Reading @charlie_savage on the FISA failures, it seems like the incompetence defense - "it shows the process is always bad, not that they were politically motivated" - doesn't distinguish sufficiently btw two different ways of being "motivated."
nytimes.com/2019/12/11/us/…
nytimes.com/2019/12/11/us/…
@charlie_savage There's "motivation" in the sense suggested by the president and some of his allies, where ppl in the FBI were supposedly *consciously* cooking up bogus intel in order to frame POTUS and his advisers. That always seemed implausible, and the report confirms its implausibility.
@charlie_savage But there's also "motivation" in the sense of "motivated reasoning" -- reasoning that assumes guilt and cherry-picks around that assumption. That's what civil liberties ppl assume happens too often with, say, Muslims under FBI scrutiny. And it seems like what happened here.
@charlie_savage Meaning: If you had a case where the FBI built a FISA application around implausible intel bc they wanted to surveil a mosque, you wouldn't necessarily call it a frame-up, but you also wouldn't call it just a bureaucratic accident.
@charlie_savage You would say that a somewhat paranoid assumption of Muslim guilt led to highly credulous police work by agents easily taken in by hyped-up intel from dubious sources. Not a frame-up, but a motivated-reasoning fiasco.
@charlie_savage And that's what happened here, seemingly: Agents became caught up in the wild Steele dossier narrative and the general establishment paranoia about Trump that they made bad choices -- not dishonestly, but credulously.
@charlie_savage So if this indicts the whole system, it indicts it for paranoid credulity ... and if the FBI was swamped by paranoid credulity about Manchurian-Trump then they *did* effectively have anti-Trump motivations. Just not the simplistic and evil ones suggested by, well, Trump himself.
@charlie_savage In summary:
