Cont: All things Trump + Russia Part 2

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TheL8Elvis said:
It's quite bold of you to make such unsupported assertions, when you literally have almost zero evidence ... isn't it ?
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No, if you use your brain for critical analysis, it is possible to be confident of your conclusions, even without direct evidence. You should try it sometimes. It's a very rewarding experience.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller special counsel in May, and Mueller was given a broad mandate to investigate and prosecute any potential crimes he uncovered.
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I'm sorry, is that supposed to be a cite to some authoritative source? Or is that just your own fevered scribbling?

LMAO at your description "meandered into a grey area." Is that an accurate characterization of Paul Manafort in your world ?
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It may be in his case, or it may not be. My point is that most successful businessmen would wither under such intense scrutiny, including such revered businessmen as Warren Buffett.

OF course you think it's unfair, Republicans are being investigated. I'm glad to see you staying on message with the Andrew McCarthy talking points though ... based on his your arguments, you seem to be a big fan.
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Well, I have come up with my own arguments, but I'm not sure why you're dismissive of Andrew McCarthy. He is a respected former US district attorney, and knows most of the prosecutors on Mueller's team personally (including Mueller himself).
 
sunmaster14 said:
Doesn't really matter. Tax and financial crimes are not the kinds of things for which you need early morning, armed raids. Such crimes develop over long periods of time, and the evidence is generally embedded in the banking system in some fashion. It is not the kind of crime where all of the evidence can be flushed down the toilet.
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How could you possibly know what is and what isn't appropriate for the FBI? A little presumptuous, isn't that?

How about you let the adults do their job.
 
NoahFence said:
How could you possibly know what is and what isn't appropriate for the FBI? A little presumptuous, isn't that?

How about you let the adults do their job.
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Excuse me, but I'm not going to defer to a bunch of law enforcement officers on what is appropriate or not. In fact it would be dangerous to do so. Aside from the fact that I don't trust their education on civil liberties as far as I could throw Bill Clinton's booty call directory, they are hardly unbiased. The less civil liberty for us, the more power for them. And vice versa.
 
sunmaster14 said:
?.. My point is that most successful businessmen would wither under such intense scrutiny, including such revered businessmen as Warren Buffett.
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A self-serving supposition which I randomly fished from your relentless, highly unimpressive stream of self-serving suppositions.
 
sunmaster14 said:
No, if you use your brain for critical analysis, it is possible to be confident of your conclusions, even without direct evidence. You should try it sometimes. It's a very rewarding experience.
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And that's where any attempt at honest argument comes to a screeching halt.
 
TheL8Elvis said:
sunmaster14 said:
No, if you use your brain for critical analysis, it is possible to be confident of your conclusions, even without direct evidence. You should try it sometimes.
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It's a very rewarding experience.And that's where any attempt at honest argument comes to a screeching halt.
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:jaw-dropp

Well there you go, a celebration of confirmation bias.
 
sunmaster14 said:
Excuse me, but I'm not going to defer to a bunch of law enforcement officers on what is appropriate or not. In fact it would be dangerous to do so.
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Yet you seem to be quite vocal in supporting Trump, a guy who pardoned Arpaio who was doing the think you were complaining about... taking actions that Arpaio thought were appropriate but which were seen as incorrect by the courts.
 
This article captures my current thinking.

As I wrote back in April, at least six people from the campaign, including Trump himself, were identified in various reports as having been picked up in intercepted communications.

Always, the reports insisted that the Americans were not the targets of the surveillance, that they were “incidentally” picked up while talking to targets.

Those six included Gen. Mike Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, then-Senator and now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Jared Kushner.

Another was Carter Page, briefly a Trump adviser, and Manafort.

But since then, media reports say that Page was, in fact, being surveilled under a FISA warrant. And now we learn that Manafort was, too.

So those initial reports about the Trumpsters being “incidentally” picked up were wrong. Fake news, you might say, because Manafort and Page were FBI targets whose communications were being intercepted — and the media’s sources had to have known that.
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I am beginning, slowly, to come to the conclusion that the so-called deep state, with the encouragement and cooperation of the Obama administration, used a counterintelligence investigation as an excuse to get political dirt on the Trump campaign in an effort to undermine it. Now that the worst case scenario has come to pass, viz. Trump winning the election, that effort continues in the same guise so as to undermine Trump's presidency and prevent him from replacing the bureaucracy with people who are either more conservative or more populist. The deep state actors probably have convinced themselves that they are the true patriots, protecting the nation from a dangerously incompetent president, but the fact remains that what they are doing is extremely subversive.

I think the story will eventually come out, although it will never truly be admitted by those on the left. The same way the left will never admit that they were unwitting tools of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and thereby made winning that "war" much more difficult.
 
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sunmaster14 said:
Hmmm. This is the first time that I can recall you showing any desire for honest argument.
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there are not enough :rolleyes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/...tID=65851468&pgtype=Homepage&mtrref=undefined
Mueller Seeks White House Documents Related to Trump’s Actions as President
WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, has asked the White House for documents about some of President Trump’s most scrutinized actions since taking office, including the firing of his national security adviser and F.B.I. director, according to White House officials.

Nothingburgers all around ! :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
 
sunmaster14 said:
This article captures my current thinking.



I am beginning, slowly, to come to the conclusion that the so-called deep state, with the encouragement and cooperation of the Obama administration, used a counterintelligence investigation as an excuse to get political dirt on the Trump campaign in an effort to undermine it. Now that the worst case scenario has come to pass, viz. Trump winning the election, that effort continues in the same guise so as to undermine Trump's presidency and prevent him from replacing the bureaucracy with people who are either more conservative or more populist. The deep state actors probably have convinced themselves that they are the true patriots, protecting the nation from a dangerously incompetent president, but the fact remains that what they are doing is extremely subversive.

I think the story will eventually come out, although it will never truly be admitted by those on the left. The same way the left will never admit that they were unwitting tools of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and thereby made winning that "war" much more difficult.
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Note to Emily's Cat - you were asking about credible sources.

The New York] Times is generally considered credible
The Washington Post is generally considered credible
The New York Post... less so.




Of course, it was very helpful to the Deep State that Junior agreed to meeting what he thought* was representative of the Russian Government to get dirt on Hilary. And within four hours of him agreeing to the meeting, Senior said that there'd be dirt on Clinton.


*probably with justification but with a wafer thin shred of deniability
 
Enter the oligarch.

Less than two weeks before Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign chairman offered to provide briefings on the race to a Russian billionaire closely aligned with the Kremlin, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Paul Manafort made the offer in an email to an overseas intermediary, asking that a message be sent to Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate with whom Manafort had done business in the past, these people said.

“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in the July 7, 2016, email, portions of which were read to The Washington Post along with other Manafort correspondence from that time.

The emails are among tens of thousands of documents that have been turned over to congressional investigators and Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team as they probe whether Trump associates coordinated with Russia as part of Moscow’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election.
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Stacko said:
Enter the oligarch.
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Emily's Cat... Do tell, is Oleg Deripaska one of the "ordinary Russian citizens" who you claim have been swept up in the hysteria?

For the nth time, can you point to so much as one, lonely mainstream news report that tarnishes Trump et al by virtue of association with "ordinary Russian citizens" and even "ordinary Americans of Russian descent"?

Or you could retract the claim of course.
 
Listening to Hannity right now, it's all a conspiracy against Trump involving the Obama justice department, Hillary Clinton, Comey, Mueller and Rosenstein. And Hannity is certain there was no reason for Sessions to have recused himself but Rosenstein should.

It's upsidedown land on Fox, everything against Trump is fake news or a conspiracy. The connection between the Russian Bank and trump campaign computers was because of a hack to make it look like there was a connection. Comey and Clinton are plotting together. There's proof now Trump Tower was wiretapped (because everyone knows Manafort must have used a Trump Tower land line and not a cell phone. :rolleyes:

The blatant CT nonsense on a mainstream broadcast news station is mind boggling, like if Alex Jones became mainstream. [Thinks for a minute] OTOH, Fox was host to Glenn Beck crazy for years. And Hannity appears is just as crazy.

[Side note] that came up when I was looking for links to Hannity's current nonsense about the Trump/Russia connection: The Trailer for the Sean Hannity-Produced Christian Movie Is Beyond Parody [/sidenote]

But I digress... Hannity: 'President Trump Has Been Vindicated' By Report of Spying on Manafort Hint, no he is not and no lie or coverup has been uncovered. Tapping Manafort's phone, no doubt a cell phone, is not the same as wiretapping Trump Tower or tapping Trump.
 
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FBI says as many as 39 states had their voting systems scanned or targeted by Russia.

According to the FBI,*as many as 39 states had their election systems scanned*or targeted by Russia. There's no evidence of votes changed. But given the stakes, some state agencies that run elections are trying to curb any further interference prior to mid-term elections in November.

Their tool of choice: Ensuring systems can't be hacked, and if they are, making those breaches immediately obvious. To do this, some are taking the unusual move of rewinding the technological dial, debating measures that would add paper ballots — similar to how many Americans voted before electronic voting started to become widespread in the 1980s.*

A week ago Virginia announced it would no longer use touch-screen-only voting machines after a hack-a-thon in Las Vegas showed*how easily they could be breached.*
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The Trump cult is just playing Whose Lie Is It Anyway.

Where everything is made up and the facts don't matter.
 
sunmaster14 said:
The link to the primary authority doesn't work.
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Let me help you:

hXXp://-swing-state-voter-rolls/102555520/https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/06/06/russian-hackers-election-goal-may-have-been-swing-state-voter-rolls/102555520/

Should be:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech...-have-been-swing-state-voter-rolls/102555520/

But what I think you really want is this:
https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05...ian-hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election/

(via https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...h-of-39-states-threatens-future-u-s-elections)

Which I believe is the actual source of those numbers.

Now you can move on to hand-waving that document away.
 
TheL8Elvis said:
Let me help you:

hXXp://-swing-state-voter-rolls/102555520/https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/06/06/russian-hackers-election-goal-may-have-been-swing-state-voter-rolls/102555520/

Should be:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech...-have-been-swing-state-voter-rolls/102555520/

But what I think you really want is this:
https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05...ian-hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election/

(via https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...h-of-39-states-threatens-future-u-s-elections)

Which I believe is the actual source of those numbers.

Now you can move on to hand-waving that document away.
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I don't see any reference to 39 states (or as many as 39 states) being targeted in the article from The Intercept. There is no relevant mention of the FBI either. As for the Bloomberg article, I've seen no followup to its claim (made in June by the way) that some anonymous person claimed 39 states were targeted. Bloomberg never claimed that the anonymous person was from the FBI, and the FBI has never made any such announcement publicly.

According to any reasonable standards, this is yet another example of fake news (helpfully propagated by Stacko, as is his wont).
 
Stacko said:
Enter the oligarch.
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That is some powerful nothingburger.

I suppose there might be some innocent explanation for why a presidential campaign manager was offering closed-door high-level campaign access to a foreign oligarch. Some chain of causation that completely circumnavigates around the Kremlin.

[emoji553] [emoji635]
 
d4m10n said:
That is some powerful nothingburger.

I suppose there might be some innocent explanation for why a presidential campaign manager was offering closed-door high-level campaign access to a foreign oligarch. Some chain of causation that completely circumnavigates around the Kremlin.

[emoji553] [emoji635]
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When someone offers to work for you for free, you might be their product.
 
Argumemnon said:
You are in possession of all the information and yet you keep pretending that it doesn't mean what it clearly means.
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I am in possession of all of the speculation, allegation, and accusation... and yet I keep failing to add my own opinion regarding what it must actually mean.

Yep, clearly that's total dishonesty, and I'm totally just a liar because I haven't rounded out all those not-yet-verified news stories with what I want to believe. :rolleyes:
 
sunmaster14 said:
No, if you use your brain for critical analysis, it is possible to be confident of your conclusions, even without direct evidence. You should try it sometimes. It's a very rewarding experience.
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I object to this. This is exactly the same thing that's being done by those who have concluded Trump's guilt. Both they and you are filling in the blanks in a paucity of solid evidence with your own beliefs.

A lack of evidence is a lack of evidence. There may be enough of a plausible story to prompt suspicion, but there is absolutely NOT enough to support a confident conclusion.

Confirmation bias cuts both ways.
 
Argumemnon said:
What? Seriously you're making less and less sense.
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I'm tired of this argument.

In essence, you claim that I've been given all of the evidence, so my defense of Trump means I'm dishonest.

My rejoinder is, and has been pretty consistently, that the vast majority of information being supplied does not constitute evidence. The majority of it is allegation, accusation, or speculation. As such, it is insufficient for me to reach a conclusion.

Your entire premise is flawed.

1) Most of the information is not evidence
2) I haven't defended Trump - refraining from adopting an uninformed option is not a defensE
3) None of that in any fashion indicates a lack of integrity or honesty
 
Emily's Cat said:
In essence, you claim that I've been given all of the evidence, so my defense of Trump means I'm dishonest.
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Oh, so it was a strawman. Got it.

My rejoinder is, and has been pretty consistently, that the vast majority of information being supplied does not constitute evidence. The majority of it is allegation, accusation, or speculation. As such, it is insufficient for me to reach a conclusion.
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Yes, that's what I said: you have all the information and you're dismissing and ignoring it to avoid reaching the obvious conclusion.

I haven't defended Trump - refraining from adopting an uninformed option is not a defensE
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Yes. No.
 
Emily's Cat said:
I object to this. This is exactly the same thing that's being done by those who have concluded Trump's guilt. Both they and you are filling in the blanks in a paucity of solid evidence with your own beliefs.

A lack of evidence is a lack of evidence. There may be enough of a plausible story to prompt suspicion, but there is absolutely NOT enough to support a confident conclusion.

Confirmation bias cuts both ways.
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Look, I appreciate that you want to use me as a foil to make yourself look more objective, but, ... well, actually I don't appreciate it.

In the context I made that statement, it was absolutely reasonable. Gathering evidence of financial crimes does not require no-knock search warrants in the middle of the night. I would have thought this was easy to understand, but maybe you need a financial background to fully appreciate how difficult it is to cover up financial improprieties by flushing a baggie down the toilet.
 
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