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.