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The FBI spied on Trump's political campaign and his employees using, as a pretext, a political document of misinformation that the FBI itself knew to be full of lies. They didn't investigate Trump because he was a businessman, they investigated him because he threatened them. If they wanted to investigate Trump because he participated in shady business deals, they'd investigate Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell. (How did Diane Finestein become so wealthy? Who was Trump conducting shady deals with if not, at times, other politicians? How many of them are being investigated?)
I want to repeat this because this is key to repudiating your argument: the investigations against Trump were not normal and they were not lawful. We have the documents and records. There was a cadre of top officials at the FBI, like Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, who wanted to do everything they could to impede Trump. People like Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe ordered investigations against Trump on pretexts they knew to be lies. Lies about Trump were deliberately leaked to the press, so that those news reports could be used as justifications in a FISA court. The Durham Report tracks this. There was nothing normal about any of this.
You specify one specific investigation that the Durham report rightly concludes was founded on bogus grounds. However, this is not the only investigation against Trump and those in his orbit, and is not sufficient by itself to generalize. You're implying that all investigations against Trump follow this form, but that's incorrect. Rather, you should also consider the people in Trump's orbit that were indeed found guilty beyond reasonable doubt of various crimes (or admitted to such), including Flynn (lying), Stone (lying, threatening a witness), Manafort (conspiracy, obstruction), not to mention several financial related crimes (Cohen, Trump Org, Gates, Barrack, etc.)
Manafort and Cohen deserve to go to jail for what they did. That said, their crimes were totally unrelated. That is in absolutely no way justification for the particular way this investigation played out. It's the definition of a fishing expedition, and fishing expeditions certainly catch some guilty fish from time to time. One can justifiably hope that their crimes had been discovered, investigated, and prosecuted, but via other means. I don't think anyone on the right thinks, "Oh, maybe there's something worth investigating concerning China and the Bidens, so that's justification for the FBI to start rooting around in every single prominent democrat's business, and the whole expedition will be justified so long as we catch a couple folks doing random, unrelated, dirty shit. I hope the specific folks who are doing random, unrelated, dirty shit get caught specifically for what they're doing.
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You're joking, surely.
Flynn "lied" after being set up under an investigation for a Hatch Act violation, ambushed by FBI interviewers, made to answer all sorts of questions, and then misremembering the answer to a particular point. Before he "lied" the underlying crime was that, before Trump was officially sworn in, he talked to the Russian ambassador and briefly discussed the prospect of sanctions. Not illegal in the slightest, but blow it up into a big controversy because of the spectre of "Russian collusion" (which, again, the FBI already knew to be bullshit) and then harass the victim until they commit some sort of process crime.
This is what all these "crimes" were like: unprecedent levels of investigative harassment against Trump and his people, with the underlying investigations based on completely made-up accusations, and then charging them with process crimes committed during the investigation. "I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you. ... Mom, Flynn just attacked my fist with his face!"
This is a ridiculous argument. All the examples you cite are proof of exactly the dynamic I've been describing. It's as if you took the fact of prosecution of witches at Salem as proof that there must have been witches after all.
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This is something that frustrates me to no end about this conversation. The moment you pay the slightest bit of attention to the corrupt origination of Crossfire Hurricane it becomes immediately obvious that all the horseshit about this not being a political operation is exactly that - horseshit. The FBI knew that the Russian allegations were bogus, shopped the story around to the media, then used those own media reports as justification. I don't think even the most disingenuous of commenters could make the sequence of events outlined in those reports look good, and the only way they can even try in comment threads like this is to just ignore huge elements of what happened (like the FBI knowing in advance that there's actually no Trump/Russia collusion at all).
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