The goal, as stated, was to knock Russia out of the war…? 
We’ll see. The whole thing gets weirder and weirder.
We aren’t actually. A sitting president can be impeached, and subsequent to conviction, be removed from office; only THEN can he be tried for treason, convicted, and executed.
But as Johnny L.A. points out, he shouldn’t. This is because capital punishment is morally wrong, always and everywhere, and always has been, since the beginning of time.
It’s all a great big lie from the Failing New York Times. Nothing to see here, move along:[ul]
[li]Comey is a partisan hack;[/li][li]McCabe is a known liar;[/li][li]Trump has been harder on Russia than any previous President, especially that weakling Obama.[/li][/ul]Now don’t you feel better? Just drink your warm milk and go back to sleep.
I mean, technically, both he and Cohen were probably already under RICO investigation by Preet Bharara from before he even started running for President. Beyond that, both Manafort and Carter Page had large FBI files against them and had been close to being indicted at varying points in the past.
Maybe there’s more that we don’t know, but we have known that there was sufficient reason to open an investigation into Trump himself for 2 years now, just based on that alone. If you further have the Australian Ambassador telling you that Trump’s people were talking about secret Russian hacking, before everyone else knew about it, and that he fired the head of the FBI as soon as he could, you really don’t have to feel that there needs to have been more, before opening a file on the question.
Bombshell certainly but at the same time it has a certain familiarity to it which is to say I could swear I read about this months ago. Trump did something absurd, the FBI said “WTF?” and an investigation started. I know there is now about seventeen different variations of this story going on right now but this specific one feels oddly familiar.
Schrödinger’s asset.
After the firing of James Comey, between the Lester Holt interview and the Oval Office meeting with the Russians (no American press allowed), the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation to determine if the President is a Russian asset. This is a different investigation than the campaign stuff, the Cohen stuff, etc.
This makes 18 investigations.
This CI work was folded into Mueller, giving it more protection. This is why Mueller’s order, to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, was so broad - it is a counterintelligence investigation, not just a criminal investigation.
And, yes, you’re right… in some ways we “knew” this, but this certifies what we previously pieced together.
So, in one week:
- Manafort gives raw polling data to Kremlin intermediary,
- Trump is found/confirmed to be the subject of a CI investigation.
“Of course you would. Now piss off.”
I was wondering how someone could be a witting asset when he’s witless in the first place.
I don’t know, this shutdown indicates he is still a witting asset.
From our perspective it makes little sense, but if you’re a Russian asset looking to delay the inevitable, why wouldn’t you shut down as much of the government as you can just when the opposition party takes over the House? And you might get to mobilize the military!
Hillary Clinton called Trump a Russian puppet during one of their debates. This was no secret. The FBI’s investigation is huge news, and not surprising news. Almost half of the voters voted for him anyway. Welcome to America, land of the dipshit.
I think that the ‘et’ is superfluous.
That’s why I think the tipping point will be a massive disaster of epic proportions. Trump has the senate. He has the courts. He’s undermining the executive bureaucracy and trying to make it less independent. Some people who voted for Trump voted to shock the system. They’re going to get their wish.
It took “the Russian steamroller” out of the war.
If anything like that occurs, he will fall back onto his tried and true defense of lying about it.
We may all get their wish. Many already are. Of course, according to Trump, they like not getting paychecks. I think they should camp out on his golf courses.
I think that one way out of this is that Trump supporters (except for the top 1%) are going to get hit the hardest. They will, or course, continue to avoid those nasty things called facts. I suspect that if Trump makes it to 2020, they will simply not vote.
Since we’re talking about Cheetolilni’s short-term job coming to a conclusion, we could say, “the gig is up.” 
A gig is also the captain’s dinghy. When the gig is down (in the water), the captain is off somewhere else; when the gig is up, the captain is back onboard and you better be behaving yourself again.
True. It can also be a person who is subject to blackmail because of a tape of him consorting with prostitutes, or because the blackmailer with one phone call to the right oligarch can have all of the blackmailee’s lines of credit cancelled.
Or an Occupy Mar-a-Lago?