As far as principles go I agree with pretty much everything you said; my analysis entirely depends on how much power and influence a potential leader has over his subordinates in practice. As a trivial case, Stalin basically was the federal government of Russia. And getting your subordinates to break the law by giving a neutral measure, say reducing the number of reported roberries, without explicitly enumerating the ways they’re supposed to cheat can be an extremely effective technique for preventing any actual legal troubles, because we’re not in Dath Ilan and don’t convict people based on probabilistic reasoning.
However what Bill Barr needed to do was make these very indirect subordinates do these very particular things, like turn off cameras and then say nothing to the FBI. I’m not coming from the perspective of Barr as an in- or out-group member, I’m coming at it from the perspective of his limited ability to do things that put his subordinates at risk of prison time. Saying “get this Epstein thing over with” doesn’t accomplish that, just like saying “I’d really like to know what they’re talking about” didn’t do that for Nixon.
Saying “get this Epstein thing over with” doesn’t accomplish that, just like saying “I’d really like to know what they’re talking about” didn’t do that for Nixon.
Nixon also said things like “Can you please give me the files of what happened around the Kennedy assassination?” which made him pretty unpopular with the CIA and FBI. The US government is currently violating laws to not give the citizens access to those files on the ground that releasing those files would have important real-world implications.
The idea that Mark Felt was mainly driven by moral considerations about Nixon’s failings seems strange given how Mark Felt himself was responsible for highly illegal operations like COINTELPRO.
The idea that Mark Felt was mainly driven by moral considerations about Nixon’s failings seems strange given how Mark Felt himself was responsible for highly illegal operations like COINTELPRO.
Perhaps there’s some critical difference between the kind of criminal activity inherent in things like COINTELPRO, or NSA surveillance, and the kind of criminal activity inherent in what Nixon did, and that that difference would also apply to covering up Epstein’s murder. The existence of such a distinction between agency-wide abuses of power that plausibly have some relation to its charter, and explicitly self-serving corruption on behalf of individual political appointees, would also explain why Mark Felt did what he did in lieu of another explanation like “Nixon asked for files from the Kennedy assasination.”
As far as principles go I agree with pretty much everything you said; my analysis entirely depends on how much power and influence a potential leader has over his subordinates in practice. As a trivial case, Stalin basically was the federal government of Russia. And getting your subordinates to break the law by giving a neutral measure, say reducing the number of reported roberries, without explicitly enumerating the ways they’re supposed to cheat can be an extremely effective technique for preventing any actual legal troubles, because we’re not in Dath Ilan and don’t convict people based on probabilistic reasoning.
However what Bill Barr needed to do was make these very indirect subordinates do these very particular things, like turn off cameras and then say nothing to the FBI. I’m not coming from the perspective of Barr as an in- or out-group member, I’m coming at it from the perspective of his limited ability to do things that put his subordinates at risk of prison time. Saying “get this Epstein thing over with” doesn’t accomplish that, just like saying “I’d really like to know what they’re talking about” didn’t do that for Nixon.
Nixon also said things like “Can you please give me the files of what happened around the Kennedy assassination?” which made him pretty unpopular with the CIA and FBI. The US government is currently violating laws to not give the citizens access to those files on the ground that releasing those files would have important real-world implications.
The idea that Mark Felt was mainly driven by moral considerations about Nixon’s failings seems strange given how Mark Felt himself was responsible for highly illegal operations like COINTELPRO.
Perhaps there’s some critical difference between the kind of criminal activity inherent in things like COINTELPRO, or NSA surveillance, and the kind of criminal activity inherent in what Nixon did, and that that difference would also apply to covering up Epstein’s murder. The existence of such a distinction between agency-wide abuses of power that plausibly have some relation to its charter, and explicitly self-serving corruption on behalf of individual political appointees, would also explain why Mark Felt did what he did in lieu of another explanation like “Nixon asked for files from the Kennedy assasination.”