monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Text exchanges further revealed that Cothren regularly uses racist terms and memes in his correspondence. For example, in a text to Casada, he referred to a West Tennessee district with a meme demonizing “black people.” Other exchanges with friends reveal him saying “black people are idiots” and referring to Tampa Bay quarterback Jameis Winston as a “thug nigger.”

Blackwater founder Erik Prince arranged for political activist James O’Keefe’s conservative group Project Veritas to receive more than one round of “training in intelligence and elicitation techniques,” The Intercept reports. In 2016, the self-styled “guerrilla journalist” group reportedly got lessons from a retired military intelligence operative. The training lasted several weeks and ended with the operative, Euripides Rubio Jr., reportedly quitting because the group “wasn’t capable of learning.” In 2017, Prince next set Project Veritas up with a former British MI6 officer in hopes of turning the organization into “domestic spies,” according to report. At the time, O’Keefe posted social-media photos of the event at Prince’s Wyoming ranch, claiming he was training in “spying and self-defense” and planned to turn Project Veritas into “the next great intelligence agency.”

Intelligencer writers Ed Kilgore, Benjamin Hart, and Margaret Hartmann discuss whether campaign-trail slipups still matter in 2019.

Ben: The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer tweeted the following this week: “I don’t know if this is true but I wonder if Trump has so inured the public to verbal gaffes that Biden’s weaknesses in that area are neutralized in a way they wouldn’t be against a traditional candidate. Trump says like five things every day worse than the typical Bidenism.”

This gets at something I think a lot of people have been wondering: Has President Trump’s ascent rendered a lot of candidate behavior that would have once been deemed problematic as forgivable, or maybe not even newsworthy anymore? What has become of the political “gaffe”?

Margaret: In preparation for this chat, I looked up some of Biden’s alleged gaffes.

Ben: I appreciate your research commitment.

Margaret: Most range from “meh” to kind of endearing when viewed through Trump-weary eyes. What is asking a paraplegic state senator to stand up so everyone can applaud him — and quickly realizing the error — when you have Trump’s infamous mocking of a disabled reporter? So yeah, I think a lot of these things aren’t even going to register. But as we saw with Hillary’s “deplorables” remark, if just one line catches on, it can make a dent. That was even true of Obama. The theme of the 2012 Republican National Convention was “You didn’t build that,” which was a distortion of the point Obama was making.

Ed: There’s definitely some truth in what Serwer is saying, if only because Trump creates the crucial context for everything in U.S. politics right now. But I think we need to qualify the “Nobody cares what Trump says” planted axiom here. Democrats and both liberal media and the mainstream media endlessly document and talk about Trump’s lies, excesses, high crimes and misdemeanors, etc., etc. It’s Trump supporters who don’t care, because for the most part they view him as a scourge for lashing their hated enemies. Every time he says or does something outrageous, he’s “owning the libs,” not breaking time-honored norms.

At the moment, though, the main context for judging Joe Biden is the Democratic presidential nominating contest, and Democrats have not abandoned the old norms. So Biden’s gaffes may bug them now, even though they’d stop caring in a general-election contest with Trump.

Margaret: That’s true, though I do think Democrats have limited capacity for being outraged, or it’s hard to get all Democrats to be outraged on the same point, unless we’re talking Trump.

Ben: Right now, the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination — Biden — is someone well known for (among other things) getting off message, committing verbal miscues, and generally being undisciplined on the campaign trail. In 2008, he called Obama “clean” and “articulate” on the first day of his campaign, a remark that I think would land with even more of a thud today. But as Ed pointed out, they may view things through an “Okay, it’s not perfect, but the guy can beat Trump” lens in a way that contrasts with previous election cycles.

Margaret: I’m sure people who already aren’t big Biden fans are going to latch onto any gaffes, but he already survived the unwanted-touching issue. I think there’s the mystique around him, that he’s the guy who might be able to beat Trump so we can’t care about these comments that might have bothered us a few years ago. It takes a gaffe machine to fight a gaffe machine.

Ed: I dunno, Ben, some of the heartburn over Biden as a gaffe machine involves the fear that it will keep him from beating Trump.

Margaret: I think in some ways — depending on the gaffe — they could be an asset. A minor slipup make him look fun and reinforces the avuncular image. But if he makes a few racial remarks, I think that could be a real problem. For instance, I had never heard this one from the Time list: “In 2006, Biden commented on the growing population of Indian Americans in Delaware. ‘You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking,’ he told a voter.”

Ben: One issue here is that the definition of “gaffe” is slippery. The stuff we’re talking about runs the gamut from “potentially lovable slipup” to “insulting the voters you’re trying to win over.”

Ed: I’m going to go all Big Picture here and suggest that part of the reason this stuff may not matter as much in 2020 is that the general election will be about big, consequential differences between the parties. I was talking to Margaret earlier today about Trump supporters who don’t care he’s a crook because they think he will help them end the American Holocaust of legalized abortion.

Margaret: I think the harmless slipups won’t even register anymore. We have a president who regularly mispronounces and misspells words to the point that people wonder about his health.

Ed: Democrats could develop the same high tolerance for relatively inconsequential mistakes. That’s different, however, than Biden’s actual record on actual issues.

Margaret: That’s interesting. My initial thought was that Democrats won’t develop that same high tolerance.

Ed: Not sure they will in the primary season, but by the general election, sure.

Margaret: I think they’re still holding candidates to a high standard, and we’re diving into what may be a very nasty 25(?)-way contest.

Ed: But again, that’s an intramural competition, not one against Trump.

Margaret: It’ll be interesting to see if, after the primary, they can actually pull back together to take on Trump, which they didn’t really in 2016, in my view.

Ed: Well, I’ve been saying and writing for a while that Democrats’ hidden weapon in 2020 is that nobody’s ever going to get complacent or assume their candidate has it in the bag.

Ben: Okay, so let’s say there’s less focus among media and voters this time around on small-ball verbal miscues. (I’m not convinced this will actually happen.) Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Perhaps a rare salutary side effect of Trump’s domination of a political party?

Margaret: I’ll say yes, good thing. We’re living in Idiocracy, I don’t really care if a politician is caught saying “big ******* deal” on a hot mic. Everyone acting scandalized by comments like that was probably always a bit unnecessary. (Like in my dreams is the president an eloquent speaker respected on the world stage? Sure, but I now have bigger concerns.)

Ed: Makes me recall Fred Harris, who actually ran for president in the ’70s on the slogan “No More Bullshit.” Media took it upon themselves to report that as “No More Hogwash.”

’70s media would have reported Biden as saying “Darn tootin’ it’s important!”

Margaret: Haha.

If a president just does not know how to speak respectfully about all constituents, that is a problem.

Ben: I do think Biden’s mistakes are likely to go beyond the lovable. But these things are also about the gap between the image the candidate presents and reality. That may be why Trump can get away with so much, at least with people who don’t despise him — he doesn’t pretend to be anything he’s not. Whereas when Marco Rubio drinks a bottle of water awkwardly, it’s excruciating.

Margaret: Right, I think Biden has that quality too — authenticity, if you will — where some gaffes are tolerated because that’s just who he is.

Ed: In Trump’s case: You can’t lose dignity you never had.

Ed: Well, I’ve been saying and writing for a while that Democrats’ hidden weapon in 2020 is that nobody’s ever going to get complacent or assume their candidate has it in the bag.

They didn’t take a Hillary vote and change it.

The number of voters who cast a ballot for Obama in 2012 and did not vote in 2016, or voted for a third-party candidate, outnumbered those Obama voters who pulled the lever for Trump.

Hillary Clinton lost that election—and Obama agrees.

President Trump has repeatedly said that the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was “a coup.” According to the president and his supporters, individuals in the F.B.I. formed the heart of a nefarious conspiracy to take him down by engaging in rogue “spying” on the his campaign.

New details from reporting on the counterintelligence inquiry in summer 2016 lays out how a government investigator posing as a research assistant met with George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, to better understand any potential Trump campaign “links to Russia.” Brad Parscale, the 2020 campaign manager for the president, said it’s further proof that the “real scandal was the Obama administration using the Justice Department to spy on a political adversary’s campaign.”

Talk of a “coup” has also been a staple of Fox News commentary: the “the biggest scandal of our time,” Maria Bartiromo said, “the coup that failed.”

Attorney General William Barr said that spying on any political campaign was a “big deal.” On Wednesday, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri coaxed the attorney general to go even further, persuading him to agree that the surveillance of the Trump campaign was “unprecedented.”

The president’s spying complaint focuses on two investigative techniques — the contact undercover investigators made with the Trump campaign and the use of electronic surveillance on certain Trump campaign officials.

But the fact is, while these tactics may never have been used in the investigation of a presidential candidate before, they are hardly unusual. Indeed, they are common procedures when undertaking covert public corruption investigations.

Undercover investigators usually take one of two possible forms — a confidential human source or an undercover agent. Confidential human sources are ordinary citizens who act as information gatherers for law enforcement organizations like the F.B.I. They have ordinary lives and live openly in the community, working on the side to assist law enforcement investigations. Their conduct is governed by extensive F.B.I. policies. Undercover agents are trained law enforcement personnel who adopt false identities to keep sensitive investigations secret. The use of undercover agents in any investigation is also subject to strict regulations and ones involving possible criminal conduct by domestic government officials or foreign governments must be approved by F.B.I. headquarters.

Both confidential human sources and undercover agents make contact with subjects of an investigation and elicit information without revealing their connection to law enforcement. They are key in counterintelligence investigations because they can help collect real-time information about the activity of foreign powers that individuals might be wary to share with investigators. They also serve a unique role in public corruption investigations because proving white-collar crime often hinges on the hard-to-prove element of intent. Unguarded statements to confidential informants can provide prosecutors with the intent evidence that they would otherwise be lacking.

In Mr. Trump’s case, the F.B.I. started its investigation in July 2016, after Australia informed the United States that Mr. Papadopoulos claimed that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. The F.B.I. used an undercover investigator — the research assistant, who went by the name Azra Turk — and Stefan Halper, a professor in Britain and longtime informant, to make contact with Mr. Papadopoulos (Mr. Halper also made contact with two other campaign officials, Sam Clovis and Carter Page).

In light of the information coming from Australia, this conduct was actually a relatively unintrusive way to start an investigation.

Contrast that with the investigation of Mayor Tony Mack of Trenton. In 2010, an F.B.I. informant met with one of Mr. Mack’s supporters and offered cash in exchange for Mr. Mack’s help in obtaining property to build a parking garage. Mr. Mack was eventually convicted of six federal charges. Similarly, in 2014, the F.B.I. used the chief of staff to New York State Senator George D. Maziarz to gather information on him. The F.B.I. used an informant to take down former congressman William Jefferson and one to prosecute the Hoboken mayor Peter Camarano. And in the investigation into the congressional campaign of Connecticut State Representative Chris Donovan, federal agents employed an informant and an undercover agent and staked out a political convention.

In its investigation into Russia’s potential connection to the Trump campaign, the F.B.I. obtained warrants to surveil the communications of Mr. Page and the campaign chairman Paul Manafort. The F.B.I. sought the wiretaps from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, rather than a district court, because the applications contained sensitive foreign intelligence information. Ordinarily, to get to the FISA Court, the agents prepare an application and send it for review to the supervisor, the chief division counsel, the special agent in charge and then a unit supervisor at F.B.I. headquarters. It then goes to the National Security Division at the Justice Department for a verification procedure before arriving at a FISA judge who does a review of the material to see whether surveillance is warranted. In Mr. Page’s case, most of the judges reviewing his application were actually Republican appointees.

The process of obtaining a FISA warrant to wiretap is slightly different from the process used in a district court, but the authorized surveillance technique — in other words, the “spying” — is the same. Again, this is a common investigatory method when the government can show probable cause to a court. The F.B.I. wiretapped Representative Rick Renzi in an extortion and racketeering investigation. Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois was wiretapped trying to sell President Barack Obama’s former Senate seat. Associates of Mayor Joe Ganim of Bridgeport, Conn., were also secretly recorded in a wide-ranging corruption investigation.

The attorney general’s response to Senator Hawley had the unique quality of being simultaneously true and misleading. They were both playing a linguistic sleight of hand. We’ve had only 45 presidents and 58 presidential elections in history. It should be no surprise — and should in fact be a relief — that federal investigators had never needed to use such techniques to investigate a presidential campaign.

But make no mistake, in the broad context of high-profile public corruption investigations, the methods used against Mr. Trump’s associates are by no means an anomaly.

What is anomalous is the effort by some Republicans to undermine legitimate counterintelligence concerns. After Mr. Barr’s testimony, Senator Hawley tweeted that “the F.B.I. spied on @realDonaldTrump and launched multiyear investigations” because “unelected progressive elites in our government have nothing but contempt for” Trump voters.