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Post by oilsooner on Mar 26, 2019 5:39:31 GMT -6
Backpedaling: www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/25/john-brennan-ex-cia-chief-offers-mea-culpa-on-trum/Former CIA chief John O. Brennan now says his months of attacks on President Trump may have been based on “bad information.” One of the president’s harshest critics had a muted tone on Monday as he discussed special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” No evidence was found to support the claim that Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign “conspired or coordinated” with Russia. “Well, I don’t know if I received bad information but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was,” Mr. Brennan told host Joe Scarborough. “I am relieved that it’s been determined there was not a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government over our election.” Mr. Brennan said in December 2018, for instance, that Mr. Trump should prepare for the “forthcoming exposure of your malfeasance & corruption.” “We need an actual leader — our Nation’s future is at stake,” he tweeted Dec. 31. If anyone deserves prison time or potentially the gallows, it’s this clown.
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Post by xingtherubicon on Mar 26, 2019 7:12:43 GMT -6
It's so hard to let go...
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Post by xingtherubicon on Mar 26, 2019 7:15:56 GMT -6
Can Brennan be more of disgusting person?
On top of everything else, guess where he attended college...
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Post by redrex1 on Mar 26, 2019 7:44:06 GMT -6
Where are all the Liberals ?----I won't to see all the "evidence" they have-------What a bunch of mindless fools
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 26, 2019 7:50:39 GMT -6
Forgot about this: www.politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-233446A DNC official stressed that Chalupa was a consultant paid to do outreach for the party’s political department, not a researcher. She undertook her investigations into Trump, Manafort and Russia on her own, and the party did not incorporate her findings in its dossiers on the subjects, the official said, stressing that the DNC had been building robust research books on Trump and his ties to Russia long before Chalupa began sounding alarms.” ..... Looks like they will need a new lawyer now lol.
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 26, 2019 7:55:15 GMT -6
thefederalist.com/2019/03/26/collusion-deep-sixed-resistance-switches-even-crazier-claims-obstruction/With Collusion Deep-Sixed, Resistance Switches To Even Crazier Claims Of Obstruction It’s beginning with the false narrative that there’s a ‘fight’ with Attorney General William Barr over releasing the Robert Mueller report to Congress. The media and diehard resistance Democratic politicians and pundits are going to do the same thing with the obstruction of justice issue they did for two years with collusion. It’s beginning with the invention of the false narrative that there’s a “fight” with Attorney General William Barr over releasing the special counsel investigation report to Congress. It’s the old political hackery of demanding the inevitable. Everybody knows Barr will release everything he can lawfully disclose, and it seems at the moment that most of the obstruction evidence is derived from President Trump’s public actions and statements, which suggests evidence was obtained outside of otherwise restricted grand jury or classified channels and is releasable. As with the two-year collusion narrative debacle, they’re projecting onto Barr all of their hopes and wishes of scandal, then packaging their unsubstantiated assumptions into a cable news panel argument as if it were actually occurring. It’s not. As Barr clearly stated in his letter to Congress, “I am mindful of the public interest in this matter. For that reason, my goal and intent is to release as much of the Special Counsel’s report as I can consistent with applicable law, regulations, and Departmental policies.” Nothing about that statement says anything resembling what we’re hearing now from pundits and Democratic politicians talking about a “fight” to pry this information out of the clutches of a resistant attorney general. Blind to the lesson just delivered regarding rampant speculation under the guise of argument and debate, they’ve taken the extra step of characterizing the obstruction evidence as “substantial,” having seen nothing that the rest of us haven’t seen. As is inevitably the case with lessons unlearned, they’re setting themselves up for another swat on the nose, but they can’t help themselves. It’s all they’ve got left, and they’re going to play it out as long as they can—even if it requires besmirching Barr’s character in advance of any actions that he’s taken, or is yet to take. MSNBC’s Ari Melber’s comments Monday reflect this narrative: We also learned last night in this letter there were other actions by Trump that Mueller analyzed as possible obstruction that, to this morning, have not been disclosed. And Barr, who is nothing if not a skilled lawyer, felt the need to cover himself. He felt the need to volunteer the fact that Mueller has those other disclosures that we haven’t heard yet and that he’s not putting out yet because Barr wanted to close that letter by trying to close the door on the Mueller report before it’s been read. That’s an important thing – history and the congress will judge how Barr is doing this, but he felt the need to say…there’s other stuff in there, and he didn’t release it yet. Melber is referring to a segment in Barr’s letter wherein he describes the obstruction evidence as “acts by the president, most of which have been the subject of public reporting—that the Special Counsel raised as potentially raising obstruction-of-justice concerns” (emphasis added). It is Melber’s considered opinion, shared by most of the commentariat holding forth this week, that what lies beneath “most of” is quite possibly the key to the lock that opens it all up for Congress to move on impeachment. This evidence is so potentially explosive, in Melber’s telling, that Barr “felt the need to cover himself” and “volunteer the fact that Mueller has those other disclosures.” This sounds serious. And, if you’ve been paying attention to the hyperbolic sophistry of the last two years, it also sounds familiar.
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 26, 2019 8:15:23 GMT -6
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 26, 2019 8:30:21 GMT -6
www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/03/26/jeff-zucker-no-regrets-on-cnns-russia-hoax-coverage/CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker is pushing back against critics accusing the news network of being one of the chief propagators of a debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theory after special counsel Robert Mueller cleared the president’s 2016 campaign of alleged collusion with the Kremlin. In an interview with the New York Times, Zucker said he was “entirely comfortable” with CNN’s Trump-Russia coverage and suggested it was entirely appropriate to give near around-the-clock-coverage due to the story’s magnitude. “We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did,” the CNN chief wrote in an email. “A sitting president’s own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation. That’s not enormous because the media says so. That’s enormous because it’s unprecedented.” According to a four-page summary of Mueller’s findings written by the Justice Department, investigators found no evidence President Trump’s campaign “conspired or coordinated” with Russia to influence the election. Attorney General William Barr said he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had determined that Mueller’s evidence was insufficient to prove in court that the president had committed obstruction of justice to hamper the probe. Further, the attorney general stated said the decision was based on the evidence uncovered by Mueller and not affected by Justice Department legal opinions that say a sitting president cannot be indicted. ....... Zucker neglected to mention CNN’s steady stream of conspiracy-theory punditry and several stories which proved demonstrably false. Last December, CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju reported that Wikileaks emailed Donald Trump Jr. access to information nearly two weeks prior to their public release. However, the network failed to verify the email’s date — September 14th, 2016 — by which time the emails had already been released. In June, CNN reported former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci was being investigated for meeting with a Russian banker ahead of President Trump’s inauguration. Scaramucci denied the claim and CNN eventually apologized for its inaccurate report. CNN Executive editor Lex Haris, editor Eric Lichtblau, and journalist Thomas Frank resigned in shame over the story. Further, CNN claimed in July that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer, was prepared to tell special counsel investigators that the president possesses advanced knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting between his son, Donald Trump Jr. and a Russia lawyer, and others. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, later told CNN had “mixed up” its facts and denied claims that Cohen had any such knowledge about the meeting. Over the course of the Mueller probe, CNN gave a platform to Trump-Russia collusion pushers such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Washington Post opinion writer Max Boot. For example, appearing February 19th on CNN’s State of the Union, Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claimed that there is “compelling” evidence in “plain sight” of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. “You can see evidence in plain sight on the issue of collusion, pretty compelling evidence. Now, there’s a difference between seeing evidence of collusion and being able to prove a criminal conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt,” Schiff told host Dana Bash. In 2017, an undercover investigator for Project Veritas filmed CNN Supervising Producer John Bonifield saying that the Russia conspiracy theory was “mostly bullshit” and the network was promoting it so heavily — without real evidence — “because it’s ratings.”
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 26, 2019 8:31:54 GMT -6
While speaking to reporters on Monday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) stated that Attorney General William Barr “has now done the job he applied for, which is, attempt to exonerate Mr. Trump, when Mr. Mueller said no exoneration was in order.”
Schiff said, “I do want to say, with respect to the obstruction part as well, that what troubles me the most about that is that you have an attorney general who applied for the job by talking down any potential obstruction conviction or indictment, who then went to a Senate confirmation and refused to recuse himself. I don’t think, under those circumstances, he should ever have been confirmed. But he has now done the job he applied for, which is, attempt to exonerate Mr. Trump, when Mr. Mueller said no exoneration was in order. That ought to deeply concern people that someone was hand-picked for the purpose and executed that purpose.”
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 26, 2019 8:33:18 GMT -6
During an interview with CBS’ “Late Show” on Monday, 2020 presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) stated that she doesn’t trust Attorney General William Barr’s judgment on obstruction of justice.
Host Stephen Colbert asked, “Do you trust Barr’s judgment on obstruction here?”
Warren responded, “No. And I shouldn’t — you shouldn’t have to ask me if I trust it. We should see the whole report. When we see the whole report, we’ll know what the basis is for the decision, period.”
She added that people aren’t as concerned with the Mueller report as they are about issues that impact them directly.
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 26, 2019 8:38:02 GMT -6
dailycaller.com/2019/03/26/msnbc-panel-mueller-steele-dossier/The two journalists most closely linked to the Steele dossier acknowledged Monday that the Democrat-funded document was debunked by the Mueller investigation, which found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government. “I think one of the reasons people were so surprised by the Mueller finding is that it undercuts almost everything that was in the dossier, which postulated a well-developed conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign,” Michael Isikoff, a reporter for Yahoo! News, told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. That’s what got people worked up initially, and we do have to acknowledge that that which was alleged has not panned out.” Isikoff was joined by David Corn, a reporter at Mother Jones. Isikoff and Corn, who co-wrote the book “Russian Roulette,” are two of a small handful of reporters who met with dossier author Christopher Steele prior to the 2016 election. They both wrote articles for their respective outlets touting Steele’s allegations that Trump associates conspired with Russians to influence the election. Steele, who was working for the Clinton campaign and DNC, claimed that Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was the Trump campaign’s main liaison to the Kremlin. He also alleged that Michael Cohen, the former Trump lawyer, visited Prague in August 2016 to meet with Kremlin officials to discuss paying off hackers. Those allegations were dismantled on Sunday, when Barr released a summary of Mueller’s report of the Russia probe. Mueller, according to Barr, found no evidence that Trump, members of his campaign, or other Americans conspired with Russia.
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 26, 2019 10:39:18 GMT -6
thehill.com/opinion/white-house/435552-apologies-to-president-trumpMarch 25, 2019 - 09:30 AM EDT Apologies to President Trump BY SHARYL ATTKISSON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR With the conclusions of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe now known to a significant degree, it seems apologies are in order. However, judging by the recent past, apologies are not likely forthcoming from the responsible parties. In this context, it matters not whether one is a supporter or a critic of President Trump. Whatever his supposed flaws, the rampant accusations and speculation that shrouded Trump’s presidency, even before it began, ultimately have proven unfounded. Just as Trump said all along. Yet, each time Trump said so, some of us in the media lampooned him. We treated any words he spoke in his own defense as if they were automatically to be disbelieved because he had uttered them. Some even declared his words to be “lies,” although they had no evidence to back up their claims. We in the media allowed unproven charges and false accusations to dominate the news landscape for more than two years, in a way that was wildly unbalanced and disproportionate to the evidence. We did a poor job of tracking down leaks of false information. We failed to reasonably weigh the motives of anonymous sources and those claiming to have secret, special evidence of Trump’s “treason.” As such, we reported a tremendous amount of false information, always to Trump’s detriment. And when we corrected our mistakes, we often doubled down more than we apologized. We may have been technically wrong on that tiny point, we would acknowledge. But, in the same breath, we would insist that Trump was so obviously guilty of being Russian President Vladimir Putin’s puppet that the technical details hardly mattered. So, a round of apologies seem in order. Apologies to Trump on behalf of those in the U.S. intelligence community, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, which allowed the weaponization of sensitive, intrusive intelligence tools against innocent citizens such as Carter Page, an adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign. Apologies also to Page himself, to Jerome Corsi, Donald Trump Jr., and other citizens whose rights were violated or who were unfairly caught up in surveillance or the heated pursuit of charges based on little more than false, unproven opposition research paid for by Democrats and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Apologies for the stress on their jobs and to their families, the damage to their reputations, the money they had to spend to hire legal representation and defend themselves from charges for crimes they did not commit. Apologies on behalf of those in the intelligence community who leaked true information out of context to make Trump look guilty, and who sometimes leaked false information to try to implicate or frame him. Apologies from those in the chain of command at the FBI and the Department of Justice who were supposed to make sure all information presented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is verified but did not do so. Apologies from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court judges who are supposed to serve as one of the few checks and balances to prevent the FBI from wiretapping innocent Americans. Whether because of blind trust in the FBI or out of ignorance or even malfeasance, they failed at this important job. Apologies to the American people who did not receive the full attention of their government while political points were being scored; who were not told about some important world events because they were crowded out of the news by the persistent insistence that Trump was working for Russia. Apologies all the way around. And now, with those apologies handled — are more than apologies due? Should we try to learn more about those supposed Russian sources who provided false “intel” contained in the “dossier” against Trump, Page and others? Should we learn how these sources came to the attention of ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who built the dossier and claimed that some of the sources were close to Putin? When and where did Steele meet with these high-level Russian sources who provided the apparently false information? Are these the people who actually took proven, concrete steps to interfere in the 2016 election and sabotage Trump’s presidency, beginning in its earliest days? Just who conspired to put the “dossier” into the hands of the FBI? Who, within our intel community, dropped the ball on verifying the information and, instead, leaked it to the press and presented it to the FISC as if legitimate? “Sorry” hardly seems to be enough. Will anyone be held accountable?
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 26, 2019 13:31:09 GMT -6
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 26, 2019 14:01:45 GMT -6
www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/on-obstruction-robert-mueller-abdicates/On Obstruction, Mueller Abdicates By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY March 26, 2019 11:18 AM What a waste. The most telling revelation in Attorney General William Barr’s letter about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s much-anticipated final report is that Mueller has punted on the main question he pursued for nearly two years of investigation: Did President Trump commit an obstruction offense? The Barr letter gingerly states that, after making a “thorough factual investigation” into alleged instances of obstruction, Mueller “ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment.” Since making a prosecutorial judgment was Mueller’s job, that means he defaulted. What did we need him for? Not only that, but Mueller determined that it would be better for the attorney general to make the prosecutorial judgment. So, for the millionth time, what the hell did we need a special counsel for? If the Justice Department, in Mueller’s judgment, was perfectly well-suited to make the call, how could there possibly have been a conflict so profound that it was necessary to bring in a special counsel in the first place? A special counsel, mind you, who recruited his staff from the Justice Department, transferred the cases he brought to Justice Department components, and, now, has ultimately delegated his decision-making responsibility to the Justice Department. The lack of a so-called collusion case is no surprise, as I contended in my weekend column. As far as President Trump and his campaign were concerned, there never was a case of the only kind of actionable collusion that would have been of interest to a federal prosecutor: knowing complicity in Russia’s cyber-espionage operation to influence the 2016 campaign. The refusal to draw a conclusion on obstruction is notable in contrast. At bottom, this is a retreat on the push by at least some members of Mueller’s staff for a novel theory of obstruction, which held that the president could be charged based on exercises of his constitutional powers (e.g., firing the FBI director) if a prosecutor decided his motivation was improper. Regarding this retreat, it is worth exploring the effect of the Barr memo — the June 2018 memorandum that Barr, when he was a former attorney general rather than the incumbent one, submitted to Rod Rosenstein, the deputy AG who was the acting AG supervising Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation. In the memo, Barr argued that the obstruction theory Mueller’s staff appeared to be pursuing was constitutionally infirm and practically unworkable. Based on statutory law, the Constitution, court precedent, and longstanding Justice Department guidelines, Barr posited that an indictment of a president for obstruction could properly be based only on plainly corrupt acts — not constitutionally ordained exercises of presidential prerogative — that involve tampering with evidence and witnesses. In the end, then, Mueller had a choice to make: Either (a) accept that Barr’s interpretation of obstruction law was correct, or (b) recommend an indictment based on the more expansive interpretation of obstruction that his staff seems to have been pursuing and dare Barr to reverse him. The special counsel couldn’t bring himself to decide. In effect, he accepted Barr’s construction of the law, but he declined to admit that he was doing so. After all, if Barr was right all along, what were the last 22 months about? To be sure, Barr gave Mueller a face-saving way out. The Barr memo catalogues several ways in which Mueller’s obstruction theory would unconstitutionally strip the president’s Article II powers and flout well-settled Justice Department rules of statutory construction. Yet, in announcing the decision to decline prosecution, Barr’s letter refrains from rehearsing these flaws. Instead, without mentioning his memo, the attorney general emphasizes its position that, even on the Mueller theory’s own terms, obstruction could not be proved. In his memo, Barr observed: Even if one were to indulge Mueller’s obstruction theory, in the particular circumstances here, the President’s motive in removing [FBI director James] Comey and commenting on [the investigation of fired national-security adviser Michael] Flynn could not have been “corrupt” unless the President and his campaign were actually guilty of illegal collusion. This is obviously true. That is, even assuming for argument’s sake that a president could be prosecuted for otherwise lawful executive acts that a prosecutor claimed had been corruptly motivated, it would still be incumbent on the prosecutor to prove corrupt motivation beyond a reasonable doubt. If Trump is not guilty of the underlying collusion offense, then any actions he took that arguably had a negative impact on the investigation — even if we found such acts foolish or unseemly — could be explained by his frustration over the baselessness of the investigation and its debilitating effect on his capacity to govern. If the president has not colluded, a prosecutor could not establish a corrupt intent to conceal guilt. This reasoning is echoed in Barr’s letter on Mueller’s report: The Special Counsel recognized that “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference,” and that, while not determinative, the absence of such evidence bears upon the President’s intent with respect to obstruction. Generally speaking, to obtain and sustain an obstruction conviction, the government would need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a person, acting with corrupt intent, engaged in obstructive conduct with a sufficient nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding. At the end of the same paragraph, the attorney general again stresses that corrupt intent “would need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to establish an obstruction-of-justice offense,” under the Justice Department’s guidance for prosecutorial charging decisions. The letter adds that the president’s contested actions “took place in public view,” which also cuts against the suggestion of corrupt intent. Classic obstructive acts of mutilating evidence and bribing or intimidating witnesses are done in the shadows. Barr’s letter also points out that each of the president’s contested acts was within his Article II authority and that none of them “had a nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding” that is cognizable under the obstruction laws. These are also themes of Barr’s memo. That is to say, Mueller had to know that, if he left the ultimate charging decision to Barr, the outcome would not be in doubt — not because Barr was appointed by Trump, but because Barr had already laid out, in scholarly detail, the legal and evidence-based rationale for rejecting obstruction charges. In the greater scheme of things, the special counsel’s dereliction would be of little moment were it not for his gratuitous pronouncement about what it all means. To divert attention from his failure to render a prosecutorial judgment, Mueller stated (Barr’s letter quotes him): “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” That’s a political statement, not a prosecutorial statement. Prosecutors never “exonerate” people. It is for others to say whether a person has been exonerated. All prosecutors can say is whether there is enough evidence to charge or there is not. If there is not, then you don’t file charges, period. To cite the obvious example, you didn’t hear Mueller say, “I am exonerating President Trump on the collusion claims.” He simply found insufficient evidence to establish a crime under the governing legal standards, so he declined to file charges and left it to the commentariat to sort out what it all means. On obstruction, however, Mueller declined to apply the law to the facts. That was the only job he was hired to do. Whether he thinks the Justice Department’s decision not to charge the president is an exoneration or something less is no more relevant than what you or I think about it. What a waste.
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 26, 2019 14:09:06 GMT -6
www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/trump-russia-investigation-mueller-report/The Late, Not-So-Great Mueller Investigation By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON March 26, 2019 6:30 AM It followed the Soviet style: ‘Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.’ Had Hillary Clinton just won the 2016 election, there would have been neither a Mueller investigation nor much talk of Russian collusion. No Trump Victory, No Collusion Investigation A losing Donald Trump would have slunk off to left-wing and Never-Trump ridicule and condemnation — and no investigation about collusion. A defeated Trump would have posed no threat to the 16-year Obama-Clinton progressive project. President Clinton would have been content to let her unverified but lurid dossier rumors hound Trump for the rest of his life, with Trump as the supposed “loser” who had tried, in cahoots with the Russians, to unfairly beat Hillary, though he pathetically failed even at that. Of course, a President Hillary Clinton herself may well have faced some Russian blackmail attempts. Kremlin fixers would have likely threatened to go public that their planted lies to Christopher Steele were gobbled up by President Clinton’s own private Fusion GPS hit team. In essence, the Russians would have claimed that they had fueled the dossier that wounded the Trump campaign — and expected some sort of quid pro quo, perhaps in Uranium One fashion. Obama-administration bureaucrats — Attorney General Loretta Lynch, subordinate attorneys general such as Bruce Ohr and Rod Rosenstein, FBI grandees such as James Baker, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe, intelligence kingpins such as John Brennan and James Clapper, and national-security officials turned intelligence sleuths such as Susan Rice and Samantha Power — would all have been competing on the basis of service beyond the call of duty for top jobs in the Clinton administration. Among their swamp talking points would have been rival obsequious claims to have squashed Trump. Clinton-administration transition officials would have had to parcel out patronage by judging the relative help of people who had seeded Hillary’s Steele dossier around the government and the media, or fooled a FISA court to monitor Carter Page and thereby generated leaks that the Trump campaign was “under investigation,” or obstructed the Clinton email investigation, or placed an informant in Trump’s campaign, or unmasked the contents of surveilled conversations and leaked them to the press. Translated, that means the hysteria that helped prompt the Mueller investigation was in part whipped up by those who had knowingly acted unethically or illegally during and also after the 2016 campaign. These Obama officials bet on the sure-thing but wrong horse and suddenly, after Nov. 8, 2016, feared that they were soon to be subject to lots of criminal exposure. Assume that both the ruse of “collusion” and James Comey’s leaking gambit to prompt a special counsel’s investigation were thus the preemptive defenses of an assortment of crimes by Obama-era officials, such as lying to federal officials, conspiracy to obstruct justice, illegally leaking confidential or classified documents to the media, deceiving a FISA court, and myriad conflicts of interest. In other words, there were never any evidentiary reasons to appoint a special counsel other than to divert attention away from an array of wrongdoing. After 22 months, that fact finally became clear even to a largely partisan group of attorneys, once eager to become folk heroes by aborting the Trump presidency. Let us hope both that Attorney General Barr can now turn to the real illegal behavior of an entire array of Obama-administration officials, and that the public at last can have access to unredacted documents that record their frenzied and illegal efforts. No Phony Dossier, No Investigation The Clinton-purchased Steele Dossier was the encephalitic virus that infected the entire Washington establishment between 2016 and 2019. Without it, there would have been no such thing as “collusion,” much less a Mueller investigation. Had James Comey and his associates (and Bruce Ohr had briefed them all previously on the shaky dossier) been honest and apprised the FISA court in October 2016 that their “opposition research” evidence for a warrant was 1) paid for by Hillary Clinton, 2) largely written by a foreign national (with help from the spouse of Obama DOJ official Bruce Ohr) who despised Donald Trump and who was dismissed from his nebulous relationship with the FBI, 3) remained unverified, and 4) served as the basis for submitted news accounts that in circular fashion supposedly substantiated collusionary behavior, then the writ might have been rejected and the dossier’s usefulness died. Immediately after the election, the dossier was reinvigorated (by nervous-lame-duck careerists like John Brennan and James Clapper, and Senator John McCain) to serve a new role in aborting the Trump presidency, given that it had always been the only real basis for the entire mythology of Trump-Russian collusion. Paul Manafort was no doubt duplicitous and acted in a variety of felonious ways, but, without the seeded dossier, his illegal behavior would no more have sparked a wider investigation of the Trump campaign than the actions of the Podesta brothers (whose suspect Russian ties had long contaminated the Clinton campaign) would have spurred investigations of liberal Russian collusion and profiteering. The Machiavellian brilliance of Trump-hater and otherwise washed-up hack Christopher Steele was his knowledge that lying outrageously (just ask Jussie Smollett) is a far more effective weapon than lying incrementally. So, Steele’s insertion of the Trump-prostitute-Obama’s-hotel-bed-urolagnia meme was the sharp hook that snagged Washington’s swamp creatures. The Steele dossier was not just spurious in its wild claims about Carter Page eyeing billion-dollar payoffs or a bumbling Michael Cohen in Prague on a secret Trump collusionary mission, it was also so salacious that it served as lurid pornography that supercharged its odyssey throughout the bowels of the Obama government and the media. The ‘All-Stars’ and ‘Dream Team’ Were Flawed from the Beginning Robert Mueller spent over $30 million and 674 days in vain ferreting out “collusion” not because it was necessarily difficult to prove such a charge either true or false. After all, the basis for the allegation, the veracity of the Steele dossier, could have been easily and quickly adjudicated. Indeed, already by May 2017 and the beginning of Mueller’s investigation, the dossier was roundly denounced as fraudulent. FISA transcripts of surveilled conversations had already apprised officials that there was no direct evidence of collusion, which is why Peter Strzok, well before Mueller began, had privately warned his paramour and soon to be fellow Mueller team member, Lisa Page, that “there’s no big there there” to the collusion charge. What explains the cost and length of the Mueller investigation? It’s not the (relatively easy) challenge of adjudicating collusion. It’s the politicized make-up of his team, which relentlessly and expansively drove on to tag any Trump aide with almost any crime imaginable. Mueller could have saved the nation a great deal of national angst and division had he only insisted on a brief series of special requisites in his personnel selections: 1) None of his lawyers and investigators should have donated either to the Trump or Clinton campaign; 2) there should have been some numerical parity between Democratic and Republican members; 3) attorneys should not in the past have directly defended either the Trump or Clinton Foundation or any aides who had previously worked for Trump or Clinton; 4) they should not have transmitted on government devices any prior hyper-partisan praise or invective concerning either Trump or Clinton. Yet Mueller could not fulfill even those minimal requirements. And the result was twofold: Mueller never escaped the charge that his team was biased; and, because it was stocked with progressives, in its zeal to get Trump, the investigation started out with the Soviet assumption that to convict the guilty criminal Trump, they needed only enough time and money to find the right crime. Members including Page, Strozk, and Weissman had either in email or in texts on their government phones or computers earlier expressed hyper-partisan, anti-Trump views. Another working for Mueller, Jeannie Rhee, a prosecutor on the team, had been employed as “outside counsel” at one point by the Clinton Foundation. Rhee also had represented Obama official Ben Rhodes in the Benghazi controversy; Rhodes, remember, after the election, was outspoken in his efforts to resist the Trump administration’s initiatives. Another prominent Mueller team member, Aaron Zebley, had once defended Hillary Clinton’s staffer Justin Cooper. Cooper infamously had set up the private and illegal email server in the basement of the Clintons’ home. Mueller attorneys such as former federal officials Andrew Weissmann and Zainab Ahmad had also both previously communicated with, and been briefed by, Bruce Ohr, who allegedly had warned them of the unverified nature of the Steele dossier. Mueller team member Strzok had long been directly involved in Clinton-Trump investigations. He had previously interviewed Michael Flynn (Jan. 24, 2017) to learn about possible Trump-Russian collusion. Earlier, Strozk had interrogated Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills in connection with the Clinton email scandal; both had clearly lied to the FBI and both had been given de facto immunity. In short, Peter Strozk had no business posing as a disinterested investigator of Trump. Another lead attorney on Robert Mueller’s team had also previously been assigned to the investigation of the Clinton emails. After the election, the unnamed Mueller team member, later revealed to be Kevin Clinesmith, had bragged in a text to an FBI attorney acquaintance (a Trump-hating Sally Moyer, who once wrote, “Screw you, Trump”) of his opposition to Trump: “Viva le [sic] resistance.” Other than Mueller himself, a registered Republican, there was no known member of the Republican party, or Republican donor, on his legal team. The point is not that Mueller deliberately selected a biased team. It’s that he did not exercise proper caution in order to avoid even the appearance of bias in such a high-profile investigation. That is why liberal activists and the media were understandably giddy on hearing of the make-up of the team, and they gushed approbation of their newly adopted “army,” “untouchables,” “all-stars,” and “dream team” — or what Max Boot praised as a “hunter-killer team of crack investigators and lawyers.” It did not help appearances that the appointed Mueller was a longtime friend and associate of fired FBI director James Comey, who had bragged that he had sought to prompt a special-counsel investigation by deliberately leaking to the press confidential (if not in one case classified) memos of private conversations with the president. Worse still, Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw the Mueller investigation, signed off on a misleading FISA writ after the start of the Mueller investigation. Rosenstein also had provided the official rationale for firing James Comey, and he had been knee-deep in prior investigations involving both Trump and Clinton. Rosenstein allegedly had agreed to wear a wire, shortly before Mueller was appointed, to capture enough supposedly treasonous or unhinged Trump dialogue to invoke the 25th Amendment. Remember, in surreal fashion, Rosenstein stepped up to oversee Mueller’s work because, unlike Attorney General Jeff Sessions, he posed as someone who had no such conflicts of interest. In the end, to justify the absence of any proof of collusion, Mueller’s progressive attorneys and investigators descended to dogging small-time wannabes and a few shady operators on charges that had nothing to do with Russian collusion — before they finally ended up ignominiously going after minor nobodies such the braggart and provocateur Roger Stone and Infowars’ Jerome Corsi. Does anyone doubt that a comparable conservative team of lawyers including a few Trump donors, with $30 million of government money, a 90 percent favorable press, and 22 months’ time, while investigating Team Clinton and its hangers-on, couldn’t find scads of extraneous felonies, apart from its purported mission of investigating the collusionary Steele dossier? Mueller, Progressive Hero? The bias and the wasted resources and time of the stymied Mueller investigation will not matter to progressives. They saw Mueller and company as heroic, or at least useful, for all the righteous damage that the special prosecutor has already inflicted on the hated Trump administration. For some 674 days, Donald Trump was under a cloud of a special investigator, prying into all aspects of his personal and private life, as well as the lives of his family and aides. Or to put it another way, for 83 percent of Trump’s first term, constant media announcements have blared about the “bombshell” to come as “the noose is tightening” and “the walls are closing in” — all as inaccurate as they were damaging to the efficacy of the administration. The mainstream-network, MSNBC, and CNN prophesies of impeachment hearings driven by Russian “collusion” had, as planned, driven down Trump’s polls. Between 2017 and 2019, Mueller’s supposed prelude to impeachment caused defections among a once-solid Republican House and Senate and thereby stalled initiatives, thwarting efforts to curb illegal immigration, repeal Obamacare, quickly confirm judicial nominees and executive appointees, and preserve diplomatic leverage abroad. Without the Mueller investigation and enablers such as Representative Adam Schiff (who had falsely insisted to the media that the dossier was not integral to a pre-election FISA application and had not launched the FBI investigation before the election), and without the MSBNC/CNN punditry, all the serial conspiratorial talk of invoking the 25th Amendment and the emoluments clause, as well as the comical McCabe-Rosenstein palace coup and the efforts of the “resistance” to thwart Trump’s administration from the inside, as outlined in the Sept. 5, 2018, anonymous New York Times op-ed, would probably have been written off immediately as short-lived psychodramas. Instead, they were all sensationalized by a 90-percent-biased media as the prefaces to the Mueller “bombshell” to come. In the end, Mueller’s investigation really did prove to be a witch hunt, just as half the country came to conclude. It has probably forever ended the idea that a special prosecutor can be useful or fair. It has curtailed foreign-policy options and prevented the traditional American realist approach to Russia as a triangulating counterweight to China. It ruined the lives of innocents such as Carter Page and the reputations of dozens of others such as General Michael Flynn. It divided the country in its transparent violation of any sense of disinterested investigation and turned the idea of American jurisprudence into a version of the Soviets’ “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” And now that it is over, we should not forget what it wrought and those who empowered it.
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Post by kcrufnek on Mar 26, 2019 19:10:22 GMT -6
During an interview with CBS’ “Late Show” on Monday, 2020 presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) stated that she doesn’t trust Attorney General William Barr’s judgment on obstruction of justice. Host Stephen Colbert asked, “Do you trust Barr’s judgment on obstruction here?” Warren responded, “No. And I shouldn’t — you shouldn’t have to ask me if I trust it. We should see the whole report. When we see the whole report, we’ll know what the basis is for the decision, period.” She added that people aren’t as concerned with the Mueller report as they are about issues that impact them directly. More moonwalking. I saw this advertised but didn't have the stomach to watch. I'm wondering what sort of follow up Colbert gave. I would have said something like at least he's not like Holder and Lynch who would lap up anything their boss put in front of them. Prolly why I don't have my own show on CBS.
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Post by thievingmagpie on Mar 26, 2019 19:41:03 GMT -6
Backpedaling: www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/25/john-brennan-ex-cia-chief-offers-mea-culpa-on-trum/Former CIA chief John O. Brennan now says his months of attacks on President Trump may have been based on “bad information.” One of the president’s harshest critics had a muted tone on Monday as he discussed special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” No evidence was found to support the claim that Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign “conspired or coordinated” with Russia. “Well, I don’t know if I received bad information but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was,” Mr. Brennan told host Joe Scarborough. “I am relieved that it’s been determined there was not a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government over our election.” Mr. Brennan said in December 2018, for instance, that Mr. Trump should prepare for the “forthcoming exposure of your malfeasance & corruption.” “We need an actual leader — our Nation’s future is at stake,” he tweeted Dec. 31.
That bastard needs to be chained behind the back of a pickup and dragged through a cactus patch.
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Post by thievingmagpie on Mar 26, 2019 19:43:37 GMT -6
During an interview with CBS’ “Late Show” on Monday, 2020 presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) stated that she doesn’t trust Attorney General William Barr’s judgment on obstruction of justice. Host Stephen Colbert asked, “Do you trust Barr’s judgment on obstruction here?” Warren responded, “No. And I shouldn’t — you shouldn’t have to ask me if I trust it. We should see the whole report. When we see the whole report, we’ll know what the basis is for the decision, period.” She added that people aren’t as concerned with the Mueller report as they are about issues that impact them directly.
Anyone remember way way back, when late night talk shows were all about entertainment, and not leftard political propaganda?
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Post by sooner98 on Mar 26, 2019 22:33:53 GMT -6
During an interview with CBS’ “Late Show” on Monday, 2020 presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) stated that she doesn’t trust Attorney General William Barr’s judgment on obstruction of justice. Host Stephen Colbert asked, “Do you trust Barr’s judgment on obstruction here?” Warren responded, “No. And I shouldn’t — you shouldn’t have to ask me if I trust it. We should see the whole report. When we see the whole report, we’ll know what the basis is for the decision, period.” She added that people aren’t as concerned with the Mueller report as they are about issues that impact them directly.
Anyone remember way way back, when late night talk shows were all about entertainment, and not leftard political propaganda?
David Letterman got the ball rolling on this. He was funny as hell for the first half of his TV career. Then his mojo started fading away. By the end, he was reduced to an old, bitter shell of his former self, and instead of telling genuinely funny jokes, he would just recite political applause lines for the clapping seals in his audience. Paved the way for Colbert and Kimmel.
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 27, 2019 4:05:14 GMT -6
James Comey giving a speech last night:
Former FBI chief James Comey said in a speech Tuesday evening that he is confused by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s reasoning on charging President Trump with obstruction of justice.
Mr. Comey told his audience that while he had “great faith” in Mr. Mueller, the special counsel essentially punted on the matter, neither recommending that Mr. Trump be charged nor exonerating him.
“The part that’s confusing is, I can’t quite understand what’s going on with the obstruction stuff,”
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 27, 2019 4:10:31 GMT -6
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 27, 2019 9:55:50 GMT -6
www.foxnews.com/opinion/andrew-mccarthy-how-long-has-mueller-known-there-was-no-trump-russia-collusionAndrew McCarthy: How long has Mueller known there was no Trump-Russia collusion? Andrew McCarthy By Andrew McCarthy | Fox News Almost from the start, Democrats and their media echo chamber have moved the goal posts on collusion. The original allegation – the political narrative that the Clinton campaign, through Obama administration alchemy, honed into a counterintelligence investigation – was that that the Trump campaign was complicit in Russia’s “cyberespionage” attacks on the 2016 election. But there was no evidence that candidate Trump and his surrogates had anything to do with the Kremlin’s hacking and propaganda schemes. And no supporting logic. The Russians are very good at espionage. They neither needed nor wanted American help, their operations predated Trump’s entry into the campaign, and some of those operations were anti-Trump. Nevertheless, in short order, that endlessly elastic word, collusion, was being stretched to the breaking point – covering every conceivable type of association between Trump associates and Russia. Some of these were unseemly, such as the Trump Tower meeting, an apparently unsuccessful effort to obtain campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton. More of them were routine, such as incoming national-security adviser Michael Flynn’s communications with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the post-election transition. But none of these collusion episodes were criminal. The only “collusion” prosecutors care about is conspiracy; a criminal agreement to violate a federal penal statute – such as the laws against hacking. There was never any such evidence. There was just unverified, sensational, hearsay nonsense – the Steele dossier generated by the Clinton campaign. Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has concluded that there was no criminal collusion, the question arises: When during their exhaustive 22-month investigation did prosecutors realize they had no case? I put it at no later than the end of 2017. I suspect it was in the early autumn. By the time Mueller was appointed on May 17, 2017, the FBI had been trying unsuccessfully for nearly a year to corroborate the dossier’s allegations. Top bureau officials have conceded to congressional investigators that they were never able to do so – notwithstanding that, by the time of Mueller’s appointment, the Justice Department and FBI had relied on the dossier three times, in what they labeled “VERIFIED” applications, to obtain warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. And make no mistake about what this means. In each and every application, after describing the hacking operations carried out by Russian operatives, the Justice Department asserted: The FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election were being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with [Donald Trump’s] campaign. Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has concluded that there was no criminal collusion, the question arises: When during their exhaustive 22-month investigation did prosecutors realize they had no case? Yes, the Justice Department continued to make that allegation to the secret federal court for months after Trump was sworn in as president. Notably, in June 2017, about a month after Mueller took over the investigation, while he was still getting his bearings, the Justice Department and the FBI went on to obtain a fourth FISA warrant. Yet again, they used the same unverified information. Yet again, they withheld from the court the fact that this information was generated by the Clinton campaign; that the Clinton campaign was peddling it to the media at the same time the FBI was providing it to the court; and that Christopher Steele, the informant on whom they were so heavily relying, had misled the bureau about his media contacts. You know what’s most telling about this fourth FISA warrant? The fact that it was never renewed. The 90-day authorization lapsed in September 2017. When it did, Mueller did not seek to extend it with a new warrant. Think about that for a moment. President Trump fired FBI Director Comey on May 9, 2017. Eight days later, on May 17, Mueller was named special counsel. This appointment effectively wrested control of the Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation from acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, transferring it to the special counsel. By August 2017, Mueller had removed the lead investigator, Agent Peter Strzok over the rabidly anti-Trump texts he’d exchanged with Lisa Page, a top FBI lawyer who served as McCabe’s counsel. Page herself had resigned in May. Meanwhile, the FBI reassigned its top counsel, James Baker (who later resigned); and the bureau’s inspection division referred McCabe to the Justice Department’s inspector general for leaking investigative information and then lying about it (and McCabe was later fired and referred to the Justice Department for possible prosecution). This means that by autumn 2017 when it would have been time to go back to the court and reaffirm the dossier’s allegations of a Trump-Russia espionage conspiracy, the major FBI officials involved in placing those unverified allegations before the court had been sidelined. Clearly up to speed after four months of running the investigation, Mueller decided not to renew these allegations. Once the fourth warrant lapsed in September, investigators made no new claims of a Trump-Russia conspiracy to the court. The collusion case was the Clinton campaign’s Steele dossier, and by autumn 2017, the investigators now in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation were unwilling to stand behind it. In order to get the FISA warrants, the Justice Department and the FBI had had to allege that there was probable cause to believe former Trump adviser Carter Page was an agent of Russia. Under FISA law, that requires alleging that he was knowingly involved in clandestine activity on behalf of Russia, and that this clandestine activity involved probable violations of American criminal law – offenses such as espionage. Yet, despite the fact that this representation was made four times in sworn “verified” applications, Mueller never charged Page with a crime – not espionage, not false statements, nothing. When Special Counsel Mueller closed his investigation last week, he almost certainly knew for about a year and a half that there was no collusion case. Indeed, the indictments that he did bring appeared to preclude the possibility that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin. Yet the investigation continued. The Justice Department and the special counsel made no announcement, no interim finding of no collusion, as Trump detractors continued to claim that a sitting American president might be a tool of the Putin regime. For month after month, the president was forced to govern under a cloud of suspicion. Why?
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 27, 2019 14:31:33 GMT -6
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 27, 2019 14:41:30 GMT -6
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 27, 2019 14:46:48 GMT -6
t.co/FF5pCojqvnConclusion of Mueller probe raises anew criticisms of coverage And now comes the reckoning for the mainstream news media and the pundits. After more than two years of intense reporting and endless talking-head speculation about possible collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian agents in 2016, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III put a huge spike in all of it on Sunday. Attorney General William P. Barr relayed Mueller’s key findings in a four-page summary of the 22-month investigation: The evidence was insufficient to conclude that Trump or his associates conspired with Russians to interfere in the campaign. Barr’s announcement was a thunderclap to mainstream news outlets and the cadre of mostly liberal-leaning commentators who have spent months emphasizing the possible-collusion narrative in opinion columns and cable TV panel discussions. “Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media,” Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote in a column published Saturday, a day before Barr nailed the collusion coffin shut. He added: “Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population.” Taibbi wrote that the reporting and commentary asserting collusion between Trump and Russia belonged in the dustbin of other discarded stories, such as Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion in 2003. He even called out “Saturday Night Live” — one of Trump’s favorite Twitter foils — for a cast singalong to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” that featured the line: “Mueller, please come through, because the only option is a coup.” Journalist and commentator Glenn Greenwald — a longtime skeptic of the collusion angle — tweeted his contempt for the media coverage on Sunday, too: “Check every MSNBC personality, CNN law ‘expert,’ liberal-centrist outlets and #Resistance scam artist and see if you see even an iota of self-reflection, humility or admission of massive error.” He added: “While standard liberal outlets obediently said whatever they were told by the CIA & FBI, many reporters at right-wing media outlets which are routinely mocked by super-smart liberals as primitive & propagandistic did relentlessly great digging & reporting.” Greenwald reserved special vitriol for MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, who he said “went on the air for 2 straight years & fed millions of people conspiratorial garbage & benefited greatly.” An MSNBC representative declined to comment Sunday; CNN’s representatives did not respond. Among the theories commentators advanced was one by New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait, who speculated in a cover story in July about whether “the dark crevices of the Russia scandal run not just a little deeper but a lot deeper.” He suggested that “it would be dangerous not to consider the possibility that the [then-upcoming] summit [between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin] is less a negotiation between two heads of state than a meeting between a Russian-intelligence asset and his handler.” In a statement Sunday night, Chait stood by his article. “That story relied on reports in credible public sources. None of those reports have been refuted. . . . If the full Mueller report does show that media reports on Trump’s ties to Russia were wrong, I would absolutely amend, correct or withdraw commentary I have written on that basis.” Other news outlets defended their reporting as well, noting that much of it is undisputed and has led to indictments and guilty pleas by figures associated with Trump’s campaign. “I’m comfortable with our coverage,” said Dean Baquet, the New York Times’s top editor. “It is never our job to determine illegality, but to expose the actions of people in power. And that’s what we and others have done and will continue to do.” He noted that Barr’s letter summarizing Mueller’s findings points out that the actions that warranted an obstruction inquiry were “the subject of public reporting” — a fact “that’s to the credit of the media.” In fact, revelations by the Times and The Washington Post about contacts between Russian agents and Trump’s campaign advisers in 2016 helped prompt the inquiry that the special counsel took over in May 2017. The two newspapers shared a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the issue that year. As Baquet noted Sunday, “On Russia interference, we and others wrote extensively about Russia’s attempt to influence the election, both through hacking and direct approaches by Russians to people around candidate Trump. Those stories were true. And nothing has happened to call into question the reporting about Donald Trump’s financial history, or the use of his charity, or any of the other fine investigative reporting over the past three years.” “Russiagate” has been a news media obsession since Trump’s victory in November 2016. The nonpartisan Tyndall Report pegged the total amount of time devoted to the story on the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS and NBC last year at 332 minutes, making it the second-most covered story after the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. According to a count by the Republican National Committee released Sunday, The Post, the New York Times, CNN.com and MSNBC.com have written a combined 8,507 articles mentioning the special counsel’s investigation. The cable news networks, particularly CNN and MSNBC, have added hundreds of hours of discussion about the topic, too. The story undoubtedly was an important factor in shaping voters’ perceptions before the 2018 midterm election, in which Democrats won control of the House. But the conclusion of the inquiry has put a question once hazily debated into sharp focus: Did the mainstream news media mislead? “Liberal journalists expected Mueller to build a case for scandalous collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government,” said Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the conservative Media Research Center. Noting Mueller’s broad findings, he said, “So now it’s apparent the news channels merely channeled their wishful thinking. They had a grand denouement in mind, and it didn’t happen. They mocked Trump for saying ‘no collusion,’ and that ended up being the truth. . . . The voters should feel punked, swindled.”
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 27, 2019 16:03:28 GMT -6
www.foxnews.com/politics/rep-eric-swalwell-president-trumps-lies-about-russia-worry-me-and-should-worry-you-tooRep. Eric Swalwell: Trump was 'caught lying' about Russia, and could still have colluded despite Mueller findings President Trump was caught lying about his connections to Russia, and regardless of the Mueller probe's findings, that should worry the American people, House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Eric Swalwell charged. "The only person who has been caught lying about Russia is the president," the rumored 2020 presidential hopeful said during an appearance on "The Story with Martha MacCallum" Tuesday. "He said he had no business dealings with Russia and we have now learned that he had business dealings going all the way up to and beyond the primaries." MacCallum then grilled the California Democrat on a statement he made during a previous television appearance in which he agreed with President Trump colluded with the Russians. "Donald Trump works on Russia's behalf," Swalwell said. "When he meets with Vladimir Putin he won't tell the country what was said and he essentially took the notes from the interpreter. "That really worries me, and I think Martha, it should worry you too. But, just because he's not been criminally indicted for collusion doesn't mean he has not conducted colluding behavior with the Russians." Swalwell also drew similarities between Trump's situation and that of actor Jussie Smollett, who shockingly had all charges dropped against him on Tuesday for allegedly organizing a violent hate crime against himself. Swalwell believes that in the case of Smollett, he is no longer facing criminal charges even though many believe that he is, in fact, guilty of orchestrating the crime. In Donald Trump's case, Swalwell argues that it's possible that the president still could have committed crimes despite not being indicted. "I agree with Robert Mueller and accept his conclusion that the president did not commit criminal collusion, but if the best day of his presidency is that he has not been indicted for criminal collusion, we still have problems and that's what I think should be addressed by seeing the full Mueller report," he concluded. Democrat still defending the Steele Dossier: SWALWELL: No. I — I feel very strongly that no candidate, no president-elect, no president should have conducted themselves the way that Donald Trump has with Russia. He’s drawn us so close to a foreign adversary, and I’m gonna do everything I can — as long as I’m in power — to always put the United States first. MACCALLUM: So it doesn’t bother you that the Clinton campaign paid for a dossier to be put together by someone who had all kinds of ties to intelligence and put together something that — that turned out to be not necessarily factual? (crosstalk) SWALWELL: Which part of it hasn’t been proved factual? MACCALLUM: Well, Christopher Steele himself said it was not a finished work product — SWALWELL: He didn’t say it wasn’t factual, though! MACCALLUM: — and, you know, everyone who analyzed it — SWALWELL: Which part was not proved factual? MACCALLUM: Are you serious? SWALWELL: Yeah!
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Post by kcrufnek on Mar 27, 2019 17:30:40 GMT -6
I hope all these people run. Every last one of them. Keep talking.
I heard some report from Catherine Herridge talking about Brennan and Clapper and the texts between Page and McCabe. Apparently those directors wouldn't get involved with such low level agents but in some case did. I was only half listening. Still sounds promising.
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 27, 2019 19:05:18 GMT -6
Lester Holt interviewing James Comey :
Holt: “The President is taking the Mueller news as complete vindication.”
Trump: “It was just announced there was no collusion with Russia.”
Holt: “He’s making it based on a pretty bold claim in that four page letter we got from Attorney General Barr that there was no coordination, there was no collusion. The language was pretty clear there was nothing between this campaign and Russia. So on that basis should he be breathing a sigh of relief?”
Comey: “I don’t know that I read the letter from the attorney general that way. I read him as saying, “the special counsel didn’t find that the evidence established that there was any conspiracy between an American and the Russians.” What other evidence there is, what evidence there might be that falls short of that standard, I have no idea.”
Holt: “‘Establish’ is the word that you’re honing in on there?”
Comey: “Correct. And so I don’t know what the special counsel found. And I’m prepared, I hope everybody is, to wait and get the transparency that we need.” .......
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 27, 2019 19:06:14 GMT -6
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Post by soonernvolved on Mar 28, 2019 5:51:46 GMT -6
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