Brian Peacock wrote:Text Messages in Hand, Republicans Plan to Accuse Justice Department of Bias
Accusations of bias, primed by the newly released texts from an F.B.I. agent, Peter Strzok, and an F.B.I. lawyer, Lisa Page, took center stage on Wednesday when Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who appointed Mr. Mueller as special counsel, began testifying before the House Judiciary Committee. Republicans pressed Mr. Rosenstein to appoint a second special counsel to investigate political partisanship in the department and to scrutinize Mr. Trump’s former presidential rival, Mrs. Clinton.
The campaign against the Justice Department, at the very least, provides a rallying cry for the president’s supporters to counter the drumbeat of news about Russian interference in the election and the possible collusion of the Trump campaign.
“Each and every day we are finding more and more instances of intractable bias that is infecting this investigation,” said Representative Matt Gaetz, a first-term Florida Republican who has emerged as one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal defenders on Capitol Hill.
Democrats on the committee tried to extract assurances from Mr. Rosenstein that Mr. Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia is safe.
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Mueller, a registered Republican appointed by President George W. Bush to direct the F.B.I., has long had critics in the most pro-Trump corners of the House and the conservative news media. But in recent weeks, as his investigation has delivered a series of indictments to high-profile associates of the president and evidence that at least two of them are cooperating with the inquiry, those critics have grown louder and in numbers....
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/13/us/p ... paign.html
It's interesting how someone's private political views are being beefed up to somehow represent the official public political view of their employer. This swings both ways of course - no member of the FBI can ever have political views again.
It's not a black and white issue. Of course people are allowed to have private political views. However, if the views impact one's job performance as an investigator in the FBI, then it is a problem. Before the Republicans knew about this, the guy was fired from the FBI for precisely these tweets. So, apparently Mueller thought they were a problem in August. Efforts were then taken to try to prevent the information from being made public or being disclosed to Congress, even though the documents showing the texts were within the scope of Congressional subpoenas.
If there was investigation of a prominent Democrat, and a Republican FBI agent was heavily involved and was referring to that Democrat as loathesome, and a douche and a scumbag, and dishonest, etc., then that would probably be viewed as an issue of concern. If, also, that same FBI agent was in charge of investigating a Republican, like Trump, and while making fawning comments about Trump, and highly negative and profane comments about Democrats, the agent modified a report about Trump to make it much less damning to him. Wouldn't that be a concern? I'm not saying it would be the end of the analysis, but would it not be a legitimate question to ask whether the FBI agent let his personal views influence his decision? Or, if role were reversed, would you simply say that the FBI is very trustworthy and their personal beliefs don't get in the way....?
“When I was in college, I took a terrorism class. ... The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘Al Qaeda’ his shoulders went up, But you know, it is that you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity,” she continued. “... But you say these names [Al Qaeda] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.” - Ilhan Omar