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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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