There’s something bizarrely inane about so-called news reports whose content consists entirely of stating that someone tweeted something. Tweets aren’t news. They’re tweets. And tweets don’t need to be reported. They are their own micro-reports.
If Watergate Happened Now the Press Would Be Too Busy Reporting on Tweets
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Don’t forget to throw in reactions to the tweet and comments about typos.
Don’t forget to omit how whistleblowers were actively hunted down by Barack Obama’s administration.
Don’t forget to also omit that he was a Constitutional law professor.
If filler is needed, add “jaw-dropping,” “you won’t believe how ________ looks today,” and a few quotes from “senior officials” about how close Trump is to being out of a job/indicted/convicted. (You can just cut/paste this last item from pretty much any news [sic] of the past 18 months.
On a less-cheeky front: I realize that a lot of dots are being connected, but has anything ACTUALLY linked Trump DIRECTLY to a serious illegality? Has ACTUAL collusion been shown yet? I read an absolutely pie-in-the-sky article yesterday where the fabulist writing it opined that the entire election could be rolled back and maybe that meant Pelosi would become president, and Kavanaugh could be removed. Then the same fantasist asked if anyone knew if any election had ever been undone so long after the fact, and if so, could the reader let him/her know. (Cue Kent Brockman: “Do your research.”)
The most realistic path I see, still, is:
Trump remains.
Pelosi get seated and proceeds to begin the long, arduous task of both being ineffectual and bipartisanly surrendering on every issue through the mechanism of compromise.
The Republicans want everything, so Pelosi will give it to them in the hopes that next time, they might give up a little (rinse, lather, repeat).
HRC will announce her run. As will Sanders.
With the race nowhere near as crooked this time, HRC will get her ass handed to her in the primaries, losing to Sanders time after time. (Except those key Rust Belt states that the dems never win in the general elections and thus are meaningless.)
She will blame everyone but herself and her wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing (aka Democratic Party Centrism) policies: Trump, her email server as a non-issue, Hitler, Napoleon, Le Quan, pant suits, Chthulu, Lewinsky, Janice Lester, godless Communists, the Ood. She will then demand a Supreme Court appointment for her concession to Sanders. Sanders will decline; HRC is too far into the pocket of big business, and the court work might interfere with Hill’s GS speeches.
During the general election, all the independents that voted for Trump because they loathed HRC will vote for Sanders.
The same talking heads who so actively had their tongues ALL the way up Clinton’s ass in 2016 will be nodding their heads in agreement about Sanders being so clearly the best candidate and the obvious choice to beat Trump and move the country forward.
I can only hope Sanders simply ignores the press while he’s in office.
Yay!
Megadittos on Sanders.
> but has anything ACTUALLY linked Trump DIRECTLY to a serious illegality?
Consigliori Cohen said he paid off mistresses at Don Trumpoloni’s behest. Assuming it was intended to suppress information that could have influenced the election it’s a felony on both their parts.
I’ll leave it to the reader to decide for himself whether it was intended to suppress information that may have influenced the election.
So when Bill Clinton lies about having had sex, I get to listen to multiple people explain to me that a blowjob isn’t sex. Those of you who are married, weigh in. How would this go if you tried it: “Honey, I didn’t have sex with him. I just blew him.” Or “Oh. You only blew him? Phew. I thought you had sex with him.”
Then I get to listen to how it’s not my business what goes on betwixt Bill and Hill and Congress had no business asking in the first place.
If this is the best Mueller has, that Trump, according to a known liar, paid off a fling, the only thing I can conclude is that Mueller was told to find Trump guilty of something that satisfies all the criteria for non-impeachment.
1. It’s the same basic thing Bill Clinton got caught doing, so pushing for it as impeachment makes the Dems into two-faced hypocrites. Imagine trying to ask HRC for (one of) her takes on it.
2. It’s a crime that makes Trump a victim, at least to his supporters. The mean old woman was shaking him down. That monster.
3. It also makes Trump into a player. He’s scoring all over the place. He’s the kind of smooth operator every guy wishes he could be.
4. Don’t forget that the longer this takes, the easier it becomes for Trump to argue that it’s all politically motivated.
This, more and more, seems like a whole lot of people are gonna be shocked, just shocked, when everyone under Trump goes to jail, but Trump simply walks away.
And my apologies. I mentioned Hillary Rodham Clinton but neglected to point out that Henry Kissinger, one of her mentors, is a war criminal. I apologize for the lapse.
You asked what was proven, not what’s still cooking.
> It’s the same basic thing Bill Clinton got caught doing
False. The crime here is not sex, but rather the pay-offs. Yes, it’s a felony if it was intended to influence the election.
We’ve got Trump dead to rights on obstruction of justice – the same thing Nixon faced impeachment for.
We’ve got DJTJR dead to rights on influence peddling, and if you think that daddy didn’t know about that meeting I’ve got some prime beachfront property in Arizona you may be interested in.
Maria Butina has plead guilty of being a Russian operative trying to influence the election, as if there wasn’t already enough evidence known to the public.
Consigliori Cohen has testified that the Moscow Project went on far into the campaign & Komrade Trumpinov was directly involved. That’s a huge conflict of interests even if collusion can’t be proven. But gosh, the real estate negotiations somehow directly involved the Kremlin and Putin was to have a penthouse on top of the tower. Them’s some interesting dots there.
The Whitewater investigation took six years.
CrazyH,
You’re completely right. But people aren’t going to hear “felony.” They’re going to hear “sex.” In the court of public opinion, especially because of Bill Clinton’s beating the rap for lying to Congress, a guilty verdict for Trump will be a badge of honor. “Proof” that the system is rigged.
(And don’t forget, Bill Clinton’s wife is besties with Hank “Bomb All the Children” Kissinger.)
> But people aren’t going to hear “felony.” They’re going to hear “sex.”
And you’re completely right as well…
@Alex – Henry Kissinger doesn’t actually exist. He’s been played by a variety of actors over the years. I wonder who’s Kissinger now …
(A pun a day keeps people away ;-))
> Tweets aren’t news.
They certainly shouldn’t be, and wouldn’t be if we lived in a sane world, but I’m afraid that option is off the table.
The preznit does federal business over Twitter, insults our allies and praises our enemies. You can bet our allies & enemies are paying attention. So, in this case, I see the lamestream media as doing the job of NewsHounds. (“We watch Fox so you don’t have to.”) I get alerted to the most egregious of his tweets, but I don’t have to waste time wading through his entire twit feed.
Don’t feed the troll (even if he was made president).
Also, if Watergate happened today they would not even pretend to try to make any sense of it, least of all on its own terms. It would all be like “Is Deep Throat the Lee Harvey Oswald of Richard Nixon?”, “Watergate-wald: top five disputed things”, “Impeachment-wald: Official sources confirm the president can pardon himself”, and “One weird trick to save the presidency from the deep state (hint: it’s anti-semitism)”.
Meanwhile the Newspapers would debate whether they should print stuff that Nixon recorded confidentially (“Rant tape-wald”).
More importantly, Tricky Dick would have been schooled by an NLP communication specialist and not ineffectually flailed about “I am not a thug”. Instead he would lead chants of “lock him up” (referring to Daniel Ellsberg’s therapist and/or the special prosecutors Rabbi). However, “it’s not illegal when the president does it” actually works out fine this time around as it is backed up by secret court rulings.
btw: I bet his tweet would read: Soros paid the Russkies to break into Watergate. False flag to save the failing Democratic Party. #Hillary-wald.
It depends on what your definitionn of “who’s” is.
CrazyH- You might want to take a look at Aaron Mate’s article on the latest Russiagate BS before you assert that Butina’s guilty plea proves Russia collusion.
https://www.thenation.com/article/russiagate-russophobia-mueller-trump/
1) Prosecutors couldn’t find any connection from her to Russian intelligence services.
2) Joking text messages from Butina have been misconstrued to show her offering sex for access as the judge in the case has admitted.
3) The best they have is a connection by her to an ex-deputy of the Central Bank of Russia.
4) She was a legitimate Grad Student with an interest in politics.
5) And of course no connection from any of this to the Trump campaign.
Basically it’s the usual conflation that any Russian in the vicinity of American politics must be a nefarious figure working for Putin to undermine our democracy. Not a fan of his, but if you think Trump’s going to be impeached on such a hazy connection, you’re nuts. Russiagate continues to be MSM/national security state propaganda ginned up to keep Cold War 2.0 going and the money flowing to the military-industrial-intelligence complex.
> Russiagate BS before you assert that Butina’s guilty plea proves Russia collusion.
I seem to say this a lot, “I’m perfectly happy to defend anything I do say, but I have no obligation to defend any nonsense you pull out of your ass”
I never said her plea proved collusion. Only that it is one more piece in an already overwhelming mountain of evidence that Russia supported Trump’s election. At this point I’m no more willing to argue that they *tried* than I am to argue whether the earth is flat.
So, can you explain why Butina would plead guilty? Am I seriously to believe she’s willing to go to jail because she wants to restart the Cold War? Do you have one, single, shred of evidence to support that assertion?
> And of course no connection from any of this to the Trump campaign.
Neither did I say there was a *direct* connection there, but I do ask, “Qui bono?”
A *direct* connection is DJTJR’s meeting with a self-avowed Russian operative with ties to the Kremlin, in which he offered to peddle the influence of the highest executive in the land in return for information intended to influence the election. Did Jr. promise daddy’s cooperation without daddy’s knowledge and consent? I doubt that very much.
> Russiagate continues to be MSM/national security state propaganda ginned up to keep Cold War 2.0 going and the money flowing to the military-industrial-intelligence complex.
Really? So Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg want to restart the Cold War, even though it would have a negative impact on their businesses and Zuck was only five years old when the Berlin wall fell?
Multiple independent cybersecurity firms want to restart the Cold War … why, exactly? In this narrative, they are all telling big, whopping lies which would absolutely ruin their careers and businesses for … what reason? Any one of them could destroy their competition simply by exposing the lies – why don’t they?
Why do Manafort, Cohen, Flynn, Gates, and Papadopoulos want to restart the Cold War? They have all plead guilty – are they willing to face jail time in order to propagate the lies necessary to support this vast left-wing conspiracy? Funny, they don’t strike me as people who would sacrifice themselves for some higher purpose.
Oh, and Russia wants to restart the cold war, which they could easily do in a straightforward manner, yet they concocted this elaborate scheme with the US media and Clinton Foundation instead …
At this point, denialism requires a conspiracy larger than the fake moon landing and the climate change hoax multiplied together. Thousands of players with nothing to gain and everything to lose all telling the same lie for no obvious benefit.
Excuse me while I scoff.
I suppose I could just direct you to Ted’s latest comic to make the point about how unlikely it is “Russia Collusion” will lead to Trump’s impeachment, but lets examine the ridiculous assumptions underlying the Russian collusion thesis.
1) You’re asking us to trust U.S. intelligence agencies, organizations that have repeatedly lied to the world and the American people (read just about every book Ted has written for examples). Ex-CIA officer John Stockwell (he was at the Agency in the 60s + 70s) once said that every time the CIA briefed Congress when he was with the Agency, they lied about one or more CIA operations. EVERY TIME. They’re willing to lie to us into multiple wars (Gulf of Tonkin, Grenada, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc.), but by God, this time they’re telling the truth!
2) Forget about “Shattered”, where the authors SHOW that Russiagate was cooked up by the Clinton Team days after the election so they wouldn’t have to explain how they lost to an orange buffoon or make concessions to Progressives.
3) Ignore the metadata evidence from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (including from Bill Binney, the man who designed much of the software the NSA uses) that the “hack” took place too quickly to be downloaded over the internet, so it had to be an inside job at the DNC, likely to a flash drive.
4) Ignore the many Russiagate stories that have been retracted (with some reporters fired for making them) by the press. Ignore that the most recent Guardian allegations have nothing behind them except intelligence agencies that have an axe to grind with Russia & Wikileaks. Somehow Manafort gets into Ecuador’s London Embassy 3 times without showing up on the 24/7 surveillance undertaken by multiple spy agencies, w/o getting recorded by the Ecuadoreans, and somehow got through British customs without getting his passport stamped, so unless you want to posit that the British government is part of Russiagate…
5) Russian intelligence is smart enough to hack the DNC, but is dumb enough to hack it in a way that it’s obvious that Russians did it. Forget the Vault 7 tools by which the CIA has the ability to fake the electronic signature of any country they want, so we can’t trust any attribution of the hack.
6) When Russiagaters have to defend their allegations to a skeptic like Aaron Mate, they’re generally reduced to sputtering assumptions before they hang up.
7) Stretching the truth. Butina pled guilty to not registering as a foreign agent, but everybody’s repeating she pled guilty to spying. She didn’t plead guilty to spying or to working for the Russian government. Cohen could’ve been charged with perjuring himself before Congress that he had seen nothing to prove that Trump had colluded with Russia, yet that’s not one of the charges he pled guilty to, which means they don’t have enough EVIDENCE that there is Russia collusion with the Trump Campaign, 2 years after the Mueller investigation started. By this point in Watergate and Iran-Contra, it was clear the President had lied about what happened, but Mueller’s going to make damning allegations any day now.
8) Somehow the Russians with much less money than the $1+ billion Hillary spent on the campaign influenced enough people to swing the election, a preposterous. Certainly Israel and Saudi Arabia put in much more money to influence the election. The NY Times has this on Israeli collusion with Trump that’s much clearer and more concrete than any Russiagate allegations:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/politics/rick-gates-psy-group-trump.html
So go after Trump on that, where the Israeli government might cooperate to provide more evidence.
9) None of us seem to have been manipulated into voting for Trump by these efforts, yet we’re supposed to believe that tens of thousands of Americans were in the states that swung the Electoral College to him. Find me a Trump voter who was convinced by the social media campaign to vote for him, because it’s probably a few thousand across the entire country. I voted for Jill Stein because I was tired of voting for the lesser evil, and I refused to vote for Hillary, a candidate I knew had participated in war crimes in Libya, and might do worse in Syria. I made up my mind when I saw a segment on Democracy Now! in mid-2015 about her role in the Honduras 2009 coup, and decided then I would never vote for her. There’s an assumption here that American voters are easily manipulated morons that has no basis in fact.
1) You’re asking us to believe that all of our intelligence agencies are not only telling HUGE lies, but actively coordinating those lies with other country’s intelligence agencies, private cybersecurity firms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Senate Republicans, and industry insiders.
IOW: A far larger and more complex conspiracy than the obvious explanation.
Even ignoring the obvious fallacy in your argument (“Sometimes they lie, therefore they always lie”) – it strains credibility to believe such a conspiracy could exist. Any one of the players could expose the lies, yet no-one has.
2) “Shattered”, where the authors SHOW that Russiagate was cooked up by the Clinton Team days after the election …
Haven’t read it – did the authors explain why Facebook joined in? Or why the DOJ jumped on the bandwagon? This narrative assumes that everyone listed in 1) above is very sad Hillary lost.
The CIA, FBI, NSA, and Homeland Security aren’t exactly known for being liberals. Bill Gates endorsed Bush not once, but twice. Comey and Mueller are both registered Republicans.
3) Ignore the metadata evidence from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
They’ve been pretty much debunked at this point. Several members refused to sign, and others have since recanted.
4) “Some people have been wrong, therefore all people are wrong.” Same fallacy as above.
5) Russian intelligence is smart enough to hack the DNC …
Many people have trouble grasping that this is *ENGINEERING* – science; ones and zeroes; laws of math and science. It is 100% falsifiable in a court of law. It’s not subject to opinion and computers don’t have political agendas.
Moreover, MULTIPLE INDEPENDENT CYBERSECURITY FIRMS have verified the data. Per this narrative, however, they are all lying. Every one of them making public statements they know to be false. Any one firm/agency could blow the cover off – yet none have.
Each of these firms stand to destroy their businesses and professional reputations because … why, exactly? Any one could eliminate all their competition in one fell swoop, yet they don’t.
Are you familiar with the Carbanak gang? They’ve scammed millions – perhaps billions of dollars from banks using methods very similar to the attacks on the DNC. They’re still running around loose, they’ve been discovered multiple times, discovered to be in Russian, but they just fold up shop, move, and try a different bank later.
The point being that they don’t have to continue forever, just go undiscovered long enough to get the job done.
6) When Russiagaters have to defend their allegations to a skeptic …
When deniers defend their allegations to me, they’re generally reduced to screaming about Hillary, spouting fallacies, and calling me a democrat, but never, ever, actually defending their own arguments.
which proves nothing either way.
7) Butina pled guilty to …
infiltrating the NRA for the express purpose of supporting Trump. (and yes, she’s admitted being a Russian agent.)
8) Somehow the Russians with much less money than the $1+ billion Hillary …
Another red herring. Hack shops are cheap to run, a few computers, a few hackers, a few cases of Mountain Dew and you’re all set.
9) None of us seem to have been manipulated into voting for Trump by these efforts,
“Argument from ignorance” – neither can you prove they didn’t. However, that is absolutely irrelevant to the question of whether the President conspired with an unfriendly foreign country to undermine our most important right.
So, you’ve thrown some oil on the fire, shown up some weaknesses and spouted a whole lot of fallacies.
But what you haven’t done is provide a motivation for this Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. Why is the Senate Intelligence Agency playing along? Why are Congressional Republicans playing along? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram? Independent cybersecurity firms? Are they all sad Hillary lost? Are they all trying to restart the Cold War?
Given a simple, straightforward explanation with clear motivations on all parts, vs. a vast, vague, pointless and self-contradictory conspiracy theory I’ll go with simple every time.
But then, I’m still waiting for that vast, vague, pointless and self-contradictory conspiracy theory to actually be articulated. It’s easy to throw stones, much harder to come up with a cognizant and cohesive explanation of your own.
CrazyH-
1) When Western intelligence agencies have incentives to lie (like getting more money by pushing Cold War 2.0) more than a little skepticism is warranted. Then a look at the flimsy evidence they’ve provided (claiming Abby Martin’s RT show somehow influenced the election when she was off the air a year before it), I await better evidence.
2) Ok, if you’re so smart about computer engineering, explain to me how Bill Binney is wrong when he says that the NSA watches every interaction on the internet, so there would be a zero % chance of the Russians hacking the DNC without the NSA being able to show exactly what happened, and they would already have enough evidence w/o any other investigation necessary, so if they’re not showing such evidence, THEY DON’T HAVE IT. Please tell us when you served in the NSA, so we know you have a leg to stand on.
3) You make me laugh. Cybersecurity firms literally get BILLIONS from the U.S. government, so yeah, they have a financial incentive to push fears of Russian hackers being out to get us. Terrorism or China aren’t big enough threats to justify our insanely bloated defense budget so they need to add Russia to the mix, so there’s the motive for the DOD to be on board. Democrats can use it to stop progressives from taking over the party after the debacle that was 2016, or any effort for a 3rd party. Political opponents of the establishment (see Corbyn, Jeremy) can be whacked for being insufficiently anti-Russian.
4) Russiagate also helps to justify the repression of dissenting left voices on Facebook et al. NY Times just put out an article claiming Russians influenced African-American voters not to go to the polls (it couldn’t be because Bill put their relatives in jail, or Hillary called them super-predators) so lets de-platform Black Agenda Report and BLM. And we know algorithms have been altered to prefer mainstream over alternative media, slowing its inevitable demise to net-based news.
5) Russiagate is great for ratings, and we know how cable news loves ratings. They helped elect Trump because they were chasing ratings, so they’ll beat this dog to death unless Mueller actually brings the show to a close.
Let me take a guess that you grew up in the middle of the Cold War era. I grew up in the 80s, so I didn’t go through the intense Russophobia of the earlier part of the Cold War, and I don’t see Russia as a bogeyman. They’re a mid-level power with nukes and an economy that’s 8% of ours in size. I could agree they swung a few hundred or thousand votes, but they didn’t win the election for Trump with Buff Bernie & Jesus fighting Satan posts. I’m sure there were some countries with influence operations quietly helping the Clinton campaign, and all foreign collusion is dwarfed by the major parties and the big donors. Kochs and Mercers should be the focus of your ire much more than Russia, their money actually buys elections and they loyalty of candidates.
One more off the smorgasbord, I’m not going to tackle the whole thing.
“Ok, if you’re so smart about computer engineering, explain to me how Bill Binney is wrong when he says that the NSA watches every interaction on the internet, ”
Actually, I am a computer engineer with a solid background in security. (You’ll excuse me if I don’t post my resume.)
As for “NSA watches every interaction on the internet:” Patently, absurdly, false. The NSA monitors the internet in the same wise as the DOT monitors the highways. They can tell general trends but they can’t tell you what’s in each and every car, where it’s going, or why.
In order to do what’s suggested, they would have to capture every packet on the net, stitch them back together into messages, then parse and interpret each message. They’d have to back trace every single one back as far as they could – it’s easy to tell which server any one packet came from, but where did that server get it from? The trail gets murkier with every step back and while the information may be captured in server logs – those logs are not held in memory or publicly accessible. You pretty much have to get the admin’s help to scrabble through them.
So, let’s say we’ve managed to reassemble a message and determined that it might be a spearphishing email. The only way to know for sure is to reverse-engineer the payload and figure out what’s it’s supposed to do.
All in real time.
At this point, the required infrastructure is larger than the actual internet. Quite an achievement in an of itself – But Wait! There’s More! The overwhelming majority of traffic on the internet is encrypted. Contrary to popular misconception, the NSA has not cracked RSA (they’d need to discover some new mathematical laws to do that.)
So, stir decryption into the mix & we’re now into “Millions of computers for millions of years” territory just to handle one minute’s worth of traffic.
But we don’t need such back-of-the-envelope analyses in the first place. We know that hacks happen all the time – costing the country billions of dollars, imperiling our security, and interrupting our cat videos.
If the NSA had the power to stop them, they would. They’d get all the funding they needed without constructing some cockamamie story about election meddling. Moreover, they would have solid proof: they wouldn’t need to fake up “proof” in order to make their point.
CrazyH-
Seems to me what you’re saying that they never will be able to prove that Russians were behind the hack (unless some Russians were to admit that they did it). So how the hell can they prove that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians on that subject. And that tracks with the only internal NSA document we’ve seen regarding hacking, the one Reality Winner provided to the Intercept that clearly notes that attributing the DNC hacking to a particular GRU unit was a judgement by analysts, and could NOT be proved.
https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/top-secret-nsa-report-details-russian-hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election/
Again, I’m confident in my skepticism, especially when we consider all the complicated things that Mueller will have to prove in order to bring Trump down with Russia Collusion. I’m sure he’s corrupt, and the recent statements by the former editor of the National Enquirer alluding to possible Trump collusion with the Saudis provides a more likely means of ending the Trump presidency (or the emoluments clause for that matter). If anyone swung the election through social media, it was Cambridge Analytica, not the pinky-dink Russian “influence” operation.
Focusing so much on Russia collusion gives a huge pass to the horrible campaign and candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Not campaigning in the states where the election was lost, choosing Tim Kaine as VP, a big F-U to every Bernie supporter (I would’ve voted for her if Warren was the VP choice), the pied piper strategy to promote Trump, and putting her personal ambition ahead of what was the best interest of the country. If Trump was such a danger, why not let the better candidate (as we saw in every poll up to the election) run, Bernie Sanders?
Putting so much faith in Mueller also means we’re not looking at the systemic problem that is our current socio-economic system, and the Democratic Party. Trump can lose in 2020 or be impeached and if we don’t end Neo-liberalism, we can expect a future Republican President who’ll be like Trump, but will know how to use the levers of government to destroy our country. Forget Mueller and start organizing a mass movement to change this country, it’s the only thing that’s going to save us.
> Seems to me what you’re saying that they never will be able to prove that Russians were behind the hack
Nope, only that this real-time monitoring fantasy is simply not possible, nor is is possible to keep track of enough data to come back after the fact and put the pieces together.
(Also, you just contradicted yourself – you started out claiming they were omniscient and therefore couldn’t have any proof (??) so now that we have found that they aren’t omniscient does the prove they do have proof?)
> And that tracks with the only internal NSA document we’ve seen regarding hacking
Not really – they’re more or less unrelated. However, that document does include a digital signature for the payload used in the spearphishing attack, (that would be the attack which is purported to be a hoax made up by the DNC and implemented using a time machine.)
That document corroborates the DastardlyRussiansGate story. Also note that it’s the only leak we’ve seen – given that the FBI, CIA, NSA, and HS are all in on the hoax, you’d certainly think that there’d be at least one honest Snowden type to blow the lid off. (Especially given that law enforcement attracts right-wingers – isn’t there a single one of them to stand up for the man he voted for, knowing that he’s being unfairly persecuted? That man would be a hero, lauded by the right and pardoned by the president. Where is he now that they need him?)
> I’m confident in my skepticism, especially when we consider all the complicated things that Mueller …
You’re conflating two very different things, whether Trump is guilty is an altogether different thing than whether he will be convicted.
I, personally, doubt he’ll ever serve time. Bush, Cheney, and Obama are all still free men regardless of well-documented war crimes.
> not the pinky-dink Russian “influence” operation.
Suggest you go back and READ the link I posted. The latest research – commissioned and released by the [republican] Senate Intelligence Committee – shows that the social media campaign was both larger and more effective than previously reported.
But of course, the republicans could have bribed both Cambridge University and New Knowledge to undermine their boss by perpetrating a hoax (even though they’ve got a lot more reliable, powerful, and most of all factual tools at their disposal.)
> Focusing so much on Russia collusion gives a huge pass to the horrible campaign and candidacy of Hillary Clinton.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve said this, “IT’S NOT ABOUT HILLARY!”
Hillary is an entirely different person than Trump. She lost the election, it’s over. What say we concentrate on the horrible administration currently in power?
However, continually bringing her up calls into question one’s motives. Are you really seeking Truth and Justice – or are you just out to own the Hillbots?