> The law firms he's going after are the ones that knowingly lied and generated the whole "Russia Collusion" conspiracy theory.
Where's the lie? It's a fact Trump's 2016 campaign held a meeting in his home with a Russian spy to discuss an exchange of relaxed relations for dirt on Clinton. It's a fact Russia hacked the DNC and Trump helped disseminate the content of that hack. It's also a fact that Trump's campaign manager exchanged internal campaign data with a Russian intelligence officer, while the GRU was waging an influence campaign on social media targeting Americans to sway the election.
There's a few things you're slamming together that are better understood when teased apart.
There were actions that Russia took during the 2016 election season to support the election of Trump. This is a well documented fact.
There was a meeting between a Russian intelligence connected lawyer and Trump campaign personnel including Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort. In this meeting, the Trump campaign was offered information to use against the Clinton campaign. This is a well documented fact.
After thorough investigation, it was concluded that there was not substantial explicit collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. But that same evidence showed they were extremely aligned in their goals. Trump was clearly Russia's preferred candidate and Russia was spending time, money, and effort to support his candidacy in a number of ways.
That investigation was impeded by Trump, as Mueller found in his report and testified to Congress.
Trump and his acolytes like to take "Trump did not explicitly collude with Russia" to mean "There is nothing whatsoever to the idea that Russia wanted Trump to win and took actions to support that outcome." And that's just not the case. That's putting some extreme interpretations on the actual facts of the matter.
"Extremely aligned in their goals" - absolute horse shit.
And believe it or not, Trump can't control who Russia chooses as their candidate. The UK Labour Govt had Kamala as their chosen candidate and campaigned for her to win.
Foreign governments always have a view on preferred winners in elections. But just because Russia independently wanted Trump to win and tried to influence the election without his co-ordinating with him says nothing at all about Trump as a candidate. It more speaks to Russia's intelligence assessments.
The difference is in 2024, Kamala wasn't brokering a hotel deal in London with a penthouse for the King of England, and lying about it to the American people.
MI-6 wasn't hacking Republicans and laundering the material through Wikileaks so that Kamala could crow about it.
Kamala's campaign wasn't meeting James Bond in her home and making secret deals with him and lying about it when caught.
> It more speaks to Russia's intelligence assessments.
Yes, it speaks to their assessment that Trump is the candidate that supports Putin's interests.
Russia is a dictatorship that is often working in opposition to US interests. The UK is a close ally with an elected government. I know which one I'd rather be endorsed and supported by, should I be a political candidate. If Russia was supporting me I would want to understand why, because I don't feel my interests and positions would align with Russia's. I'd want to understand why they think my election would be good for them. Maybe I like those reasons, maybe I don't, but it's an opportunity for reflection and evaluation.
Don Jr could have said "No, that seems like it would be potentially seen as inappropriate" when that Russian contact reached out. Instead, he replied, "if it's what you say I love it".
I concur with 99% of this but there's a crucial point I need to make. According to the Mueller report, they specifically investigated "conspiracy", and never even touched the idea of "collusion":
"In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of 'collusion.' In so doing, the Office recognized that the word 'collusion' was used in public reporting about the investigation, but collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. For those reasons, the Office’s focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law." (Mueller Report, Volume I, p. 2)
This is important for two reasons. First, because during the election, the prime claim made by people who were pointing this out was that collusion was happening. An actual conspiracy between Trump and Russia was thought to be too outlandish even by the people like Seth Abramson, who was one of the most ardent proponents of the collusion idea.
So it's a sleight of hand:
- raise the bar from collusion to conspiracy
- say the bar for conspiracy is not met
- therefore Trump is exonerated of collusion
But the charge of collusion still stands. And as I laid out in my other post, the facts support the plain meaning of collusion - "secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others".
> After thorough investigation, it was concluded that there was not substantial explicit collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The second reason this is important is that because the bar was raised to conspiracy, we cannot claim that the investigation that was performed was sufficient. It wasn't a thorough investigation of conspiracy, so we can't even say they didn't find enough evidence when they didn't look under the biggest rocks.
For starters, the investigators were essentially barred from investigating any financial links. In 2008 Trump's own son is quoted saying "In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets", so any serious investigation of links between Trump and Russia should necessarily include financial links.
And of course now we have hindsight to know why financial links were verboten -- after the investigation concluded, it was revealed by none other than Michael Cohen, that Trump was actually brokering a "Trump Tower: Moscow" deal during the 2016 campaign. He had already signed a non-binding letter of intent with a Russian company, and the deal included a penthouse dedicated to Vladimir Putin. But Trump when asked about his dealings in Russia in 2016 had said this:
"I have nothing to do with Russia. I have nothing to do with Russia – for anything. I don’t have any deals there. I have no deals that could happen there because we’ve stayed away."
The most frustrating part about this is we didn't learn it through the Mueller Investigation, although we should have. The investigation was kneecapped, cut short, and then the results were spun and lied about (a federal judge admonished AG Barr for a "lack of candor" in the way he selectively quoted ad redacted the "executive summary" of the Mueller report he released before the full report, which allowed Trump to take a "exoneration" victory lap, that was anything but).
No, we know about this because Michael Cohen was arrested for campaign finance violations, for crimes he committed in 2016 on the behest of Trump, to buy the silence of a porn star Trump had an affair with.
And this doesn't even get into the second volume, which details the myriad ways Trump obstructed the investigation, which included firing investigators (Comey), witnesses tampering (dangling pardons in front of Manafort), lying to investigators (according to Mueller's testimony), etc. etc.
So it's safe to say the investigation was not thorough or complete.
This is just an infinite fractal mosaic of malfeasance, degeneracy, ineptitude, buffoonery, and all around disappointing behavior, from all parties.
The facts I stated were established irrespective of anything Clinton did or didn't do, so we can step past your smokescreen.
The Mueller report did not clear Trump. Clearly you did not read it, it's damning. Only according to Trump is he cleared by that report.
The Mueller Report Vol I firmly establishes that the Russians sought to interfere in the 2016 election, they explicitly preferred Trump over Clinton and aimed to help him by 1) hacking her campaign and 2) spreading misinformation on social media. It further found that despite the Trump administration claiming they the campaign had 0 contacts with Russian nationals, in fact they had over 100 contacts.
One such contact was a Russian spy named Natalia Veselnitskaya. She met in Trump Tower with Don Jr, Jared Kushner, and Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort. They discussed relaxing international relations with Russia, in exchange for providing dirt on the Clinton campaign. These facts were admitted to by the members of that meeting, after they first attempted to cover it up with a lie that the meeting was to discuss adoption of Russian orphans. Absurd.
It's also a fact that Donald Trump aided in the dissemination of the hacked materials, as he referenced them constantly and even implored Russia to find more. The Mueller reports found that GRU operatives actively responded to that public request from Trump. Again, this is all in Vol I of the report.
Then there's the smoking gun, the fact that Paul Manafort was caught funneling internal campaign data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a known Russian intelligence officer. This was not in the Mueller Report, but established later by the Senate Intel Committee in volume VI of their report on Russian active measures during the 2016 election, at a time it was chaired by none other than current Secretary of State, then Senator, Republican Marco Rubio. It was further confirmed by the Department of Treasury.
So I ask you again: where's the lie?
Because the facts found by investigators show collusion happened. Russia wanted Trump to win, and Trump wanted to win; the two coordinated publicly and in private; the campaign lied about it every step of the way; and they obstructed any investigation as much as they could, which included firing the FBI director, and lying about the contents of the Mueller report when it was finally released.
It's a stain of historical magnitude on the office of the presidency, and the fact it wasn't dealt with properly in 2016 is a direct cause of us being in this thread today, right now, discussing imbeciles in the highest echelons of government conducting themselves like people who can get away with anything. Because they already have.
"The Mueller Report Vol I firmly establishes that the Russians sought to interfere in the 2016 election, they explicitly preferred Trump over Clinton and aimed to help him by 1) hacking her campaign and 2) spreading misinformation on social media. It further found that despite the Trump administration claiming they the campaign had 0 contacts with Russian nationals, in fact they had over 100 contacts." -- Russia preferring Trump is nothing to do with Trump, and in fact backfired on them.
The fact that Trump made jokes about emails that showed the DNC cheating the primaries to disfavor Sanders and give first sight of questions to Hillary doesn't prove he's a Russian agent.
"Because the facts found by investigators show collusion happened. Russia wanted Trump to win, and Trump wanted to win; the two coordinated publicly and in private; the campaign lied about it every step of the way; and they obstructed any investigation as much as they could, which included firing the FBI director, and lying about the contents of the Mueller report when it was finally released."
There is no evidence Trump campaign colluded with Russia. If there was, he would have been indicted.
Edit: And the Mueller report notes[1] that as the primary reason Trump wasn't indicted. You keep making false statements about what's in the report. Perhaps that's something you might think about doing if you're going to use it as a source.
> Russia preferring Trump is nothing to do with Trump
It does because that's the reason Trump colluded with them.
> in fact backfired on them.
How do you figure?
Look around: the US is currently realigning itself diplomatically to favor Russia and turn against traditional allies like Canada/UK and Europe. NATO is hanging by a thread as Trump threatens to invade Greenland. US is capitulating on every demand Russia is making in Ukraine, lifting sanctions, dropping efforts to track kidnapped children, halting funding to Ukraine...
It could hardly be going any better for them! How do you think it backfired?
> doesn't prove he's a Russian agent.
I didn't claim he's a Russian agent, I claimed he colluded with Russia.
> There is no evidence Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
Yes there is and I already told you what that is, but I'll put it in bullet form:
- Lying about over 100 Russian contacts that happened.
- Lying about a hotel deal in Russia that was being put together while Trump was running for office.
- Talking to a Russian spy about hacking his opponent in secret and lying about it when caught.
- Handing campaign data to Russian intelligence officers while they were engaged in active measures to interfere in the election.
- Campaigning using materials from the DNC that Russians hacked specifically to help Trump.
etc. etc.
If that is not evidence, what kind of evidence would you say is evidence of collusion?
> If there was, he would have been indicted.
That he has not been indicted for this is not evidence collusion didn't happen, primarily because, as the Mueller report lays out (and you would know this if you had actually read it) "collusion" is not actually a crime for which one can be indicted under US code.
"The investigation found no evidence that President Trump or any of his aides coordinated with the Russian government’s 2016 election interference."
"However, "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities"."
And he was cleared of any collusion charges, cleared of "collusion". Trust the experts:
"Indeed, based on the evidence gathered in multiple exhaustive and costly federal investigations of these matters, including the instant investigation, neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion..."
Oh you've devolved to name calling now? Speaks volumes about the merit of any argument you may offer.
Who's Robin? Like Batman?
> and the Columbian Journalism Review
Okay, surely you agree with them about the danger of Trump today?
"When the president attacks the First Amendment from the Oval Office, or makes sweeping and false statements about some of the most important news organizations in the world, you can hide from it and hope it goes away, or you can speak up, saying publicly, That’s not right, and it’s not what I believe. Quite frankly, too few of you have stood up as we’ve come under attack."
Where's the lie? It's a fact Trump's 2016 campaign held a meeting in his home with a Russian spy to discuss an exchange of relaxed relations for dirt on Clinton. It's a fact Russia hacked the DNC and Trump helped disseminate the content of that hack. It's also a fact that Trump's campaign manager exchanged internal campaign data with a Russian intelligence officer, while the GRU was waging an influence campaign on social media targeting Americans to sway the election.
How is that not collusion?