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Democratic Party Files Suit Alleging Russia, the Trump Campaign, and WikiLeaks Conspired To Disrupt the 2016 Election (cnbc.com)
The Democratic Party is suing Russia, the Trump campaign and the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks for conspiring to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. From a report: The multi-million-dollar lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court says that "In the Trump campaign, Russia found a willing and active partner in this effort" to mount "a brazen attack on American Democracy," which included Russian infiltration of the Democratic Party computer network. The Trump campaign, according to the lawsuit, "gleefully welcomed Russia's help." The suit says that "preexisting relationships with Russia and Russian oligarchs" with Trump and Trump associates "provided fertile ground for [the] Russia-Trump conspiracy." The common purpose of the scheme, according to the Democratic National Committee, was to "bolster Trump and denigrate the Democratic Party nominee," Hillary Clinton, while boosting the candidacy of Trump, "whose policies would benefit the Kremlin." Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said the party's suit "is not partisan, it's patriotic."
Their Mueller investigation must truly be going poorly. It's been over a year and they haven't found anything that says Trump colluded. They've found wrong doing by various underlings but, considering the average person commits three felonies a day.... Now the Democrats want their own investigation where they themselves can run it and leak with impunity.
They couldn't stand the whisper campaign that Trump himself practiced for say, Obama's Birth Certificate, or Hillary Clinton's alleged crimes, they couldn't handle the investigation by Mueller despite calling for endless inquiries into Benghazi, Whitewater and whatever else. They couldn't even take it when people pointed out that Trump's endless pompous proclamations and self-professed boasting were challenged.
And wow did they howl when Trump's attorney got raided due to evidence of his acts of various malfeasance being too odious to ignore.
Now? Now it'll be something in a court of law, and everybody will get to watch.
Expect them to protest with their empty-handed declarations, that they'll make up in volume what they lack in substance.
This will be fun. Can't wait to see Podesta and Mook cross examined under oath.
Up until now, the Democrats have generally behaved properly in respect of the Russia investigation, leaving the interference and unwarranted attacks on law enforcement to the White House and the Republicans. However, I was distressed to read about this.
It is totally inappropriate to engage in this kind of political theater while Mueller's investigation is ongoing. When Trump and the Republicans are lying and attempting to interfere, by all means denounce their actions forcefully. However, lowering yourself to their level just feeds into the narrative that all politicians are the same, and they are all unprincipled conmen. It makes it harder to defend the institutions that are under attack.
I really believe if a small group of 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans in Congress could come together to denounce all anti-democratic activities, and pledge to act together in the country's best interests, they would do themselves and the country a great deal of good. The silent majority would applaud them. I am not holding my breath. I appreciate, by the way, that acting ethically here is more difficult for the Republicans as their administration has a lot to lose. However, I think that they could present their actions as heroic and vastly enhance their personal reputations in the process.
Clinton is running again, that should be obvious to all now. This is the funniest thing I've seen in a long, LONG time!
You're right- and bad news for Democrats. With her ability to raise financing she'll be a significant player in the primaries no matter who else runs. Hillary, like Trump, is a very polarizing figure. Disgruntled Republicans aren't going to vote Hillary- they would shoot themselves before voting for her.
She may not win the party nomination this time around, but even if she doesn't she'll probably hurt her rival nominee enough to help out Trump long term. If Hillary runs, even if she doesn't win nomination, it increases the odds of four more years of Trump.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Is that the Russians supposedly did a terrible, un-patriotic, anti-American thing, by revealing the truth to the American people. And people are screaming "oh my God, no! The truth is a threat to American Democracy!" I mean, does Hillary get any blame for what was contained in those emails? No. The evil thing was that the plebes found out what was in them. We basically operate under the assumption that, if we ever knew what they were saying behind the scenes, we would never vote for any American politician. I mean, perish the thought that we'd ever be relieved ... that we'd ever be pleasantly suprised were a politicians emails to be revealed. That's not even in the realm of possibility. The whole system is rigged so badly, that the truth, the TRUTH, is a poison pill for American politics. We really have nobody to blame but ourselves for this. Voting for the lessor of two evils for 200 years ensures we always get evil and we're clearly good with that. You can't make the arguement that we deserve better. So, anyway, yeah, Democrats suing for revealing the truth to the American people ... and proudly suing at that. Calling it Patriotic even. Weep for us.
I honestly don't think she will. And I don't think this is evidence of anything related to a specific campaign.
The DNC did the same thing after Watergate. That was a pretty successful lawsuit, and they gained a lot from it. My guess is that they're seeing echos of Watergate here, and playing the same hand that was successful the last time this sort of thing happened.
And a civil lawsuit will be very damaging to the RNC win or lose. They will be forced to air some dirty laundry in court, and it will likely demonstrate just how unprepared they were to be hitching a ride on the Trump train. My guess is that there's just as many distasteful things happening in the RNC as in the DNC, and this is one way to bring some of them to light.
I also fully expect a counter-suit from the RNC along the same lines. If that doesn't happen, I think some good money is on them having done some really problematic things that they want to limit exposure on.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Yes, we were pissed Hillary stole primaries through constant media manipulation, superdelegates, vote rigging, and what was that? Oh yeah. Russia. GTFO with your bullshit.
Hilary and the DNC actively promoted Trump, because they thought he was the easiest candidate to beat.
Hillary, far more than Russia, is the reason Trump is president.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The really funny thing about that election to me was, there was absolutely no other Democrat Trump could have beat - but there was no other Republican Hillary could have lost to.
Trump is lite a literal embodiment of proof there is fate or some higher power at work.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They have no case, even against themselves. Bernie lost because the DNC rigged the primary - legally. All according to rules.
Except, perhaps, maybe, the Clinton campaign starving his campaign by laundering donations through state committees. But that's an FEC violation waiting only for the FEC to act, as the allegations have been in the public domain for more than a year, and the evidence seems overwhelmingly obvious. Especially to Bernie.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Not necessarily. Flynn's confession was coerced. He'd spent over a million on legal and lost his house and they were saying they were going after his son next. The judge who presided is currently reviewing everything which is almost unheard of after a plea. I'm sure you are a good guy and all but I'm equally sure that if a Special Council looked through your life close enough they could put you away. I had this same conversation with a friend who was high up in the Bill Clinton campaign. He didn't believe me. I rattled off a bunch of laws that I suspected he'd broken and let him know that all those could send him to prison. He said: "Oh, I didn't know doing those was illegal". I said: Yep, that's my point. There is a lot of stuff that we do every day that is covered by felony level laws that we don't know about or simply ignore because we don't think they apply. All it takes is for a prosecutor to decide to follow up. I'm still waiting for someone to look at Huma Abbedin's forwarding classified emails to her husband to print. They are ignoring it. But I know that if any of my friends that I grew up with in Los Alamos did that with our nuclear secrets there would be hell to pay.
You voted for a delegate to represent a candidate, not a candidate. They also had a big chunk of "superdelegates", appointed by the party itself, so that everything wouldn't be left in the hands of smelly, stupid individual voters like yourself.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Spare me. If they'd found a shred of evidence it would have been leaked already like they leaked everything else. This whole "investigation" has been a sham trial by media and now they're just trying to goad Trump into doing something they can use to extend the party...
It's all over but the shouting. I see this as an act of desperation by the Democratic party. Mid-term elections are coming soon, the economy is doing well, unemployment is down, and they have been mostly too busy obstructing and absent from helping.
The guy won. Move on.
Federal law however has some strong things to say about how the 'actual' election is supposed to be run.
Except the obvious rule that voters have to provide proof of U.S. Citizenship.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Well, something the GoP demonstrated over the last few years is that political investigations are real crowd pleasers, so they really should not be so shocked the the Democrats actually learned something from them. The GoP made heavy use of the tactic during the Clinton years, and the Democrats did not retaliate during the Bush years I guess in an attempt to keep a moral high ground or hope that such theater could be kept from being 'eye for an eye', but then the GoP doubled down on it during the Obama years, so we are probably going to see more of it now.
Their Mueller investigation must truly be going poorly. It's been over a year and they haven't found anything that says Trump colluded. They've found wrong doing by various underlings but, considering the average person commits three felonies a day.... Now the Democrats want their own investigation where they themselves can run it and leak with impunity.
On the contrary Mueller's investigation seems to be moving fairly quickly.
And he's gotten a bunch of guilty pleas, including from Flynn, Papadopoulos, Gates who were some fairly important campaign members. Not to mention having Manafort absolutely dead-to-rights on really serious money laundering. Cohen, Trump's lawyer/fixer, being under direct investigation and having his documents seized. Not to mention Kushner, Trump's son in law, is now being investigated for both his company's long history of fishy dealings (submitting fraudulent docs for renovation permits), not to mention the question of who gave Kushner 1.2 billion to bail out the family business and why?
You are correct that we don't have any public indictments connecting the Trump campaign with Russian intelligence, but the investigation is far from over, and Mueller isn't likely to show his hand until he's ready to charge someone.
For instance, there's already rumours that Mueller has evidence that Cohen made a secret trip to Prague, an major allegation from the Steele Dossier that Cohen has denied. But Mueller may not want to make that evidence public at this point in the investigation, nor may he want to do it in October when he might be accused of inappropriate interference like Comey did. But if that evidence doesn't come out till after the election it doesn't help Democrats till 2020, and if they don't win a house they won't be able to launch congressional investigations.
More likely the suit has 3 objectives.
1) See if they can use subpoenas to get their hands on any proof of collusion before the midterms.
2) Open a line of legal inquiry going that Trump can't pardon/fire his was out of.
3) Keep generating Trump-Russia news. As they learned from the Clinton emails once the narrative is established all you need to do it trigger the keywords to be effective.
I stole this Sig
And your evidence for this is what?
That's what I thought.
Why is it so hard to let the investigation play out, and see what happens in the end? Why do you absolutely have to defend someone you've never met, that you know nothing about, on charges you don't understand based on evidence you haven't seen?
What has this person done for you that you are so loyal to him? It's baffling to me.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
There's plenty of evidence already available to the public (Jr meeting with Russians to talk about getting help in exchange for sanction relief is an obvious one). Seems like Mueller is just working through the mountain of evidence to get a solid case rather than push something flimsy.
The best political cartoon I've seen on this is a chessboard with Hillary as one king, pinned in the corner, checkmate. She says, "But as you can see, I have more pieces on the board, so in a sense, I won."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You voted for a delegate to represent a candidate, not a candidate. They also had a big chunk of "superdelegates", appointed by the party itself, so that everything wouldn't be left in the hands of smelly, stupid individual voters like yourself.
Imagine if you dislike gun violence and have never owned a gun and you get robbed at home by a gun toting criminal who takes stuff you really don't want to lose. And then you buy a gun so this won't happen again and I call you an "ammosexual gun lover and supporter of gun violence who hates kids". I get that it's fun to claim that the Democrats did this so only the big cheese could pick the winner, but that's about as accurate as calling you an ammosexual in my example.
The superdelegate thing was a reaction, maybe an overreaction, to the 1972 and 1980 election disasters the Democrats suffered. The rules at the time forced them to nominate what were basically unwinnable candidates. Superdelegates were put in so that there wouldn't be any more brokered conventions (the 1968 one also ended in a White House loss) and if something weird happened in the vote where a fringe candidate with almost no chance of victory somehow ended up with a small majority of elected delegates (McGovern in 1972), the superdelegates could save the election by voting for a better candidate. Now it's fair to argue if maybe the intentions were OK but it gives the appearance (accurate or not) of the common citizen's vote not mattering or if maybe the voters want to run a bad candidate they should be allowed to do so, but it's not really an attempt to stifle the voters so special interests get their way. I know the Sanders supporters are going to claim until they die that Bernie won and Clinton stole the nomination, but the superdelegates did not put her over the top. People forget that in 2008 the superdelegates voted mostly for Obama and they didn't mostly vote for supposed vote stealing Hillary. There's yet to be a nomination in which the superdelegates clearly voted for a 2nd place candidate in the popular vote to deny the voters their will. But again, the fact that people think that is exactly what happens all the time is possibly a very good argument that the system should be eliminated.