But just look at how dirty that wall is after they threw all that mud at it!
< sniffs > That’s not mud.
Putting the phrase “fake Trump ‘collusion’” in the thread title doesn’t make it so. And 'collusion" was Trump’s term anyway. What a joke.
Mueller’s investigation was specifically into “Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election”. And boy howdy, did he find a lot of that.
Yup. None of the convicted criminals, resulting from Mueller’s investigation, that Trump pardoned were pardoned of “collusion”.
Wow ,what an amazing coincidence that this allegation made up out of whole cloth by the Clinton campaign, matches so perfectly the actual well documented conspiracy by Russia to influence the 2020 campaign on Trump’s behalf that was subsequently discovered. What are the odds?
Incidentally I did a quick search over the Mueller report, and neither Sussman nor the Alfa bank servers in Trump tower are even mentioned. The Steele Dossier is only mentioned in the volume on obstruction in terms of Trump’s reaction to it (the orange one doth protest too much methinks). It is surpring that these pieces of evidence that were the very basis of the Mueller report without which it all falls apart like a house of cards, receive so little mention in it.
No one disputes that Russians tried to screw with the election. They have been doing that for many decades. The question is whether Trump colluded with them.
And of course it’s no coincidence. If you are going to frame someone for colluding, you need a bad actor to collude with. Since everyone kmows Russia is dicking with America, they are the obvious choice. No one would have cared if Trump was accused of colluding with Sweden.
By the time of the Mueller investigation, both of those had been debunked. That’s why he didn’t have to investigate it.
The point is that the ‘dossier’ and Alfa Bank claims were used to jump-start the investigations, and then the existence of the investigations was leaked to the press to implicate Trump in the public’s mind. And Hillary Clinton is responsible.
The mere presence of Paul Manafort in a high level position in an American political campaign would’ve been more than enough grounds for an investigation.
Manafort had long been associated with rigging elections in Ukraine on the behalf of Russians and Russian backed candidates. The FBI would’ve been negligent not to investigate on that basis alone. Everything else was gravy.
That is factually incorrect.
I posted this once already but here it is again…
March 2016 - Papadopoulos/Misfud meetings Rome and London
April 2016 - Misfud travels to Moscow and meets with Papadopoulos on his return and tells Papa about “thousands of emails” that could be politically damaging to Hillary Clinton.
May 2016 - Papadopoulos meets Aussie Pol Alexander Downer for drinks and tells him about the Russian emails.
July 2020 - Aussies tell FBI about Papa’s bragging and Crossfire Hurricane is launched on July 31, 2016.
September 19, 2016 - Sussman meets with Baker.
It is simply not chronologically possible that, “Alfa Bank claims were used to jump-start the investigations.”
Sam appears to be operating on the assumption that if he repeats the same narrative enough times, it will somehow stop being debunked.
Mueller provided substantive evidence of 140 instances of close interaction between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 campaign, plus 11 examples of attempted obstruction of justice to block the investigation into Russia’s involvement with the Trump campaign, plus the six felony perjury convictions for lying about meetings with Russia (not counting Jeff Sessions who fired the guy investigating him, nor Jared who committed multiple felonies in neglecting to report his meetings with Russia on his security clearance form).
If Russia have been “doing that for many decades”, I’m sure you can provide us with similar examples of this kind of direct involvement with one candidate’s campaign from earlier presidential elections.
We’ll wait.
Missed this earlier.
This is not the question. This question has been answered. It is a well established fact that many of the 140 instances of close interaction between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 campaign satisfy the ordinary, every day definition of collusion.
There’s 100 consecutive pages of the Mueller report that cover this. There’s collusion on almost every one of those pages.
e.g. page 140
Manafort briefed Kilimnik on the state of the Trump Campaign and Manafort’s plan to win the election. That briefing encompassed the Campaign’s messaging and its internal polling data. According to Gates, it also included discussion of “battleground” states, which Manafort identified as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota.
The internal polling data being the most damning part. Giving internal polling data, which campaigns spend millions of dollars to obtain, to a guy connected to the Russian effort to help Trump win is pretty straightforwardly collusion.
That might be a good day to start a thread on the topic.
Main Steele Dossier Researcher Arrested in Durham Probe:
So, the Democrats hired a foreign spy, who in turn hired a suspected Russian agent to collect dirt on a Presidential candidate using contacts in the Kremlin.
Isn’t this exactly the kind of stuff Democrats were accusing Trump of doing?
No. 
I think you’re skipping an intermediary or two here. As I understand it, it was:
DNC&Clinton campaign (via lawyer) → Fusion GPS → Steele → Danchenko.
As far as I know, Gathering dirt/oppo research on a political opponent using foreign contacts is perfectly acceptable, as long as it is done without direct involvement of the campaign/candidate, to avoid a clear conflict of interest between a foreign government and a political candidate (potentially) beholden to the foreign government.
I think:
Political campaign (via lawfirm) → US subcontractor → UK subcontractor → Russian sources with Kremlin contacts
is far different than:
Political campaign → Russian sources with Kremlin contacts.
No. The Clinton Campaign hired Fusion GPS. And they hired Fusion GPS to tell them the truth not to make up a story.
Even if Danchenko is a great big liar, which remains to be seen, it would mean that the Clinton Campaign is the victim of fraud and not the perpetrator of a crime.
If Durham’s indictment of Danchenko is to be believed, and it’s beginning to look like the previous Sussman indictment was a fairy tale, then it absolves the Clinton Campaign.
There’s only two possibilities here. Durham is overstating his case and the Clinton Campaign didn’t do anything wrong or Danchenko lied to everyone and the Clinton Campaign didn’t do anything wrong. Which do you think it is Sam?
Also Sam, you never answered this upthread… process crimes, serious or something that can be hand-waved away?
That the Clinton Campaign did something wrong.
The first person to be indicted was a lawyer for Perkins-Coie who worked directly for Clinton, and who billed Clinton directly for peddling the fake Alfa Bank shit, including billing her for the time spent hawking bullshit to the FBI and CIA, where he lied about Clinton’s involvement.
It’s amazing the flips and twists you guys will go to to defend what went down.
And if some lawyer had peddled bullshit from Russians to the FBI and CIA, or had hired a suspected Russian agent to get information from the Kremlin to use against Hillry and then billed it to Trump, you would have been just as dismissive of it, right? After all, Trump didn’t do it - just some lawyer.
Also I’d be interested in a cite that the Steele dossier was debunked. It was always presented as being raw intelligence not the gospel truth. For example I don’t think that the salacious golden showers incident in the hotel room was ever treated as anything more than a rumor. But last I heard, all the claims of the dossier fall either into the category of corroborated with additional independent evidence, or a category of unverified but not proven to be false.
As we noted, our interest is in assessing the Steele dossier as a raw intelligence document, not a finished piece of analysis. The Mueller investigation has clearly produced public records that confirm pieces of the dossier. And even where the details are not exact, the general thrust of Steele’s reporting seems credible in light of what we now know about extensive contacts between numerous individuals associated with the Trump campaign and Russian government officials.
However, there is also a good deal in the dossier that has not been corroborated in the official record and perhaps never will be—whether because it’s untrue, unimportant or too sensitive. As a raw intelligence document, the Steele dossier, we believe, holds up well so far.
That article dates back to 2018, and there may be new analysis that I haven’t seen (and would welcome links to). However even if it did turn out that some of the claims were verifiably false, that doesn’t automatically falsify the entire document. Even if there is proof that Trump spent a restful night in Moscow in a completely dry bed, that doesn’t mean that he was wrong that the Russians were behind the DNC hack.