This is…
You…
You are kidding here, right?
Yes and no. I was exaggerating a bit when I referred to present day as I don’t do a lot of meetings in my current work. But when I worked in corporate America? Absolutely. I spent 90% of my time in meetings and the workday was a big blur of going to one meeting after another. Last week was ancient history.
Now, let’s be clear. I’m not saying there is no meeting that I could remember everyone from, but there certainly would have been some meetings like that.
Anyway, this is a big deal right now and the investigation is going to bring to light all sorts of things. What DTJ told Hannity in an interview is unlikely to be of any import a few months from now. Other stuff will be, for sure. But that Hannity stuff is mostly fluff.
I can certainly see in a drone-like setting like Corporate America, a lot of people are something like zombies lurching from one meeting to the next, barely able to keep anything straight, preoccupied with the few things that they need to present at those meetings and not really caring much about what else is talked about. You probably can’t remember exactly who is at them because you have the same sort of meeting every few days/weeks/months, and participation may vary without warning. Nothing much gets discussed that couldn’t have been done via other methods, but you need to meeting to reinforce the team aspect of the work that you’re doing. It’s simply a repetition of what you’ve been working on and listening to what everyone else was working on, and rarely is anything particularly interesting because it’s all corporate droning.
But I think the meetings we’re dealing with here are slightly different.
Are you calling me a drone? 
Some of the meetings were regular meetings with mostly the same people, but a lot of them were vendor or customer meetings. It varied a lot. And the meeting we’re talking about was one year ago, not one week ago. It’s easy to say “oh, I can’t believe he can’t remember such and such”, but each of us has our level of adjustment to the lives we lead. Maybe the kind of meetings these guys in would seem spectacularly memorable to you or I, but it was what these guys do all the time.
Anyway, feel free to have the last word. Not really something I’m invested in enough to continue debating.
I have to admit my own oversight on this. I guess I wasn’t associating campaign financing (donating money to candidates, which the Chinese may have done to Bill Clinton) with campaign interference (actively trying to smear the disfavoured candidate, which the Russians may have done to Hillary Clinton).
Neither is good, but I note that John Huang was convicted and Al Gore did acknowledge the problem. I can picture eventual convictions for Trump’s people (probably not Trump himself, though) but acknowledgement… nah.
As weak, and flexible with facts, as Okrahoma’s arguments can be it’s not useful to display the same factual contorionism in response. While the leaks of DNC email began after the meeting, the intrusions had happened in mid-2015 and April 2016 before the meeting. The DNC was already aware of the intrusion in April 2016. Russian involvement had already begun long before Trump looked like anything other than a hopeless vanity candidate.
It doesn’t take implied conspiracies greater than anything current data supports to explain either of those things just based on what is already on record. Russia also hacked the Republicans; they mostly hit older servers but old voter information data is still pretty useful for their purposes. In addition they hacked state and local level election databases. They also have a whole host of open source data about our elections through our press and polling organizations.
Our election wasn’t the first, or only in the time frame, exercise of their ability to target their information operations capabilities to a populace. NATO’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence publications pages have several papers detailing various aspects of their capabilities, it’s previous uses, and it’s tie to their hybrid warfare principles. I enjoyed “Internet Trolling as a hybrid warfare tool: the case of Latvia” from JAN16. There’s quite a bit of information available from before any of our election issues brought Russia’s capabilities to a broader popular awareness.
Russia hasn’t shown a particular need for active collusion to gather the information needed to effectively target their campaigns. They’ve been able to gather, analyze, and effectively use relevant data even without major collusion. Let’s not assume a sudden burst of renewed incompetence on their part. Let’s also not mistake the threat of exactly the same type of campaign against our future elections is removed if Trump (or another campaign colluding) isn’t around to help.
FYI - *An ellipsis (plural: ellipses) is a punctuation mark consisting of three dots.
Use an ellipsis when omitting a word, phrase, line, paragraph, or more from a quoted passage. Ellipses save space or remove material that is less relevant. They are useful in getting right to the point without delay or distraction:
Full quotation: “Today, after hours of careful thought, we vetoed the bill.”
With ellipsis: “Today … we vetoed the bill.”*
Listen, I agree. Staff meetings from June, you ask me for sure to name everyone who was there, I can’t do it. Not even close.
Ask me whether there was anyone there who was an ex-member of the Russian military who lobbies for Russia, though. C’mon, ask me.
Similarly: I have no idea what I ate for breakfast last Tuesday. Except if you ask me whether I ate quail eggs stolen from the Princess of Russia’s breakfast table, I can remember that. No! If I had, I’d remember!
Of course not!
He was listening on the intercom.
Mouthpieces. If they were robots, they wouldn’t be so incompetent at repeating his messages. (Interpreters?)
My biggest nits with Star Trek is, there’s not nearly enough meetings or checklists.
We do see a checklist in TOS The Naked Time which was kind of neat.
Besides being smaller than chicken eggs, they cringe. Chicken eggs just sort of lie there.
FWIW, I would mention President Clinton’s reaction to the ensuing investigation(s) was rather different than the current occupant of the Oval Office.
From the link in Sage Rat’s post:
The bolding is mine.
What’s shocking to me, OTOH, is that there are any. Nothing I have seen from them would lead me to that conclusion.
ETA: btw, when referring to Meuller & Team, the “& Team” should, by convention refer to his subordinates. It’s not really a thing thae he is kn the same team as whoever ennds up deciding which issues to prosecute.
Come again?
Yeah, I read that too assuming there was a Scotch/bourbon/vodka component, given the hour.
But I can’t really parse it that well either.
An intelligent man takes control of the investigation into his own (potentially) nefarious deeds. The stupid man denies the whole thing, acts guilty, and doesn’t take it seriously until the adults have all hired an independent council.
Sorry. Fat-fingers on a tablet.
“It’s not really a thing that he (Mueller) is on the same team as whoever ends up deciding which issues to prosecute.”
[grammar nitpick]are laid[/grammar nitpick]
Even some of the Fox News guys seem to be realizing that they can’t defend this while retaining any journalistic credibility.
Here, Charles Krathammer scoffs at the idea that incompetence is an excuse.
And here’s Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace. Wallace says “If you’re a fair-minded citizen you ought to be concerned”. Shape is much harsher, I often speculated that he’s going to defect soon to a more mainstream news organization. He’s obviously decided he can’t defend this crap anymore.
And, for your amusement, here’s the Trump Beatles singing My Son is Dumb
First they get laid, then they lie. (With humans, it is often in the opposite order.)