a campaign under false cover, fishing for evidence which could be used against you, apparently pay him for doing it, don't let the other party know what you're doing, and have them secretly report back to you, you can call it a "confidential human informant" all you want, but to me you're spying on that group. And I suspect most folks would see it that way too, unless they're unwilling to do so for partisan reasons. An informant to me is someone already inside the group that comes to you (the FBI) with evidence of wrong doing, not someone sent in by the FBI. Now am I positive that's exactly how it happened? No, but reporting sure seems to be indicating it is. We'll see one way or another what actually happened. I hope.

As for Clapper, do you honestly not think he doesn't have motive to deceive or downplay this? Even ignoring that he already showed he was willing to lie to cover up, of course he has reason to suggest it wasn't as bad as what it may have been. And IMO he's playing the same silly game so many on the left do of muddling "meddled with" and "influenced" and actually impacted our election. There has been zero evidence that a single vote was changed without the voter's knowledge, that any voters were kept from voting, votes disappeared, etc. due to actions by the Russians. Let alone that the Trump campaign knew or colluded with it happening. So he and those claiming that, will have to define "meddled with", or in his case the more insidious "turned the election for Trump". If he's talking about placing fake ads and fake news stories favorable to Trump on FB, etc. my thought on that would be "so what". Not like you could realistically stop that by Russia or any country no matter hoo they favor. Nor can you convince me that "meddled with" the election any more than others putting out fake stories and ads favorable to Hillary, or Harry Reid standing on the Senate floor falsely claiming Mitt paid no taxes. If you're talking about hacking the DNC or Podesta's servers and possibly being the ones that supplied stuff to Wikileaks, that's certainly more serious but what did he and others do to stop and expose that when they were in power and it was happening? I don't believe we've even seen proof that Russia did do that hacking, just allegations and claims they did, and the DNC did us no favors not allowing the FBI to investigate their servers to verify their claims. And ultimately, regardless of how it happened, all that did was expose Podesta, Hillary, the DNC, Donna Brazille, et. al. for things they actually did! They never actually denied or provided evidence the stuff that came out on Wikileaks was false, just tried to discredit it with no basis supporting those claims.

Finally, as far as an independent DOJ, are you seriously suggesting no past POTUS' ever directed, influenced, or controlled what the DOJ did or didn't do? Holder wasn't directed to insert himself in Ferguson? Loretta just took it upon herself to downgrade Hillary's server to a "matter", and meet with Bill on the tarmac, out of her own desire to investigate separate of any political influence, and with no regard to what her boss may or may not have preferred? They may have done a better job of giving him plausible deniability (hopefully we'll find out just how involved he was and what motivated their actions), or not been as open and public about what they wanted as Trump is, but IMO to think there was no influence, control or direction is rather naive.