But, in that case, how about laying out what, hypothetically, would constitute an ethical violation for you?
If people in Trump’s campaign engaged in a conspiracy to commit a crime with agents of the Russian government or promised to do once Trump won something he wouldn’t have otherwise in order for illegal help during the election, then it would constitute an ethical violation for me. For instance, if people in Trump’s campaign somehow participated or abetted the hacking of the DNC, assuming it was really commited by Russia which we don’t even know, then it would be unethical. Even if they are now pretending otherwise, this is what people have been talking about all along, not something as obviously morally unproblematic as accepting opposition research from a foreign government.
I ask, because when I wrote about this, I argued that seeing months of insistent denials — that there was any contact whatsoever between the Trump campaign and the Russian government — get disproven so completely meant I no longer could give them the benefit of the doubt.
I haven’t read your article yet, but if it’s premised on the idea that Trump Jr.’s emails prove that people in Trump’s campaign were lying when they denied there had been any contact between them and the Russian government, then it’s simply false. I know people say that all the time, but that’s because they’re sloppy. Except for an email written by a pop star publicist, there is no evidence that Veselnitskaya was acting on behalf of the Kremlin and, for reasons I explained in my previous article, it’s extremely unlikely. I also think it’s very misleading to talk of giving people in Trump’s campaign “the benefit of the doubt”. This suggests that we have reason to think the accusations against them may be true, but as even Clapper, Brennan and Comey admitted, even after almost a year of investigation, there still isn’t a shred of evidence to support the theory that Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia during the election. This theory is totally implausible on its face and, despite almost a year of looking for it by every journalist in the world and several US intelligence agencies, there is still no evidence whatsoever to support it. To talk of giving people in Trump’s campaign the benefit of the doubt is to completely misrepresent the situation: it suggests that we have reasons to take very seriously the accusations against them or even perhaps that the default position is that they are true, but any rational person can see that this whole story is epistemically on a par with any other crazy conspiracy theory, the only difference being that more people take it seriously because the sophisticates hate Trump so much that they will believe anything about him no matter how unsubstantiated. As for the fact that people in Trump’s campaign have been caught in lies, there is at least 2 things to say. First, in almost every case where people claim people in Trump’s campaign have been caught lying, it doesn’t actually prove that. (In fact, I’m not sure I can think of a single case where we really have a proof they lied, which requires more than just making a false statement.) This story about Trump Jr. is a great example of that. Everyone is talking as if it proved that he was lying when he said that he’d never met with any Russian officials, but it just doesn’t. He perhaps lied by omission before that, but as I explained next, this is really not surprising. Indeed, every time people in Trump’s campaign are accused of having lied about this because they made a false statement, the stuff they allegedly lied about is totally innocuous. Even if they did lie about it, which we don’t know, it’s really not hard to understand why: the anti-Russian hysteria has reached such a level that, at this point, even having a brief encounter with Kislyak in a room full of hundreds of people during which they talked about Trump’s foreign policy position at an event organized so that Trump can explain his foreign policy positions is presented as somehow nefarious... This creates a massive incentive to deny even the most innocuous contacts with Russian officials, because people are going to spin them in the most absurd manner. In any case, what really matters is that, in every case, the stuff they allegedly lied about has nothing to do with the original accusations thrown at Trump’s campaign and are actually totally innocuous.