Can someone explain to me what’s actually new in the WaPo story? I thought we already knew that the Clinton campaign picked up funding for Fusion’s oppo research after the republicans dropped it. Did we not already know that? Is there any problem with the Clinton campaign or the DNC funding it?
Well, somebody needed to vet the candidate, right?
That was my thought, too. Didn’t we already know this? If it wasn’t explicit, everyone on the planet assumed that the DNC paid for it. I guess now we just have some harder evidence that the group we were pretty sure hired some work, did in fact hire that work. Ho-hum.
It’s just dishonest Fox News trying to spin it into a scandal. I’m sure their viewers buy it.
No. You should probably wait until you hear something from someone else.
The scandal is that they paid for it off the money they made from running their child sex ring out of the pizza parlor.
Ding ding ding!
Is there *any *response we can get from them that’s even a little more thoughtful than “no u”?
Suspicion that the uproar here is largely to distract from the culmination of the actual investigation:
No, the Clinton campaign consistently denied any such connection.
Any opposition research is investigating wrongdoing, however. Trump Jr. thought he was investigating wrongdoing by the Clinton campaign when he met with Veselnitskaya (who of course is also linked to Fusion GPS). And Trump supporters are likely to see Steele’s reliance on a Russian government source, and the Clinton campaign’s funding of that effort, as assisting a nonfriendly foreign government in its attempt to influence a US election.
Steele’s dossier itself says it includes information that was obtained from “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin.” There is no indication (so far, anyway) that the Clinton campaign knew at the outset that Steele would be obtaining information from current or former Russian government officials, but they certainly knew that the document contained such information once they received it.
Here is my impression of what has happened.
A major republican operate (maybe Jeb Bush and his team, I don’t know) started funding opposition research into Trump. Among other things that led to the Chris Steele dossier.
After Jeb dropped out, the DNC picked up and kept funding the dossier.
I don’t see why this is considered a tie to russia. An ex-MI6 agent used his contacts in Russia to find incriminating evidence about Trump.
The dossier said Trump has been working with Putin for years, and Trump several times in the campaign called for Russia to engage in illegal acts in the US.
How are the two comparable? Major republican and democratic politicians funded opposition research into Trump that included intelligence agents contacting their contacts in Russia to determine Trump-Russia collusion.
In a way, that is like saying if I were growing opium poppies in my back yard and my neighbor who hated me videotaped it and gave it to the police, that makes my neighbor guilty of a crime and me innocent. Investigating a crime doesn’t make you a criminal or sympathetic to criminals.
I don’t follow the logic of it. How does this reflect bad on Hillary?
I’m hearing it claimed that:
Her campaign folks spent a long time denying what has now been shown to be true (that they helped financed the dossier).
They violated FEC rules by failing to disclose the purpose of the payments made. They had a law firm forward the money to FusionGPS, which they then claimed to have spent on legal services.
I dunno whether these claims are yet verified.
Yeah, apparently a watchdog group filed a complaint about it.
The watchdog group is non-partisan, so it isn’t some GOP witchhunt. If they broke the law though, I hope they find it.
Trump winning makes me have more respect for the rule of law (or at least, as the rule of law should be). Of course if we truly had rule of law, then we would’ve investigated torture and financial fraud a decade ago.
Latest Trump tweet which should help settle this matter:
It is now commonly agreed, after many months of COSTLY looking, that there was NO collusion between Russia and Trump. Was collusion with HC!
We all know, “commonly agreed” is about as good as it gets when it comes to FBI and special investigations. LOCK HER UP!!! :smack:
For clarity as I understand it, the Republican operative had engaged Fusion GPS, but Steele was hired and the dossier prepared only after the DNC and the Clinton campaign took over the funding. In other words, Steele, his contact with Russian government officials, and the dossier are not attributable to the previous Republican funder, only to the DNC and the Clinton campaign.
You’re glossing over the fact that Steele was getting information from Russian government sources. When it’s the Trump campaign supposedly in contact with Russian government figures, you call it “working with Putin.” When it’s a Clinton agent representing that he got information from Russian government figures, you call it “contacts in Russia.”
Stripped of euphemism, the Clinton campaign paid someone who obtained information from agents of a purportedly hostile foreign government, and then it sought to use that information, without attribution, to influence the US presidential election. Are you OK with that?
As I understand it the allegations against Trump about Russia is that someone did a phishing attack on Hillary’s campaign chief Podesta. That person then gave the hacked files to Wikileaks which coordinated with the Trump campaign to publish the findings that the DNC was in the tank for Hillary during the primaries. Since Wikileaks is known to be a subsidiary of Russian intelligence this show that Russia interfered with the election on behalf of Trump. This has produced much tsuris among certain types of people.
This new material shows that the Hillary campaign was paying someone to investigate Trump. This person or firm worked with Russian intelligence to dig up allegations about Trump engaging in gross and embarrassing practices. The allegations were then assembled into a dossier designed to look like an intelligence report and shopped to various media outlets in an attempt to interfere with the election on behalf of Hillary.
If it is wrong for the Trump campaign to work with Russian intelligence to influence the election via Wikileaks, it would seem just as wrong for the Hillary campaign to work with Russian intelligence to influence the election via the Steele dossier.
Or Ukraine, for that matter.
As usual for a Clinton, the cover-up just makes it look worse.
Regards,
Shodan
I assume you apply this same sentiment to cover-ups on the other side, right? :rolleyes:
This is just incorrect. The info in the dossier wasn’t published until after the election, and although reporters knew of it, there’s no indication that the info was given to them beforehand by the DNC. Steele himself was alarmed enough about what he found out, that he passed the info to Mother Jones in October, and then to the FBI. Another major point is that the salacious “gross and embarrassing” allegations were an extremely minor point to the findings, and it seems that anyone who brings this up is just trying to dismiss the report as not politically or criminally important, hoping that everyone will forget about the the serious charges in the info.
They are not at all equivalent. Someone earlier made an analogy to the mob that fits. If Candidate A suspects his opponent has mob ties, it’s perfectly OK to hire an investigator to dig for info with mobsters to see what those ties are. But it’s not OK for Candidate B to hire the mobsters themselves to engage in criminal activity in order to influence the election.
If true, this raises an interesting question: Was the Russian government (IOW Putin) seeking both to help and to harm Trump’s election chances?
Yes.
Russia didn’t think trump would win. They were just trying to throw a bunch of fire on our national discourse. They expected to be dealing with a hillary in political turmoil, but a trump in political turmoil works to their advantage just as well.