Projection. The whole right wing has more of it than a multiplex theater.
Giuliani talks about a claim by Cohen that there was a planning meeting for the Veselnitskaya meeting:
Obviously, it never happened.
I think I’m hearing Giuliani describe an alleged meeting. He describes in detail the purpose, attendees, and dates. Then he says it didn’t happen. That’s a curiously detailed description of a thing that didn’t happen.
Anyone got Batman’s number? I think Rudolph Cobblepot needs some time back in Arkham.
This will not be news to anyone in this thread, but it’s a good, short video explaining how Russian interference was enough to put Trump in the White House. It’s Max Boot, summarizing a paywalled column of his that appeared in The Washington Post a couple days ago. It’s only a little over 3 minutes long and worth a watch. Boot argues that the disinformation campaign, the altering of voter rolls, and the timed release of hacked DNC emails were enough to put Trump over the top in an election that was swayed by, in Boot’s estimation, 80,000 votes in three states.
There was no collusion! Derpity derp…
“… well, my son colluded. BUT I DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT IT! AND IT WAS TOTALLY LEGAL ANYWAY, BUT JUST PUTTING IT OUT THERE THAT I DIDN’T DO IT. IT WAS JUNIOR!”
I think we can now amend this thread title to “Don Jr colluded with Russians, according to his Dad.”
Trump’s tweeting fingers are his own worst enemy.
Fake Fingers! Lying Digits! Crooked Claws!
Maybe it’s like the movie where the guy gets the evil hand that keeps trying to kill people, except instead, it’s an evil guy with a good hand that is trying to warn everyone.
It was legal, yet we lied about it because…
To be fair, “We lied out of habit.” is not actually an unreasonable defense for them.
Covfefe!
“Really, Don Jr was a nobody. He may have fetched covfefe for some of the staff. Or so I was told. I never met him. He had no official role in my campaign.”
Josh Marshall from TPM makes the point that since Trump and his team have lied about every aspect of the Trump Tower meeting with Russian agents so far, there’s no reason to believe they’re telling the truth when they say that the meeting produced nothing of value. Even if they didn’t hand over a dossier in that meeting, they easily could have coordinated future leaks or the timing of other damaging Clinton information:
Once again, Trump’s explaination of his actions reminds me of this: I thought the cop was a prostitute - YouTube
What’s amazing is that some people can hear a statement like that, and walk away that the matter has been totally addressed.
While there are some curious points in Manafort’s notes on the meeting, that could be worrisome, it seems reasonable to assume that he made the notes in a chronological order as the meeting went on. Based on that, they clearly started by talking about Browder and ended by talking about sanctions - which is to say, they started and ended talking about the Magnitsky Act. While we might not understand those middle points, it seems more likely that those are things we don’t understand about the Act than that they are something on some other topic.
Personally, I think that Veselnitskaya was operating independently of the GRU and Yevgeny Prigozhin’s troll farm. Her job was to work on bringing an end to Magnitsky and that’s what she was trying to do. Her other job, in the US, was after all to try and use our court system to get Bill Browder as we know from Glenn Simpson.
She suckered Trump’s team, and got a chance to lobby them using a bit of fluff that she’d been able to get her hands on.
This doesn’t absolve Junior of making an attempt to use the Russian intelligence apparatus to win an election, since that’s what he was almost certainly trying to do and is, in essence, treason. It’s just happenstance that he ended up entrapping himself via a random group of Russians rather than through a string operation.
But the Trump Tower meeting is not the only matter of likely coordination between the campaign and Russia. It seems likely that they were receiving money through the NRA, arranged by Gates and Manafort (even after he left the campaign). This explains their friendly relationship with Butina, including a variety of emails between her and JD Gordon, and the presence of some Trump people at her inauguration party. It also explains the presence of Russian oligarchs at Trump’s VIP-only inauguration party.
It’s certain that the Russians were comfortable communicating with Roger Stone, asking him what he thought about some data they posted - which he then spent enough time looking through to reply, “[p]retty standard”. It seems likely that there’s more there between them.
And then there’s Papadopoulos’ whole back and forth with Russia and the possibility that he arranged something with them while he was in Greece.
And, similarly, Carter Page’s mission to Moscow, where he met with a bunch of bigwigs.
And then there’s Eric Prince’s meeting on the Seychelles…
And Kushner’s four meetings…
Back when the Nunes memo was making rounds, I had noted that the timing seemed rather stupid. They really want to wait until the midterms before dumping on the FBI.
Those who are smarter than Nunes have now headed basic logic and are now striking:
The general idea is to point out that Bruce Ohr was acting as an intermediary between Steele & Simpson and the FBI, despite not being on the case.
Obviously, they are using a lot of scary words to make this sound like nefarious behavior, where Steele and Simpson would probably categorize it as, “We were trying to report our findings about possible crimes to the FBI and we knew someone who was friendly enough to help us do so.”
Do we know when the DNC stopped paying Simpson (if ever)?
He wasn’t even my son for very long. A couple months, tops.
Best part of that article:
So these people are still colluding to obstruct justice, perhaps, by coordinating their stories through Trump’s legal team, eh?