Who from Russia provided dirt on Hillary Clinton to the Trump campaign? The FBI Crossfire Hurricane investigation was initiated over the meeting between Joseph Mifsud and George Papadopoulos.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
There was no "dirt" that was provided to the Trump campaign
Correct. But only in the fact that it was delivered to the entire world population.
and Joseph Mifsud is obviously not a Russian agent.
Ok. Super. Thanks for sharing.
This is where the skeptics skill at semantics comes into play.
This is where nitwits take pot shots.
You are referring to Christopher Steele as the non-government foreign source. Christopher Steele was not the source of the information. He was a compiler and launderer of information. What were the sources? The Steele Dossier lists them as:
- sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively.
- Source B (the former top level Russian intelligence officer)
- Source G, a senior Kremlin official
- Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP.
So the sources were senior Russian officials. Christopher Steele was just the errand boy.
Christopher Steele is the "source" in legal/investigative parlance because he's the one attesting to the veracity of the data.
As is typical, after making an accusation of playing semantics, you literally started playing semantics.
My scenarios hold. The Clinton campaign, the DNC, Fusion GPS, and Christopher Steele got fake dirt on Trump from Russian sources and used it to launch a coup attempt to overthrow his Presidency. The reason for the investigation into the Trump campaign? Because the he got "dirt" on Clinton to sway an election.
I love how you surgically extract the other GOP candidates who used Steele for opposition research out of your list of boogeymen.
Scenario 1: A Republican presidential campaign gets dirt on their political opponent from foreign sources, so investigate the Republican candidate and his campaign for colluding with a foreign power to sway an election.
Scenario 2: A Democratic presidential campaign gets dirt on their political opponent from foreign sources, so investigate the Republican candidate and his campaign for whatever the alleged crimes are.
Of course, this entire proceeding is you trying to "change the venue" of the conversation.
Accepting opposition research, even opposition research collected with the assistance of foreign nationals, is not remotely illegal or improper (unless you're really careless about it). You have to understand the philosophy of electoral oversight as it stands. There's very little in the grand scheme of things that the agencies will ever do to you, assuming this one important thing: you just straight up say that's what you're doing.
The idea is bribery and nepotism and corruption are going to happen, if you enforce it away, it just goes under the table and gets harder to spot and starts to overlap with really dangerous illicit activities (organized crime and the like). So enforce lightly and have lots of rules about being transparent about it. In that sense, the enforcement is supposed to come by way of we the voters, armed with information that our elected officials are scum, doing something about it. So in such a system, when you have people subverting oversight, failing to disclose things, or outright lying, the people are denied their right to know who pays them, who influences them, who they're talking to. Also, at the same time, you've got that problem again of the monitored activity going under the table creating even more problems.
It's not that the subversion makes it too ambiguous to tell if a crime happened or not. The subversion
is the crime.