To the extent that there was anything in the email beyond the proposed deal, it’s nothing of importance.
Trump’s “vehement” denial was accurate. The proposed deal never came off, and at the time he made the denial you quote it had long since been abandoned.
But this type of thing (if possibly not this specifically) has been long known. Again, nothing new.
Good point, Il Douche’s moral and ethical poverty has been a known fact at least since Trump University! Nothing new to see here! Good catch, there, FP.
This is pretty much what it all boils down to, for some people.
Which is why you see so much silliness in these discussions.
The New York Times just released some emails between Sater and Trump’s lawyer and they are fanning an might implicate Ivanka as well. If Sater is flipped, as seems likely, this is going to be interesting.
Trump does not coordinate anything.
You have some apparent typos so it’s not clear what you’re saying.
But the only connection to Ivanka is that Sater asserted that he had so much influence that he had arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s chair 10 years earlier. So your presentation is misleading on that score.
Also, it’s clear from the NYT that Sater’s saying he would help Trump get elected only meant that he said that this proposed deal (which he was trying to sell at that time) would be such a boon to Trump’s image that it would help him get elected. IOW, just part of his salesmanship on that deal. Nothing there either.
Lastly, the NYT also says that this proposed deal itself has been previously reported on, as I suggested earlier.
In sum, this pumping of the story here is just part of a pattern of Trump-Russia CTs stretching further and further to boost their flagging story. Nothing more.
Well, one of us will be right and one of us will be wrong, and it looks like we will find out relatively soon.
While this is no “smoking gun”, I would think that being shown to be working a business deal will a Russian mobster while running for president would be newsworthy on its own.
Show me the part that makes you think this is about image much less clearly about image.
I doubt it. One feature of this story has been that as initial expectations that Trump would be implicated in Russian election-hacking have faded, the Trump-Russia CT have cast an ever wider net, to the point where people such as yourself are reduced to excitedly reporting on the fact that Ivanka’s name is mentioned in an article about a guy with connections to Russia.
The thing about that is that there’s no limit to that type of stuff. IME, what happens in such cases is that as the story fades, the less invested people lose interest. But the people who are invested to the point where they’re posted 150+ times to threads breathlessly announcing the latest indication that we’re almost there and the final conclusive proof is about to be revealed can just keep at it forever, flogging the latest to a dwindling audience.
I disagree. If you’ve been following this story, one thing that’s emerged even for those previously unfamiliar with Russia is that big business in Russia is inexorably intertwined with government, intelligence, and organized crime elements.
It’s not like Sater himself is/was a full time mobster. The allegation is that he has connections to organized crime. That pretty much goes for everyone high up in Russian business society. And the same goes for connections to Russian intelligence services.
Did you read the NYT article? That’s how they present it.
They don’t suggest that there was some separate effort to elect Trump, as part of the deal. Rather that the project itself would help get him elected. They don’t specify in detail how the project would help him beyond the email saying that the “ribbon-cutting in Moscow” would be part of it. But more broadly, the important thing is again that it was the project itself, e.g. where he “predicted that building a Trump Tower in Moscow would be a political boon to Mr. Trump’s candidacy”.
The article says that “The emails show that, from the earliest months of Mr. Trump’s campaign, some of his associates viewed close ties with Moscow as a political advantage”, which is also consistent with the above. (I myself wouldn’t even go that far. Again, this a salesman trying to sell a deal. He’s going to spin everything as some sort of advantage.)
What I can’t wrap my head around is how the Trump supporters, or at least the people who have already made up their mind that Trump has done nothing wrong, if you prefer that characterization, look at every story and say “this is no smoking gun, therefore the whole thing is a lie.”
I’ve said several times here that this story, the story of Trump’s weird subservience to Russia, the election, the Russian hacking, it’s all a long story that will last months and every time a new story comes out, it’s part of the puzzle. Some will turn out to be false, some will turn out to be unrelated, and in the end nobody knows what the puzzle will look like, but every piece of the puzzle is still newsworthy.
I don’t know what importance Trump’s business dealings with the Russian mobster (maybe I’m taking liberty with that term but his father is a Russian mafia boss and he went to prison for a deal involving the American mafia, so I’m comfortable with my assessment that he’s mobbed up in one continent or another) will end up being, but if any president has dealings with mobsters, that’s certainly newsworthy to me.
This line of stories (with the Washington Post’s add-on reporting today) strikes me as just as potentially exculpatory for Trump as it is damning.
One of the puzzles to be solved is Trump’s odd and enduring praise for Putin. One possible explanation for this was that we was trying to curry favor to get Putin to interfere (or continue to interfere) in the U.S. election, or to signal to Putin his potentially favorable policy if Putin could get him elected.
But the fact of his having potential business in Russia as late as January 2016 provides an alternate accounting for his Putin praise–he just wanted to butter up the guy that would likely control whether a deal got done. Of course, Cohen et al. are denying that Trump knew anything about the deal, but they’re probably just lying. Ironically, if they are telling the truth, then this would be less exculpatory.
I do think there’s quite a lot of “it depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is” going on when people deny that Trump was lying when he said he had no business dealings in Russia when the deal in question was terminated only months earlier.
Depends on context.
In the case of Clinton, whether he had previously had a sexual relationship with ML was about as damning for purposes of the question he was asked as if he was currently having one.
In the case of Trump, the issue of the day was whether the Russians had some sort of hold over him, in the form of debts or business interests. If he once explored a possible venture which came to nothing, it wouldn’t matter in that context.
I largely agree, with two quibbles.
First, very often the questions asked about past contacts. For example, ABC’s Cecilia Vega asked: “Can you stand here today, once and for all, and say that no one connected to you or your campaign had any contact with Russia leading up to or during the presidential campaign?” Trump tells her: “No.” [The perils of a badly-asked question, but I think in context he intended his answer to be denying contact.]
Second, even when asked in the present tense, I think the purpose behind asking was not exclusively about whether Russia maintained some kind of ongoing leverage over him. It was also about whether they had such leverage in the past and the likelihood of having it in the future. Assessing whether Russia would have some leverage over Trump also requires knowing whether Russia is the kind of place he would want to build in the immediate future. Indeed, if he tried and failed in the past because of lack of political juice, that would be pretty strong motivation to gain that political juice by way of his then-quixotic presidential campaign. I doubt he expected to win in January 2016.
Then why didn’t he stop in Jan 2016, or at least November 2016, or January 2017? Here he is today refusing to criticize Russia.
Having influence over him isn’t necessarily illegal, though. Legally speaking, he was just another private businessman up until his official electoral college vote in December. Unless it can be substantiated that he knowingly violated campaign finance laws or violated acts related to national security, I don’t really see anything that constitutes illegality.
I suspect we’re not talking about acts of “collusion” but rather acts of corruption, which may or may not necessarily involve quid-pro-quo (i.e. hacking in exchange for foreign policy changes). More and more this investigation, whatever we don’t yet know of Trump seems to be more related to his business practices than campaign practices. That’s not to say that Russia didn’t have an interest in seeing Trump elected and that’s not to say that Trump didn’t have an interest in his receiving help from Russia. But having mutually beneficial interests per se isn’t illegal, though it’s entirely possible that criminal wrongdoing occurred.
I don’t think this is any sort of puzzle.
Firstly, there’s a range of opinions about Russia. While it’s become fashionable to view the Russians as the #1 Bad Guys these days, it wasn’t so long ago that Obama ridiculed Romney for suggesting this in a presidential debate.
Second, regardless of whether Trump actually had any intention of doing business with Putin and needed to butter him up, it’s likely that his view of Putin was formed by a long time of seeing him primarily in the context of a potential business contact for himself or an actual one for others he knew, rather than in a foreign policy context. This would naturally put him in a much more benign light.
Lastly and most importantly, on which issues does Trump not have an idiotic viewpoint? It’s not like Trump has some sophisticated perspective on a broad variety of issues, such that if he’s an outlier on one of them you need to scramble to find a rational explanation. When it comes to Trump adopting a position on any issue, all bets are off, and no particular position can be seen as puzzling.
Putin is a darling of the alt-right, has been for years. He’s the yin to Merkel’s yang. All you need to explain Trump’s praise of Putin is to know that the alt-right would throw a shit fit if he ever said anything bad about a true alpha like Putin.
I think the last few leaks about the Trump campaign’s attempts at coordinating with Russia are getting further and further from anything that matters. The time for people to care about that was before the election. If it comes out that some mundane campaign finance law was broken, it won’t lead anywhere. “Oh well, there’s lots of rules, I was too busy winning to read them all.”
IMHO, the extent to which the Russia investigation matters now is that it gave Trump some justice that he could and did obstruct. That’s a much bigger deal, because it transcends (I hope) partisan sniping.