The Trouble with Informants

I never trusted paid informants.

We have two prime examples of FBI informants in the news today, Christopher Steele and Douglas Campbell.  Unless you were sleeping the last year or so, you know the name Christopher Steele because he was the one paid to put together “the dossier”  which turned out to have been paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Party she represented.  But, you may not have heard of Campbell.  He is the “Uranium One” informant which is in the Hill article today (well worth reading, by the way) and he too says Mrs. Clinton is up to no good in helping the Russians get control of a part of the uranium market.  Neither of these guys were atypical when it comes to informants who get paid for what they provide.  There is a natural inclination to want to provide more so they can make more money, though they seldom get as much as we would think.

Both of these guys were being paid by more than one party in all of the political mess, and the Russians were probably paying them too.  They would also have been paying Russians for information, or getting it from other sources - like the State Department, as it turns out.  They will take what they can get, and bill for it back to more than one customer.  It’s just business, and for a few of them, it pays well.

You can’t really blame the informant for the information you get from them.  They do the best they can within the constraints of the consequences of getting caught.  If they are snitching on the local drug cartel, the information is worth more than gold, which they may never get the chance to spend.  If they are snitching on drug companies (The Informant) they are not just going to walk away and count their money.  Neither one of these guys will be able to make a living at providing accurate information again, since everyone knows they were knee-deep in Russia, Trump, and Clinton.

So who benefits from the information these two have brought into the U.S. Congress?  The Russians. Now, we have everybody who can read questioning the appointment of a Special Counsel, and the dealings of the Clinton Foundation with its hands in the uranium cookie jar.  It is churn, bought into by both sides of the political spectrum and perpetuated by the press, who sells content based on this stuff.  We need a little more of a suspicious nature to asked questions of these two.  We need a little less political posturing on both sides.  Paid informants are the FBI’s problem.  They get good ones and bad ones, but somebody ought to be vetting the information they are providing.  Maybe they don’t do that anymore.