Quote (IceMage @ Feb 2 2018 03:08pm)
Question for Trump supporters. Do you think these people involved, McCabe, Comey, Ohr, Rosenstein legitimately thought that Steele might be onto something, and with good will pursued this investigation? Or do you think they were political hacks seeking to undermine the Trump campaign and/or presidency? Black and white thinking there, but tell me what you think.
They had to have read the dossier. They had to have read the rather ridiculous allegations of bed-pissing and compromat and known how bogus their source was.
I think there's a better case to be made for them being willfully careless with bogus evidence in an effort to prop up an investigation in hopes of finding dirt on page, flynn, manafort, trump, than that it was all part of some snidely whiplash conspiracy to undermine trump from the get-go as part of a grand plan. That is to say, that they had a partisan political motivation in seeking out the fisa renewals, and tortured the evidence to produce the legitimacy they needed and fudged the application, but they probably had the sincere hope of
finding something to legitimize their investigation after the fact. Yet they did this all while knowingly spying on a political campaign, which is itself something so politically toxic that as I've said many times before, an apolitical and good faith FBI would need extremely good reasons to do it for fear of the watergate-esque damage that could unfold from such spying.
It makes the FBI's counterintelligence operation very disturbingly similar to a democrat-led opposition research campaign. They never had good reason to be looking into Trump's campaign. If they were doing it in good faith, there would have been a high burden of evidence and extreme care taken not to jeopardize the apolitical station of the FBI. Instead there was a sloppy FISA application citing DNC oppo dressed up to self-corroborate and stripped of its partisan origins, then a series of dubious unmaskings, then high profile leaks of that data.
There's no way thats indicative of McCabe, Comey, Ohr, Rosenstein legitimately thinking that Steele might be on to something and pursuing it out of proper diligence and professionalism, no. And as you point out, its black-and-white thinking to pose a dichotomy, so if I had to put an arbitrary metric on it, if white as 0 and grey is 5 and black is 10, you're in the ~7 area.
This post was edited by Goomshill on Feb 2 2018 03:28pm