Again, cite? Are you talking about Peter Strzok? The one who sent text messages disparaging Trump, Clinton and Sanders, yet only the Trump messages were released by the GOP? The same Peter Strzok that:
“helped write the controversial letter to Congress sent by then-FBI Director James Comey announcing the reopening of the probe into Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton”
There are facts and there is propaganda. Learn to know when you are being purposely misled.
Strzok, McCabe (via spouse), Ohr (via spouse). I’m aware of the D talking points.
What I’m saying is that there are aspects that you have in the case that you don’t have in the case of Trump, and vice versa. You can’t make an objective case that one is unique by focusing on the aspects that favor your own side.
Funny how every GOP “objective case” falls apart under scrutiny.
Such as, oh I dunno, the memo that spawned this thread?
This is the definitely the current GOP playbook. We just can’t know if the FBI is biased against Trump so therefore we have no choice but to dismiss the Mueller investigation and anything it uncovers. Even though Mueller, Comey, Sessions, Rosenstein and Wray are all Republicans, with Rosenstein, Sessions and Wray actually being appointed by Trump himself. Still totally reasonable that all of these Republicans are actually biased in favor of the Democrats. Somehow.
I know what that side is trying to push, it seems you either have bought into it hook line and sinker, or you are just playing the same cynical game playing on the gullible. Either way, its BS.
So, what you are saying is, if any of the many people who were working on Hillary’s emails, or about benghazi, of anything else like that, ever sent a text criticizing her, then all those investigations should immediately be halted?
ISTM that you (and others) are losing track of the context of this discussion.
I’m not saying I personally think the FBI investigation into Trump was influenced by bias (or that I don’t - that’s not the point here) let alone that the Mueller investigation should be stopped.
The context here is about whether there’s a difference between Democrats and Republicans WRT the malleability of their beliefs based on how it applies to their positions and causes. Someone suggested that from an objective standpoint, D suspicion of the FBI over Clinton was justified, while R suspicion over Trump was not. I don’t think this is valid, and each has some basis for it.
That’s without taking a position on whether either was correct in their suspicions.
Well, I personally sacrificed a goat to the FBI last week, and you can’t say I’m not a liberal!
The whole GOP response is to attempt to discredit, usually by cherry-picked, out of context allegations.
Nothing in the Steele Dossier has been discredited as of now. Some have been verified. Yet Steele’s integrity is called into question because of a comment or two and poof the Dossier is phony.
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page are discredited as hating Trump. This is based on a handful of text messages critical of Trump. This ignores the treasure trove of text messages that the Wall Street Journal investigated and found no conspiracy. This ignores they were sometimes critical of Hillary Clinton. But those cherry-picked texts are evidence that any FBI activity they did was false.
Fusion GPS was funded by Clinton at one point. Never mind it started with the Free Beacon, never mind they worked for Republicans in the past, never mind they didn’t tell Steele who was funding them when he was investigating on their behalf. That one cherry-picked fact means that anything they uncovered is suspect.
The same can be said for Comey, McCabe, Mueller. Every actor, the same thing: Cherry-picked, out of context fact that is supposed to destroy their credibility and taint anything they did as false.
Not only is the evidence cherry-picked and out of context, but it ignores the simple logic that even if everyone was biased against Trump it doesn’t mean that their biases affected their work. Steele likely did good work. He and Fusion GPS were good in going to the FBI. What they and the special counsel have unearthed and released to the public shows that they are using verifiable facts and not inventing stuff.
Even the Nunes memo doesn’t say that anything uncovered is false. It doesn’t take on the veracity of the dossier, the results of the FBI warrants. They’re just trying so hard to say those things came about through bias - and the memo even sucks at that.
Personally, I don’t think I’d mind too much if the FBI did have a bias against Trump, seeing as he was clearly and grossly unsuited to be president and has gone to great lengths to reminds us of this on a near-daily basis for the last 18 months. It wouldn’t be a conspiracy (“get that guy!”) as much as a consensus (“that guy is an idiot.”)
That said, Trump is by now well into negative-credibility territory, in that he’s lied so often and so blatantly it is now reasonable to suspect deception by default when he speaks.
A Wall Street Journal reporter read through all the text messages and concluded that the agents in question had a clear bias against incompetence, resulting in them taking shots against Sanders, Holder, Clinton, and especially Trump.
I actually think that such views are something that nearly everyone on this board ought to be able to relate to.
It’s not clear whether you’re saying you don’t mind if they were opposed to Trump based on him being unsuited, or whether you’re saying you wouldn’t mind if they treated him differently than another person (or candidate) on that basis. I agree with the first, but the second is a huge problem.
If their bias means that they are making up evidence, then sure, I’l absolutely agree that that is a problem.
If their bias means that they will continue investigating, even though they have been demoralized and denigrated by the president, then that’s fine.
I’m not sure what distinction you’re drawing. I wouldn’t mind if the FBI had a bias against a candidate who was grossly unsuited for the job, as Trump clearly was and clearly still is (“grossly unsuited” in this case meaning the unsuitability should be obvious to any reasonable person, not just by some imagined FBI standard). Being opposed to the grossly unsuited does not mean, nor should it imply, that the FBI should take specific favourable action toward other candidates, if that’s what you meant.
That said, I’m unconvinced that any particular bias actually exists and I’m certainly not going to take Trump’s word for it, given his demonstrated indifference to factuality.
Well as long as the FBI treats everyone the same, then I don’t care if they’re biased for any (non-personal) reason at all.
Whoever suggested that you should take Trump’s word for that (or anything else)?
Sure, treat all the obviously grossly unqualified candidates the same. You may have to customize things a bit - what could have worked on Trump might not play as well against, say, a party nominee who ran on a platform of “Let’s replace the criminal justice system with an annual Purge”, of course. Or the Libertarian, for that matter.
Well, Trump, for one.
I think this is an issue where opinions are not split along party lines but on a perpendicular axis. This is why the 2014 numbers are so evenly split.
There are factions of both Republicans and Democrats that espouse conspiracy theories about deep and worldwide government corruption and are suspicious of the federal government and its agencies. Your Cliven Bundy / sovereign citizens type are in this group. Some of your Bernie Bros and some progressive new age hippie types believe this stuff. And the alt-right is frequently contemptuous of the federal legal system.
And it’s not just extremists, a lot of it is borderline - otherwise normal people that think that even though most CT stuff is crazy, just maybe there is something to some of it. Unfortunately some of these people can become swayed when these conspiracy theories become accepted by people like the President of the United States and pushed on Fox News. This is why the R numbers are up over 2014
Or those of us who know history–not just how a domestic intelligence agency can be abused, but how ours has been. Hoover feels like ancient history to a lot of people, but the FBI as we know it is still in many ways his brainchild. I’m not a crazy CT to have a healthy mistrust of the Feebs; I’m just part of the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe it is an important and useful tool of governance and rule of law…with both appropriate safeguards and some modicum of protection from being hamstrung.
Use of the FBI for political ends is not appropriate, in either direction. The current winds are blowing very clearly towards crippling the agency for political purposes. When they inevitably blow in the opposite direction, I will oppose that as well.
But then, I am merely a pinko liberal socialist. Clearly, my support for an important institution of law enforcement is both unreasoningly rabid and entirely partisan, based only on my irrational hatred of the President and my abiding blind lust for George Soros.
While this is true enough (i.e. there are nuts on both sides) I think the difference this time is that we have a lot of deep state CTer types who are actually in positions of power, including the head clown, our orange haired Commander in Cheese. That’s the really scary part…Trump buys into a bunch of these CTs, including the deep state ones.
That’s part of why the idea of an actual FBI effort to torpedo him has some charm, as long as it’s not due to some dark conspiracy for vague motives, but just FBI agents (who by and large are intelligent, inquisitive, college-educated persons) knowing a shitbird when they see one.
It’s not a situation where both sides are equal.
Hannity is talking about a “cleanse” of the FBI, and, yes, saying mueller should be fired and the investigation dropped. That’s a very different thing to any level of mainstream left-wing criticism I’ve ever heard.
And before you say “Well that’s just hannity” we all know the feedback loop that exists right now between hannity and the pres. Hannity (or fox and friends) say it, the president repeats it and then trump fans believe it.
There are numerous examples of this follow-the-leader cycle where the pres quotes verbatim something heard on hannity or fox and friends. And in fact it’s the whole mechanism by which the memo got released and the whole point; Hannity drummed for release of the memo, Trump fell in line, Hannity monologued and now their loyal fans want at the very least for the investigation to be shut down.
Which sets us up for a very ugly situation if the president (or anyone very close to him) gets indicted. Trump loyalists will be out with the tiki torches.