It’s opened the door to more frank discussion about Trump’s ability to do the job in the mainstream press than we’ve seen before. See the “revelations” about Trump’s short workday and “executive time” in Axios the last couple of days.
That’s not new news. Trump’s the same lazy, stupid, incompetent, possibly senile slacker he was a year ago. Everyone’s always known about it. But “respectable” news sites waited for an outsider to point it out the emperor had no clothes before bringing it up themselves. That way they could claim, “We’re not the one raising this, we’re just following up on what People Are Saying.”
She has, I’m just [still] having trouble adapting to this strange new world we live in.
If you had told me in October 2016. “Within 18 months Jennifer Rubin will be tweeting that the FBI interfered in the election for Trump” I would have said you’re insane.
Simpson’s testimony, however, was not accurate, according to a person close to Fusion. The source said that Simpson’s mention of an internal Trump campaign source actually refers to the Australian ambassador who contacted the FBI to pass on information that he received from former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos.
I think that it is splitting some hairs. Simpson is relating his interpretation of what Steele believed based on both of their conversations. From his perspective what’s the difference between the FBI having a direct source in the Trump organization and the FBI having an indirect source of information in the Trump organization?
There’s no rational world where you’d want the FBI to actually tell a random US citizen how they knew what they knew, let alone a British PI.
Simpson’s testimony isn’t that he actually knew the source of the information, and it isn’t even that Steele knew it, just that Steele felt like they probably had one.
Nevertheless, the phrase “FBI apparently had a source in trump’s campaign” leads you to think that the FBI had specifically developed on ongoing a human intel source within a US presidential campaign staff. That is one really gigantic split hair away from “bozo Papadopoulos bragged something to an Australian diplomat who passed what he heard on to the FBI”.
Still, I think the larger picture here is that Steele went to the FBI on his own volition and that the FBI found Steel’s intel credible.
I don’t agree that the FBI put their thumbs on the scale for trump - I wouldn’t expect the FBI to release information on an ongoing investigation to the public. (However I still don’t understand their actions on the Clinton investigation. )
I would argue that the fact they DID do this for Clinton but didn’t for Trump constitutes a thumb on the scale (even if it was technically through inaction).
