Is political bias on part of the FBI a fact or fiction?

I don’t think the comparison is apt. Lots of laws have First Amendment exceptions that would cover the press receiving and publishing hacked information, and not a political campaign receiving the information, keeping it secret, and using it to influence an election. Arguably such an exception is required by the First Amendment.

If we can set the law aside for a minute, do you see no moral difference between a news organization receiving hacked information and reporting on it, vs. a political organization receiving that information and using it in secret to advance their political ends? Does the moral math depend on what news organization and which party it is?

I am not making this argument.

Knew in advance of the hacking.

Or, you know, a government of a country named “Russia”, which is colloquially referred to as “Russia” in standard American English c. 2018.

52 U.S. Code § 30121 reads, in part:

(emphasis in original)

I’m not talking about press releases, I’m talking about the plea deal that Mueller offered and Flynn accepted (see section 8, “Cooperation”), and the plea deal that Mueller offered and Papadopolous accepted, which states that,

What do you mean by a “deal” if not a signed agreements with investigators to cooperate in the ongoing investigation in exchange for favorable treatment at sentencing?

Ah, I’d forgotten about the Iran Contra scandal, but Reagan didn’t start his first term under investigation for it. I understand that you want to categorize their issues the same, as parallels, but what’s happening to Trump is beyond severe and it’s not even based on his acting Presidency (well not yet, not until they throw those obstruction charges at him). I won’t argue your feelings of similarity any farther, I see why you like comparing them, but I don’t see any relevant connections since Reagan had served in politics as an acting governor before his presidency. They both share the wealthy, male Republican status, I’ll give you that. :mrgreen:

Not only do I not see those as morally different, I barely see them as different states of affairs. CNN is a political organization. Fox News as well, though less so. If it was one such political organization and not Wikileaks that got those hacked emails, we only would have seen or heard about them insofar as it advanced the political ends of the news organization that got them.

It is extremely disingenuous to tell me that there’s a moral difference between journalists doing something and politicians doing something when you have benefited from the journalists working to advance your political interests for decades.

If the DNC got their hands on a bunch of illegally-gotten emails that would be damning for Republican, and they decided it would be illegal for them to use or hold on to them, they’d simply leak them to any of a number of press agencies.

Knew that the hacking was going to happen in advance of it? Whoever knew might be guilty of not reporting a crime, but that’s unlikely to get to Trump and doesn’t show any sort of collusion or conspiracy or anything else.

Yeah, and how many millions of people does that represent? “A person in the Russian Government did something” does not make anybody who talked to “A person in the Russian Government” complicit or suspicious. This is where it’s important to point out that the nature of the hacks (a password phishing scam) were such that a college student working alone could easily do the entire thing. We now know that we are simply not talking about something that requires the involvement of multiple agencies in multiple countries.

You aren’t a lawyer, but I get the impression that you follow politics. So do you perhaps remember when Nigel Farage, then member of Parliament and leader of the British far right UKIP party, came to the United States, met with Donald Trump, held a press conference in front of every journalist they could fit in the room, and announced in front of everybody that he, Nigel Farage, a foreign federal official, was in the United States to help Trump with his election campaign? And then they left that press conference to meet in secret and discuss who knows what with who knows what promises exchanged?

Do you understand that the Clinton campaign had perhaps dozens of lawyers watching this, pouring over this - and so did the rest of America-, and their legal conclusion was to do absolutely fucking nothing?

What was much less widely supported is that Gianni Pittella, then member of Italian parliament, also came to the United States and actively campaigned for Hillary Clinton, giving speeches all over the Philadelphia area specifically and emphatically endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, in events that served no purpose other than being campaign rallies for Hillary Clinton. We’re not talking about a press conference where he happens to mention her, he campaigned for her here.

Once again, dozens of lawyers on the opposition watching her every move (and it’s worth while to point out how sue-happy Trump is), and once again, the conclusion was to take no action. I didn’t see a single news article speculating about how much it might have cost cash-strapped Italy to fly Gianni and his aides here and pay their salaries while he campaigned for Hillary Clinton. As far as I can tell, nobody expressed any curiosity about what the Italian gov’t or Gianni’s party might have been promised in exchange.

Why was no action taken? I mean other than because these things obviously aren’t against the law? Because Trump hadn’t won yet and the “Getting help from foreign nationals with your campaign is a crime” bullshit hadn’t been pushed to the press from the DNC yet, so nobody knew they were supposed to be outraged.

I mean, were you?

You are trying to prove something that everybody already knows happened. It’s not a crime. The lawyers of the opposition would have destroyed the campaigns of both parties if it were. Now, taking monetary bribes can probably be punished. But trying to stretch ‘other thing of value’ to mean ‘Anything I need it to mean to condemn Trump because I hate him’ as the left is doing right now is obviously and by precedent a misreading. The First Amendment simply will not allow you to criminalize speech simply because the person speaking is running for office.

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Well obviously I and everybody else who hears ‘deal’ would mean the connotative definition of what is implied whenever it is brought up, which is that Flynn offered the FBI dirt on Trump in exchange for a lighter sentence, not that the FBI demanded that Flynn cooperate with their investigation and Flynn said “ok”. That IS the only reason it’s a talking point, after all.

Is it just disingenuous, or is it actually incorrect? Is journalism just politics by another name? If so, is that inherently the case, or just contingently the case in the modern US? This is an interesting claim (if it is your claim); my initial reaction is to disagree, but I acknowledge that there’s a lot of grey in the distinction.

If someone told the Trump campaign that they were going to do something illegal for the benefit of the campaign, and the campaign received the spoils of that illegal act, that would be more than just a failure to report a crime, it’s complicity. Given that senior members of the Trump campaign were in contact with people offering them the spoils of a criminal hack, it’s not impossible, it’s not even that much of a stretch that Trump himself knew about it.

Another point of moral clarification: If you know someone is going to hack into someone’s email for your benefit, do you have a moral obligation to take steps to prevent them from doing so?

I am a lawyer.

Doesn’t this answer your point? Again, there are First Amendment exceptions throughout criminal law. Even when they aren’t there expressly, they’ll be read in by courts to save the law from being unconstitutional. There’s a rule of statutory construction in the US that says, where possible, courts should avoid interpretations that would render a statute unconstitutional.

Here “contribution or donation of money or other thing of value” is ambiguous, but easily interpretable to exclude stump speeches in support of a candidate, but not exclude e.g. material support in the form of the spoils of criminal hacking.

If “dirt on Trump” includes dirt on any more senior member of the campaign, or a promise to testify to what he does know, etc., that’s how I understand it as well. The fact that Flynn and Papadopolous entered these plea agreements, that Papadopolous’ agreement was entered under seal, and that neither has been sentenced and likely won’t be sentenced until the investigation is complete, suggests strongly that that’s what we have. The written agreement makes it pretty clear that that’s what the investigators believe they have. Whether or not Flynn or Papadopolous are in fact able to provide what investigators seem to expect them to provide remains to be seen, but it is a reasonable conclusion from what we do know.

How can Trump be held liable for a Russian hack that he did not aid? Even if he had the DNC emails in advance and reported their existence, that wouldn’t have stopped the source of the hack from releasing them. Trump would have still won. If Hillary and her swamp scum DNC crew hadn’t written such egregious things, the DNC wouldn’t have shot itself in the head (not that there were or are brains there to destroy anyway). I see blame Trump for Clinton’s horrible garbage.

As a co-conspirator to whoever is responsible for the hack, either for agreeing to it, or for helping to disseminate it for profit after the fact. There may also be direct criminal liability for knowingly accepting stolen goods, but I don’t know about the application of that concept in hacking cases.

This doesn’t matter for purpose of determining if he committed a crime.

This also does not matter for purpose of determining if he committed a crime.

The FBI is biased, the media is biased, the judges are biased, the facts are biased, reality is biased, all against Trump. Everything that keeps Trump’s ridiculous nature in check is what they attack and make up lies about, in order to sustain their delusional sense of self righteousness

K: perhaps… I might offer up a different idea… that the supporters of IQ45
have biases and still believe in the myths and habits and prejudices and
superstitions that they were taught… never having lost those biases and
myths…etc… they believe in IQ45 and his lies because they cannot
move past having those biases and myths…etc…they are a victim of the past
because they can’t move beyond the past training of their childhood…
for them… Santa Claus still exists as does the easter bunny…
myths and habits that people outgrow as they grow older, conservatives
have yet to outgrow… and thus they are believers in anything that
confirms their myths and biases and habits and prejudices and superstitions
of childhood…in other words… they have never grown up emotionally…
the world is still that dark and mysterious place of childhood… where
belief is more important then facts…if you believe… clap your hands…
I recall that from watching Peter Pan in my childhood… conservatives
still clap their hands because they still believe…

Kropotkin

Trump refusing to apply new sanctions to Russia is a big deal too, right? Congress nearly unanimously passed a law requiring him to impose new sanctions, and he’s just choosing to ignore that law. Curious to hear how this one is not problematic.

Here is the law. I can’t find the official statement from the State Department, but here is one article on it (feel free to provide a conflicting source if you think this report is inaccurate).

EDIT: here’s a conservative (but generally anti-Trump) commentator arguing that the administration is in compliance with the law. I don’t think this accurately states what the law requires, but it is probably similar to the case the administration would make.

Perhaps Trump can provide us with the actual number of conservatives who hated Obama in order to prove that so many more liberals hate him.

And whatever the political bias of the FBI [and others] actual sets of facts will eventually emerge. Then we can squabble about them. All the while pretending that if there is any political bias to be found it will be theirs and not ours.

I predict that.

Not inherently, but in this time and place it certainly is. To return to my point, it is disingenuous for you to make a special plea that the press should be allowed to do things political campaigns can’t when it just so happens the press is in the pocket of your favorite political campaigns.

The American press has voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, and donated overwhelmingly to Democrats, since at least Nixon. Landslide losers like Mondale and Dukakis were landslide winners if you poll just the press.

Then that somebody would be a fool, because telling them that would serve absolutely no purpose other than to incriminate the person you’re helping. Plausible deniability is a thing- there’s nothing to be gained at all by doing what you describe.

No shit! Cool.

And it will be interpreted that way by any given lawyer that wants to see Trump impeached, I’m sure. Of course the problem there is that you can’t easily say that getting information is legal, but getting information that was obtained in an illegal way is illegal, if the receiver of the information didn’t know. And I would think conspiring to obtain illegally-obtained information must be covered by some other law.

But again, the salient point here is that we already know Trump and Hillary both were ‘meeting with foreign officials to seek help with their campaign’, and zero curiosity was apparently raised about their private conversations and so on.

Those are two completely different things. A promise to testify to what he does know leaves open the possibility that he doesn’t know anything useful to the investigation whatsoever- which is also a left open possibility in the documents you’ve shown me, which just say Flynn is going to cooperate. Again, the implication by all this ‘Flynn cut a deal’ bullshit is that Flynn offered dirt on Trump in exchange for a lighter sentence. Flynn agreeing to answer questions and not impede the investigation is a completely other thing, and I’m not sure that he could have ever disagreed.

It’s entirely possible that they have some information that points to somebody in the Trump campaign talking to somebody in Russia at some point in time about the campaign, and maybe even soliciting/accepting help with the campaign. But as I already showed everybody knows that isn’t illegal. The entire precedent for what we’re even talking about this shit is false, and the obstruction of justice case isn’t any stronger. The entire thing revolves around pretending strategizing your campaign with foreign nationals is somehow sinister, which in turn revolves around pretending the Farage thing never happened.

Remember, we’re not looking for “I saw Trump talking to a Russian guy about what piece of shit Hillary is” or even “I saw a Russian guy strategize with Trump about how to beat Hillary.” This are both publicly available activities, you just have to swap out Russia for UK or Italy. By your own admission, we’re looking for one of two things: A Russian official offering Trump money to help his campaign even though Trump is already a billionaire, Or a Russian official declaring to Trump (or Trump floating the idea) that they intend to nail Podesta with a phishing attempt.

Both of those are so ludicrously amateurish that they sound more like bait for just such an investigation as this, and not any serious attempt to collude.

Without bias it is fair to say that something happened to the American political landscape since the early days of politics when moral and ethical ground was much more inclined to become a real issue based on true rather then fake inventions of political rhetoric. The same had precedent in the Roman Empire, where, Sophism had claimed the routes of political design and evolution.

Transposing it to today, the media being the message, it seems obvious that there is a divisive two level approach to public and private distinction In US politics.

Earlier in the Teapot Dome, the Watergate, and the Lawintsky efforts of censure, the distinction between what the public was made to understand what’s behind the closed door conferences held , was less obviously sewn with , efforts to prevent the appearance of gross McCarthy type overreach between the two.

Today the apparent brazenness of political rhetoric resembles a kind of gross public trial of American Values , as distinct from the intentions of the Constitution. The message seems to be , -let the political lawyers present cases, regardless of the truth, our society has evolved to the stage of sophistry and let the whole of society become the jury, believing truth to be based on the best oratorical presentation, since cynicism as to political correctness has slipped into the equation as well.

The public knows that the beat defense is funded by the best filled pocket book, this is a politically correct statement with which no one really could , or would argue with. Truth as am ideal has been displaced by praatix approaches to interpretation , the black letter has been washed out to protect those whom society understands to be victims of circumstance. Circumstantial evidence bars any justification based on other then entry into the slippery slope d terrain of lowering it, the bar to establish more stringent levels of proof.

This is process of values in free fall , and it is the other side of the logic between arguments such as this. The free fall dangerous because it can effect the course democracy"s unraveling of distinctive didferemces between those governing amdntje governed, at the very least impinging on the stabilizing power of checks and balances, ultimately creating an authoritarian governance, based on false allegations claiming to be truthful.

That it happened in Rome, which fell, may be an indication of what will take place in the US, excepting that perhaps something has been learned in history.

Never the less, the Coanstitition has been written in no uncertain terms, therefore look for efforts to change it, challenging its said archaic vision.

As ambigoqus said earlier , that we shall see the outcome as it turns out, but results will be fed into the evolutionary matrix by constant repetition and conflation of ideas. Too long a time in the various investigations will wash out relevance and the irony of time healing all wounds of society passe., bloating the evolving correlation between fall of values and public cynicism
It is this replacement to public trust and religion that is becoming the opium of the people, and this Narcotic is the price of redemptive payout by the governence.

The new antipathy between Wray, the new FBI chief and President Trump over the release of the Nunes document is an indication that the snowball is rolling down the slope. Otsnsaid that its coming to a head between the administration and the intelligence community as a whole.

Does Wray have the choice to betray the FBI by allowing the Trump WH the memo’s release? I don’t think so, even if he supports Trump, he would have to side with the FBI, his employees, or eventually there would be no FBI left for him to manage.

Carleas, like I said the FBI (all the security agencies) are in the Democrats pockets with the media. This memo may be the start of the evidence regarding Clinton that you requested and it will go along ways towards answering the OPs question as a yes for #1. Who stalled the release of the memo to the Republicans for a year?

I don’t know, WENDY , l am trying to adhere to no bias on my part , in order to be more objective , and with me its like both parties are complicit in devaluing the concept of fair play , honesty so as to create the cynical impression that its business as usual, the difference being which party is doing it more conceivably, effectively.

Both parties are not complicit. One party, the Democrats, are doing all this BS and the media is who is complicit in aiding them to rile up the public.

I would not state that beyond a reasonable doubt experts in the field just came out with the opinion that the case does not require the production of a warrant to produce evidentiary proof beyond preponderance of evidence. Legal scholars do not see the issue rising to a need for criminal action.(as of 02/03/2018).

With the threat of a coming Constitutional Crisis, based mostly on the irreducability of. real and fake truths, where the smoke is so heavy that it covers a political maelstrom , US society is basically repressed by changing winds whose sources are equally hidden. That’s all an objectivity can say at this point"
in light of a poll’s supposed fairness.

Repression is a strong word but the facts are that mixing intangibles which correlate to the use of sophistry to undermine meaning , by creating a sense of vagueness about who opposites can create hybrid meanings , do repress the understanding of constituents who basically either are in a fog, or are vested by self serving interests.

The release of the memo is simply an act of self serving interest, putting the interests of the country after the real fact of gaining political clout. Trump allegedly has not read the document, but if he is sure that it will serve his interest in overriding an alleged bias by the intelligence and justice arm of the US system of governance, why not?
To create more confusion? Follow the classic tools of repression? Why not if truth, or the impressions such create necessitates it?

The results can be serious:, either an explosion of Constitutional wrath, or an implosion of trust in the capacity to govern, resulting in a large boost to a non aligned independent voice in the U.S…

In any case, the trend toward disenfranchising ‘Democatic Principles’ and undermining and deconstructing the tie in between economic - political struggle between principle and process, will be more successfully buried under the increasingly failing intelligence memory of the country and collusion will morph into just another ideological relic, not at all resembling McCarthy-ism.

Democracy is not affordable as a tool to bring NWO about. Either party could attest to it, but they are too worried about asymmetry between their political careers and constitutional niceties.

In fact, it may not be too early to project some kind of consistent view of a resolution to the title of this poll, that appears credible at this time.

Bias seems to have been present in some degree in both camps, but the question comes up, what degree of preponderance can be attributed to either, in this mix, which may prove libel, defactoring the normal attribution of political horseplay.

This slippery slope is what they are navigating on, imminently testing the litmus of public knowledge, tolarence, and believability. Since the cluster of issues have not been raised to a liability in terms of a criminal standard, the playing field is as of now, is still maneuverable with some margin for error left. Once criticality is reached, the noose will tighten in the amount of slack presumed.

So, fact, as it turns out.

Could You elaborate? I am somewhat in the fog . I could let it stand. , as a statement of probability, against a backdrop of certainty, since definitionally the whole nine yards is still in process.

I may be off on Your intended meaning here , though.