Russia Collusion Scandal (aka A Leftist fantasy)

looks like they buried the lede in the last paragraph

the more information revealed it is becoming apparent Trump was played.
They targeted a greedy, over leveraged ambitious to a fault stooge. A Boob. A Tool
An unwitting pawn in the Russian campaign.

It is informative going back to the S Florida House (D) primary race where a woman named Taddeo was running to be nominated for a House seat. No one outside of Florida has heard of her , but reports at the time vaguely indicated she was a target of Russian dis information. She eventually lost her primary race.
I know the family so followed the race at a distance. The details are no longer clear but do remember there was embarrassing information ( I think that was what it was) published that no one could figure out, where it came from. Makes you wonder how many of those races were so effected.
You will have to look that up for the details

I no longer think Trump or his cronies initiated collusion with the Russians. I think he was a target.
Never had a conscious choice. A deal too good to be true. (again with that phrase)
To the point as of today he and his are wondering what hit them.
My point is the Presidential race is proving to have been the tip of the iceberg on how massive Russian influence was, IS, in our electoral process

This report this morning:

https://apnews.com/3bca5267d4544508...t-exposes-Russian-hacking-beyond-US-elections

But, they never got into HRC's private server.
Just sayin'

Bearing out Condi Rice and Colin Powell
ain't that somethin'
 
my worry is less with whether or not trump and his camp personally colluded and more with how russia was able to influence the election by causing further division. apparently the russians organized both sides of a texas protest and encouraged both sides to "battle in the streets." there were bots and trolls spreading disinformation. i'll just post some from another comment:

"New York Times' summary of the hundreds of thousands of Russian online trolling employees directed by Putin (published in 2015, even before the election):
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html
The trolls are measured on how many likes they get and know that bringing up "guns and gays" with conservatives is one of the guaranteed ways:
“That could always get you a couple of dozen likes.”

Russia's accounts setting up Texas secession protests and anti-Hillary Clinton protests:
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-brief...ok-group-asked-texas-secession-movement-to-be
Russia-backed groups trying to set up a California secession referendum ballot initiative:
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/04/17/calexit-leaders-drop-ballot-measure-to-break-from-the-u-s/

Russian accounts pretending to be American Muslims:http://www.thedailybeast.com/exclus...slims-to-stir-chaos-on-facebook-and-instagram"

the list is extensive. i think it's safe to say we lost a cyber war in 2016. Bannon also has his hand in all of this. his main goal is to cause division. what i don't understand is trump's denial of all this and refusal to do anything about it. we were and are under attack.
 
Is what Russia is doing anything more than what we have been doing all over the world? Now that someone is doing it effectively back at us people are up in arms. If what Russia did was an act of war then started the war and he was just returning fire.
 
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Is what Russia is doing anything more than what we have been doing all over the world? Now that someone is doing it effectively back at us people are up in arms. If what Russia did was an act of war then started the war and he was just returning fire.

We interfere. They interfere. You are right about that.

Trump is being Benghazied on a grand scale. But there is a lot of material to work with (including crimes being unearthed by Mueller). It is what is sometimes referred to as a target rich environment. And Trump is playing the game very poorly. So poorly it is possible he gets impeached for obstruction.

But there is an element beyond domestic politics. I think it is very important for the public to understand as fully as possible what the Russians did. If you are anti-Trump there is a convenient convergence between high-minded public policy and the desire to git im.
 
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Is what Russia is doing anything more than what we have been doing all over the world? Now that someone is doing it effectively back at us people are up in arms. If what Russia did was an act of war then started the war and he was just returning fire.

maybe not. but that doesn't mean we ignore it, play into it, and just hope it goes away.
 
Some interesting details in this CNN article (especially the last paragraph):

Much is being made of Donald Trump, back when he was a Republican presidential candidate under pressure to show that he had a foreign policy team, referring to George Papadopoulos as "an oil and energy consultant, excellent guy," according to a recording produced by The Washington Post.

What has not been reported much from that recording -- which was made during an interview Trump had with the Post's editorial board -- was what Trump said just before he uttered the guy's name:
"Do you have that list, so I'll be a little more accurate with it?" Trump asks an aide, responding to a question about his foreign policy advisers.

We don't know how much Trump actually knew about who was on the list, but he begins reading notes from a piece of paper. One suspects, from his delivery, that if Jason Voorhees had been listed, Trump would have read his name and said: "Hockey player. Excellent guy."

That recording was taken on March 21, 2016. On March 31, Trump's campaign released a picture of the candidate meeting with his foreign policy team, and Papadopoulos is shown at the table. At this event, according to The New York Times, Papadopoulos "pitched the idea of a personal meeting between Mr. Trump and (Russian President) Mr. Putin," but then-Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, "as the campaign's top national security official, spoke vehemently against the idea, asking others not to discuss it again. Mr. Trump did not challenge him."

My sense of the way Papadopoulos interacted with the rest of the campaign is that he (and his contacts with Russians and the Maltese Falcon) were really small potatoes and that the campaign had much better contacts at a much more senior level. Otherwise they would have been more eager to exploit the opening offered by the Maltese Falcon. There is an alternative interpretation that is more favorable for the Trump campaign. And this is that they knew enough to be wary in their interactions with the Russians.
 
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name:
"Do you have that list, so I'll be a little more accurate with it?" Trump asks an aide, responding to a question about his foreign policy advisers.

We don't know how much Trump actually knew about who was on the list, but he begins reading notes from a piece of paper. One suspects, from his delivery, that if Jason Voorhees had been listed, Trump would have read his name and said: "Hockey player. Excellent guy."

Classic.
 
Sam Clovis, Trump campaign co-chair and "campaign supervisor" in Papadopoulos statement, withdrawn from Agriculture Dept nomination.
 
Funny note: Victoria Toensing, whom I had referenced in the initial discussion about the Uranium One corruption article in The Hill--she was the attorney for the alleged FBI "whistleblower"--is also Sam Clovis's lawyer.

Worth commenting how one of the people who was apparently pimping the "look over here!" story is also representing a Trump campaign official (who, it must be said, was characterized as a cooperative witness).
 
Is what Russia is doing anything more than what we have been doing all over the world? Now that someone is doing it effectively back at us people are up in arms. If what Russia did was an act of war then started the war and he was just returning fire.

We also did the same thing to Russia herself, except at a much more crucial juncture in the country's electoral history.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/russia-us-clinton-boris-yeltsin-elections-interference-trump/
 
At a March 31, 2016, meeting between Mr. Trump and his foreign policy team, Mr. Papadopoulos introduced himself and said “that he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin,” according to court records.

“He went into the pitch right away,” said J. D. Gordon, a campaign adviser who attended the meeting. “He said he had a friend in London, the Russian ambassador, who could help set up a meeting with Putin.”

Mr. Trump listened with interest. Mr. Sessions vehemently opposed the idea, Mr. Gordon recalled. “And he said that no one should talk about it because it might leak,” he said.

Several of Mr. Trump’s campaign advisers attended the March 2016 meeting, and at least two of those advisers are now in the White House: Hope Hicks, the communications director, and Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser.

After Mr. Trump was sworn in, he could not escape questions about Russia. At a Feb. 16, 2017, White House news conference, a reporter asked Mr. Trump, “Can you say whether you are aware that anyone who advised your campaign had contacts with Russia during the course of the election?”

“No,” Mr. Trump said. “Nobody that I know of. Nobody.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/...column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
 
looks like perjury for Sessions and possibly Hicks and Miller if they testified under oath that no one from the campaign reached out to the Russians
 
looks like perjury for Sessions and possibly Hicks and Miller if they testified under oath that no one from the campaign reached out to the Russians

All I really want out of this is for Stephen Miller to rot in a cell. I'm pretty much okay with whatever else so long as that happens.
 
At a March 31, 2016, meeting between Mr. Trump and his foreign policy team, Mr. Papadopoulos introduced himself and said “that he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin,” according to court records.

“He went into the pitch right away,” said J. D. Gordon, a campaign adviser who attended the meeting. “He said he had a friend in London, the Russian ambassador, who could help set up a meeting with Putin.”

Mr. Trump listened with interest. Mr. Sessions vehemently opposed the idea, Mr. Gordon recalled. “And he said that no one should talk about it because it might leak,” he said.

Several of Mr. Trump’s campaign advisers attended the March 2016 meeting, and at least two of those advisers are now in the White House: Hope Hicks, the communications director, and Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser.

After Mr. Trump was sworn in, he could not escape questions about Russia. At a Feb. 16, 2017, White House news conference, a reporter asked Mr. Trump, “Can you say whether you are aware that anyone who advised your campaign had contacts with Russia during the course of the election?”

“No,” Mr. Trump said. “Nobody that I know of. Nobody.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/...st-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Fake news. Focus on the Dems. GDP. MAGA.
 
Mr. Sessions vehemently opposed the idea, Mr. Gordon recalled. “And he said that no one should talk about it because it might leak,” he said.

The way Sessions has behaved about the whole matter suggests he is hiding something big. Bigger than what we know about the activities surrounding George Papadopoulos and bigger than the meeting taken by Junior, Kushner and Manafort with the Russian lawyer. Certainly he seemed very concerned about the risks of leaks about those kinds of contacts.
 
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