I strongly suspect that the Democrats are headed for a major disaster with this Russian scandal. If it doesn’t end up having some real meat, Trump’s going to shrug it off and any future investigations are going to be tainted by it becoming a real flop. I don’t see any solid evidence of the kind of grand collusion that the more rabid Trump opponents think is a certainty, what I’ve seen is speculation based on a big items that don’t point to collusion (like the Russian hacking of the DNC), padded out with a ton of completely useless facts like"Trump says positive things about Putin!" (which only shows that he likes and admires a strongman), highly speculative like “people in Trump’s circle talked to Russians” (which is explained by things like business interests)…
or really weird like digging up a law that’s only been used for one indictment and no convictions in two centuries. Seriously, the more people harp on ‘violations of the Logan Act’, the more I think the whole case lacks any substance at all.
I’m imagining the responses from the likes of Carl Hatch, Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Dick Nixon, Reagan, etc., if their contemporaries on the Left accused them of simple “anti-Russian bigotry.”
Wikileaks is not a reliable source of information. They don’t disclose sources, except when they do… which usually happens to be when they say something about sources to support Russian claims.
The Wikileaks claims that the CIA leaks show that CIA could have hacked the DNC are completely unsupported by the actual documents (which is often the case when breathless headlines from Wikileaks are repeated without first looking at the supporting documents). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/opinion/the-truth-about-the-wikileaks-cia-cache.html
Whether it’s a break-in at Watergate, Yellow Cake in Niger, or collusion with Russia, the weight of a scandal depends on how Americans feel about the country and their own lot in life. If Trump is somehow perceived as a successful president - even if it’s just the mere fact that the economy is doing well and he hasn’t done anything to derail its growth - then Russia won’t mean anything. The fact is, most people don’t really see Russia as an adversary – at least not now. The danger for Republicans is that Putin could storm Eastern Europe and start taking economic and political control away from the United States. But until that happens, even if there’s a “smoking gun,” it’s going to be difficult voters that a crime has been committed. Most Americans just aren’t that knowledgeable of nor invested in politics.
The indictment of Scooter was in 2005. If the Russian investigation yields a grand jury indictment of a senior Trump official then maybe we can compare the two events.
But I agree it’s quite odd that Okrahoma implies there was some kind of backfire.
You realize that’s very similar to a description of the Hillary private server escapade, right? A law that hasn’t been applied in a century over “gross negligence” could be safely described as having an effect on the election even if you would agree there was no substance at all.
There does seem to be a lot of smoke, it seems reasonable to call for an investigation to see if there’s a fire. If there are investigations and they turn up nothing, I don’t want endless investigations but we haven’t gotten to that point yet.
One worry though is that all the Russian connection stuff could overshadow much worse things that the Trump administration and the Republicans are doing, and that would be bad if that happened.
Perfectly reasonable for him to change the platform. But if I’m remembering correctly, literally the only change he requested was regarding Russia, and that makes it a little suspicious.
There’s also the fact the Trump repeatedly denied having anything to do with the platform change. Why not just say “I asked them to change the platform because I think it would be great it we could be friends with Russia. We could do great deals with Russia. Sending weapons to Ukraine could cause nuclear war. Nuclear war would be very bad!”?
Instead, we got this total flat denial, which appears–shockingly enough!–to be a great big fat lie; in fact, Trump was totally behind the platform change.
That doesn’t mean there’s a scrambler phone in Trump Tower that Trump was using to call Moscow Center for instructions every night during the campaign. (“This is Agent Zolotój Dožd, calling for instructions!”) In itself, that denial doesn’t even mean that there was illegal/inappropriate/unpatriotic collusion between the Trump Campaign (and now the Trump Administration) and Russia.
But the lie about Trump and the Ukraine plank in the platform is very weird.
If the right wing really thought the Democrats and the media were going to end up looking bad over this, then they’d be urging them on to their destruction.
But if the right wing is faking concern for the Democrats and the media and urging them to stop investigating for their own good, it just convinces me we should keep digging.
It’s telling that you don’t even name the law here, while the comment I was referring to specifically mentioned ‘violations of the Logan act’. More than half a dozen people were charged under the Espionage Act (I’m guessing that’s the law you’re referring to) during Obama’s administration alone. A law that’s applied repeatedly and consistently, and gets indictments followed by plea bargains or convictions is not remotely like a law that has been around twice as long and never managed any convictions (or pleas) and only one single indictment.
Also, there seems to be implicit claim in your post that the Russian Connection allegations are about as legitimate as the Clinton Email scandal. You might want to pick a better point of comparison if you’re not trying to undermine the Russian Connection idea.
The Logan Act was always an absurd and specious law. Why do you think in over two centuries, it has never landed a single conviction since it was adopted?
I just didn’t bother typing Espionage act. And if you had listened to Comey’s explanation as to why he wouldn’t recommend charges he specifically mentioned the part of the act that related to gross negligence which had been used once in a hundred years and that one time there was still more intent involved.