Donald is suing Fusion GPS, for creating the dossier, and also Buzzfeed, for publishing it, on the grounds that it’s a bunch of hooey. This is a beautiful moment.
Of course, this puts the veracity of the dossier front & center. I don’t know - is Trump planning to testify that all this stuff is false? That should be hilarious.
OTOH, imagine if Donald spins up a bunch of case law that say it’s illegal for journalists to print items that they can’t verify. Donald, Rush, Glenn, & Sean will never be able to speak in public again!
You do you, Donald. Nothing about this Dossier that a few more lawyers can’t clear up!
No, I meant what I asked, do we really know much about Steele?
People are speaking of him as if he is Caesar’s wife, but the one fact I know about him is not evidence of an ethical character. (To be sure, it’s not necessarily evidence of a lack of ethics, either.) So I wondered.
And it appears the answer is, 'No." That’s fine. Man’s a spy, we probably shouldn’t know too much about him.
(It’s unfortunate for him that he looks like Michael Kitchen in Proof of Life)
Ahhh, sorry. It just seems like the poor man has been under constant attack for no decent reason and has paid a pretty steep price for doing what I think is simply… the right thing to do. I’ve become reflexively defensive.
Agree we shouldn’t know much about a professional spy. Still, it hasn’t stopped some from relentlessly besmirching a man’s reputation on the basis of nothing whatever to support their contentions.
Yes I was corrected in the previous thread but failed to follow through here. I misread it as Donald’s lawyer filing on Donald’s behalf. It’s Cohen filing on his own behalf. I’m sure though that he’s doing it as a stalking horse for Big D.
Making the veracity of the dossier the centerpiece of the suit should still be good for some laughs
Chances are it won’t come to that. Trump threatens to sue anyone who looks a him funny, but generally withdraws them before they get to court if the accused doesn’t back down.
This is just a way for Trump to claim to his base the dossier is all lies and that Trump can prove it. But it has about as much chance of actually happening as Mexico paying for Trump’s wall.
If your source is Keith Schiller or Vladimir Putin, then it’s a bit more than unsubstantiated gossip. I would expect that Steele did reveal his sources to the guy in Rome and to Mueller when they met. Depending on who the sources are, the importance of the information varies widely. It could be crap that comes from Grigori the 7 Eleven clerk. Our only ability to get a sense for how well-placed his sources are would be to look at other information we know.
Quotes from Trump’s children about getting a lot of money from Russia pre-existed the campaign, as did Deutsche bank’s conviction for Russian money laundering and Trump’s strange loan from Deutsche during the same time period. The first memo’s allegation that Trump was getting funding from Russia seem quite credible.
The other accusation in the first memo, that Trump was attempting to get compromising material on Clinton from Russia, has also demonstrated itself to be true.
On the whole, the information that we have gleaned over the last 1.5 years since the dossier was written generally supports the dossier.
I’ll also note that the idea that foreign involvement in campaigns is always bad would be a stupid position to take. Maybe there is someone who has taken that position. I have not.
Take the example that a politician, Gerald, has been flying to Thailand to have sex with infants. It’s in the American public interest to know this fact. You can’t just say, “No, unless there is an American witness to this event, we cannot consider any information about this crime!” Clearly, we need to be able to get information from foreign sources and, like all information, consider its credibility.
But, at the same time, we don’t want the government of Thailand to call up Gerald’s opponent in a campaign, Mary-Beth, and tell her that they’ll give her the information about Gerald if she will use her influence in the government to benefit Thailand’s relations with the US government. If Mary-Beth accepted that arrangement, it would be a conspiracy to commit a crime of corrupt use of power.
Now, given that I live in a world where there are alternative methods of getting information around that don’t involve backroom deals with foreign nations, for personal enrichment, I’m not too fussed by the basic concept of “getting information from foreign sources”. I have an issue with “corruption” not with “foreign involvement”.
If a journalist calls up a journalist whom he has worked with on various stories before, who happens to work for a newspaper in Thailand, and asks him about the trips that Gerald is always taking to Thailand - I’m not really all that concerned about the revelation coming back to US ears.
If the government of Thailand rings up the FBI and warns them that they should be investigating this guy, again, that doesn’t really bother me.
If Mary-Beth hires an American company, at an hourly rate, and they call up a detective firm in Thailand that works at an hourly rate, and the information comes back, again, that doesn’t really bother me.
Truth is fine. Foreign-originating truth is fine. Quid-pro-quo deals with foreign governments, I do not approve of.
Now let’s also assume that Thailand hacked into Mary-Beth’s campaign email and found out that she’s having an affair. But then, Thailand only releases the information about Mary-Beth.
This concerns me greatly, because it means that a foreign government can blackmail a member of the American government. I would be concerned to discover that there is good reason to believe that Thailand has proof that Gerald is a pedophile. I would want to see to it that Gerald could not affect our relationship with Thailand at all, nor do anything that is known to be in the Thai interest. There are other people in government, and we have no question about their loyalty on this subject. There’s no loss by taking the one man out of the picture for that one topic.
If we could prove that Thailand was, in fact, blackmailing Gerald, then I would further want to see to it that they were punished for it.
I also don’t want Thailand spreading mistruths in the American media (nor our social media), any more than I want an American doing it. If an American does it, they should be prosecuted for libel or fraud. If a foreign government is doing it, then that is bad.
Contrariwise, if a foreign government takes out ad time in America, clearly states that it is produced by the government of Thailand, and lobbies the American people on Gerald’s behalf, I’m basically fine with that. Our nation affects other nations and Americans might care about how we impact other humans on the planet.
Overall, there’s a wide space of interactions that are proper, improper, and those which could easily be debated either way. A blanket answer is stupid. But, for most of the things that we are talking about with Trump and Russia, we’re looking at the things we don’t want: Corrupt quid-pro-quo arrangements, blackmail, false advertising, etc.
Saying that it should be just as bad for a foreign national to report a crime to the FBI as arranging a deal to reduce sanctions on a foreign government in return for them to break into the offices of your opponent’s psychiatrist is a sort of false equivalency of pretty vast proportions.
This seems to be the gist of your post, so I’m not quoting the rest.
Two points (I think I’ve noted both before, but just in case):
[ol]
[li]The notion that there was any deal to reduce sanctions in exchange for any foreign favors is pure speculation. If this should be substantiated at any point, I absolutely agree that this brings things to a different level, but at this point there’s been nothing substantial on this point.[/li][li]The bigger deal with the dossier is not Steele himself being a foreign national, but that all or virtually his sources were Russian government and intelligence people. Some people might distinguish between benign and evil Russian government and intelligence sources, based on whether they like what they’re reporting (in which case they’re White Knights) or dislike it (in which case they’re evil monsters out to subvert democracy) but this is based on little. It’s very unclear what Russia’s strategy really was in their election-related actions, and for all we know besmirching one of the major candidates itself was part of it. (It’s worth noting - especially since it keeps getting overlooked here - that Steele himself declined to vouch for the accuracy of his intelligence, and when sued over it he said, essentially, “hey, I never said any of this stuff was accurate, I just said it’s worth looking into”.)[/li][/ol]
[li]The notion that there was any deal to reduce sanctions in exchange for any foreign favors is pure speculation. If this should be substantiated at any point, I absolutely agree that this brings things to a different level, but at this point there’s been nothing substantial on this point.[/li][/quote]
a) Wanting something to be given a full and proper investigation by the FBI and chanting and indiscriminate, “Lock him up!” are two different things.
b) There’s quite a lot on that specific point. Sufficient that even though there’s no smoking gun, the statistical odds that all of those factotums would all be due to random chance seems worth ignoring. Maybe not enough for a court to prosecute, but sufficient to assume that the Trump camp was at least revising the Republican platform in Russia’s favor in order to woo them into releasing information about Clinton, even if there was no direct communication. (The timing of Page’s trip to Russia and his messages about the platform make it unlikely that they weren’t directly communicating.)
[quote]
[li]The bigger deal with the dossier is not Steele himself being a foreign national, but that all or virtually his sources were Russian government and intelligence people. Some people might distinguish between benign and evil Russian government and intelligence sources, based on whether they like what they’re reporting (in which case they’re White Knights) or dislike it (in which case they’re evil monsters out to subvert democracy) but this is based on little. It’s very unclear what Russia’s strategy really was in their election-related actions, and for all we know besmirching one of the major candidates itself was part of it. (It’s worth noting - especially since it keeps getting overlooked here - that Steele himself declined to vouch for the accuracy of his intelligence, and when sued over it he said, essentially, “hey, I never said any of this stuff was accurate, I just said it’s worth looking into”.)[/li][/QUOTE]
While I’m willing to believe that Putin is a clever man, I find it implausible that he set up the Russian Collusion storyline at a time when Trump was consistently polling as a losing bet, on the potential that Trump might become the President and not already be sufficiently stupid that you’d be able to dance around him with ease.
Alternately, if Steele just asked his sources to make up any old thing to help him give some anti-Trump stuff back to Simpson, then there’s no reason for him to go to the FBI and fly out to Rome for a debrief. He’d want to absolutely avoid people who had some chance at actually fact-checking his information and sources.
Some Congresscritters and other grand high GOP muckitimucks may have gotten themselves entangled in Trump’s shenanigans thinking they were just the usual dirty tricks, and were in too deep to get out when it became evident that Team Trump was engaged in seditious collusion with a hostile foreign power. To use an analogy somebody (I forget who or in which thread) posted here, they’re in the situation of a burglar who gets surprised by the homeowner, clubs him over the head with the candlestick he’s stealing, realizes that the blow was lethal, hears other people waking up and coming to investigate, and kills them too so that there are no witnesses.
I rise to quibble. Quibble the first: Clearly, there is a warmth towards Putin that defies reason, but evidence indicates that the platform “correction” was a Manafort special, if for no better reason than Il Douche’s Dark Tower of Ignorance. Say “Ukraine” and he will answer “No, I don’t crane. You crane?”.
As to “direct communication”? Rather the opposite, really, a series of winks, nods and muted signals that allow a proposition to advance. Rather like flirting, neither party directly states “I want to tear off your clothes and boink you into next week.”
Putin wants his Exxon deal back. He cannot help but see the installation of his partner in that venture, the current SecState, as a major signal of approval. He needs that money, he and his buds have stolen it all, and they need more before the people start weaponizing their vodka. After that, comes weakening NATO and the European alliance, among other heinous intentions.
None of this needs direct communication, indirect flirting and coy games of footsie are effective and, importantly! deniable.