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CIA Captured Putin's 'Specific Instructions' To Hack the 2016 Election, Says Report (thedailybeast.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: When Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James B. Comey all went to see Donald Trump together during the presidential transition, they told him conclusively that they had "captured Putin's specific instructions on the operation" to hack the 2016 presidential election, according to a report in The Washington Post. The intel bosses were worried that he would explode but Trump remained calm during the carefully choreographed meeting. "He was affable, courteous, complimentary," Clapper told the Post. Comey stayed behind afterward to tell the president-elect about the controversial Steele dossier, however, and that private meeting may have been responsible for the animosity that would eventually lead to Trump firing the director of the FBI.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-14/new-russian-hacker-claims-putin-ordered-theft-clintons-email-after-first-one-refused
Thats what redaction is for...
Nothing burger? You should tell that to Michael Flynn, Peter Smith (oh...), George Papadopoulos, Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner.
Considering some of them have already admitted their crimes, it's odd that you forgot to mention it in your summary.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
>they were acting in a criminal manner to rig the nomination process
The party was in a financial mess, and Team Hillary essentially bought the debt and the right to have significant control of the party with it. Not illegal in the slightest, 'just' slightly unethical in that it was not traditionally how things were done.
Also, as it turns out, a giant mistake because Hillary was not actually a viable candidate.
> and to burn Trump with made with a made up dossier .
Nope. You know that dossier was first commissioned by Republicans, right? And then shopped to the Democrats after Trump secured the Republican nomination? It's standard opposition research. They even do it to themselves to see where they're vulnerable.
Oh, and it's not made up. Some of it is of questionable reliability, but that's what happens when you go looking for dirt - sometimes you get bad leads. It was put together by a former British intelligence agent, and recently another one gave public comment to the effect that it was actually credible.
So while I'd question the bits about the hookers and watersports, I wouldn't throw the whole report in the garbage. There's stuff in there worth investigating, ESPECIALLY when Trump calls it 'fake news'. With Trump, that's code for, 'could be bad for me'.
You have a very bizarre definition of "following this very closely" if you missed both Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos pleading guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about contact with the Russians during the campaign and transition. It was on pretty much every news outlet available.
the fact that we learned that the HRC team contributed to the campaign of an FBI deputy directors wife, to escape indictment; and another special prosecutor's wife works for Fusion GPS, the same wife who provided this 'dirt dossier' to the FBI, to her husband, the same person who spearheaded the wire tap in trump tower. (remember back in may when you insisted that trump was making that part up about an illegal wire tap?)
Here is why his investigation is struggling:
Peter Strzok - dismissed for bias and losing objectivity. This was more than saying something negative in a text, his entire career just got sacked to a shitty desk job in human resources. This wasnt a small thing, according to Meuller.
Buce Ohr - we learned that he met with Fusion GPS many times during the campaign, and his wife WORKS for fusionGPS and was part of the anti-trump dossier
Andrew McCabe - Deputy FBI Director and husband to Jill McCabe, while running for a Senate seat, received $467,000 in contributions from Terry McAuliff right around the time that her husband, Andrew, edited the words 'grossly negligent' to 'extremely careless' in Comey's statement, because 'grossly negligent' is the precise words in the law that would have triggered an indictment.
now stand back and look at this objectively... if HRC had won, and this same investigation was underway trying to impeach her, and you have all these examples of the investigation team being packed with hillary haters... so she screams VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY at the top of her lungs again... would you consider the fact that the prosecution would have a hard time moving anywhere with this?
You do understand impeachment right? Simple majority of the House has to vote for impeachment and 75% of the Senate has to vote to remove him. With all this 'reasonable' doubt and allegations of bias flying around, its never ever ever going to cross the 75% threshold and most of the senate republicans do not even like the guy.
That would be news to those of us who have been following this very closely. Please provide a citation.
Lying to investigators is a crime and guilty pleas are convictions. If you actually need a citation, then you haven't been following closely.
Of course, lying to investigators isn't evidence of an actual conspiracy to do anything, though it looks very bad. The charges against Gates and Manfort are much more substantial, but not related to the Trump campaign.
My guess is that Trump and his staff are too incompetent to have really colluded with the Russians to subvert the election. Putin decided to do what he could to manipulate the election on his own, and that it's impossible to know whether Trump would have lost without the Russian interference (I'd guess that Comey's October surprise had a bigger effect than everything Russia did). Russia did reach out to the Trump campaign (that's well-supported), and the Trump campaign was willing to cooperate but I suspect nothing happened that Putin wasn't already doing anyway, and the Russians were cagey enough not to say anything openly enough that the Trump staffers had a legal obligation to report it to the FBI. Which is good for the Trump team because they were too clueless to have realized they had such an obligation.
So, I think the way this is going to work out is that Mueller is going to shake a lot of trees and a lot of dirt is going to fall out, because Trump is dirty and the people he works with are dirtier. Little of the dirt will be related to the election. Trump will probably have been sufficiently well-insulated from the dirt to escape prosecution, but the issue will dog his entire term of office, and his remaining three years in office will be even less effective than his first, assuming he lasts out his term. I give it even odds that some combination of health and stress over the investigation get him to resign or be removed under the 25th. There's also a chance that he gets frustrated and decides to try to shut down the investigation, which would generate a huge backlash, and probably convince GOP leaders to impeach him in self-defense.
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I'm curious. When was being a lobbyist treated as treason (a crime defined in the Constitution)?
Quite the contrary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is just one of the things that Madison, and the court, have gotten wrong. The forces do not, in fact, tend to balance out in time because Madison had no concept of the degree of accumulation of wealth that would occur over the next two centuries and how much this would lead to a small oligarchy controlling immense resources and correspondingly acting as a superselector for the actual private citizen's choices. Shockingly, the courts have even recognized corporations themselves as having many of the rights of private citizens, in particular the "right" to petition the government via lobbying. In this way, the entire concept of democracy (republican or not) is subverted, as in the actual constitution corporations are NOT recognized as political entities -- all political power ultimately devolves to we, the people, the citizen. A corporation is not a citizen, nor is it a democracy.
Sadly, the only way we can get out of this at this point is EITHER having a congress that passes laws that muzzle lobbying -- personally I'd prohibit ALL lobbying, as the baby drowned long ago and all that is left is the sewer sludge swamp water of extremists on all sides, fueled by the oligarchs who maintain power as long as they keep wethepeople too distracted to care and too stupid to want to. Then we'd have to have a court that would actually consider the point that corporations are NOT citizens and do NOT have a right to "freedom of speech" -- only individual persons (owners or employees alike!) do, and only to the extent that they are willing to expend their own personal resources on it. OR we'd have to pass an amendment to the constitution specifically limiting the power of corporate entities to participate in or influence government decision making. Frankly I'd prefer the latter, but it will probably require the second American revolution to bring it about.
In the meantime, much as I appreciate the sentiment that corporate lobbying SHOULD be, well, not "treason" but a pretty serious crime, the lobbying part per se is the tip of the iceberg. I could even live with it as long as the real problem is repaired.
That is the simple fact illustrated here: https://www.opensecrets.org/ne...
and here: https://www.opensecrets.org/ne...
Scroll down to the graphic detailing PAC contributions. To put that graphic in perspective, one has to look at the numbers:
https://www.opensecrets.org/or...
and
https://www.theverge.com/2017/...
Opensecrets (among other places) follows this all the way down to the following brutal fact. It costs an average of around 11 million dollars to run for the Senate. It costs almost 2 million dollars to run for the House. It costs well over 100 million dollars to run for President. Actual donations from private citizens making less than $200,000/year constitute about 6 or 7 PERCENT of this. Well over 90% of the cost of running for office comes not from We, The People, but from corporations, filtered through PACs and the parties themselves, and those corporations are controlled by a tiny handful of the world's wealthiest people.
Nothing illustrates the corruption more clearly than the fact that many -- arguably most -- of the PACs contribute roughly equal amounts to Republicans AND Democrats running against each other. They don't care who wins, regardless of their stated position on whatever "issue" the PAC is supposed to give a shit about.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Only if by "Trump" you mean "a russian backed coalition of Syrian Government Forces, International Mercenaries, and Hezbollah Terrorists with little to no US involvement".