If you asked me if I’d ever met singer Tommy Makem, I’d say yes, even though it was nothing more than a minute’s talk after a show, about long enough to ask for an autograph. If you asked me if I’d ever met Stephen Hawking, I might even say yes to that, too, even though it was just being at the same party as him, and not even talking to him. And if I’d ever met a high official of any national government, even in such a perfunctory way, I’d admit that, too.
Again, it may have taken a great deal of tooth pulling because he was hiding something, and it may have taken a great deal of tooth pulling simply because his initial response was as to whether he had meetings with these people and when pressed on it he allowed that if you’re going to define “meeting” as “any form of contact” then he might have. ISTM that his approach is consistent with both guilt and innocence. YMMV.
[BTW, I assume when you write “go to Rosneft” you really mean attend a soccer game, and when you say “CFO” you really mean “head of investor relations”. Fortunately, you’re not testifying before congress here, so you can afford to be a bit careless … :)]
Presumably such meetings would be outside of your ordinary experience, and would stand out in that regard. If you had innumerable “meetings” of that sort, you would probably not consider them meetings.
Beyond even that, the dossier accusations against Page were that he had substantial meetings, and it’s natural that he would have been thinking along those lines in his initial responses.
Michael Cohen received $500,000 from a Russian oligarch with ties to Putin.
And it doesn’t end there. Apparently, other companies paid into that same account. AT&T is the only one so far that has confirmed payments:
http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/08/media/att-michael-cohen-consulting-payments/index.html
So tell me again how the “Stormtrooper-style raid” (which really wasn’t) was unsupported?
Novartis: https://twitter.com/MCappetta/status/993999663400353799?s=19
Pretty LOL statement there.
So in other words, Page had so many meetings of that sort that he thought that he didn’t have any?
Anyone watching Rachel Maddow?
Mm, I like Christmas.
The President’s bag man running a slush fund from money supplied by major American corporations and Russian oligarchs… seems like a not insignificant development.
And some random money from South Korea, Hungary, Malaysia, Singapore, etc.
The Hungarian one, I find particularly curious. (It’s part of the Schengen Area and one might travel through Germany if he was going from Hungary to Poland.)
I can’t help but think that with this investigation, Bob Mueller, law man and investigator that he is, is just fully erect 24/7 these days.
Since, ostensibly, these payments are for “consulting”, I would be curious how Cohen calculates his per-hour that would come to these numbers.
Who was the poster who kept crowing that “the football was pulled away [from liberals] again” every time there was any news on the Mueller investigation that didn’t conclusively prove Trump was guilty? What happened to that guy?
I wonder what AT&T was paying for? Help with the merger? Net neutrality?
Amazing that these big companies knew to pay this nothing LLC, one with no employees or salesmen, a bunch of cash.
But Hillary wouldn’t release the text of her speeches!
Hey, you wouldn’t want to try to explain those monthly payments of $9980, either.
The mental gymnastics required to believe that everything here is on the up and up are staggering.
He was forced to eat crow?
A giant multinational like Novartis signed a $1.2 million contract without researching his credentials first? I’m skeptical.