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Comment by lsaferite | Hacker News Reader

What should concern you most is that they didn't disengage when they were informed that she was a Senate staffer discussing legislative work and in fact seemed very bent on getting details about the legislation in question.

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The FBI is responsible for monitoring lawmakers too, it is possible for Congresspeople and their staff to break laws. It's part of the FBI official list of duties. I specifically and explicitly want law enforcement monitoring elected officials. Imagine if all you had to do was claim you were researching legislation and law enforcement just disengages, that is a ludicrous request.

Why should FBI be interrogating people without their lawyers present, when they have no evidence of a crime? The FBI should not be deploitng Gestapo/Stasi denunciation tactics on anyone.

Talking about tear gas in the privacy of one's home is not a crime. If that appliance repairman was the "informant", he should be in jail for wiretapping.

Nope, if you are stupid enough to talk about important confidential topics in front of rando strangers you have no expectation of privacy. These are the types of people Chinese spies target and harvest information from, if anything this staffer should be let go for mishandling information.

> When she told them about the proposed legislation, they insisted on knowing what it would say, whether it would be formally introduced, and when.

Is that really necessary?

I would imagine that those questions would be easily answerable if true, similar to how a border guard might ask seemingly random questions in that context but a series of 'uh, uh' answers might indicate something else. Sometimes investigators ask questions just to keep the target talking and build a report. Those questions are reasonable to expect a public figure politician and their staff to answer.

Imagine if the FBI did any investigating prior to avoid the easy and obvious authoritarian parallels while questioning a free citizen working for an elected representative.

I want the FBI to do their job; I just don't want them to look like and/or be the bad guys. In this situation, they smell like the bad guys.

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