Posted on 04/25/2018 7:03:15 AM PDT by Kaslin
When a political figure is accused of wrongdoing, a conversation begins among journalists, commentators and public officials. Are the charges true? Can the accusers prove it?
That's the way it normally works. But now, in the case of the Trump dossier -- the allegations compiled by a former British spy hired by the Clinton campaign to gather dirt on presidential candidate Donald Trump -- the generally accepted standard of justice has been turned on its head. Now, the question is: Can the accused prove the charges false? Increasingly, the president's critics argue that the dossier is legitimate because it has not been proven untrue.
It's an argument heard at the highest levels of government, academics and media.
"Not a single revelation in the Steele dossier has been refuted," noted Sen. Dianne Feinstein, top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, in February.
In late December, Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, tweeted a message about the allegations against Trump to his followers: "Retweet if, like me, you're aware of nothing in the (Trump) dossier that has been shown to be false."
"The dossier has not been proven false," said MSNBC anchor and former George W. Bush aide Nicolle Wallace in February.
More recently, Chuck Todd, moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press," asked former CIA director John Brennan, "So far with this dossier, nothing yet has been proven untrue. How significant is that?"
"As Jim Comey has said, I think very famously, these were salacious and unverified allegations," Brennan responded. "Just because they were unverified does not mean they were not true."
That's where the Trump dossier story stands today. No one has proved that the most serious allegations are true. But since no one has proved them false, either, some in the political class act as if they were true.
What is still unclear is how much effort the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies put into trying to prove the dossier's allegations. Fired FBI director James Comey noted in his Jan. 28, 2017 memo that Trump asked that the FBI investigate the dossier's so-called "golden showers" allegation -- the charge that Trump watched as prostitutes performed a kinky sex show in a Moscow hotel room in 2013. Comey, by his own account, demurred.
"I replied that it was up to him," Comey wrote, "but I wouldn't want to create a narrative that we were investigating him, because we are not, and I worried such a thing would be misconstrued. I also said that it is very difficult to disprove a lie."
In an interview with ABC News, Comey repeated the story and added, "It's very difficult to prove something didn't happen."
For his part, Comey still won't vouch for the dossier's truthfulness. Instead, Comey makes a much softer claim, saying that the "core" of the dossier -- the big-picture conclusion that Russia tried to interfere with the 2016 presidential election -- is "consistent with the other information we'd gathered during the intelligence investigation."
By the way, when it comes to the most spectacular allegation in the dossier -- the sex story -- even the dossier's author doesn't have much faith in its veracity.
In the new book "Russian Roulette," authors Michael Isikoff and David Corn note that Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier, once said there was perhaps a 50-50 chance of the Moscow sex episode being true. Glenn Simpson, head of the opposition research company Fusion GPS, which commissioned the dossier, reportedly considered the Russian source for the story a "big talker" who might have made it up to impress Steele.
But now, some leading lights in the political conversation defend the dossier by arguing that it has not been proven untrue -- as if that, instead of proof of truth, were the standard to apply to such consequential allegations.
"Setting aside the absurd and patently unfair 'guilty until proven innocent' standard that thinking requires, it also ignores the fact that the FBI has never tried to disprove it," Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe, a former federal prosecutor who now serves on the House Judiciary Committee, said in a recent text exchange. "When the president asked the FBI to do exactly that, one of Jim Comey's secret memos documents the response: (Comey) told him it is 'very difficult to disprove a lie.'"
Yes, it is. And that's something to keep in mind whenever someone suggests the dossier is worthwhile because it hasn't been proven false.
The media, the deep state, the FBI, the CIA, the Democrats have all exposed themselves for what they truly are.
comey has sex with prepubescent children and goats.
There is not a single shred of evidence to prove that statement untrue.
Therefore it is true.
In formal mathematics, you can’t disprove an assumption or a postulate, can you?
Trump’s guilty! QED
“As Jim Comey has said, I think very famously, these were salacious and unverified allegations,” Brennan responded. “Just because they were unverified does not mean they were not true.”
Kind of like the anonymous sources that state Comey and Brennan are pedophiles. They need to prove they are false, along with the suppressed Feinstein dossier that claims she urinated on a hotel bed at the request of Putin himself.
“Seriousness of the charge” is all the “evidence” any lynch mob throughout history has ever required.
They all went to the Dan Rather school of journalism.
That would be an EXCELLENT review of his book on Amazon. Give it five stars, but say the one big negative is that he hasn’t addressed the persistent rumors about those “activities.”
Fact: If the government had anything on Trump, it would have come out by now.
All discussion to the contrary is manipulation. How do I know this for a fact?
NSA has been collecting data on ALL Americans since October 2001. If they wanted to know exactly what Trump and his associates were doing before the election, it’s simply a line of code to pull a timeline’s details via Bill Binney’s ThinThread program...the same program which NSA weaponized against him (literally) after he quit NSA.
They have nothing. There is nothing.
Nothing except an opportunity to make more useful idiots...
Innocence cannot be proven, only guilt. Our legal system is predicated on that premise, that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty.
my thought exactly. It does, however, prove that liberals are illogical.
Legally, that's exactly what it means at the moment. They're false until proven true. Well, in the olden days that's what it meant.
I agree.
I heard that Brennan is a necrophiliac that has a flock of bald eagles that he cooks for his weekly Sunday dinners. I heard that, but it's never been verified. I'll add that it's not been verified but that doesn't mean it isn't true.
By the way, it’s one thing for dem hacks to engage in this sort of thing but for the guy who ran the our the Central Intelligence Agency to publicly state his stance that absence of evidence is no reason to discount a rumor makes one quite happy that the communist muslim is out of there finally.
I think the goats were of legal age.
I dunno, remember how doggedly they pursued all thos rumors about Obama's birth and his activities at Columbia and how he got into Harvard, and who his early supporters were?
Oops, they dismissed all of that as unworthy of comment right from jump. Hmmm. Yeah, double standard exposed.
At least until 2024.
When President Trump finishes his second term.
Anyone noticed how food prices are going down?
"Even though there is no evidence," he said, "the seriousness of the charge is what matters."
So, would this not be like the expression “it is a logical impossibility to prove a negative”? I never quite understood the proper application of this.
Someone falsely accuses you of brandishing a weapon and making threats. There are no witnesses, so how does one prove it did not happen? Proving a negative, or disproving a negative?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.