dylsexicbleu
Player Valuation: £8m
I'd say many conservatives and RINO's are as anti-Trump as the moderate left. Pointing to person X being conservative in no way minimises their potential anti-Trump bias. The Bush and John McCain clans are second to no-one when it comes to hating Trump and his brand of populism. You can add Romney to the list. Time after time the intel community have sided on the anti-Trump side.Obviously, this is a bit more nuanced than a soundbyte from 2020. For example, law enforcement agency members lean conservative, and the current and past Directors were both Republican. The entire DoJ report that looked into this issue is quite lengthy and, within their broader investigation, they looked into political bias of the investigators. Page 410 of this report (link below) shows that they found no evidence of political bias and that the FBI followed policies/procedures.
https://www.justice.gov/storage/120919-examination.pdf
To be sure, the decision to look into any potential criminal activity is always "discretionary" but it would be hard to factually point to a cadre of high-level FBI agents, which included "[Bill] Priestap...who ultimately made the decision to open the investigation, and evidence reflected that this decision by Priestap was reached by consensus after multiple days of discussions and meetings that included [Peter] Strzok and other leadership in CD [counterintelligence division], the FBI Deputy Director, the FBI General Counsel, and a FBI Deputy General Counsel." No doubt, Strzok was biased, as evidenced by his texts, but bias alone doesn't necessarily lead to partiality, as concluded by the right-leaning Wall Street Journal.
You can look up the political affiliation of those above, but it doesn't seem to indicate that the "political and intel establishment" are on some sort of conspiracy against Trump.
This from the AP:
'according to Durham, the FBI rushed into the probe without having any evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign had had any contact with any Russian intelligence officers. It identifies by name the Russia experts in the FBI and other agencies who were never consulted before the investigation was begun and says that had they been, they would have said there was no information pointing to a conspiracy between Russia and the campaign.'
continued
'The report contends that the FBI fell prone to “confirmation bias,” repeatedly ignoring, minimizing or rationalizing away evidence that undercut the premise of collusion, including a conversation in which Papadopoulos vigorously denied knowing about any cooperative relationship between Russia and the Trump campaign.'
'It also says investigators did not corroborate a “single substantive allegation” in a dossier of Democratic-funded research that was compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, and yet continued to cite it in applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to eavesdrop on a former Trump campaign aide, Carter Page.'
Nah, no way I'm believing the FBI were playing with a straight bat with regards to Trump. Call it a conspiracy, confirmation bias or whatever you wish. It's their thumb on the scales to undermine Trump, his campaign and his administration.