No wonder Clot likes them. :rolleyes:
I don’t necessarily see those as that closely related. This is a group that hates Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party to a pathological extent. Even if they had had only a 0.001% chance of winning the election, I could see them doing anything to fuck with Hillary and the Dems. That the collusion actually helped their slim chance of winning to pay off would be more of a happy accident (or not) than proof that they actually had intended to win all along.
Trump seems like the sort who would go along with collusion simply because it must mean Putin thinks he’s a Really Important Guy and gets off on the ego boost.
This is very much true. And MSNBC and CNN have been good about pointing out errors, but they’re small ones. Mika B. pointed out this morning that something attributed to Ivanka was actually said by her. It was a small thing,though…it had to do with Trump looking puzzled by the word “woman” so Ivanka ( actually Mika) drew an hourglass with her hands. But that’s a small thing.
I finished the book. I agree with a previous poster that felt there were holes in it, Merkel and May not being mentioned. And it got spottier later in the book once it got past June. He wrote quite a bit about the Scaramucci debacle and he covered the Priebus firing and John Kelly and Stupid Watergate* but he didn’t cover much else that happened until Charlottesville- and even his coverage of Charlottesville seemed perfunctory. And I think he mentions Mnuchin once and he doesn’t mention SHuckabeeS once. I’m thinking this had to do with publisher timelines and deadlines — it was intended to be a book about the first 100 days - but I can see why Wolff found it hard to stop.
But some of the Russia investigation stories towards the end were jaw-dropping. They obviously came from Bannon, it’s from his POV and he has motive. He considers himself completely clean on Russia and he considers that a weapon But it’s not just him calling the Trump Tower meeting treasonous. It’s about his exploding frustration at the Trump family’s clumsy attempts to obstruct justice and their steadfast refusal to shut up and let their lawyers handle everything.
And Trump scheduled an interview with Maggie Haberman at the NYT without consulting with his staff or preparing. This one:
And during that interview he said the special prosecutor would be “crossing a line” if he looked into the family finances, which, as Bannon saw it was tantamount to telling Mueller to look into the family finances.
What was really interesting is that Bannon realized, based on who Mueller was hiring, that this was becoming a money-laundering investigation. And it doesn’t seem to be the Trump money that Bannon is worried about most. It’s Jared. He thinks the Kushner cash is really really dirty.
Part of the inside joke about Kushner brokering Middle East peace was that Jared was the right guy for the job because he knew all the crooks in Israel. And he and Ivanka are besties with one of Trumps biggest oligarchs.
And Bannon apparently blew up at Hope Hicks over her dumb-assed enabling and told her that she was in deep trouble and she needed to hire a lawyer and that if she didn’t do it he’d call her parents and tell them to hire her one.
All in all the book was worth reading. And most of it is undisputedly true.
- He never called it that. That’s what I call it.
FYI, the author was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert yesterday. He said that he would hear conflicting stories about conversations, events and so forth, and that he would need to put together what actually happened from these conversations.
That doesn’t really make sense, though. Why would candidate Trump, if he wasn’t serious about winning and was only doing this as a lark for ego-aggrandizement, collude with a foreign government…especially knowing the risks from President Hillary’s DOJ if it failed?
Why would the Russian government even have a suspicion that candidate Trump was likely to win, and so throw their weight behind him? Was their polling better than any available to the U.S. media?
Both claims fail the reasonability test.
Wolff’s creation of the “notional truth” idea for what he writes is disgustingly Orwellian. That is reason enough to avoid the book.
Include me out, as Yogi Berra used to say. It is a book that will preach to the already converted, the rest will see it for what it is.
Rather than doing what an honest journalist does, and reporting the conflicts in accounts from 2nd and 3rd hand sources.
Granted that Putin was pissed that Clinton’s DoS interfered (from his point of view) and colluded with his political opponents during the last Russian election. That, and the Marc Rich scandal, was enough to make him want to screw her over.
But his intelligence agencies were also clearly passing information through Steele (NO Russian IO, current or former, will be meeting with a former British spy without letting their superiors, or former superiors, know what is going on) to try to harm the Trump campaign.
The evidence shows that Putin likes to act as an agent of chaos in U.S. elections, just as (from his POV) we do in theirs.
Why would they need to? If Russia was acting as a “chaos agent” and Putin deeply dislikes Clinton then any problems for Clinton are a win for Russia. Doesn’t matter if it’s just a narrower win or more people distrusting her or having a useful idiot like Trump win – there’s no bad outcome for Russia.
And yet they were actively working an intelligence operation through Steele to provide disinformation to help Clinton win - I agree, Russia took no hard sides in this, but seemed to want to cause chaos in our political system.
I’ve seen 3 or 4 interviews with him in the last week, and he doesn’t interview all that well. If Trump were smart (hah!), he’d just ignore this book and it would drop off the radar in a week or so.
It doesn’t even really matter if Russia took “hard sides” (I disagree with your opinions on Russia and Steele but it’s irrelevant). “No one thought Trump would win so there can’t be collusion because who would collude with a loser?” is a terrible argument. Russia would collude with a loser to cause problems in the US political system. Trump would collude with Russia because he loves getting his ego stroked and made to feel important (this is the guy who went apeshit because he didn’t get Obama-sized crowds for his inauguration). Whether or not anyone realistically thought Trump was going to win or even if Trump had no real intent to win is meaningless in the question of any Trump/Russian collusion.
Now, I can’t comment on your seeing Wolff with the tentacles because we aren’t in the Pit. I’ll just simply say that the author admitted parts of the book are false. That makes the book bullshit, as it is supposed to be a “hard-hitting and factual” account of the Trump White House.
Right wing opinion columnist in right wing newspaper takes a couple lines out of context to defend Trump: Film at eleven.
Sounds like a middling fallacy by him. If Dave says Oswald shot JFK, and Mike says Oswald did not shoot JFK, the solution is not to say that Oswald’s bullet floated in mid-air to JFK’s head and never got there.
You, being a former police officer, should recognize this as being what you went through getting witness statements.
If Wolff was held to the same standards, he wouldn’t decide which version was correct and ignore the others. He would write, as an LEO does in an affidavit, that A told me this but B told me that. I think A is true because xyz. He would include exculpatory statements as well as inculpatory statements. He doesn’t do that, by his own admission.
Blah-Blah about the book’s veracity aside, I’ll note that Amazon has yet to send me my copy and is now saying they don’t know when they’ll be able to send it. A whole buncha people are buying this book.
Read the quote. He did that also.
The point is that witnesses often give varying accounts of what happened. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Read your own quote. He admits he doesn’t do it in every case, and presumably, we will have to guess when: