emptywheel

Fbi: hey George papa, this is special agent strzok calling from the FBI. Papa: hey, what's up? Fbi: just letting you know that mifsud guy is bad news. Papa: oh ok. Am I in trouble? Fbi: absolutely not. You've nothing wrong. Just giving you a heads up on Russians Papa: k, thx

While I appreciate your effort to move the goalposts, I don't see anything particularly aggressive about an interview (which is all Chuck suggested), let alone anything more aggressive than surreptitiously monitoring someone under false pretenses.

Covert investigation is significantly less aggressive than an overt interview.

How is an interview aggressive at all?

Because it alerts them to the investigation. What happens when the press hears about it? Suddenly you've got stories about Trump personally meeting with Putin to get Hillary's emails, and the FBI is accused of interfering with the election because something something deep state.

Why would interviewing Carter Page cause the press to lie?

You mean Papadopoulos. Page *was* interviewed, but you knew that. "A-ha! You said interviewing would alert them!" No, I said interviewing Papadopoulos in August would alert them, a time when the hacks were public, the leaks were flowing, and the investigation actually existed.

Page was before all that, before the trips to Moscow, before Manafort was running the campaign, but *after* foreign intel warning that something spooky was afoot. Page's involvement in previous CI investigations (plural!) made him a good person to talk to while assessing that.