[The Hill] Witch hunt or mole hunt? Times bombshell blows up all theories

not everybody agrees with you. Here is Stewart Baker at Lawfare:

"Like everyone else on Lawfare, I was struck by the recent New York Times story about the FBI opening a counterintelligence investigation into President Trump after he fired former FBI Director Jim Comey. It adds to my unease, not about President Trump but about the FBI.

"In the end, the story probably doesn’t tell us anything new about President Trump. If the investigation had turned up evidence in the last 18 months that the president was working for Russia and covering his tracks from investigators, we’d have the evidence by now, not just a story about investigators’ suspicions in mid-2017.

"What’s most troubling about the story is what it seems to say about the FBI and its leadership. I agree with Jack Goldsmith that the story is deeply discomforting. There is only one American agency with a history of destroying American politicians to serve its own bureaucratic interests. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover used illegal wiretaps and other files on political leaders to ensure his power. When he was gone, Mark Felt’s effort to succeed him included leaks that destroyed Richard Nixon. Now we hear that the bureau opened a counterintelligence investigation of President Trump on the politically explosive premise that he was doing Putin’s bidding. I don’t think that’s an accident. We like to say that no president is above the law. The unspoken corollary is that no president is above the FBI. If so, we need to be damn careful about how the FBI uses that power.

"Like Goldsmith, I’m a long-time admirer of the bureau. It rarely has any doubt about who the bad guys are or what they deserve—relentless, overwhelming, and street-smart pursuit within the law. But the bureau’s self-certainty has risks, summed up by the old saw that for the FBI there are only two kinds of people: agents and suspects.

"And, like Goldsmith, I think the Trump campaign and Russian interest in it posed an impossible problem for the bureau and other intelligence agencies. There was too much smoke to ignore. Russia’s effort to influence the campaign had to be probed. But the decision to add President Trump as an individual counterintelligence subject of the investigation is a lot harder to justify."​

https://www.lawfareblog.com/inspector-general-should-review-fbi-counterintelligence-probe-trump

 

more on the question of a subpoena for Trump's interpreter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...na-trumps-interpreter/?utm_term=.bc7140954ac1

Don’t subpoena Trump’s interpreter

By Randall D. Eliason
January 15 at 8:45 AM

The Post recently reported on the lengths to which President Trump has gone to conceal details about his private conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In one instance, Trump reportedly took the notes from his State Department interpreter following the meeting and ordered her not to reveal to anyone what had been discussed. This news has prompted calls for Congress to subpoena the interpreter and compel her to testify. But as outrageous as Trump’s conduct is, seeking information from the interpreter is the wrong response.

Trump routinely shatters norms that have guided other presidents, including norms governing meetings with foreign heads of state. A great risk of the Trump presidency is that we respond in kind, jettisoning important principles in pursuit of the truth about Trump’s misconduct. It’s understandably tempting to seek the interpreter’s testimony here, but that temptation should be resisted.

Imagine for a moment that a sitting president had similarly suspicious conversations with a foreign leader but the secret talks were in English, with no interpreter present. We would be left with no way to learn the contents of those conversations short of subpoenaing the president himself. Such a subpoena would no doubt trigger a vigorous legal challenge based on executive privilege and separation of powers. Politicians on both sides of the aisle would likely raise legitimate concerns about Congress intruding on the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy and speak candidly with foreign leaders.

The presence of an interpreter does not change this equation. If an attorney needs an interpreter to speak to her client, the interpreter obviously cannot be compelled to reveal conversations that were otherwise privileged. The same should be true in a meeting like this. The interpreter is essentially acting as the voice of the president, not as some independent third-party witness. If the president himself could not be compelled to discuss the conversation, the same must be true for the interpreter.

It’s worth noting that interpreters have a code of ethics that would strictly prohibit revealing any such confidences. The International Association of Conference Interpreters has put out a statement noting that interpreters are bound by strict obligations of secrecy and opposing any attempt to make Trump’s interpreter testify. That code of ethics doesn’t create a legally enforceable privilege, of course, although it does raise the possibility that the interpreter might feel professionally bound to refuse to testify and risk being held in contempt. And the White House would no doubt intervene, seeking to block the interpreter’s testimony on grounds of executive privilege, although it’s not clear whether a privilege claim would be upheld.

But the interpreter should not be placed in that position — not for her own sake but for the sake of all future diplomatic and foreign policy activities. It would be very hard for any diplomat or head of state to communicate frankly if they knew there was even a chance their interpreter could later be compelled to repeat their conversations.

Democrats who favor subpoenaing Trump’s interpreter must recognize they could be setting a precedent that would allow a future Republican Congress to subpoena the interpreter working for a future Democratic president. Even if there were an official record of the meeting, Congress might decide to subpoena the interpreter if it wanted to challenge the accuracy of that record. Especially in our current partisan environment, we should not want to start slipping down this particular slope.

It’s true this may leave us without a way to discover exactly what was said between Trump and Putin — which is the same position we would have been in had their private conversation taken place in English. That doesn’t mean we can never figure out what happened between the two of them. There are ways to investigate and prove misconduct without access to particular confidential communications, through other direct and circumstantial evidence. The law does it all the time.

Whether a president’s conversation with a foreign leader may remain confidential cannot turn on the happenstance of whether they speak the same language. For legal purposes, including the ability to probe the contents of any such conversation, it should be as if the interpreter were not even present. If there are grounds to challenge the secrecy of any such conversation, those challenges should be directed at the parties to the conversation themselves.

Congress may have the power to make Trump’s interpreter testify, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. Trump may be shredding rules and norms on a daily basis, but we don’t need to let him drag us down with him. The work of all future presidents and diplomats depends on their ability to rely on the complete confidentiality of interpreters. We should vigorously investigate Trump’s misconduct — but we should leave the interpreter out of it.

Randall D. Eliason teaches white-collar criminal law at George Washington University Law School. He blogs at Sidebarsblog.com. ​

 

I guess I would agree if and only if it turns out in the end that the worst-case scenario about Trump "working for the Russians" or "acting as a Russian agent" turn out to be in fact TRUE. Otherwise I'll reiterate my point from the other day: it's premature to start talking about making the interpreter violate her oath of confidentiality.

I do not think it likely that Trump was acting as a Russian agent or working for the Russians. I do think it is entirely possible that the Russians did in fact exploit Trump's inexperience as a politician, as a presidential candidate, and as a would-be diplomat. Trump was and continues to be a rank amateur when it comes to many aspects of political life. On the other hand, I do not believe that Trump is the 100% train wreck or catastrophe that some others make him out to be. I believe ultimately he will rank low on the Presidents List, but I don't think it's a done deal that he's "the worst."

So again, re: the interpreter, the Mueller report, etc etc, I think the most defensible position is simply to adopt a wait-and-see attitude about almost all of it. None of us are in any kind of position to be confident about what we know or don't know.

 

this analysis makes a lot of sense to me:

Pattern recognition is one of humanity’s great evolutionary advantages. It is the foundation for trial and error, the scientific method, and reason itself. But it can also mislead us. Most conspiracy theories involve motivated reasoning in which we deduce backward from a result, cherry-picking which dots to connect to fit a preexisting idea.

The people who insist that Trump colluded with Russia start with the explanation — the election was “stolen” by Russia — and then pluck facts to fit. And there are many such facts.

But, as Trump defenders and even Trump himself will quickly note, there are many contrary facts as well. His energy policies, for example, are deeply contrary to Russia’s interests.

The bombshell New York Times report that the FBI opened an investigation into whether Trump was a Russian asset strikes me as simultaneously understandable and outrageous. Trump’s behavior in 2016 and early 2017 was enough to overload the pattern-recognition software of anyone not already committed to Trump’s innocence at all costs, particularly if you were both reading the news and receiving raw, and occasionally flawed, intelligence such as the Steele dossier.

Trump’s disastrous hiring of actual Kremlin stooges and cronies, his praise of Putin, his lies about business dealings with Russia, his public beseeching of the Kremlin to release Clinton’s emails, his campaign’s infamous meeting at Trump Tower with an actual Russian agent, not to mention his firing of the FBI director and his comments to Russian officials in the Oval Office: One doesn’t even need to resort to Deep State theories to understand why the FBI would be concerned.

But that doesn’t necessarily make Trump a Manchurian president either.

He or his campaign may or may not have colluded with Russia. The Department of Justice might have cut corners to “get” him. Still, rather than elaborate conspiracies, it’s far more likely that ad hoc decisions were made in response to ad hoc actions by a candidate who thought he was going to lose and, later, by a president who didn’t know what he was doing.​

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/trump-russia-conspiracy-theories-unlikely-to-pan-out/