Jeff Sessions Resigns

[rightleft22]

Well not quite.  The report will either lay out facts or it won't

When it come to spin from the far left and right what do facts have to do with it?

So far Mueller has kept his thoughts on the matter to himself so I’m not sure it’s fair to question the integrity of the investigation based on the problems you identified in the legal system as a whole. You also seem to be connecting the media's reaction to the investigation so far - “the media gleefully seemed to think…” with the integrity of the investigation and I’m not sure that is fair either.

I know I’m reading between the lines of your posts however it appears to me your consciously or unconsciously preparing you defense of the Administration if the report hurts the administration or GOP.

I'll believe good faith if his report is more focused on facts than narrative

I’m not trying to be mean, but I read your posts knowing that I can count on you to defend the GOP by re-arguing what are facts. That’s not a bad thing, sometimes you convince me. Your posts tend to hit most of the arguments I see coming from the right so I get a good understanding of how the right is going to respond to whatever.

Base on your comments here I suspect the right is going to discount any facts or re-shape them and focus on integrity. (Which is odd as not only do fact no longer matter neither does character)   

[Seriati]

rightleft22, not sure if you caught it, but there have been a bunch of leaks about the Mueller investigation .  As of today, CNN alone has published multiple items from the investigation.  Of course, everything that has leaked has been shared in other contexts so you can't be definitive about who the leakers actually are, but the timing is certainly helpful to Mueller as it lets him explain the reasons behind say cancelling the Manafort deal without actually explaining the reasons.

Given what's come out from McCabe and Comey about how intentional leaks were part of the DOJ strategy, I find this all highly suspicious.   

Again, I just don't know what he's going to bring forward.  I think if it were an open and shut case he'd have done so long since.  In fact, not having done so if he could prove Trump is a Russian plant is the next thing to treason.  If I had to guess, I'd say he has some documentary evidence (email chains and intercepts) about someone in the campaign (which was probably Manafort) contacting Wiki leaks, and he may have some computer evidence tying Wiki-Leaks to the hack or to the Russian hackers.  All pure speculation. 

What I'd guess he lacks is any proof that it connects to Trump.  He desparately wants to believe it does, so rather than take what he can prove and call it a day, he's twisting things to the breaking point to make a connection that may never have been there in the first place.  That's the context I read on the Manafort retraction, I suspect the "lie" that's most irksome is that Manafort told him Trump didn't know - and that's the only reason he wanted Manafort in the first place.

[Seriati]

I know I’m reading between the lines of your posts however it appears to me your consciously or unconsciously preparing you defense of the Administration if the report hurts the administration or GOP.

I'm pretty consciously preparing for a defense, just as I'm completely sure the media is preparing to convict without regard to what the facts say.  But I'm only preparing for it because I don't expect the evidence to be convincing.  That could easily change based on what's revealed.

I’m not trying to be mean, but I read your posts knowing that I can count on you to defend the GOP by re-arguing what are facts. That’s not a bad thing, sometimes you convince me. Your posts tend to hit most of the arguments I see coming from the right so I get a good understanding of how the right is going to respond to whatever.

I kind of agree with you here.  Lately, I've been amused at how often I write something and within a day find someone has published the exact same points.  I guess there's a certain logical necessity on some of the conclusions and complaints.

[Seriati]

We already know of two reasons, Papadopolous and the Steel report.

First, Papadopolous seems to have occurred after the investigation began not before, and there's a substantial question about whether he was a set up.  He only went to jail because he claimed not to have met a certain individual, as far as I know, there was no substantive crime involved in anything he did.  How does that justify an investigation?

It's been suggested that Steele was involved in that set up.  It's been shown that the FBI and DOJ were aware of Steele's severe anti-Trump bias, and acknowledged that the cut ties with him "officially" then maintained a back door to him.  It's pretty clear -at this point - that the FISA warrant was issued on a questionable grounds, both with respect to the representations they made and with respect to its actual purpose. 

Where does that leave us?  You think unverified opposition research justifies a two year investigation that so far has only convicted Americans for lying about lawful conduct and, in the case of Manafort, for completely unrelated financial crimes.

I know you have already decided both of those are invalid, but if you have a former British MI6 officer reporting confidentially to the FBI that he suspects Trump is compromised and/or working with the Russians then that should be investigated.

Should it?  Then why did they deceive the court about how reliable he may be?  About his known anti-Trump animus?  Why did they leak stories and then cite to them as additional support for the FISA warrant?

This has ALL the hallmarks of a manufactured case.

What if the Trump campaign through opposition research learned that Clinton was receiving aid from Chinese intelligence, should the FBI refuse to investigate?

Or you know, a charity run by Clinton received enormous contributions from foreign governments at the same time she in her role as a Secretary of State was deciding major issues on which they cared....

Or dual hatted staff members of Clinton's allowed major donors to the charity enhanced access to the candidate....

Or, you know, there were a history of actual illegal contributions from Chinese nationals to the campaign of her husband...

Or possibly her husband was receiving speaking fees in the hundreds of thousands of dollars from foreign nationals...

I mean seriously, try to step out of your shell and look at it from the other side.  I could buy a reasonable investigation - IF - there was any evidence that the rules applied to both sides.  I don't see that evidence.  Instead I see Republicans ruined financially and prosecuted on process crimes for trying to answer questions, while Democrats were granted immunity prior to testifying and no charges ever came out of it.  I see Democrats plead the fifth and everyone lets it slide. 

I mean for goodness sake, you're decrying the idea that Trump received something of value from Russia as revealed by the Clinton campaign paying a British spy for something of value from Russia.  The hypocrisy is staggering.

Or should they look into it while keeping the investigation secret to avoid the investigation being used for the political campaign while trying to protect the country.

On something like this is should have been done in public by a bipartisan committee that followed the facts where they led into both parties bad acts.  The travesty was turning this into a political argument in the first place.

There actually evidence shows the Russians were seeking to disrupt our democracy not that they were working to put Trump in power.  Clinton was the front runner and everyone thought she'd be President, the real efforts were in trying to discredit her as legitimate.

Please remember almost everyone who has been fired at the FBI was fired for leaking damaging things about Clinton (this was the official justification for firing both Comey and McCabe), the Trump investigation (and the dossier) stayed secret until after the election.

Well of course it stayed secret.  If Obama had revealed he was investigating the Republican Presidential campaign it might have caused a revolution.

Comey was fired for a large number of reasons, and honestly that was great thing.  Not since hoover has a head of the FBI more deserved to be fired.

McCabe's releases were self serving.  He was fired for lack of Candor.  You may be familiar with the concept, since that's the internal FBI/DOJ version of lying to federal agents with which they threaten the common people with decades in prison and financial ruin.  Maybe ask yourself why you think Papadapolous deserved to go to jail, but McCabe didn't.

Both Comey and McCabe had something in common, they clearly believed they had a right to release governmental records for their own benefit.

[rightleft22]

I’m not a fan of speculation, to many people mistake it as being news – fact

Maybe Mueller is the master manipulator with an ax to grind and behind all leaks that the “media” is feasting on, however you have no facts to back that up other then the feasting of the “media”.
I suspect his report will be factual and land somewhere in the middle and in the hindsight of history be judge fair. But that won’t matter. (I have no facts to back that up)

When you use the word media do you include the right leaning media or is it just the right leaning? I’m not sure what the word media means or points to anymore.

Anyway it seems to me you have already made your conclusions about any future facts and to be fair I suspect your correct in the assessment that many on the left have also done so. I don’t see the bigger problem here as being philological as at this point its not about facts or integrity. There is a loud segment of the population that wants/needs to believe what we they want/need to believe.

I wonder if one of the factors is America first is really ‘me first’ = short term verses long term and if that is how populism transitions patriotism into a nationalism that ends in authoritarianism.  Just a thought

[Seriati]

I mean seriously, try to step out of your shell and look at it from the other side.  I could buy a reasonable investigation - IF - there was any evidence that the rules applied to both sides.  I don't see that evidence.  Instead I see Republicans ruined financially and prosecuted on process crimes for trying to answer questions, while Democrats were granted immunity prior to testifying and no charges ever came out of it.  I see Democrats plead the fifth and everyone lets it slide. 

Well now, isn't this an interesting tidbit:

((James Trusty, a former federal prosecutor and senior Justice Department official)) also said that during the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, investigators and former FBI Director James Comey “swore off ever pursuing false statements charges,” quoting a recent Justice Department inspector general report.

“Are there two sets of rules?” Trusty said. “It’s a fair question that someone in the FBI or Justice Department ought to answer at some point.”

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mueller-hardball-fuels-trump-allies-anger-toward-probe-risks-backfiring - moved the text in the double parens to make it clear who was talking.

So it looks in fact like there were two sets of rules, and the tactic that Mueller is relying on heavily was "off" the table for the Clinton investigation.

Or there's this:

DiGenova, who has informally advised the president throughout the probe, suggested that Mueller was running a “parallel Justice Department.”

“These threats to Dr. Corsi and to Paul Manafort are a manifestation of a fatally flawed constitutionally corrupt investigation,” diGenova said. He added: “If you’re a Democrat, you get off scot-free, with immunity, and are able to destroy evidence and ignore subpoenas. If you’re a Republican, you’re going to jail no matter what.”

Any way, that's how it looks to me from the outside.  That's credibility and good faith gap that the report would have to cross.

[Fenring]

I wonder if one of the factors is America first is really ‘me first’ = short term verses long term and if that is how populism transitions patriotism into a nationalism that ends in authoritarianism.  Just a thought

I think this kind of short-term memory loss isn't a necessary corollary of "me first", but more a corollary of what De Tocqueville predicted, which is that the nature of short-term frequent (and partisan) elections means that it's almost perpetually campaign season, and that there is no accountability for any actions taken when people are often shuffled out quickly and the can is kicked to the next guy. Fundamentally you can see how obvious it is that the next best thing politically to winning is to turn your opponent's victory into ashes by undermining everything you can, whilst at the same time blaming all failures on the stints the other side had in office while claiming all victories to be a result of your side's actions. And because most significant actions take many years to have their effects known and measured it makes it effectively impossible to determine how much truth their is to assigning blame/credit to either side for most things. And even if blame can be squarely placed at someone's feet it doesn't matter, because 8 years later that person is gone and the one to take their place can just say "oh, that problem was isolated the that guy, we're different. And this is exactly why Trump won the election: people can see through this lie now and just voted for the most irregular person they could to give the finger to the known liars.

So I don't think it's a populism => authoritarianism issue: it's actually an issue of rebellion against a revolving door of the same club of oligarchs. "Me first" is a symptom of an already corrupt system, I think; people turn on each other when they sense that they may get screwed. But as we know, many rebellions have an "out with X" but no plan for what Y should be. I guess for now that's Trump, for all the 'good' it's doing.

[Wayward Son]

I have heard that the innocent defend themselves with the facts, and the guilty defend themselves with the letter of the law.

And it's looking more like Trump may have to rely on the letter of the law.  Apparently the Trump campaign knew about the stolen e-mails before they were released.

Two months before WikiLeaks released emails stolen from the Clinton campaign, right-wing conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi sent an email to former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone anticipating the document dump, according to draft court papers obtained by NBC News.

"Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps," Corsi wrote on Aug. 2, 2016, referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to the draft court papers. "One shortly after I'm back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging..."

The interviews began on Sept. 6 when Corsi told investigators that an associate, identified by Corsi as Stone, asked him in the summer of 2016 to get in touch with an organization, identified by Corsi as WikiLeaks, about unreleased materials relevant to the presidential campaign, the draft court papers say.

"Get to (Assange) [a]t Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending (WikiLeaks) emails," read the email to Corsi dated July 25, 2016, according to the draft court documents.

Corsi said he declined the request and made clear to Stone that an attempt to contact WikiLeaks could put them in investigators' crosshairs, according to the draft court documents.

But Mueller's team said that was a lie.

Instead of turning down the request, Corsi in fact passed it along to a person in London, according to the draft court documents. Corsi said that person was conservative author Ted Malloch.

Eight days later, Corsi sent the email to Stone saying that WikiLeaks possessed information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign and planned to release it in October.

"Time to let more than (Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta) to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC (Hillary Rodham Clinton)," Corsi added in the Aug. 2, 2016, email, according to the draft court papers. "That appears to be the game hackers are now about."

Wouldn't a campaign knowing when a PAC was going to release damaging information about the opponent be consider illegal coordination under the law?  Wouldn't it likewise be illegal for a foreign government to coordinate with a campaign?

After all, Trump Jr. had his meeting at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, almost 2 months before Hillary's e-mails were leaked.  And if he discussed those e-mails with the Russians at that time, then they knew where the e-mails came from.

[Seriati]

Timing is a little messy for what you seem to want to imply.  Corsi's email is only a little more than a week after WikiLeaks began releasing DNC emails.  It makes perfect sense in that context.  In fact the July 25th email is only 3 days after Wiki started releasing those emails.

It only looks nefarious when you fail to mention that context and try to tie it to the release of the Podesta emails two months later.  But it's literally right after they released DNC emails and at a time when anyone would have been asking - what more do they have.

I'd say the selective inclusion of some facts is all that's even remotely making that look odd.

[rightleft22]

My bet is that the Trump campaign knew about the stolen e-mails before they were released

I know the reasons why I think so have been explained away on this site. But I still don't think Trump was joking with the slip of asking Russian hackers for help and many of those working on his campaign hinted at the big reveal before the reveal.

[Seriati]

I highly recommend reading Corsi's complaint against the special counsel's office.  https://www.foxnews.com/politics/read-jerome-corsis-complaint-against-special-counsel-robert-mueller

It's walks through a lot of conduct and it seems pretty clear that Corsi is telling the truth.  Doesn't mean the prosecutor's can't still make the case because more than one interpretation is possible, but it does hammer home that by endorsing Mueller you're endorsing tactics that want to ruin people's lives without any real cause.

[TheDrake]

It's walks through a lot of conduct and it seems pretty clear that Corsi is telling the truth.  Doesn't mean the prosecutor's can't still make the case because more than one interpretation is possible, but it does hammer home that by endorsing Mueller you're endorsing tactics that want to ruin people's lives without any real cause.

Yes, "oh I forgot" is always a clear sign of one's honesty when explaining away a dishonest statement.

[Seriati]

That's quite a mischaracterization,  he literally walked through that he told them he couldn't recollect without his emails, and promptly amended when he had them.  He also recounted that they were well aware of his qualification at the time and of the amendment.

There's no evidence of any intent to mislead in forgetting about a two year email you forwarded.

Perjury is not intended to criminlize forgetting details.

[TheDrake]

He's going to be talking to a prosecutor, whom you know is going to ask you about emails, Russia, et al. The news cycle has largely never dropped the entire story about the emails. You are a journalist, and never stopped writing about these emails.

Even the idea that you are a professional journalist, and your emails solely exist on one laptop stretches credulity.

It's not one email, there were three.

Citing three emails Corsi sent to Stone in 2016, prosecutors informed him that they had evidence to the contrary and, after reviewing those emails, Corsi amended his testimony.

I wonder how many Corsi supporters thought it was impossible that Hillary didn't remember that there were a handful of classified documents on her server, and that she should be locked up for it.

[Seriati]

He's going to be talking to a prosecutor, whom you know is going to ask you about emails, Russia, et al. The news cycle has largely never dropped the entire story about the emails. You are a journalist, and never stopped writing about these emails.

Even the idea that you are a professional journalist, and your emails solely exist on one laptop stretches credulity.

It's not one email, there were three.

He's in his seventies, the emails were seized, it's not remotely improbable as you imply.  In any event, per the account, he told them his response was qualified because he didn't have his emails.

And as to it being 3, who cares, cleaning out my inbox the other day, I found hundreds of emails on a matter that I didn't even remember working on.  The odds that I could have related the content of any of them, or who they went too is zero.

I suspect, that with the contents of your inbox I could convict you of perjury in less than a day - using the Mueller standard.

Citing three emails Corsi sent to Stone in 2016, prosecutors informed him that they had evidence to the contrary and, after reviewing those emails, Corsi amended his testimony.

I wonder how many Corsi supporters thought it was impossible that Hillary didn't remember that there were a handful of classified documents on her server, and that she should be locked up for it.

Interestingly, did you see Starr's recent statement that he thought of charging Hillary with perjury because she claimed she couldn't recall things to an improbable extent?  It's one thing not to testify, it's criminal to lie about not remembering.

Whether Hillary knew about a specific confidential email is on her server isn't the point.  She was fully aware that by redirecting her work related emails to a private server that she would be receiving confidential information on the server.  She was briefed on and repeatedly acknowledged legal requirements on handling confidential information, including that received in a private account, and she routinely ignored her obligations to preserve it.  Not to mention, none of you, not one, has ever put forward a legitimate reason for the private server.

[Seriati]

So replace the words "Bill Clinton" in this with "Donald Trump" and tell me with a straight face you wouldn't be demanding impeachment and jail time.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/jeffrey-epstein-a-registered-sex-offender-settles-civil-lawsuit-and-avoids-testimony-from-alleged-victims

[TheDrake]

Well, since all this happened after Clinton left office, I probably wouldn't be demanding impeachment. I do find it disturbing, I think I'll wait until the dust settles a bit before I form a more complete opinion. Especially after so many other people have cried "pedophile" about the Clintons with no real evidence, like Pizzagate.

[NobleHunter]

It looks like the Epstein case is an excellent test of a reporter's bias. Did the Republicans let him walk away with a slap on the wrist? Did he pimp out under-aged girls to Bill Clinton? How is Trump involved? It depends on the article.

[Seriati]

TheDrake it's a fair criticism that it was after he was in office, immediately after in some cases, but still after.  But it is so shady.