General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: If this is not the bottom of the damn barrel and worthy of impeachment, then [View all]rlegro
(338 posts)As the Washington Post and New Yorker both reported, after the Democratic Party / Clinton lawyers hired Fusion GPS, the research firm subcontracted with Steele, which development the Clinton campaign reportedly was not aware of. Nor was Steele aware who the Fusion GPS client was (there were two clients, actually, the other being conservative political website The Washington Free Beacon). After Trump's election, the Democrats dropped the project but Fusion GPS owner Glenn Simpson continued working with Steele. Here's ABC News, January 2018, quoting Simpson: "[Steele] said he was very concerned about whether this represented a national security threat and said ... he thought we were obligated to tell someone in government, in our government about this information." Simpson told Senate staffers in a transcript: "He [Steele] said he was professionally obligated to do it." The Steele memos were first shared with Sen. John McCain, who passed them onto the FBI.
Regarding the question of whether opposition research is ever ethically right: Well, it is now. The modern norm is that many candidates for public office -- and not just high federal office - are vetted by pollsters, the news media, voters, other candidates and the general population, not just on the basis of their political views and proposals, but also on who they are and what they've done.
While it's quite laudable to argue that the right thing would be to foreswear opposition research, campaigns now often feel obliged to vet their own candidates, so they are later not surprised by opposition charges. Heck, the GOP spent 25 years conducting oppo research on Hillary, often manufacturing unwarranted story lines and spinning innuendo.
So, opposition research? Unilateral disarmament by Democrats is unwise. In any case, conducting an investigation of Steele's sort is not illegal, nor is it comparable to a political campaign leaning towards foreign interests offering stolen private campaign information. If interviewing foreigners in the private sector or government were illegal, news media in the US would be shutting down their overseas bureaus lest someone besides Trump regarded them as enemies of the state.