I’m working on a english discussion question and need support to help me learn.
In this discussion, address the case study topic in your original, primary response of approximately 250 words. After posting your original, primary response, reply to at least two of your peers’ posts.
Before and after the election of Donald Trump, the intelligence community and the FBI opened up a covert intelligence investigation on the Trump Administration. Discuss the legal and ethical issue of the intelligence community’s investigation of a presidential candidate and then a president during and right after an election. FIRST PEER POST Hello class,
After doing a lot of research, I think the easiest issues to identify are ethical issues so I will start with those. The first ethical issue that came to mind was that of investigating the President of the United States. He is a policy maker and the job of intelligence officers is to support policy makers in any way they can. It seems as if this investigation was politicized intelligence where there was a bias by the FBI. Also, if an intelligence community is going to be making an investigation on a policy maker, the policy maker should know the reasons for why he is going to be investigated. This investigation started out as a covert action without the President knowing and even though James Comey made the investigation public, by the time he made this announcement, the investigation had already started. Normally one would say that the end justifies the means but in the end, the FBI was not able to find any evidence against the Trump Administration.
Now regarding the legal issues, there has been a lot of debate in the community whether what the FBI did was illegal or not. A lot of people say that this was illegal and that it was an abuse of power on the part of the FBI. Also, the ones that started the investigation against the Trump Administration were them. If we see a recent example, former President Trump was investigated for impeachment not so long ago. One would say that this is also an abuse of power on behalf of the FBI but in order to make this investigation, it needed to be accepted by Congress and the Senate, which was. If we compare both examples, in one the government gave permission to the intelligence community to start the investigation, which had nothing illegal in doing it, and in the other, the intelligence community started the investigation without permission of these two entities. It does show a sort of abuse in power from part of the FBI but it was seen as a national security threat which kind of protects them. Overall, the legality of this action can be questionable and it arises legal and ethical concerns regarding how the intelligence community can act.
If there is something wrong with my analysis or any correction you guys would like to make please feel free to let me know.
Kindly
Bryant. References:
Apuzzo, M., Rosenberg, M., & Huetteman, E. (2017, March 20). F.B.I. is investigating Trump’s Russia Ties, Comey confirms. The New York Times. /politics/fbi-investigation-trump-russia-comey.html” rel=”noreferrer noopener” target=”_blank”>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/us/politics/fbi-investigation-trump-russia-comey.html (Links to an external site.).
Goldsmith, J. (2019, January 13). On what grounds can the FBI investigate the President as a Counterintelligence Threat? Lawfare. com/what-grounds-can-fbi-investigate-president-counterintelligence-threat” rel=”noreferrer noopener” target=”_blank”>https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-grounds-can-fbi-investigate-president-counterintelligence-threat (Links to an external site.).
Schmidt, M. S., Rosenberg, M., Goldman, A., & Apuzzo, M. (2017, January 20). Intercepted Russian Communications part of Inquiry into Trump associates. The New York Times. /politics/trump-russia-associates-investigation.html” rel=”noreferrer noopener” target=”_blank”>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/trump-russia-associates-investigation.html (Links to an external site.).
SECOND PEER POSTClass
The 2016 Presidential Election was something unique if I where to say so myself, but where the investigations that occurred during and after it unethical? I would say no. The reason the investigation occurred was because there was suspicion of involvement from a foreign government in our democratic process. This alone should warrant investigations, since as a country we would not want our government shaped by a foreign power. In 2016 we had one candidate who was already in the beginning of an investigation from the FBI and a second candidate which, first had no political background, secondly, he had a successful but at the same time questionable business background and lasty, had associates communicating with agents of foreign governments not allied to the United States. The investigation started because Donald Trump’s son was having communications with a Russian lawyer allegedly working for the Kremlin in regard to Hilary Clinton. They where supposedly feeding incriminating information about the opposing Presidential candidate in order to sway the election towards Donald Trump. And let’s not forget that Hilary Clinton was already under investigation for her email servers, so any information that may have been passed by Russia to the Trump campaign would have been additional and therefore beneficial not to the United States, but to Russian government. In the months leading to the election, Donald Trump wanted the emails that Hilary Clinton was being investigated for found (Mueller, 2019). This could give us motive for the above-mentioned communication. I think that the investigation was not unethical, but I do not think that it could have been carried out any other way. We had one candidate pressuring for an investigation on the opposing candidate and the other one trying to avoid an investigation. After the election and Donald Trump was elected President, the investigations continued on his campaign’s relation with Russia. Nothing in the DOJ manual says that a sitting President or a Presidential candidate cannot be investigated; Bill Clinton was investigated as well as Nixon so this should not come as a shock that Trump was being investigated as well. I think the investigation was ethical although highly flawed, but at least it had the interest of the American people serving as the main reason for brining the investigation to light.
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