Yes, because Democrats are just saints. Witness Harry Reid and his “it worked, didn’t it?” philosophy on lying about Romney’s taxes.
It’s not “hard to prove” - it is impossible to prove, mostly because it’s just your fantasies. And you definitely cannot prosecute it. Not unless you’re willing to overturn the Constitution. Although sometimes it seems that Democrats are quite willing to overturn it, as long as it helps “get” Trump.
If the precedent being set is this is an okay strategy, who do candidates court? The American people or nation states sympathetic to their platform which will then work over the American people on their behalf?
Seriously, where is the line? Can Sammy Socialist accept billions in campaign contributions? Can he accept espionage? Can he direct nation-states on his behalf?
Is this really the line we want to go down as a country to protect a man whose every policy decision could less be ascribed as conservative and more as what will enrich himself?
And now we cycle back to “They prolly would have done it too!”
Would you be shocked if it turned out that the fake offer was precisely to set up major Trump reps? I mean the emails were so explicit. You may hate on Hillary but you can be sure as shit she wouldn’t have been dumb enough to send her child, son in law and campaign manager to that meeting.
Could have been. I have no idea. I tend to think that it was just bait in order to get in to talk about the lawyer’s clients’ interests.
But all that’s just theorizing. I try to deal with the facts.
You and others keep harping on “it may not have been illegal but it was underhanded and unethical”. Of course it was. “Underhanded and unethical” is how campaigns have been run in the US forever, both by Democrats and Republicans.
LOL. If you just dealt with facts, you wouldn’t dismiss any of the allegations while an investigation is still ongoing.
It’s not a very sound theory that a lawyer who spent her whole career arguing business disputes thought making a completely fake offer would be a good place to start negotiating a lifting of sanctions.
They might have stolen it just as easily as they stole other stuff.
Deadly crux of the biscuit is that it may have worked.
I am somewhat leftish, as are most of my friends. The astonishing prevalence of fake news releases on socialist media (like “Hillary and DNC kidnapped Bernie’s grandchildren for ISIS sex slaves!”) took me by surprise. I would check them out, and find a one-off, a release from an appropriately named entity (Say, Americans United for Bed Hair) and find that they didn’t exist yesterday. Even as HRC and Bernie strenuously worked to repair the rift between them, someone else was strenuously working to expand it.
If enough Bernie people in those crucial states…what was it, about 100,000 votes?..if enough of them didn’t go out and vote for HRC despite instructions by their leader…then this effort might have swung the election.
And that is some serious shit, right there. Very. Serious. Shit.
I support your continued endeavors!
Until that point–as long as you see Trump Jr.'s testimony as honest and free of deliberate obfuscation–I’m not seeing continued conversation with you as productive.
Of course they didn’t need permission but it might have been nice to get that permission on tape anyways. Might come in handy.
I don’t think any of us is naive enough to think that you get to be president without doing at least a few underhanded and unethical things. But there are lines that shouldn’t be crossed, and Trump is sooooooo far past that point that it’s not even funny. And, none of this is particularly new. He’s always been that way. The fact that people chose to ignore that and vote for the guy anyway is what got us in the mess in the first place.
The even sadder part is that it’s not because a bunch of back-woods dufuses voted for him. Case in point: I had dinner earlier this week with a group of 7 guys who I would describe as acquaintances, not friends. They are friends of one of my good friends, and I’ve met them several times before, but I don’t hang out with them or anything. Anyway, the dinner conversation turned to politics and every one of these guys (except my friend and I) voted for Trump. Not so much that they like him, but they absolutely hated Hillary. They were of the “yeah, I know Trump is a disaster, but it would be so much worse if Hillary was president” school of thought.
Now, these guys are all well educated guys who own their own businesses, and have been quite successful, financially. They are not sleazy businessmen like Trump, but hard-working guys who built businesses for themselves. They all grew up in the SF Bay Area, so they don’t hail form coal country or the rust belt or anything. It’s just weird how visceral the hatred for Hillary is among these guys. Socially, they are what I would describe as “moderate” (that is, not religious, not law-and-order types, not anti-gay). But they were mostly older guys (55 and up), and they just hate Hillary like you cannot imagine.
The Wikipedia article doesn’t mention it, but I understand that some laws were enacted by Congress after this to tighten up what all help could be given by a foreign state to a campaign, and that’s one of the laws that Trump’s people are liable to get prosecuted under.
I so agree with this. It is underreported and underappreciated.
I think the far more successful tactic of the Russians in the 2016 election was their focused, systematic fake news assault on voter “markets” that were vulnerable to them.
I remember being completely flummoxed at the outright hatred of Hillary Clinton by young Bernie Sanders supporters after Hillary won the nomination. I’ve lived through a fair number of elections. Democrats (including Bernie, who was one at the time) did what they always do: The loser moves to bring his constituency behind the winner and they work together to win the election. It happens reliably. But not this time, even though Bernie did his part. He entreated his voters to support Hillary in the general election. He elbowed Trump every chance he got. But Bernie’s supporters seemed impervious to Bernie’s own wishes. When I talked to them, their hatred of Hillary was entirely outsized to anything she had actually done. I pointed out such things as that Hillary and Bernie voted the same 93% of the time in Congress. It didn’t matter. They just hated her, and I couldn’t grasp the reason.
It wasn’t until I understood how active Russian hackers were in promulgating fake news in places like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit (places I don’t spend time) and others that I finally understood why. This tactic worked very well for them.
And it didn’t work only on Bernie supporters. It also worked on rust belt Democrats in places like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Between Comey’s finger on the scale and fake news targeted in those places at just the right time, to Trump went the win.
I have never bought the tired meme that Hillary ran a bad campaign. She ran a fine campaign, with the obvious caveat that there is always room for improvement, and people can quibble about that. But the fact that it was so successful in the face of such a sustained, systematic, coordinated and likely illegal crusade of lying opposition by Putin, American oligarchs and alt-right operatives even to the extent of winning the popular vote, is a testament to her success. In other words, she withstood all they threw at her and still managed to win the popular vote.
I love Bernie, but I smile a little when I hear people make the argument of how he would have succeeded where Hillary “failed.” I read about the opposition playbook the Trump team had in reserve for him if it looked like he might win the nomination. They would have smeared him just as hard as they smeared Hillary by cynically and ironically intimating he had ties to Russia and is a communist. He would have struggled to succeed in the face of it, same as Hillary did.
I am seriously concerned at the coalescence of common goals (albeit for different reasons) of American oligarchs, the Russian government/mafia (same thing) and the alt-right to fix our elections in favor of Republicans, even Republicans who are nominally Republican, such as Trump. We must fight tooth and nail against actual fake news promulgators such as Fox “News,” Breitbart, Zerohedge, Infowars, Limbaugh, Drudge, Sinclair News Group and all the others who recognize that the true battle is in the propaganda game. There’s a reason all the opposition players are working so hard to control the “message.”
As for the Trump “fact gatherers,” I suggest they should study the following facts:
There are basically 5 elements for the crime of Conspiracy.
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You must have two or more persons who
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Intentionally
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make an agreement
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to violate federal law or defraud the United states, and then
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Commit some overt act in furtherance of the agreement.
If it can be shown that the people who attended that meeting did indeed agree to accept Russia’s help to target voters with fake detrimental information and then provided voter information to Russian operatives to accomplish that goal, well then… Oh, dear.
Based on the facts known to date, I don’t find it much of a stretch.
I agree 100%. This is the point I’ve tried to make in the rare instance I post in these threads. The USA can survive Trump. He’s an incompetent buffoon out to enrich himself and embiggen his brand. The USA can survive the GOP implementing their agenda, in fact, that’s kind of the point of having an election. The GOP should be able to implement their agenda, they’ve won repeatedly in many areas over several elections (yeah yeah caveats, gerrymandering, etc). What the USA cannot survive is if foreign propaganda can be used to sway your election and if there’s no repercussions for a political party/individual using a foreign power to do so. The amount of indifference to this is… stunning to me. I’m a child of the 70s/80s, and to me the USA was always the place of liberty and democracy. That Americans more than anything else in the world loved their country and would DIE before seeing it disgraced and trampled upon. Now there’s 38% (roughly) of Americans who are like “Meh. Whatever. At least we won. Better than Hillary.” It is so different from the USA I used to know and it really is remarkable. When Trump said during his election said they should just cancel the election and declare me the winner, I thought for sure that was it. There’s no way an American candidate could even joke about cancelling an election. When he called out to Russia to find the emails, I thought FOR SURE, that was it. Surely no American is going to be ok with a Presidential candidate calling out to a foreign power. But nope, nothing. And that’s the biggest threat to the USA right now, total indifference so long as your side wins (and yes that true for the Democrats as well where applicable).
I think that’s going to be the final “drip” that seals their fate. And yet, there will be Trump supporters who will say that there is nothing wrong with doing this, that “everyone does it” and that it’s probably all Hillary’s/Obama’s fault anyway.
But a bunch of people will be spending time in jail. Many of them for the cover-up.
So you’re saying that if it can be shown that all the elements of a crime happened then it could be trouble for the perpetrators? Fascinating stuff.
There are a number of problems with that analysis:
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Hillary was trying to win the popular vote and Trump was not.
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See number 1. That was a stupid move for HRC to make, and really good campaigns don’t make stupid moves like that.
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If these people who were so easily influenced by fake news are so easily targeted, why wasn’t HRC’s campaign targeting them, too? A really good campaign would have done that.
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This meeting was in the summer of 2016, but HRC never had a particularly commanding lead in the polls even before that. Call it bad campaigning or a bad candidate, but it’s hard to separate the two.
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It’s not good enough to run a “pretty good campaign” if you have a candidate like Hillary. And let’s not forget that she lost the nomination in 2008 to Obama when she started with what looked like an impossible-to-beat lead. Lots and lots and lots of Americans just don’t like her. And she was an establishment candidate in a change election. Seriously, could Bernie have done so well against someone else?
I supported Bernie, but I’m not in the least certain he would have beaten Trump. I think someone like Biden might have been able to, but Bernie had his definite weaknesses outside the Democratic base (as did Trump outside his base).
If that’s the case, and I’d be surprised if it was, then yes, their goose is cooked.
It needs to be put this explicitly for those who continue to misunderstand things, and think “It’s OK because everyone does it”