WaEx: One of the more unfortunate effects of the Trump-Russia investigation — and there have been many — is the weakening of traditional standards of argument and proof in the public debate over allegations that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to fix the 2016 election. (Just for the record: It didn’t.)
In particular, angry disputes about the president have done terrible harm to the principle that an investigator, be it a journalist or a prosecutor, should meet at least some standard of proof before leveling an accusation.
Two examples. First is the so-called Steele dossier, the collection of wild allegations against Trump compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Steele’s unfounded accusations — that there was a years-long “well-developed conspiracy” between Trump and Russia, that Trump accepted “a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin,” and that Russian spies taped Trump watching prostitutes perform a kinky sex act in a Moscow hotel room in 2013 — circulated throughout law enforcement and political circles starting in the summer of 2016. That just happened to be the time the Clinton campaign and some in the media began accusing Trump of “colluding” with Russia to gain an advantage in the election.
Top Clinton staff received updates on Steele’s material. Then, they accused Trump of collusion. FBI investigators, who also had the dossier, were trying to confirm it. They failed. more
I’m waiting for the “Declassification” & watch them all run to hide in their “Skunk Holes”, then maybe all the stench they created from all their crap will finally start to subside with a number of them actually ending up being removed from the general population through incarceration.
To me it just re enforces how corrupt/complicit the Obama Administration was in their tacit approval of illegality.
Obama did nothing about Russian interference (on his watch) because the result was preordained. The FBI cabal of criminals (Comey, McCabe,Strzok,Page) worked with WH approval to taint/destroy Trump because they needed an insurance policy. They lied to the FISA court, they leaked to their buddies in the media, they failed in their duties to investigate Hillary and her bathroom server, and they started a counter intelligence investigation into Trump with zero evidence or provocation.
Intelligence agencies have been disbanded for less. These guys shit all over the rule of law.
“But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
Churchill
I think “Obstruction of Justice” and “Civil Forfeiture” should work this way: If you don’t have a charge to go along with it, then you shouldn’t be able to do it. How can someone obstruct an investigation that shouldn’t have been conducted in the first place? And their threshold for what constitutes “obstruction” is absurd.
Obstruction charges have come to mean this: you don’t like that person? Then come up with some reason for a bogus investigation, ask a million questions — about which someone is likely to give an inadvertent incorrect answer, then charge that person with obstruction even though the reason for the investigation slipped away quietly in the night.
Only if we let them.
The wretched, loathsome Hillary Clinton along with the rabid hate spewing Obama have done a degree of damage to this country that’ll take years to completely assess.
It’s vital that a severe response come from legal authorities and they had better do it very soon.
This country is teetering on a social explosion and at that point it will be uncontainable.