07 January 2021.
Unless you’re looking for an admission that the mail-in votes weren’t corrupted. I don’t think Trump’s admitted that yet. (And no, I’m not saying there was anything wrong with the mail-in votes.)
From Trump’s mouth, just yesterday:
He backtracks on this rare concession almost every day.
Funny you haven’t noticed this.
Due to the number of different scandals involving Trump and Russia the OP would need to be more specific for any meaningful discussion to occur.
If we are talking about the Trump-Russia Collusion in illegally hacking DNC emails or influencing the 2016 campaign, that has never been substantially proven. My personal opinion has always been Russia had no actual reason to “collaborate” closely with the Trump campaign on any of that, and doing so just risked their OpSec for no reason that pertains to Russian interests. Russia wanted Trump to win because he and his people were incompetent, you don’t loop incompetent people deep into your black bag intel ops.
If evidence had emerged that the Trump campaign colluded, I’d change my tune, but all we ever got evidence of was some low-level associations with shady Russians, which were ill-proof of anything clearly criminal by Trump personally. I think Trump was very happy the Russians hacked the DNC and leaked their emails, I am very skeptical he or his campaign was involved in the effort for the simple reason I doubt anyone involved in his campaign could hack a grade school teacher’s classroom PC, and Russia on the other hand has well known and very good cyberwarfare types on its roster that would need zero help from Trump doing anything.
What is interesting is that Trump all but certainly committed obstruction of justice and abuse of power while President, to try and undermine the Russia investigation. While lots of things have been glossed over since, that reality remains–and Mueller, weak and terrible at his job, should be chided for having not made it more clear in his report that Trump committed those crimes (whatever his opinion on whether or not Trump could be prosecuted for them.) I’ll note that abuse of power and obstruction of justice were things that were going to be cited in the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon had he not resigned.
That does beg the question of why Trump committed crimes to undermine an investigation if he wasn’t guilty? My theory is that of course, he was guilty of something, but probably not direct collusion with Russians. He probably was afraid the investigations would turn up any number of crimes that he’s probably committed over the years, and while we’ve never been able to investigate it further there’s been some good reporting by the guy who runs DCReport that are a decent baseline for assuming Trump was involved for many years helping Russian oligarchs closely associated to Putin launder money. Just spitballing, maybe that was what he really feared being caught up in.
Sure I’ve noticed Trump saying the 2020 election was stolen from him.
I’ve noticed Hilary Clinton supporters, if not Clinton herself, saying the 2016 election was stolen. And not just stolen, but stolen by Russian interference.
I still occasionally see that comments that the 2000 GW Bush election was stolen from Al Gore.
I think that all of these stolen election claims are meaningless and spurious.
We know he was laundering rubles through Trump Taj Majal.
Ah, here’s the “both sides” we’ve all been waiting for.
Hillary conceded within days of the election, but pointed out (correctly) that there was a lot of outside interference in the election.
Trump, on the other hand, said the election he won was fraudulent, then said that the only way he could lose the next one would be through fraud. Then his followers staged a riot and threatened to kill anyone who stood in Trump’s way to the office. Then he insisted he didn’t actually lose. Then said that he didn’t win (but refused to say Biden won). Then he said, multiple times at multiple rallies, that the election was stolen- and he’s still doing that, to this very day.
But yeah, both sides are clearly the same.
Not just Trump, remember.
Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Alex van der Zwaan, and Michael Cohen were all convicted of obstruction of justice or making false statements to the FBI to obscure their meetings or connections with Russia (Roger Stone likewise engaged in obstruction, false statements and witness tampering, albeit not specifically with regard to Russia). A perjury investigation was begun into Jeff Sessions, who simply fired the person investigating him, and Jared Kushner “forgot” on multiple occasions to report his meetings with Russia on his security clearance form (a felony).
Focusing on the word “collusion” - which has no legal meaning here - is not particularly constructive. There is clear evidence of extensive Russian interference in the election, and clear evidence that Russia was helped in this endeavor by the Trump campaign (if only by the provision of key information). That Russia was entirely controlling the efforts rather than it being a joint collaboration is not really a mitigation.
I haven’t seen it, but apparently there’s a new drama based on Monica Lewinsky and the Bill Clinton impeachment.
The review I read stated that Bill Clinton’s impeachment ultimately came about because an initial investigation into the Whitewater real estate scandal, that then moved into investigations into sex scandals, and ultimately led into his impeachment for perjury.
With that as precedent, I can pretty easily see why Trump would try to prevent, or even obstruct, investigations into his past business dealings.
You are surely not claiming that Trump groped poor Ms Lewinsky too?
I’m not being argumentative on this specific point, but it’s the first time I’ve seen this accusation. Could you please cite it?
Collusion certainly has legal relevance (it is not a word that itself is used to describe a crime, but it’s a regular English word that is synonymous with conspire and conspiracy can be a crime), if you can prove collusion with Russian criminal acts by domestic actors, it opens up a number of serious criminal charges you can bring against them. Obstruction by itself carries much less weight politically, because it’s a common thing that politicians get charged with and many bounce back from it, and the penalties for it are often not perceived as that serious. Famous people who have been convicted of obstruction: Barry Bonds (30 day sentence, overturned on appeal), I. Scooter Libby (30 month sentence, commuted after a time), Martha Stewart (5 months in a prison camp.)
I think it is highly unlikely you ever see a President successfully impeached and removed, in any partisan environment, solely for obstruction of justice, particularly because there are constitutional theories that a President may not even be capable of committing the crime. Additionally due to the back and forth between different branches of government, executive privilege etc, a lot of Presidential obstruction of justice will often be seen as a quasi or inherently political activity which will insulate it significantly from severe public opprobrium.
If all they had on Nixon was the obstruction, it is unlikely IMO enough Republicans would have bolted to push him out of office. Nixon got forced out of office because of the underlying criminality and the public reaction to it being exposed, not the coverup. It was not a case of the cover-up being worse than the crime (I often think people who say that about Watergate don’t actually understand the nature and scope of crimes Nixon orchestrated.) So without proving anything more than obstruction, I think you have little of real power on something like the Trump-Russia Collusion issue.
Yep. I am entirely engaging in “bothsidesism”. Democrats spent four years demonising Trump and denying his legitimacy as President. They were wrong. Trump, and the Republicans who parrot him, were and are wrong when he denies the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s Presidency. Welcome to partisan politics. The attack on the US Capitol on 06 January 2021 was far more harmful than anything that happened in the preceding four years, or since. But it doesn’t excuse either side from not accepting the results of a democratic election.
Well this thread is about unstated conspiracy theories. I haven’t seen yours put forward from a Russian source, but I haven’t actually been following the subject all that closely.
That is not my theory, I am told he prefers blondes. Your post reads like you think that he feared that, not mine.
Wait… Are you suggesting that Democrats had conspiracy theories about election fraud getting Trump elected in 2016?! That didn’t happen except maybe among some fringe nutjobs on social media.
Yeah, you are taking bothsidesism to an absurd degree here.
This is fictional.
I’m sure that there can be some nutpicking and find someone who made that claim.
And a nut on one side is the equivalent to elected officials on the other.
I would agree and I think this forum is bad at admitting it–that the people who tried to say Trump was not legitimately elected were as bad as the Trumpers who said Biden wasn’t legitimately elected.
I can also note however, that very few mainstream Democrats seriously suggested Trump wasn’t the legitimately elected President even a couple weeks after the angst of election day 2016. A few House Democrats objected to certifying Trump’s electoral college win in 2016–which is objectionable behavior. However zero Senate Democrats did the same.
In 2020–147 Republicans in Congress objected to certifying Biden’s election. This represents a massive element of one of our two major political parties who believe that it is fundamentally illegitimate for them to lose an election, and who equate fair elections, in a terrible dystopian way, with any elections Republicans win, and “fraudulent” elections with any elections Republicans lose.
I’ll also note there was nothing remotely comparable to Trump’s attempts to influence State Secretaries of States and State Legislatures out of President Obama in 2016.
Both sides have acted shitty about elections, one side it was limited to a few fringe members of elected government and a small minority of the overall country who got mad on election day. The other side it was over 140 members of congress, several governors, and an angry mob that violently assaulted the U.S. Capitol on the day the electoral college results were being certified.
So the only condemning statement relating to Russians I can find is this one:
The violations date back to a time when the Taj Mahal was the preferred gambling spot for Russian mobsters living in Brooklyn, according to federal investigators who tracked organized crime in New York City. They also occurred at a time when the Taj Mahal casino was short on cash and on the verge of bankruptcy.
Most of the violations seem to be along this line:
The casino repeatedly failed to properly report gamblers who cashed out $10,000 or more in a single day, the government said.
So Russian mobsters in the US may or may not have been tied to Russian mobsters in Russia. Not sure how they would be sending cash across to the US but anyway. The transferred cash is apparently illicit, but it’s made legitimate by being layered as unreported gambling winnings? That’s totally not how money laundering works. There may be a better explanation somewhere, but that CNN article certainly doesn’t provide it.