Quote (IceMage @ May 19 2018 01:49am)
A couple questions for you though Goom. If the FBI thinks a presidential campaign might have a Russian spy as an adviser, don't you think they have a responsibility to suss it out? That seems obvious to me, especially considering it's much more likely the candidate wouldn't know they are employing a foreign spy
Well first I'd hope they have more than such vague suspicions warranted only by association. Flynn got spied on for having dinner with Putin. Then, if they have legitimate counter-intelligence cause, any investigation should be carried out with extreme care, quarantined from political intrigue and subjected to the highest scrutiny possible. They should be dotting every i and crossing every t. When the incumbent government uses its intelligence apparatus to spy on the opposition candidate, they have to be fully aware of how dangerous it to democracy, and how politically toxic it would be if/when it gets revealed. Of course, three things we've seen since then: Its quite probably we'd never have found out about any of this if Hillary was elected president, as the FBI heads all expected. That should be cause for alarm to the safeguards against abuse. And second, we've seen the abuse. The FBI leaking all the past couple years, especially the unmasked FISA wiretap transcripts used to destroy Michael Flynn- show that at least
after the election, the FBI was engaged in rampant political weaponization of that same spying. Third, we've seen that the safeguards didn't exist. The surveillance on Trump used flimsy premises and exploited all the loopholes and 4th amendment violations that the IC has insisted it only needed to go after terrorists. Warrantless national security letters, informants, rubber stamp fisa approval citing DNC-funded opposition research, and those sneaky FISA 702 queries.
To me, we shouldn't be giving them benefit of the doubt only because we lack proof that the spying on Trump was used
during the campaign. Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn't. Maybe Obama got rolls of microfilm hidden under a fake rock in the rose garden. Maybe nobody at the FBI ever let any information slip. If we found that proof, the right-wing media would explode and it would be armageddon... but I'd maintain that maybe it doesn't really matter. Its the fact that everything surrounding the spying stinks. The lack of quarantine, the clearly politicized officials, the weaponization of the intel. It matters more than the walls are made of bamboo and paper than that someone walked through them.
Quote
If this was politically motivated, why didn't we ever know about the investigation before the election?
Well the most rational answer is because they didn't find anything. How would it play out if they announced that the FBI was spying on Trump's campaign, but had no actual evidence of any wrongdoing?
Politically, it would actually hurt Hillary by whipping up accusations of abuse, just like it has after the fact. Comey has said that his decision making was operating on the assumption Hillary was going to win, so taking the very bold step of revealing the existence of the investigation in an openly political fashion- far moreso than the already public clinton investigation- wouldn't make much sense from either a political or professional lens. And besides any grand agenda or conspiracy, there's the element of individual motivations of the actors involved and self-preservation. The abuse of the spying apparatus doesn't
require a grand conspiracy, it just requires like-minded individuals who tolerate the erosion of our civil liberties and protections. They aren't necessarily motivated to take overt actions that would throw away their careers, they aren't kamikaze pilots, especially not when it seems so unnecessary. And take James Comey at his word for his motivation; if he valued the FBI as an institution, then such political interference and ensuing firestorm would have been guaranteed the destruction of the FBI in apocalyptic scandal. Announcing the investigation for no reason but politics, with no evidence to show, without any ironclad justification? If Trump had lost as he expected, we might be in the civil war timeline.
But what would have happened if the FBI
had found dirt on Trump's campaign? If it looked like he was in the lead, and this politically compromised surveillance dug up some political dirt on him, could we have trusted they wouldn't have used it?
This post was edited by Goomshill on May 19 2018 02:34am
Guests cannot view or vote in polls. Please register or login.