. But the texts in this case are smoking gun evidence of pervasive bias - which is indeed a basis for discrediting the investigation.
No it isn't. You've got partisan text messages from a handful of people, most of whom were immediately fired. I see evidence of political affillitation, but not bias in the sense that these people in any way shaped the investigation due to this bias. What you have with these texts, are proof that some people on the investigation were democrats. For most of the right, that is enough to disregard everything they say. Not for me. Until you can show how this "bias" impacted the investigation, I'm about as shocked as someone providing text messages that show Mitch McConnel to be a republican.
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The court can shut it down based on the standard I gave you. On that note, the cat is already out of the bag that the investigation was launched based on a series of pretextual searches and seizures (which, as you know, implicates the Constitution) and “intelligence” which all players knew or should have known was untrustworthy. In particular, this Steele dossier was paid for by Trump’s political adversary. Do you realize how damning that is? So the remaining question is not whether Trump is guilty of anything, but whether these investigators are guilty of anything in abusing their authority to attempt a bogus prosecution. The text messages erase all plausible deniability. Don’t expect this to end well for them.
Three big things wrong with the above:
1) The investigation start date: This keeps getting brought out by the right, and it has no significance to whether an investigation is lawful. Police can "investigate" someone/something whenever they want. There is no threshold for when the police can turn to an issue and start looking into it. If a police officer has nothing more than a wild baseless hunch, he can still "investigate" any issue he wants. Now he can't conduct a search, detain a suspect, or otherwise violate the Constitutional rights of anyone, but he can "investigate."
Hell, the term itself is vague enough to where that should be obvious. When does an investigation start, in a legal sense? Is it when an officer is sitting at his desk and his mind turns to a particular issue? Is it when he first puts pen to paper, filling out any paperwork for some issue? Is it when he leaves the station to look into something? There is no answer for this because the courts have never bothered with it. An investigation can be benign, or incredibly intrusive. So our legal system does not care about it. Just searches, detainments, and the like.
2) The fucking dossier:
This has been beaten to death in several other threads, but here's a quick recap one more time.
All that a judge is looking for in a warrant is whether the aggregate of everything provided by law enforcement, amounts to probable cause. If it does, a search is reasonable under the Constitution and the judge will sign off. Any piece of that overall intelligence used for probable cause can be ignored, criticized, or discarded by the judge. But just because the judge dismisses one piece of evidence, does not mean that the rest vanishes. It survives on it's own and you still look to see if the total amounts to probable cause.
The republican argument was that the Special Counsel didn't include that a copy of the Steel dossier had been paid for by the DNC or the Clinton campaign (and it had been included in the application, but mentioned only in a foot note. Republicans changed their stance from "it's not included" to "well it's only mentioned in a footnote and that's not obvious enough). There is no legal obligation to include the fact that while copies of the Steele dossier were paid for by Republican sources, Democratic ones also paid for a copy.
Even so, a judge could look at this fact (or anything else) and determine that the dossier is sufficiently untrustworthy. However the correct action would be for the judge to discard the dossier and not include it in his reasoning. What the judge can't do, and what republicans are asking him to do, is throw out the entire warrant application. There could be 200 pieces of evidence in the warrant application. Even if 199 of them the judge tosses out, if that last one still gets you to probable cause, the warrant is lawful.
Prosecutors will always load the deck for a warrant application. Now you don't want to waste your time with stupid shit, or risk annoying the judge with filler, or really weak evidence. But you never know what the judge (unless you've gone before him a bunch, and feel you can read the guy/girl) is gonna find noteworthy. Maybe you've got some awesome witness testimony that you think cuts right to the heart of the case, but the judge disagrees. Well you better have something else in case the judge ignores it. To that effect, warrant applications on complex criminal cases are usually filled evidence ranging from "damn that looks bad for the defendant," to "meh." And of course this warrant application was filled with a shit ton of such evidence.
3) Politcal beliefs or party affiliation by law enforcement, triggers nothing automatically under our law. You can't remove an investigator, or throw out his findings just due to his political leanings. You can allege bias, but determining whether or not a warrant is valid, or a search was legal, turns on its own set of standards.
So did these fbi agents actually do anything to negatively impact the investigation? Did they conduct searches without a warrant? Did they detain anyone? These are the questions you ask. Not just what political party the investigators belong to. That, by itself, means nothing.
And I'd be interested in what trouble you think these people should be in. We have them texting to each other about their dislike for trump. That tells us nothing about their conduct. Nothing in here comes close to "shocking the conscious" as our law requires. If it did, you're telling me that any investigation could be stopped the moment a suspect finds out the political parties of investigating officers don't match his own. I know we live in a partisan world, but most people, and certainly our federal courts, do not presume state actors are evil just because they are republican or democrat.
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Lastly, don’t hang your hat on Mueller’s indictments. None of them has resulted in a final judgment of guilt yet. I predict the whole thing implodes, with many veteran prosecutors disbarred and/or charged, and Trump’s innocence vindicated.
None of us know the breadth of what the Special Counsel has found yet. So none of us can declare with certainty whether trump broke the law. Only partisans are acting like this investigation lives and dies depending on how trump personally is punished.
What we do know is that 20 people and 3 corporations have been charged, and some of them have pled guilty. That's one of the largest groups ever charged under a Special Counsel. That's hardly nothing, and can't see why you would want Mueller to stop now unless you're worried about what he'll find later. Obviously, the more people you find in trump's orbit who committed crimes, the harder it is to make the argument that trump was just oblivious to all this.
It's the double standard by republicans which is appalling. This is a congress who held dozens of hearing on fucking Benghazi. Despite the first score of investigations returning nothing criminal, republicans insisted they needed more investigations to absolutely get to the bottom of this. Now, we can't even conclude one investigation because some members of law enforcement might be democrats. The bullshit is obvious.
