That’s fuckin funny. The Russians weren’t trying to help Trump win, but merely trying to hurt the chances of the person running against him.
:smack:
I doubt they thought Trump had a chance of winning, any more than anyone here in the U.S. did. They thought Hillary would win (I doubt the Kremlin’s pollsters are any better than ours), but wanted to hobble her with neg attacks on her and ramping up Trump and Bernie supporters for after the election.
After he won, they pivoted to start supporting the #Resistance and funding anti-Trump rallies. Agents of chaos. It will be interesting to see if the Left continues to help them with these revelations.
Or if the Right continues to cover it up.
Poor Bernie - he had the Russians trying to help him win the nomination but the DNC’s dirty tricks operations were superior to the Russians!
Poor voters! :smack:
But it does point at where the greatest danger lies in rigging elections.
Nice meme-speak.
Except that Russians started supporting Trump before he won the Republican primary. So I guess Russian tricks were superior to the meager efforts of the RNC in stopping the Trump takeover from Russia’s preferred Republican candidate.
And if you could even momentarily remove your partisan blinders, you would see that they aimed to fool Americans on both the left and right, such as:
- The creation of the twitter handle “TEN GOP” for Tennessee GOP that purported to be the official Twitter account of the GOP in Tennessee that accrued more than 100,000 followers (page 14-15 in the indictment);
- The ramp up of their efforts to start trying to further sow divisions and sway opinions in the election seemed to be in February 2016, just as primary elections and caucuses were starting (page 17);
- Russians targeted minority groups traditionally supportive of the Democrats and encouraged them not to vote (page 18);
- Russians encouraged conspiracy theories of mass efforts of voter fraud on the part of Democrats (page 18-19) (What U.S. politicians have adopted this Russian line? Hmmm);
- Russians coordinated and arranged for pro-Trump rallies in Florida in August 2016 (page 22);
- And lastly, what you referred to earlier, Russians coordinated both anti-Trump AND pro-Trump rallies in November 2016 after the election (page 23)
Maybe Republicans should avoid repeating Russian (and incidentally, Trump’s) talking points so they don’t play into the hands of Russia.
We’ve known that since at least Spring of last year.
Similarly, we’ve known that Jill Stein and others were friendly with Putin.
We also know that Strzok talked crap about Sanders, Trump, Clinton, Eric Holders, etc.
Don’t read politicized news networks.
I don’t understand RR’s conclusion that the election was not influenced by the Russian interference. Absolutely don’t follow how he could think that.
Wonder how long it will be before some tighty-righty talking head opines that yes, indeed, the Russians were trying to foment discord and polarization in our politics. Therefore, liberals and lefties should stop being so mean, because that’s what the Russians want. Whaddaya think, Hannity or Tucker?
Какая погода в Санкт-Петербурге?
The Russians knew that the best way to promote discord was to support Trump. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
And I’m sure they are loving the discord happening now. And they kind of helped set it up - look at the phrasing of the infamous Trump Tower meeting e-mail chain. The initial e-mail was framed in a way designed to incriminate the recipient.
And I’ll agree that at least some of the Trump team may have been unwitting colluders. But being unwitting is not ansolution, because you have a responsibility to be …witting, as it were. Especially during the transition when you’re using government electronics.
Trump is, in some sense, a perfect patsy. Because he’s stupid and flatters easily and has no critical thinking ability when it comes to himself. So as soon as he announced his run for President, a bunch of unregistered foreign agents kissed his ass and offered to work for him for free. A normal person would look on these offers with skepticism. But Trump made these guys into his inner circle and was soon all in with their plans. Although I think they tried to keep him out of the loop after he ran his mouth about it on TV,
And there is such a thing as being willfully unwitting. Like Flynn was.
He was warned multiple times against getting in too tight with Kislyak. He was told that Kislyak was under surveillance. And he wouldn’t listen and he got caught up in the surveillance.
And I think this is what will take Trump down. Because I’m thinking back to the deliberately incriminating Trump Tower e-mails. And I can’t help but think that Kislyak may have been less than discreet in those phone calls. Maybe he actually referred to a quid pro quo “deal “ when he asked Flynn if Trump would enforce the new sanctions.
Maybe he framed the call in an incriminating way on purpose, in order get something on Flynn. That’s what the intelligence agencies seemed to think.
Trump is going to look ridiculous in an orange jumpsuit and I bet they don’t let him have hair lacquer in jail. He might have fun, though. Apparently Madoff is a pretty popular guy in prison.
It’s not just that, though it’s probably true as well, but Trump thinks about things in terms of image, not substance. To him, it makes sense to pile up a bunch of blank copy paper in folders, stack it on s table and sell this story about how this is all the paperwork that he has to go through, or whatever. He’s got to make a casino with gold plated floors, even if it means that he’ll never pay off his debts, because anything less doesn’t match his image. Or, at least, he had to believe that he’s convinced you that it’s gold.
From what I’ve read, when Trump found it that he needed foreign advisors to show on TV, he basically told Sam Clovis to get him people pronto, in time for whatever promotional bit he was doing, and they couldn’t find anyone who was willing to come work with the campaign that had actual foreign policy experience and gravitas.
But so, rather than wait and keep hunting, they just accepted the people that were desperate enough to take the job and take it that day. They’re just blank paper in a folder, so far as Trump cared. The actual meaning of “foreign policy advisor” was not a real component of that decision.
Fundamentally, Trump isn’t a businessman. He’s a man who has figured out how to make a living by playing one on TV. So long as it looks like the image he has in his head at each moment, whatever he’s doing wherever he is, then that’s all that matters.
When people describe donald this way it really just means that he does not have enough ordinary reality-testing to stay out of jail. (or to stay out of the white house ftm) He has been buffered from consequences for his whole life.
He has been in depositions many, many times. I’m not sure why he seems so lost now. But he is.
Well, he was a businessman but he was an East Coast metropolitan real estate businessman/developer. His product mostly sold itself as real estate values increased and increased as the population did. His cheap-skating or outright cheating his contractors seems to be the mechanism for ensuring profits. He seems to think his paltry, nouveau riche salesmanship was the secret to his success instead of the rising market and has spun that myth into his entire life. He seems to have forgotten that it was a myth and therefore vastly overrates his competence and knowledge in all areas.
And specifically coordinated with a Trump campaign HQ in Florida plus allegedly at least tried to use that Florida office to get in touch with the national campaign.
To paraphrase Howard Baker: How much did Trump know and when did he know it?
There is exactly zero chance that Trump is ever going to be in prison, no matter what is eventually revealed to be the state of his involvement. We simply don’t do that to elected Presidents, and it’s not a precedent anybody’s going to want to set now.
The best we can hope for is that he (and several others) are removed from their positions of power before they can do any more damage, and retire to someplace where they can do no further harm, hopefully taking the entire modern GOP with them. Let them rebuild from the ashes on a platform not built on hate, racism, and paranoid fantasy.
Rosenstein didn’t say that he thinks that; he said that this particular indictment doesn’t allege that.
Nothing in the statement means “we’re all done here” or “there will be no further indictments” or “we won’t be moving on to future indictments that will cover the topics of ‘the election being influenced’ and ‘Americans were knowing participants in that illegal activity.’”
The statement is rather brilliant in that it lets Trump et al. crow about ‘no influence’ and ‘no American was involved’…while letting smarter people know that more is coming. It thus acts to protect the ongoing investigation.
To put it in Animal Crossing* terms, Mueller and Rosenstein planted a Pitfall Seed — and the CFSG walked right into it. Of course, he’ll deny he ever admitted that Russian tampering was real, and his “We’ve always been at war with Eurasia/Eastasia” base will lap it up; but to anyone with the sense that Og gave mayonnaise, he’s just backed himself firmly into a corner.
*I started playing AC with my daughter when she was hospitalized for two months. It’s one of the few computer games I can play without dying on the title screen.
He’s not particularly different in depositions. He comes across as blissfully unaware and mostly destructive to his own businesses by denying and allowing projects to progress based on the internal politics of himself and his entourage.
To the extent that he has won most of his court cases, I suspect that it’s a matter that:
- He doesn’t get deposed in most of them.
- He has more money to dump into his lawyers than most of his opponents do.
- His businesses are so poorly documented that you simply can’t prove anything against him.