I never thought the “Seven Days in May” joke would become a thread…

But the thought of a rogue faction in the government trying to influence the election seems less like a joke.

From a long but very good piece in Vox by Yochi Dreazen

It’s come to this: The FBI, America’s premier law enforcement agency, just had to decide whether to investigate one of its own Twitter accounts to see if it had an anti-Hillary Clinton bias.

The account in question, @FBIRecordsVault, burst into the news earlier this week after abruptly posting records related to Bill Clinton’s last-minute — and deeply controversial — pardon of financier Marc Rich. An FBI official said in an interview that the bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility referred the matter to its Inspection Division for a possible investigation into whether anyone in the FBI had intentionally released the documents to hurt Hillary Clinton.

…

Comey has since come under sustained criticism from law enforcement veterans and lawmakers from both parties who believe he broke with longstanding Justice Department policies by directly intruding into the presidential race — and potentially impacting its outcome.

“There’s a longstanding policy of not doing anything that could influence an election,” George J. Terwilliger III, a deputy attorney general under President George Bush, told the New York Times. “Those guidelines exist for a reason. Sometimes, that makes for hard decisions. But bypassing them has consequences.”

But Comey isn’t the only member of the FBI stepping into the election. Earlier this week, unnamed sources within the bureau told the Wall Street Journal that some FBI agents believed they had enough evidence to begin an aggressive investigation into a potential pay-to-play scheme at the Clinton Foundation, but were overruled by more senior officials.

Another anti-Clinton leak came Thursday, when sources thought to be disgruntled FBI officials told Fox News that an indictment was coming in the Clinton Foundation case. The story gave Trump a new talking point, dominated Fox’s primetime news programming, and rocketed across the conservative media before being debunked by an array of other media outlets. By that point, though, the damage had already been done.

Taken together, it’s easy to come away with the conclusion that the FBI is out to get Hillary Clinton. The truth, though, is far more complicated. The FBI isn’t a monolith, and it isn’t the bureau as a whole that is targeting Clinton. Experts who study the FBI believe the leaks are coming from a small clique of agents who profoundly distrust Clinton and believe she deserves to be punished for what they see as a long record of ethically dubious behavior.

…

The recent series of FBI leaks are particularly worrisome because they raise the prospect of a state security agency equipped with the full resources and investigative might of the federal government working to interfere in the elections. The FBI is so powerful — it can, with court approval, issue subpoenas, tap phones, intercept emails and conduct round-the-clock surveillance — that even a small coterie of its agents can find ways of influencing the political process. That’s the kind of thing we normally see in autocracies like Egypt or Turkey, not here in the United States.

It’s impossible to know how many agents support Trump, and the anti-Clinton leaks are likely the result of only a tiny minority of the bureau. Still, the fact that a small fraction of the FBI’s workforce has felt free to take steps that could impact the election is profoundly alarming. Comey stumbled by personally entering the political fray. His bigger mistake may have come from signaling to other agents that they could do the same.

…

Two of Holder’s most recent Republican predecessors, Alberto Gonzales and Michael Mukasey, have also accused the FBI chief of making a serious error in judgement.

…

Outside experts on the FBI say Comey has made a serious and perhaps irreparable mistake.

“His actions were unprecedented, unethical, shocking, and have apparently led to chaos within the bureau, an unprecedented number of leaks, and chaos in our election cycle,” said Douglas Charles, a history professor at Penn State.

Charles, the author of a book about J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, said Comey has a long history with the Clintons that may have left him with a “personal grudge or underlying or subsumed political motive” to try to derail Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

When the meta-dialogue about the campaign starts to sound like the f**king campaign

Things are getting a little heated...

Nate Silver unloaded Saturday on the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim, who accused the polling guru and founder of the prediction website fivethirtyeight.com of “changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them.”

...
 
According to Grim, however, Silver is “just guessing” and his “trend line adjustment” technique is “merely political punditry dressed up as sophisticated mathematical modeling.” Grim also noted that FiveThirtyEight’s model -- due to his adjustments -- shows Trump more likely than not to win Florida, while the Huffington Post’s calculates her victory there as more likely.

And that, apparently, enraged Silver, whose track record of correctly predicting elections -- and explaining how he does it in painstaking, but accessible detail -- has made him a celebrity whose very name is synonymous with the art of data-driven prognostication, and whose model is widely considered the gold standard in election forecasting.

After dropping his initial f-bomb, Silver went on to argue why his model -- which, in its polls-only version, puts the odds of Hillary Clinton winning the presidential race at 64.7 percent -- is superior to those like the Huffington Post, which rates her election a near-certainty, at 98.3 percent.

Four from Talking Points Memo I'll want to get back to

This account of how sensible formerly anti-Trump conservatives get sucked in is essential reading (and mirrors some of my personal encounters).

Josh Marshall addresses the none-too-subtle antisemitism of Trump's latest commercial.

One of these days I'm going to run a post called "meta-inference." I don't really have anything other than the title and the fact that I'll be quoting extensively from this Marshall piece.

If Trump manages a narrow victory in North Carolina, this will be part of the reason.

Five hour lines and the tell-your-grandchildren effect

A few quick thoughts on waiting five hours to vote

1. That's right... FIVE

2. The line circled around the library building then snaked back and forth through the park. It's difficult to say how long it was but five to ten blocks seems conservative.

3. This was LA, None of the major races have any chance of being close in the state.

4. People were there because they really wanted to vote in this election. The mood was cheerful and there was a sense democratic participation.

Which leads us to...

5.This was always going to be a big, historic race, the kind people wanted to be a part of. This tell-your-grandchildren effect is not limited to either party but I suspect it plays more to Clinton's advantage and it certainly should give those arguing for a low turnout election reason to question their assumptions.

Nevada, either leaning slightly Trump or in the bag for Hillary

From FiveThirtyEight a few minutes ago:

And since timing is important

From Jon Ralston [UPDATED, 11/5/16, 5 PM]

Let me remind you of the math: Trump would need to be holding 90 percent of the GOP base and Clinton would have to be losing 15-20 percent of hers and he would have to be winning indies for him to be competitive. Let me be clear: None of those things are likely.

The Reid machine and the Hillary campaign did not spend two weeks turning out crossover voters. They know what they are doing. Trump is probably down 12-15 points in Clark County and 65-70,000 votes. You can't make that up unless Election Day turnout is so large and so GOP-heavy that he could. And with two-thirds of the vote in, and with Democrats not simply willing to roll over and not rev up the machine on Election Day, that ain't happening.

Proof = hearing about things

 Following up on "In retrospect, it's surprising we don't use more sewage metaphors,

 From TPM:

[Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC)], a Donald Trump surrogate and the first congressional candidate endorsed by the Republican nominee, was interviewed about FBI investigations into Clinton’s private email server and the Clinton Foundation on CNN’s “New Day.”

“She is under—facing indictment,” Ellmers told host Chris Cuomo. “We’re in a situation where the Clinton Foundation—”

“No proof she's facing indictment,” Cuomo replied.

“There is proof,” she insisted.

“There isn't any proof,” Cuomo pushed back.

“There is.”

“What's the proof?” he asked.

“The proof is the FBI investigators,” Ellmers said. “This is coming out everywhere. I'm hearing about it. I don't really have all that many connections and yet I'm hearing about the investigation.”

A widely-circulated Fox News report that Trump himself pushed on the stump cited two anonymous “sources with intimate knowledge” into the Clinton Foundation probe who said Clinton would “likely” be indicted. Fox later walked the report back, noting that a prosecutor must decide whether to bring an indictment against a potential defendant.

When Cuomo pointed that out, Ellmers remained defiant.

“You know what, people are talking,” she said. “So, the investigation is moving forward. Now, I do agree with you, there is someone who is trying to put a cover up in place here. And it's at the Justice Department level. That's where it is.”


“That's a conspiracy theory and that's fine for you to believe it. But you said she's facing indictment,” Cuomo said, adding that that implies “you know something that the FBI is about to do.”

“We have no basis of proof that that is about to happen. You may want it to happen, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen,” he went on.

,,,

Ellmers lost her reelection bid in North Carolina's Republican primary this June.

Ellmers is both a surrogate and a member of Congress (albeit a lame duck), but she's apparently operating on the same news stream that was intended for the party-faithful cannon fodder.

And on a related note: Fox Host: Report On 'Likely' Clinton Foundation Indictment ‘Was A Mistake’

However, the real candidate is not filled with tasty treats

Another thing I should have been blogging about earlier.

Living in Los Angeles, I've been hearing about Donald Trump pinatas for well over a year. If you go to a quinceañera, there's a very good chance that you will see the Republican candidate for president hung in effigy and beaten to smithereens by a group of young people. Given the conventional wisdom of as recently as 2013 that the GOP absolutely had to extend its appeal to Hispanics and younger voters, pummeling is not a good sign.

This is another instance where we need to be talking about range of data. Obviously, major parties have alienated various demographic groups, but I'd argue that Trump has done this in a unique way and to an unprecedented level. While it would be reckless to try to predict what this will lead to, it's important to be prepared for at least the possibility of something big.

On a related note, from Talking Points Memo:

Latino voters are already showing up to vote this election and could cast ballots in larger numbers than Democrats saw in recent elections.

On a call with reporters Friday, Latino Decisions– a polling group focused on Hispanic voting patters– said that Latino turnout is on track to make history next week.

On the call, Gabriel Sanchez, a principal at Latino Decisions, pointed to early voting trends that show Latino early voting is up 100 percent in Florida, 60 percent in North Carolina and up 25 percent in Colorado and Nevada.

Sanchez said at this point, Latino Decisions is projecting that between 13.1 million and 14.7 million Latinos will vote on or before Tuesday– a major increase from 2012 numbers when the group estimated 11.2 million voted.

I was joking about the Seven Days in May reference

But this summary by Josh Marshall of what we've learned about the role of the FBI's New York field office in this really is starting to read like the first chapter of a rather outlandish novel.

It's like a weird mash-up of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May

Where's John Frankenheimer when you need him?







We've got covert Kremlin operatives trying to rig the presidential election...





With the assistance of rogue FBI agents (from the Guardian).

Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.

For me, though, the strangest thing about all this is how unfreaked-out everyone seems to be by all this.

The message is the same but the direction has reversed

[This is something of a follow-up to An Arkansas Tea Party group plans an anti-equality rally. Guess what happens next...]

It is difficult to put exact dates on this but if you were growing up in a small Southern town between approximately the late 60s and the early 80s, you would hear a mixture of progressive and reactionary messages. The reactionary ones were overwhelmingly local and based on word-of-mouth. Blatant racism or sexism or anti-Semitism or old-style redbaiting were the kind of thing you might hear from neighbors and acquaintances.

By comparison, the national media you consumed in that pre-satellite, pre-Internet age, strongly tended toward the progressive. Norman Lear was the king of television. Nixon was a punchline. Even the Saturday morning cartoons preached diversity and tolerance. If you look at contemporary opinion polls, you can see that this is one of the few periods where both journalists and entertainers got significantly ahead of the social curve. The myth of a liberal media today owes a lot to its relative reality forty years ago.

Today, if you go to the small Southern town I grew up in, you will still hear plenty of reactionary messages, perhaps more than you would have heard back then, but the source has changed. If you actually talk with one of the locals who is voicing some extreme reactionary sentiment, you will generally learn that this comes directly from some kind of national media, be it cable news or talk radio or a website or a tweet on a smart phone.

In local interactions, there appears to have been real progress. Unlike 50 years ago, everyone in my hometown now knows someone who is in an interracial relationship or someone who is openly gay and no one seems to consider it that big of a deal. You'll find less tolerance in these towns than you will in a  big city, but considerably more than you would have found in that small town (and perhaps in many major metropolis ) forty years ago.

In short, there's a bizarre combination of progress and regression. I know the standard explanation at this point is to go for some big sweeping social or demographic factor like economic inequality or white backlash, but I don't see how those fit what I've been seeing. I'm certain these things play a part, but more in the sense of fertile ground than direct cause.

Obviously, this is an immensely complicated problem, but if you had to reduce it to one simple hypothesis, I would say it would have to be that the rise of the Trump voter was the intended consequence of a massive and not particularly secretive social engineering experiment on the part of the conservative movement, an experiment that involved right wing media, the co-opting and in some cases simply buying off of religious leaders, and blatant Astroturf among other things. The rise of Trump is the unintended consequence of that same experiment.

I'd say something about “unintended consequences,” but that implies longer term intent

From Distracted by the large flock of black swans
December 14, 2015

In recent years, a large part of the foundation of the GOP strategy has been the assumption that, if you get base voters angry enough and frightened enough, they will show up to vote (even in off year elections) and they will never vote for the Democrat (even when they really dislike the Republican candidate).

Capitalizing on that assumption has always been something of a balancing act, particularly when you constantly attack the legitimacy of the electoral system ("The system is rigged!" "The last election was stolen!" "Make sure to vote!"). With the advent of the Tea Party movement, it's gotten even more difficult to maintain that balance.

All snark aside, when asking why Trump said something these days, the safest answer is generally that he wanted to hear his fans cheer, but it is still reasonable to talk about Trump's rigging comments as part of a strategy because they predate this election, going back to a period when calm, rational (albeit cynical) people were mapping out the plan for the GOP in great detail, particularly when it came to message discipline.

There were two obvious objectives, providing cover for voter suppression and motivating the base. In terms of the latter I suspect that the key to successful execution was to get supporters to think of rigging as a surmountable challenge. If you keep sending money, voting the straight party ticket and, most important of all, showing up for every election, the cause of right will prevail.

Comments like the following, clearly overshoot that happy medium.


From Esme Cribb writing for TPM:

Donald Trump suggested in a speech at a Colorado rally on Saturday that election officials will throw away mail-in ballots if they don't "like" them.

"I have real problems with ballots being sent," Trump said, according to a transcript by NBC's Ali Vitali and Emily Gold. "People say, oh, here's a ballot, bing. Here's another ballot, throw it away. Oh, here's one I like, we'll keep that one."

Trump claimed that there are "a lot of people" watching election officials.

"We're trying to have some pretty good supervision out there," he said. "We have a lot of people watching you people that collect the ballots."

I think this pushes us into bifurcation range, where Trump supporters are either too discouraged to vote or are willing to go to extreme measures to make sure that their vote counts.

From New York Magazine:

A Des Moines woman has been arrested and charged with voter fraud after she allegedly voted for Donald Trump a second time out of concern that her first vote for Trump would be counted for Hillary Clinton instead. The Des Moines Register reports that 55-year-old Terry Lynn Rote was charged with first-degree election misconduct on Thursday after authorities discovered that she had cast early-voting ballots at two different locations in Iowa.

“I don’t know what came over me,” Rote told the Washington Post sometime after being released on $5,000 bond Friday. The registered Republican also told Iowa Public Radio that she was afraid that her first Trump vote was going to be somehow counted for Clinton. “I wasn’t planning on doing it twice, it was spur of the moment,” she insisted, also repeating Trump’s oft-made claim that “the polls are rigged.”

Petruchio liberals

As Shaw observed, Taming of the Shrew can be difficult for modern sensibilities (Benedick and Beatrice, by comparison, stand up well and are still being repackaged by comedy writers), but recently one particular element of the story has been coming to mind.

In Verona, Petruchio begins the "taming" of his new wife. She is refused food and clothing because nothing – according to Petruchio – is good enough for her; he claims perfectly cooked meat is overcooked, a beautiful dress doesn't fit right, and a stylish hat is not fashionable.

There is a certain type of vocal liberal, almost always white and reasonably affluent, who insists on blocking virtually every viable attempt to advance a progressive agenda because nothing meets his or her standards. They feel enormously proud of themselves for refusing to compromise, despite the fact that the price of their principled stands are invariably paid by the most disadvantaged.

Lawyers, Guns and Money has spent the past year or so dismantling this silliness.

Here's Scott Lemieux:

There should be a fancy Latin term for “arbitrarily chosen deal-breakers selected to reverse-engineer a justification for not voting for a candidate you’ve decided a priori you don’t want to support.” People who actually care about how the next president will affect environmental policy evaluate the candidates on environmental policy. People who want to effectively ignore environmental policy focus solely on fracking.

Her laundry list also serves to illustrate the utter stupidity of “dealbreaker” logic. “If Hillary Clinton favored a $15 minimum wage that won’t pass Congress, I might support her. But since she only favors a $12 minimum wage that won’t pass Congress, I’ll take my chances on Trump winning.” “I used to be a Democrat, but when I found out that Hillary Clinton is insufficiently woke on GMO labeling I can live with several decades of a Supreme Court where the median justice would have to turn to the left to see Antonin Scalia.” OK.
...

First of all, with the FBI director having decided to try to throw the election to Trump, this is an odd characterization. Clinton remains a favorite and probably an overwhelming favorite, but it would be wrong to say that Trump has no chance, and if Stein got any real traction he certainly would. But, hey, not only will it not be Sarandon who might die because she can’t get medical care or be unable to get an abortion or lose her legal marriage privileges or lose her welfare assistance or have no remedy for discrimination or be denied the vote if Trump wins, she stands to gain considerably from the Trump presidency she’s urging her fans to make more likely.

And it’s worth noting again that what utter chickenshit the qualifier is. At least the “heighten-the-contradicitons” crap she was peddling earlier is an argument — a really terrible argument in the vast majority of circumstances including this one, but an argument. “Vote Stein because it won’t matter anyway” just makes you a free rider patting yourself for what a special snowflake you are. Lamest. form. of. masturbation. ever. If you think that we can’t have an omelet without Trump breaking America’s most vulnerable then own it, and if not spare us.

An emerging journalistic subgenre

From the Washington Post:

Last month, the man who's tried to turn vote prediction into a science predicted a Trump win.

Allan J. Lichtman, distinguished professor of history at American University, said Democrats would not be able to hold on to the White House.

In the intervening weeks, the campaign was rocked by a series of events. The release of the Access Hollywood tape obtained by The Washington Post was followed by accusations from a growing list of women of various improprieties on Trump's part, ranging from verbal abuse and harassment to outright sexual assault. Fix founder Chris Cillizza named Trump the winner of the inauspicious “Worst Week in Washington” award for four weeks running. At the same time, WikiLeaks released internal Clinton campaign emails, and the U.S. government flatly accused the Kremlin of being involved. And let's not forget those presidential debates.

So plenty has changed. But one thing hasn't: Lichtman, author of “Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016,” is sticking with his prediction of a Trump victory.

If you aren't familiar with his somewhat unique prediction system, here are the basics: The keys to the White House, he says, are a set of 13 true/false statements. If six of them are false, the incumbent party loses the presidency. His system has correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote in every U.S. presidential election since 1984. Our first interview went into the keys more in-depth, and in September he said the keys were settled enough to make an official prediction of a Democratic loss and a Trump win.

From CNBC via Yahoo:

 An artificial intelligence system that correctly predicted the last three U.S. presidential elections puts Republican nominee Donald Trump ahead of Democrat rival Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House.

MogIA was developed by Sanjiv Rai, founder of Indian start-up Genic.ai. It takes in 20 million data points from public platforms including Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the U.S. and then analyzes the information to create predictions.

The AI system was created in 2004, so it has been getting smarter all the time. It had already correctly predicted the results of the Democratic and Republican Primaries.

Data such as engagement with tweets or Facebook Live videos have been taken into account. The result is that Trump has overtaken the engagement numbers of Barack Obama 's peak in 2008 — the year he was elected president — by 25 percent.

Rai said that his AI system shows that the candidate in each election who had leading engagement data ended up winning the election.

"If Trump loses, it will defy the data trend for the first time in the last 12 years since Internet engagement began in full earnest," Rai wrote in a report sent to CNBC.

Election wiz predicts Donald Trump will win Oval Office

Donald Trump may be behind in most polls, but one veteran New York prognosticator still predicts he will win come Election Day.

“I think he was the strongest candidate in the primaries and that he will prevail,” Helmut Norpoth, a political science professor at SUNY Stony Brook, told The Post on Monday, even as the RealClearPolitics average shows the Republican candidate trailing Democrat Hillary Clinton by 6.1 percentage points.

Norpoth developed a model that, applied retroactively in earlier races, would have correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election since 1912 — with the exception of 2000, when predicted winner Al Gore barely lost to George W. Bush.

The model looks at which of the candidates performed better in the primaries and caucuses and concludes that the stronger performer there will enter the White House.

In retrospect, it's surprising we don't use more sewage metaphors

A few stray thoughts on the proper flow of information (and misinformation) and a functional organization.

I know we've been through all of this stuff about Leo Strauss and the conservative movement before so I'm not going to drag this out into great detail except to reiterate that if you want to have a functional  institution that makes extensive use of internal misinformation, you have to make sure things move in the right direction.

With misinformation systems as with plumbing, when the flow starts going the wrong way, the results are seldom pretty. This has been a problem for the GOP for at least a few years now. A number of people in positions of authority, (particularly in the tea party wing) have bought into notions that were probably intended simply to keep the cannon-fodder happy. This may also partly explain the internal polling fiasco at the Romney campaign.

As always, though, it is Trump who takes things to a new level. We now have a Republican nominee who uses the fringier parts of the Twitter verse as briefings.

From Josh Marshall:

Here's what he said ...

Wikileaks also shows how John Podesta rigged the polls by oversampling democrats, a voter suppression technique. That's happening to me all the time. When the polls are even, when they leave them alone and do them properly, I'm leading. But you see these polls where they're polling democrats. How is Trump doing? Oh, he's down. They're polling democrats. The system is corrupt, rigged and broken. And we're going to change it. [ Cheers and applause ]
Thank you, thank you. In an e-mail podesta says he wants oversamples for our polling in order to maximize what we get out of our media polling. It's called voter suppression because people will say, oh, gee, Trump's down. Folks, we're winning. We're winning. We're winning. These thieves and crook, the immediate, yeah not all of it, not all of it, but much of it -- they're the most crooked -- they're almost as crooked as Hillary. They may even be more crooked than Hillary because without the media, she would be nothing.

Now this immediately this grabbed my attention because over the weekend I was flabbergasted to see this tweet being shared around the Trumposphere on Twitter.

Todays Wikileaks dump revealed the DNC works w/ pollsters to skew polls in their favor by over-polling Democrats & under-polling Republicans pic.twitter.com/tVA8K6n79T

— Taylor Egly (@TaylorEgly) October 24, 2016

I don't know who Taylor Egly is. But he has 250,000 followers - so he has a big megaphone on Twitter. This tweet and this new meme is a bracing example of just how many of the "scoops" from the Podesta emails are based on people simply not knowing what words mean.
Trump had already mentioned 'over-sampling' earlier. But here he's tying it specifically to the Podesta emails released by Wikileaks. This tweet above is unquestionably what he's referring to.
There are several levels of nonsense here. Let me try to run through them.
...

 More importantly, what Tom Matzzie is talking about is the campaign/DNC's own polls. Campaigns do extensive, very high quality polling to understand the state of the race and devise strategies for winning. These are not public polls. So they can't affect media polls and they can't have anything to do with voter suppression.

Now you may be asking, why would the Democrats skew their own internal polls? Well, they're not.
The biggest thing here is what the word 'oversampling' means. Both public and private pollsters will often over-sample a particular demographic group to get statistically significant data on that group.
...  You need to get an 'over-sample' to get solid numbers.

Whether it's public or private pollsters, the 'over-sample' is never included in the 'topline' number. So if you get 4 times the number of African-American voters as you got in a regular sample, those numbers don't all go into the mix for the total poll. They're segmented out. The whole thing basically amounts to zooming in on one group to find out more about them. To do so, to zoom in, you need to 'over-sample' their group as what amounts to a break-out portion of the poll.

What it all comes down to is that you're talking about a polling concept the Trumpers don't seem to understand (or are relying on supporters not understanding), about polls that are by definition secret (campaign polls aren't shared) and about an election eight years ago. 

Is this Clinton story becoming a Comey story?

I grabbed this screen capture from the Washington Post on Saturday, immediately after the announcement.

Comey was catching considerable heat even before this broke...

From CNBC:

FBI Director James Comey argued privately that it was too close to Election Day for the United States government to name Russia as meddling in the U.S. election and ultimately ensured that the FBI's name was not on the document that the U.S. government put out, a former bureau official tells CNBC.

The official said some government insiders are perplexed as to why Comey would have election timing concerns with the Russian disclosure but not with the Huma Abedin email discovery disclosure he made Friday.

Here's Marshall with some more background:

Two stories were published today alleging or suggesting actual covert communication between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign and an effort to use Trump to advance Russian interests in the United States. One of these stories is about suspicious communication between a Trump controlled email server and Russia. The second story is much more specific in its accusation. According to David Corn, who is an experienced national security and intelligence reporter, a retired spy from a western country who now works for an American security contractor has provided the FBI with evidence suggesting that "the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump." Corn further reports that this retired spy found "troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. According to his sources, he says, 'there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit.'"

The retired spy, who remains anonymous, says he's provided his evidence to the FBI and they have requested additional information from him about his sources, findings, etc. Corn knows how to do this kind of reporting. He has spoken to a US intelligence official who says this retired spy has provided credible and valuable intelligence to the US government in the past. He is considered reliable. Corn's reporting gives me a high level of confidence this retired spy is not a crank. That doesn't mean he's right or even that he's not pursuing some unknown agenda.
...

Think of it this way.

If Trump is advocating for Russia in the US political arena (he is), and Russia is conducting an espionage and disruption campaign on Trump's behalf in the US political area (highly likely), do I need to know if they're actually talking to each other while both these things are happening? I'm not sure I do.

Isn't this a much bigger deal than it has been made out to be?