THE CRIME IS WORSE THAN THE COVERUP

[kpete]

https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/951174949523329025/q13J9PDk?format=jpg&name=600x314
..............
Written By:
Brian Beutler


The transcript of that testimony, which Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) publshed online Tuesday, doesn’t radically alter what honest people already knew about the state of the Russia scandal, but it is awful for Republicans, because it paints a tidy contrast between those working in good-faith, though at times sloppily, to uncover the truth; and those, from Trump on down, who have been engaged in a coverup.

The transcript reads in chapters, which alternate hour by hour from questioning by Grassley’s counsel to questions by Feinstein’s and back. It is somewhat tedious, but extremely revealing, to reorder the transcript after first reading, and consume the Grassley half and the Feinstein half as separate, continuous wholes.

From the latter, we learn that by the time Steele reached out to law enforcement, independent sources had already tipped the FBI off to the cooperative relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia. We learn that, using decades of combined experience detecting disinformation, Simpson and Steele scrubbed the raw intel Steele collected, and were convinced that none of it was intentionally planted by Russian counterintelligence. We learn that Steele, with Simpson’s blessing, turned over his information to the FBI as a departure from their political intelligence gathering, expecting no political dividend because, Simpson said, “from my decades of dealing with U.S. elections [as a newspaper reporter] that you can’t expect the government or the FBI to be of any use in a campaign because the DOJ has rules against law enforcement getting involved in investigations in the middle of a campaign.”

We also learn that in shopping the information around (first to the FBI, and later the the press), Simpson and Steele did not cherry pick details, the way opposition researchers do, to depict Trump in maximally unflattering light.

This latter point is crucial, because there has been speculation, based on the way the memos are numbered and on reporting about Steele’s involvement in the operation, that the Steele dossier Buzzfeed published a year ago wasn’t Steele’s complete work product—that it may have been selectively edited for partisan reasons, or to make it seem more incriminating.

We learn, in other words, that Simpson and Steele were doing their civic-minded best to alert authorities, and failing that, the public, to what they believed to be the alarming and dangerous truth.


............


It’s often said that the coverup is worse than the crime. To the extent that this coverup includes character assassination and the attempted prosecution of whistleblowers, it’s pretty ugly. But in another sense it is simply lying and misdirection, undertaken by partisans, to smear those doing the best they can to find the truth. Viewed in that light, the crime in this case is far, far worse than the coverup. Simpson’s testimony is a challenging read, but it is also an acid test for determining who is engaged in the former project, and who is engaged in the latter. That makes it a critical tool, because our power as reporters and citizens to hold the guilty accountable now turns on our ability and willingness to sort good faith from bad.


MORE!!!!!
https://crooked.com/article/crime-worse-coverup/

[triron]

1. Much worse.

[BigmanPigman]

2. This is unprecedented territory.

From now on there will be politicians and lawyers going through the constitutional law books trying to figure out what to do next. They may try to make it up as they go along and deal with each detail related to collusion, obstruction of justice and money laundering by a sitting fake Perez.