contents of the laptop to Giuliani that the government got interested and seized the drives - not because they wanted to investigate, but because they wanted to make sure Biden wasn't embarrassed any further. There hasn't been any substantive prosecution or even investigation of Hunter as a result of true, verified and impeccably well documented evidence of him committing multiple felonies, because these felonies implicate his father and multiple high-ranking members of the intelligence community. Not only did the government fail to investigate, they put out a statement claiming that these actual photos were the result of a Russian intelligence campaign, when the chain-of-provenance and validity of the evidence is crystal clear. They even went to the tech companies and had reporting on this story suppressed, which at least one study has determined changed the outcome of the election.
On the one hand, you have a case where fraudulent evidence is used as the basis for a malicious investigation and prosecution of a sitting candidate for president, which continued after he was actually elected. On the other hand, you have a case where real, verifiable and publicly available evidence of multiple well-documented felonies is simply slow-walked, ignored and publicly discredited with no factual basis in order to shift the outcome of an election. These two cases just aren't comparable in the way you were suggesting.
Read the Strzok/Page messages if you want proof. I also don't think political bias will really be provable here simply because the relevant axis is not republican/democrat but Trump/DC Blob, and that's not really a distinction that the law recognises to the best of my knowledge.
None of the stuff about Giuliani is relevant - and they actually have proved things related to the president. There are multiple whistleblowers testifying to the identity of "the big guy", along with multiple photos showing him meeting with Hunter's clients. The intelligence community hasn't prosecuted him, but why would they?
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Last I heard, it's been confirmed that Hunter Biden got his bribes selling access to Joe to foreign entities, and some portion of the bribe money ended up in Joe's bank account. I'm pretty sure that's a felony.
Likewise, Hillary Clinton set up an illegal email server to evade lawful oversight, sent classified documents through it, and then attempted to cover up her crimes. I'm pretty sure there are at least a few felonies there.
Likewise, Bill Clinton appears to have been a rapist.
I'm not sure if George W Bush lying the country into a disastrous war is technically a felony, but it certainly ought to be. Ditto for Obama's administration intentionally supplying arms to Mexican drug cartels, which were then used to attack and murder American citizens, in an apparent attempt to generate support for gun control legislation.
I disagree that it's not as bad as I'm making it out to be. In fact, I think it is pretty much exactly that bad. I do not concede that the existing system retains any shred of legitimacy whatsoever. All that remains is the question of how to coordinate sufficient meanness to allow something more fit to be built on its ruins.
link for more info would be appreciated
Wiki
Writeup from the first page of search results.
OK, incompetent sting operation technically counts for quoted part.
But
is missing.
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I don’t see your angle here. Condemning the ATF for causing the deaths of mexican and parisian civilians and that border patrol guy, implies that letting people buy weapons is complicity in murder. You can either condemn the ATF, Obama, and the right to bear arms, or none of the above.
If you're a consistent 2A gunman, you have to, you know, bite the bullet. Obviously some of the legally sold guns are going to kill people. But guns don't kill people, and anyway protection against tyranny is worth it, and so on. So the ATF is perfectly innocent here.
Selling guns to murderous criminals is a bad idea, which is why we have made it illegal. The government directly facilitating the sale of large numbers of guns to murderous criminals, on purpose, is straightforwardly evil. The fact that they did so in secret, completely failed to achieve any of the purported law-enforcement objectives they offered as excuses after the fact, punished the whistleblower who revealed their activities, and rewarded and promoted the people who planned and executed their "failed" operation undermines any claim to legitimate purposes for their activities.
No. It is not only possible but is in fact trivial to distinguish between law-abiding citizens purchasing weapons for legitimate purposes, and arms traffickers buying weapons illegally and then transfer those weapons to murderous drug cartels. Such distinction is drawn in federal law, which was deliberately circumvented by the ATF. There is no justification for your conflation of legal and knowingly illegal arms sales.
This statement seems straightforwardly absurd, for reasons stated above.
No, I don't.
They were not legally sold. The gun dealers reported the purchases to the ATF, expecting them to arrest the purchasers. The ATF declined to do so, and in fact tried (successfully in some cases) to get them to sell more guns to the criminals, claiming it was part of a legitimate law enforcement operation. Given the results, I do not find that claim credible.
No, the ATF deliberately sold guns to the cartels, and claims to a legitimate law-enforcement reason for doing so are undermined by their complete failure to secure either the weapons or the criminals, and the subsequent rewarding of these failures by the agency higher-ups, the stonewalling of all subsequent attempts at investigation, and the punishment of whistleblowers. None of that looks like innocence to me.
What gun control law, that you support, makes this sale illegal?
You made the conspiratorial claim that this was some attempt to generate support for gun control legislation, but this is contradicted by their burying of the story, which is far more consistent with common incompetence. And as I said, pleading the ATF's complete innocence requires a pro-gun-rights perspective, which is obviously a position the obama administration would be reluctant to take.
...I think I misunderstood this the first time I read it. My instinctual response was "the laws that have already been passed regarding straw purchases by criminals or for illegal arms trafficking, which the government deliberately circumvented in this case." But perhaps I'm misunderstanding you? Are you asking what additional gun control restrictions need to be added to stop the Government from doing something its own laws say are illegal, simply because it's the agent that enforces those laws and can simply not enforce them when it wants to?
If that is your point, it seems like a bad one to me. What was done here was straightforwardly illegal. It happened anyway because the government directly and intentionally facilitated large-scale violation of the law, and then successfully covered it up to the point that they suffered no significant consequences. That is not a gun control problem, but rather a government control problem. No law aimed at preventing bad people from getting guns is going to work if the people tasked with enforcing it decide they would rather give the bad people guns instead.
I think they did it to push gun control because that seems to be the most straightforward motive available. Them burying the story does not contradict anything; they buried their direct facilitation of arm sales to the cartels, not arm sales to the cartels themselves, and they did it because once word got out they appear to have been more interested in insulating themselves from blowback than in deriving the hypothesized political advantage. And in fact, the political advantage was gained to a limited extent; arms trafficking from America to Mexico continues to be used as an argument for attacks on gun manufacturers and owners, as seen in the Mexican lawsuit against American firearms manufacturers that is proceeding in direct violation of black-letter federal law at this very moment.
I concede that they might be simply incompetent, and reflexively covered up evidence of their incompetence out of loyalty to the existing system. I note that there does not appear to be any available evidence that would distinguish such incompetence from active malice, and submit that if indeed incompetence is so severe as to be indistinguishable from malice, treating it as anything less than malice offers no general benefit to those suffering the consequences.
I do not see how pleading the ATF's complete innocence is even possible. The best you can argue is that every person involved except the whistleblower was so utterly incompetent and so determined to evade responsibility that the results of their actions are indistinguishable from criminal conspiracy. I do not see how a pro-gun-rights perspective enters the picture at all; the laws they deliberately violated are not a matter of significant contention in the gun control debate on either side, other than the general critique that the government routinely refuses to enforce them.
More generally, I do not think that Obama or the ATF finding it awkward to argue their innocence justifies them choosing instead to cover up either a complete clusterfuck failure resulting in numerous murders, or deliberate malice resulting in the same. I do not sympathize with them, and do not see why you would either.
Let’s say I support total marijuana legalization. Then I discover the DEA turned a blind eye to the sale of two tons of ganja, which was illegal. They said it was for a sting operation, but the drugs seemingly vanished in a puff of smoke. It would be hypocritical of me to accuse the DEA of knowingly ‘poisoning the youth’, destroying the economy and generally reefer madness roasting the shit out of the DEA for its inadequacy.
I would think extensive laws with the goal to prevent arms trafficking and straw purchases would... infringe. But you're telling me you support those laws unequivocally ? Want them strengthened?
All they did was not interfere in a transaction, I don't find it all that reprehensible, they should do that more often.
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Is there some rule that says the government can break it's own laws, as long as there are people who don't support the laws? If anything it's the opposite, people in power can either repeal the laws in question, if they think they're bad laws and don't want to be subject to them, or they should be punished for breaking them.
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"It's OK to sell duct tape, knives, ropes, and large black plastic bags" does not imply "It's OK to sell duct tape, knives, ropes, and large black plastic bags to a guy you know works for a serial killer"
Outlawing sting operations does not seem to be a good idea.
Controlling police to prevent incompetent sting operations seems a good idea (and in general having some good handle over police).
No sting operation was actually executed. No actionable evidence was gathered, no convictions were secured. Both the weapons and the criminals trafficking them were allowed to escape. The federal agent who blew the whistle on the fuckup was very obviously punished for doing so. The agents who failed to secure either the weapons or the criminals were rewarded and promoted. The Attorney General successfully stonewalled congress when it attempted an investigation.
I do not think that sequence of events is fairly described as a "sting operation", nor do I think its failure can be reasonably ascribed to "incompetence". Given the politically-charged nature of the incident, given the complete lack of consequences for those responsible, and given how those responsible appear to have been deliberately protected by their superiors and by the Obama administration itself, and given that the many remaining unknowns are unknown only because the Obama administration fought successfully and at great length to conceal them, I do not think it prudent to give either the agents involved or the administration directing them the benefit of the doubt.
You seem to really underestimate just how incredibly incompetent people can be and overestimate how often complex black flag operations are executed in real life.
Or maybe I overestimate how many things are bungled due to incompetence and underestimate presence of highly complex nefarious plots.
(may be related to fact that in my area I seen amazing examples of extreme stupidity, bad planning, incompetence, denial of reality - and have seen accusations of nefarious plots mismatching reality. I was even personally accused of running some complex conspiracy few times, that has not existed - unless I am some case of bizarre reverse schizophrenia.)
How this proves anything? I am pretty sure that if institution is rotten then they would do the same in case of conspiracy and out of scale fuckup.
Oh and note that the same claim without
would probably not trigger such nitpicking and disbelief from my side. Probably focusing on provable and mostly covered up part would be more effective, at least in my case.
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So you want morality checks, employment histories and doctor’s referrals on all purchases of duct tape? Unless they’ve been proven guilty, they’re free citizens allowed to buy goods for any suspected killer they choose.
No. I want federal agents to enforce the law against known criminals. No morality checks or employment histories or doctor's referrals were needed in these cases; the gun dealers reported the purchasers to federal authorities on their own initiative, because they correctly recognized illegal purchases.
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Operation Fast and Furious
Wikipedia page
I'm surprised this wasn't immediately recognized, but I guess I'm old, and it was at the very start of the Obama administration.
Or, as my neighbor once said, Obama had a scandal-free presidency. He meant it as an indication that Obama behaved well while in office. I took that to mean that the media did not allow him to suffer from any scandals, including F&F gun running.
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