“My guy didn’t do anything wrong. And besides, one of your guys did it, too!” Always a classic.
Yeah. Nothing. Except -
… except for the Flynn thing and the Manafort thing and the Tillerson thing and the Sessions thing and the Kushner thing and the Wray thing and the Morgan, Lewis, & Bockius “Russian Law Firm of the Year” thing and the Carter Page thing and the Roger Stone thing and the 198 Million voter records thing and the Felix Sater thing and the Boris Ephsteyn thing and the Rosneft thing and the Gazprom thing and the Sergey Gorkov banker thing and the Azerbajain thing and the “I love Putin” thing and the Donald Trump, Jr. thing and the Lavrov thing and the Sergey Kislyak thing and the Oval Office thing and the Gingrich/Kislyak phone calls thing and the Russian Business Interests thing and the Emoluments Clause thing and the Alex Schnaider thing and the hack of the DNC thing and the Guccifer 2.0 thing and the Mike Pence “I don’t know anything” thing and the Russians mysteriously dying thing and Trump’s public request to Russia to hack Hillary’s email thing and the Trump house sale for $100 million at the bottom of the housing bust to the Russian fertilizer king thing and the Russian fertilizer king’s plane showing up in Concord, NC during Trump rally campaign thing and the Nunes sudden flight to the White House in the night thing and the Nunes personal investments in the Russian winery thing and the Cyprus bank thing and Trump not releasing his tax returns thing and the Republican Party’s rejection of an amendment to require Trump to show his taxes thing and the election hacking thing and the GOP platform change to the Ukraine thing and the Steele Dossier thing and the Sally Yates can’t testify thing and the intelligence community’s investigative reports thing and the Trump reassurance that the Russian connection is all “fake news” thing and the Chaffetz not willing to start an investigation thing and the Chaffetz suddenly deciding to go back to private life in the middle of an investigation thing and the appointment of Pam Bondi who was bribed by Trump in the Trump University scandal appointed to head the investigation thing and the alfa-bank thing and the VEB thing and the The White House going into full-on cover-up mode, refusing to turn over the documents related to the hiring and subsequent firing of Flynn thing and the Chaffetz and White House blaming the poor vetting of Flynn on Obama thing and the Poland and British intelligence gave information regarding the hacking back in 2015 to Paul Ryan and he didn’t do anything thing and the Agent M16 following the money thing and the Trump team KNEW about Flynn’s involvement but hired him anyway thing and the let’s fire Comey thing and the Mueller let’s fire him too thing and the Election night Russian trademark gifts thing and the Russian diplomatic compound electronic equipment destruction thing and the let’s give back the diplomatic compounds back to the Russians thing and the let’s back away from Cuba thing and the donny Jr met with Russians thing and Trump’s secret second meeting with his boss Putin thing and the Jeff Sessions remembering thing and the don jr Wikileaks thing and the Flynn flipping thing and the Andrew Jackson painting thing and the ‘Elizabeth Warren is Pochahantas’ thing and the donating to Project Veritas before it tried to trick the Washington Post thing
Stolen from Reddit. It’s all just nothing.
It’s not complicated. Donald has being doing business with Russian mobsters for decades (this is the Felix Sater thing, among others. Also the Ms Universe thing. And the Deutsche Bank thing. And the Trump Soho thing.)
Meanwhile, in the early Aughts, a Russian accountant, Sergei Magnitsky (of the Magnitsky Act thing) started investigating some tax fraud that implicated Russian tax officials who were connected to the Vladimir Putin (of the Putin thing. Everyone in this story, except Magnitsky himself, is a Friend of Vlad.) Magnitsky was arrested, abused and died in prison in 2009. The Friends of Vlad blamed him for the crimes which he was exposing.
Magnitsky had an American friend named Bill Browder who lobbied the Obama admin to punish Russia for human rights abuses and corruption. Browder was successful in getting Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012 (H.R. 4405) passed. This prevents assorted Russian money men (Friends of Vlad, all, and through them, Vlad himself,) from entering the US or participating in the US banking system, limiting their ability to engage in money laundering in the US. Russia/Vlad responded by refusing to allow Americans to adopt Russian children and banning some US officials from visiting Russia.
Also right about then, Donald decided to get serious about running for President because Obama (who Donald hated for racial reasons) made fun of him.
Donald visited Moscow in connection with the 2013 Ms Universe pagent. While he was there, he was also attempting to get approval for a Moscow Trump Tower. And he met with various Russian money men (notably the Aglarovs, among others (see also: the Dossier Thing)) with whom he’d been doing business all the while. Around this time, Eric (the Moron Children Thing) announced that most of Trump’s money was in businesses with Russians.
Christ, this is getting long. If you want the details just go read the timeline that’s maintained by Bill Moyers and everything. The site takes a minute to load but it’s got All The Things when it comes to Donnie Moscow.
Ok so the short of it is - Donald told his Russian friends that if they helped him in his Presidential Campaign, he’d repeal the Magnitsky Act. (See - The Carter Page Thing, The Veselnitskaya Thing, the “We were just talking about adoptions” thing, all of the many “Let’s Set Up a Backchannel Communication Things”, and the Rohrabacher Thing, just for starters).
The Russians agreed and got their analog-NSA group to hack America’s election committees, up to and including voter registration rolls. They leaked the results via Julian Assange and Wikileaks, coordinating the information via Donald’s campaign advisors, including Page, Manafort, Stone, & Guiliani. They were able to swing just enough votes in just enough states to throw the Electoral Committee to Trump. Flynn texted a friend from Trump’s inauguration that they could go ahead with their post-Magnitsky plans, since they were sure that was toast. (Serious. It’s all in Bill Moyer’s Timeline.
Today: Robert Mueller is sending out 70 subpoenas, with the demand that the recipients present themselves at the Alexandria Courthouse, July 10, 10am, See you there!
*They may say I take too long
And my probe is a giant fail …
*
Predicted Future LAZombie quote: Yeah but what about Hillary’s emails?
Mueller himself has been has been working for less than a year; but his work has already resulted in:
[ul]
[li] George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October to making false statements to the FBI.[/li][li] Michael Flynn pleaded guilty in December to making false statements to the FBI.[/li][li] Paul Manafort was indicted by a grand jury for conspiracy, money laundering, false statements, and failure to disclose foreign assets.[/li][li] Rick Gates was indicted by a grand jury on similar charges to Manafort and has agreed to a plea deal.[/li][li] Richard Pinedo pleaded guilty to an identity theft charge in connection with the Russian indictments.[/li][li] Alex van der Zwaan pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI.[/li][li] 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies were indicted by a grand jury on conspiracy charges, with some also being accused of identity theft.[/li][/ul]
Is your claim that Mueller has unearthed no malfeasance? Or just that Trump himself has not yet been indicted?
Yep. American banks wised up to Trumps dirty dealings and stopped playing. While I have no love or great trust for large US financial institutions, they do have to stay within the lines or risk getting in trouble. Russia, not so much.
Your mistake here is to describe it as an “it”. It’s not just one line of events and connections leading from Trump, his campaign, his businesses and his administration to Russia: there are dozens, and all of them are strewn with questionable if not outright criminal behavior. It’s like a Great Circle level of malfeasance - move away from Trump in any direction and the lines will all converge again in Moscow.
And yet they never are. Denied, yes, much like you’re doing, but not debunked. “There’s nothing there!”, you cry, and when shown the enormous amount of material that is publicly known your response is to continue to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Just like the Steele dossier. Nothing in the dossier has been disproven. Some things are still uncorroborated, and some things are (as yet) unproven, but there’s not one. single. damn. item. that’s been shown to be false.
The problem is that this whole thing IS complicated, insanely complicated. There are hundreds if not thousands of angles to it. Seth Abramson made the point in his twitter feed recently that - despite what CNN, MSNBC, etc. would like to believe - there’s no one person who could truly understand the whole thing. Every time Trump or one of his associates opens his mouth there’s like 5 more things to investigate. Money laundering and conspiracy and back channels and thing and thing and thing and thing and …
The fact that Mueller’s already gotten as far as he has in a year and a half is a miracle. It’s bloody amazing work.
But it also speaks to the vast amount of incompetence on the Trump side that there’s this much material to wade through. “Stupid Watergate” is as good a name as any, but its just so much worse than that, in so many different ways.
To be fair, I don’t know how some of this could be disproven. How do I prove that I went to bed alone and didn’t have a couple of hookers with me?
On the other hand, Trump’s attempts to disprove it aren’t helping. When Trump says “there couldn’t have been hookers; I didn’t even stay the night in Moscow”, and then evidence shows they he did stay the night, that doesn’t help his credibility.
This just in:
Judge in Manafort case says Mueller’s aim is to hurt Trump
Anyone want to guess what Ellis’ political orientation is?
(Appointed by St. Ronnie, invoked ‘national security’ against Khalid el-Masri…)
Is Ellis’ assessment of Mueller’s motivation relevant to Manafort’s ostensibly criminal activity?
Is Mueller’s motivation relevant to Manafort’s ostensibly criminal activity?
The answer to the first question is “No”. Answer to the second question is “Oh, Hell, no!”
No, PatriotX, to both. It’s also irrelevant that the FBI knew about some of Manafort’s bullshit before Mueller started but hadn’t gotten around to filing charges.
But it’s all good. Mueller can make his case for himself.
In other news, there really ought to be age limits on our judicial-tenure-for-life positions. Say - twenty five years or 70 yo, whichever comes first.
While unproven, the Steele dossier provides a pretty decent narrative, if that’s all that you’re looking for.
Based on what evidence is publicly available, it looks very likely that Trump flirted with removing the sanctions and giving up the Ukraine, in exchange for Russia releasing Clinton’s emails at an opportune time. Whether there was direct communication on that front is hard to say, but the indirect communications seem to support that conclusion.
Manafort seems to have been feeding information back to Russia, and also seems to have been looking for ways to move Russian money into the US, for the campaign. Plausibly, he was doing that without Trump’s knowledge, but the continued presence of Gates past Manafort’s departure makes them seem less likely. It also seems unlikely that Erik Prince was trying to communicate with Russia solely on the behalf of Kushner’s desire to establish a backchannel. Nor does it seem like it should take 4-5 different meetings to “establish a backchannel” to establish a backchannel. It seems more reasonable to assume that they were communicating about something, and simply used 4-5 different means of meeting to continue the discussion.
None of which means that Mueller has something. If wiretaps didn’t catch any of this and none of the guilty parties are talking then, innocent or not, Team Trump will walk. But I think the difference between Clinton - if we assume that she’s guilty of similar crimes - and Trump is that all of her people have a clean history and do a good job of not engaging in petty crime and not working with stupid people. The Trump campaign was full of morons and petty criminals. So where, with the Clinton group, you’re at a dead end if you can’t get your hands on physical evidence, in the case of Trump you can catch the small fish on their various crimes and have them flip on their superiors. That ends up taking a long time.
If Mueller had tapes of Trump talking with Putin, then we’d probably already be in court. Since that doesn’t exist, Mueller would usually need to give up given that none of the principal parties are talking about it and their cover story is consistent among them all.
But, as pointed out, the parties involved are all guilty of other crimes. Where, with the Clintons, you’d be boned at this point, with Trump you can start flipping people and work your way up that ladder. It takes months and years, and there’s no guarantee that it will be able to continue all of the way up to the top, but I’d say that flipping Gates was a very promising step, and if they can flip Michael Cohen or Keith Schiller then Trump is toast. Completely an instantly toast.
We’ll have to see how things play out with Cohen.
Okay, that’s fair. There are definitely parts of it that are probably never going to be known with any definitiveness one way or the other.
However, to my way of thinking, if you have a lengthy document that’s (approx) 75% proven right, with 25% unable to be proven … you generally can put faith in the rest of it being fairly accurate, no? Maybe with a couple doubts. Hell maybe even “reasonable doubt” if it really requires some serious decisions (like in this case) but still. I’d find myself leaning towards “yup its all accurate” rather than the opposite.
As opposed to a document that’s 75% false … likewise I’d have no difficulty believing the rest of it is also false.
The Steele Dossier falls into the former category, no?
Then there’s that as well 
There couldn’t have been any hookers, because he didn’t stay overnight? What, if he busts a nut, he lapses into a coma?
I’m not aware of anything significant in the dossier which was not known prior to its publication which was subsequently “proven right”. What do you have in mind?
But beyond that, the dossier is not one integral document such that the veracity of parts can be used to prove the remaining parts. It’s a bunch of separate reports from varied sources. I believe even Steele and Fusion acknowledge that it’s likely only partially accurate - you’re taking things even further than they did.
Classifying the “proveness” of the Steele Dossier is difficult. It certainly knew about the movements of Trump’s people well before the general public was aware of it. In a sense, it’s been amazingly prescient. But just saying that Bob was in Milwaukee on the evening of June 2nd doesn’t mean that he was there to talk about killing hobos. As far as the contents of what Trump’s people were doing, according to Steele, I don’t know that we have seen any evidence of anything in the public sphere yet and it’s quite possible that none of it can be proved unless one of the major players flips.
What is this in reference to?
“The general public” doesn’t follow the movements of “Trump’s people”, so being more familiar with their movements than the general public is trivial. Are there any movements that were not public knowledge to those interested which the dossier was right about?
For example, people make a big deal about the dossier being right that Carter Page went to Russia. But Carter Page wasn’t making some private trip, let alone a secret one. He was lecturing at some public event also attended by numerous other public figures, and there’s little doubt that this information would have been readily available to people interested in that sort of thing. That category of people would most definitely not include “the general public”, which has little interest in people like Carter Page or seminars of the type at which he was lecturing. But that doesn’t mean that it’s “amazingly prescient” if someone came up with that information.
Well, yeah, Carter Page is such a brilliant light in international circles, he must get such invitations all the time.
You’re making the same point as I was making.