Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
The idea that Pete Strzok's texts discredit the investigation as politically motivated is conservative junk that you apparently buy. Comey is right that Strzok shouldn't have texted what he texted, but Comey did not say that Strzok's views delegitimize the work of the investigation, which is what you have suggested.
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Are you serious? If the shoe were on the other foot here and Strzok's texts were exchanged in regard to Hillary's campaign, you and everyone here would be claiming the investigation was tainted. I'm not even touching what McCabe did. You'd consider that a hanging offense.
Yes, Strzok's texts tainted the investigation. Comey said as much when he stated that it's a grievous offense for an agent to allow his personal views to infect his work. And god only knows what Sztrok said and thought, which we'll never know as we've only a limited insight based on his texts (which are already bad enough). Additionally, Sztrok has terrible judgment. To put that stuff in a text - to another agent - is insanely stupid. A person doing something so dumb has either: (1) Serious hatred for the target which is clouding his judgment; or, (2) Is not terribly intelligent. If it's 1, he should have recused himself from the investigation and acted unethically in not doing so. If 2, he's the sort of unwise person who'd think he could get away with documenting his bias during an investigation of a presidential candidate and not have it come out later. It's 1 or 2 or both, and that scenario is a tainted investigation.
And note, I'm not saying the investigation was initiated on tainted bases. We don't know that, and since it was a reasonable counterintelligence project at the start, we have to assume for now that it was legitimate, as we've no proof to the contrary. All we do know, and this is not open to debate, is that at the point in which Sztrok and Page were exchanging those texts, the investigation was tainted. By logical extension, assuming Sztrok and Page did not only hold animus toward Trump during the period those texts were exchanged, we can assume that at all times they were involved, the investigation was tainted.
And finally, and most importantly, to suggest that Sztrok's and Page's animus was not a factor, and did not dispose them toward trying to nail Trump where they might otherwise have a neutral and detached approach strains credulity. They're humans with very strong biases (based on their own words). And the ways in which an agent can shade an investigation's findings (where they're smart enough not to document animus toward the target in texts on agency phones) are endless and impossible to tease out by by post hoc audit. Defense of them on the basis they each observed internal Chinese walls strains credulity.
TM asserted I have a horse in this race. He's right. But it isn't Trump. It's proving this:
1. You have a horse in the race, and it's toppling Trump;
2. You are not merely looking at investigations here and making reasonable conclusions;
3. You are prejudging outcomes (either what you think they are, or what you think they should be -- in all cases finding Trump and his people culpable) and then fitting the facts (even the ones that don't fit) to your conclusions (granted, Trump gives you more than enough to do this).
1-3 are what people do when they've picked a side politically. When you think politically, you don't think factually. (There's a meta point in there about why our adversarial two party system delivers such shit candidates and so much dysfunction, but that's for a later date.)
I see almost no difference between the thinking of those who attacked Bill Clinton in 1997 and the people here attacking Trump. Hank really drove it home for me when he said "the stakes are too high this time." I heard that exact line used by the people who bought into Scaife's crusade against Clinton in 1997. "The stakes are too high... He's debasing the Presidency, and we'll never recover from it." It's the political mind, the ideological mind, overtaking the rational mind. Scaife is dead, Clinton survived, and the only thing we haven't recovered from is the rotten tribal politics Scaife and Gingrich loosed on the Republic.
Kill Trump at the ballot box. This stuff is all bullshit. My horse is reminding you of that.
