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Notes -
Not of the Trump campaign.
This is not probable cause or grounds for an investigation. (Notice I said "or", which responds to your second paragraph.) It's wayyyy too subjective. One could legitimately believe there was probable cause to investigate, say, the release of Trump's tax records. Very possibly a crime was committed. Very possibly not (that's the nature of PC/investigations). If they had something specifically pointing to a particular individual for an actual crime, they could go about investigating them, with the level of what they're able to do being dependent on the nature of the evidence in question. It would be insane to say, "Whelp, law enforcement can just willy-nilly decide 'who benefits' from the release of Trump's tax returns and use that as a predicate for a far-reaching investigation into them."
Bullshit. Page five is just facts and narrative. Page 11 is where they describe why they were doing what they were doing. Nowhere in this document do they ever say that any investigation was predicated on anything as ridiculous as, "We picked who benefited and started investigating them."
Check out the DOIG.
This is where the real battleground is, and probably where reasonable minds could disagree. Of course, some unreasonable minds are going to be super partisan about the whole thing, tipping every subjective factor one way when it comes to politicians they like, but the other way when it comes to politicians they don't like. Regardless, this is a far cry from, "We looked to see who benefited and opened an investigation into them."
Section 5 covers assessments, Section 6 covers preliminary investigations, and Section 7 covers full investigations. These are the areas where this current battle is being waged.
Sure. A lot of people think that. The key question is what kind of investigation, what kind of investigative steps. There's a huge transition to:
They had basically nothing here. You could easily take such minimal indication seriously by, for example, going and interviewing the source of that indication, seeing what's there. If there was something worthwhile, that could justify some additional steps. Instead, we pretty much just had fever dreams of a Manchurian candidate. Those dreams were crossbred with wet dreams of getting The Donald and preventing him from becoming president. It was irresistible to them politically, and the response to the same set of facts would have been completely different if the ox being gored was tinted blue instead.
You don't need to publicly tell the world when you're on the same team as all the journalists. You just need to not object too strongly, even though you already know that most of it is all bullshit. Carter Page was forced to resign, even though he did literally nothing wrong (he is a profoundly weird person; I don't agree with much of his perspective of the world). Rumors are swirling about this and that, AlfaBank and more. The political environment is already ripe enough for Hilary to call Trump Putin's puppet in a debate. Fortnights of airtime and furlongs of column space are already dedicated to pushing the exact message you want; you don't have to tell the world. On that score, you just have to do the minimal amount to keep the narrative going, and make sure not to squash it too hard. Note that we may never have a window into any back-channel discussions between FBI officials and members of the media, where they probe about some story or another, and perhaps instead of tipping your hand a little and telling them that it's bullshit, you just no comment your way into letting the public think it's legit. (Do these back-channel interactions go differently if it's a blue in the crosshairs? Andy McCabe leaking on the Clinton Foundation investigation?) In the meantime, keep working on vapor, just in case the unthinkable happens and the bad guy gets elected; you'll have insurance to take down his presidency, maybe even before it actually starts.
But also remember that it was unthinkable! No one thought Trump had a chance of winning. If you come on too strong in telling the world, you risk backlash. Better to just enable the whole frenzy and continue chasing ghosts, just in case.
In hindsight, given the outcome of the election, would they have behaved differently? We don't really know. That clip is great in showing the difficulty of multi-agent reasoning, especially in partial information environments. Motivations can be varied and complex. (Plus bonus reference to a source with the NYT!) It's wicked hard to work backwards and really get a glimpse of their internal calculations at the time.
...so instead of trying to proceed via proof by hypothesized motivation, we can actually just look at the problem, itself. The DOJ/FBI regulations, themselves. We're already in a weird counterfactual world, one where they didn't have any actual tip from a foreign ambassador... in our world, they literally just have, "Well, we think so-and-so benefits from this crime." In that counterfactual world, the actions they took or didn't take in the real world do zero work to explain whether a hypothetical action would be justifiable in the counterfactual world. They were in an entirely different context! We're stuck just looking at the counterfactual world you've set up, looking at the regs, and seeing that it would be wholly inappropriate for them to jump into a full, wide-ranging investigation of anyone close to Trump based on nothing other than, "...well, we think he benefits."
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If I've kept my Trump-drama details straight, what happened was that:
The Australian High Commissioner to the UK Alexander Downer had drinks with George Papadopoulos, a member of Trumps foreign policy advisory panel. Papadopoulos reportedly told Downer that Russia had dirt on Clinton. Downer then passed on his account of this conversation to Elizabeth Dibble, the US Charge d'Affaires in London.
I think it's pretty arguable that this is the sort of event that can either be used as the pretext for launching an investigation (as it was) or ignored as baseless shit-talk (as it turned out to be). Which way it goes is not unlikely to be politically influenced.
To be clear, my position is that both sides regularly conduct politically motivated investigations of the other, whether over Russia collusion, Benghazi, Ukraine bribery, Whitewater, or whatever. Both sides engage in some level of illegal/unethical behaviour, so sometimes these politically motivated investigations actually find something even if it wasn't the thing they were exactly looking for.
I think this is a good and proper state of affairs.
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