So within a massive investigation that was completely above board 99% of the time and led to arrests and prison time for dozens of officials that were involved in corruption on a mass scale, one wiretap application was improper and led to a one year suspension for the FBI agent who oversaw it? And this is supposed to be evidence that the Democratic Party as a whole are purposely lying to investigate their opponents?
They spent millions of dollars investigating at a bunch of beltway bandits and were only able to convict a handful for tax fraud, lying to law enforcement, etc. Note the distinct lack of any convictions for spying for Russia, or acting as a Russian agent.
The most serious was Manafort, and it was related to his previous work in Ukraine, before he was hired by the Trump campaign. Cohen was convicted for fraud and campaign finance violations, and then Papadopoulos, Flynn, and Gates were convicted of lying to law enforcement and got slaps on the wrist.
The Mueller investigation was a complete flop, and to top it all off they deleted their own cellphone records in potential violation of federal record keeping laws.
Why would you lie to investigators? Why commit a felony and spend years in jail? Maybe if we had a real prosecutor that actually runs a real investigation and puts the main target in front of a grand jury instead of doing some bogus here’s some questions for you to answer whenever you want bullshit. That has to be history first and speaks to the coverup by Republican prosecutor to protect a Republican president.
Fear of embarrassment, arrogance (not having legal counsel present), or ignorance (not realizing that it was a hostile interview with the FBI, rather than information gathering).
Those charges aren't the end goal of a serious investigation. Papadopoulos, for example served 12 days in jail. Flynn was pardoned and served zero. They are just a pressure tactic to try to convince low-level people to provide information or testimony. The fact that they cite those convictions as crowning achievements of their investigation means that they utterly failed in accomplishing their goal.
Being pardoned by your co-conspirator doesn't exactly scream innocence.
> The fact that they cite those convictions as crowning achievements of their investigation means that they utterly failed in accomplishing their goal.
Yeah, wonder why it failed. Almost like there was a corrupt criminal with pardon powers who told everyone to lie or clam up.
There’s more. Russians were talking with Trump kids from emails released and even tweets from his kids admitting to talking with them. Mueller never too bothered to put any of Trumps family in front of grand jury or prosecute the campaign finance violations they uncovered. It was a fake investigation to trick the American public.
They got the soft-glove Republican run investigation treatment and they still ended up charging 30+ people, including those closest to Trump. They also proved _numerous_ extremely suspicious ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, and produced a report that showed obstruction all over the place. Obstruction, by the way, is what you do when you know you broke just _all_ the laws and have to break the law more to prevent getting caught.
That was never followed up on due to _other_ Trump admin corruption. Congratulations, they managed to cheat the rigged system. It's good to be rich and well connected if you're going to crime I guess.
If you consider the absence of evidence as evidence of absence then sure 99% above the board. If on the other hand you consider that any hint of misdoing by prosecutors, much less lying to a judge in any context, much less within a secret national security court, as smoke that may or may not indicate fire in other places, then one might not be so sanguine.
Durham had years and his only goal was to discredit the investigation. All he came up with was bullshit. That's more than evidence of absense. It's not absolute proof that everything was above board, but it's very suggestive.
I cannot tell if you are serious or not, but in case someone else reads this:
All his stories revolve around a single person in the Russia investigation who may have been targeted incorrectly. The rest of the investigation turned up a lot of people going to jail, but there were errors in one case.
Source[2] is about someone adding the annotation "not a source" to an email about the person (not forging an entire email out of thin air) when asked to check if that person was a source. Everyone involved believes that was an innocent error, probably summarizing the contents of the email they got back when they forwarded it to someone else. That is, A asked B to ask C if someone was a source. C emailed back to B who added the line "not a source" and forwarded it on to A. Turns out A was a source.
His sources [0] [1] explicitly says that there was no evidence it was politically motivated. The second paragraph of [1] is:
> The inspector general found no evidence that the Russia probe was launched for political reasons but did conclude that the FBI’s FISA process fell “far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are ‘scrupulously accurate,’” according to the extensive report.
You are aware that there were dozens of arrests from that investigation of literal foreign agents working with that presidential campaign right? It wasn't without merit... At all... There's been MORE arrests since as well.
And an FBI lawyer pleaded guilty to a felony for forging an email used as justification for the wiretapping [2].
[0] - https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fisa-court-confirms-two-...
[1] - https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ig-report-details-signif...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/ex-fbi-lawyer-agree...