Cont: All things Trump + Russia Part 2

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CapelDodger said:
Whether it qualifies as a material contribution to the campaign is still, of course, moot.
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I know, but the assertion I was responding to was because the amount of money spent on internet ads was low that was evidence no collusion occurred.
The trump campaign told the russians where to spend their 44.000$ in facebook ads.

So what did they need the russians for? For the funds? If so (as ridiculous as that is) why didn't they make a super PAC to transfer the money? Each new revelation makes this look more ridiculous.
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quadraginta said:
What I find interesting is that it is apparently unimportant that the research was originally contracted for by Republican opponents of Trump, but when Democrats were willing to continue to fund it it somehow became reprehensible.
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Um no, it's 100% important. Where did you get this idea that it would be legal for Hillary to fund it & then conceal the payments? It's illegal in ordinance with the FEC. Of course, just because it's illegal doesn't mean Hillary or any of the Teflon Democrats will get nailed for it. Truth is, this is concrete proof of collusion on a much higher level than what the Trump campaign allegedly did.

Also - something else to consider... If this phony dossier was used to obtain a FISA surveillance warrant on Trump campaign officials - then there could be legal issues here because that would mean that the warrant was obtained based on false information.

The complaint from the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center said the Democrats effectively hid the payments from public scrutiny, contrary to the requirements of federal law. By law, campaign and party committees must disclose the reason money is spent and its recipient.

“By filing misleading reports, the DNC and Clinton campaign undermined the vital public information role of campaign disclosures,” said Adav Noti, senior director of trial litigation and strategy at CLC and a former FECofficial. “Voters need campaign disclosure laws to be enforced so they can hold candidates accountable for how they raise and spend money. The FEC must investigate this apparent violation and take appropriate action.”
 
NoahFence said:
:dl:
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So, the argument is the FEC paperwork says "legal services and compliance." I'm confused at what part you find risible?

Do you think the law firm did not take money from the campaign and paid for dirt?

Do you think the campaign didn't know?

Do you think that it doesn't amount to misleading the FEC?
 
logger said:
Actually, ;) this president has the Dems and what’s called the “establishment” against him. Money and power.
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This would hold more weight if the President had actually been putting forth something other than short and vague proposals (tax reform proposal was 1 page, double spaced, remember?) or no proposals at all (he's got nothing for health care, he just wants "something" to happen so that he can take credit for "something").


logger said:
Interesting that you equate people who invented this piece as folks in the information business.
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Equate? The people who wrote it were in the information business.

logger said:
There’s no reason you’ll ever believe this was a set up. You’ve completely bought it.
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Wow! That's quite the accusation. I accept the parts that have been verified and have no good reason to dismiss the rest as lies, sure. That's completely different from your accusation, though.


logger said:
You’re wrong, they bought it.
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They didn't create it.





logger said:
Lol
That wasn’t the point. ;)
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It's the only point that you could have reasonably been trying to make, short of a blatant denial of reality.





logger said:
Lol
Anything?
Confirm parts of it?
And yet they have you sold on it.
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You repeatedly claimed that it was all lies. I pointed out that it's quite clearly not all lies, even by the admission of those who really, really wish that it was, and that, in fact, it seems that there's no confirmed lies in it, so far. Nowhere did I claim to accept it all. That I haven't actually read it would be more than enough to stop me from claiming that, though.

The real question though, is "Why are you actually claiming that it's all lies, despite all the actual evidence at hand refuting your claim?"
 
Argumemnon said:
Few people were crazy about her; that's why she got so few votes. I'm still of the opinion that if she had nothing to hide re her wall street speeches, she would've released the transcripts just to shut Bernie up.
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Ehh, GOP made her paranoid- wait, never mind, they actually still are out to get her and are still entirely willing to use half-truths and overt lies to do so.
 
Emily's Cat said:
Sure. But to be fair, by early November, everyone I knew also thought she had it in the bag... so it wasn't just her polling that was off. In retrospect I can see many plausible explanations for why she lost and Trump won, but I didn't see any of those before hand.
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As a small note, I didn't think that Hillary had it in the bag. I thought that she was the more likely winner, but the main reason why I voted for her rather than a 3rd party was because I considered Trump to have a far too significant chance of victory.

TheRealnz said:
“By filing misleading reports, the DNC and Clinton campaign undermined the vital public information role of campaign disclosures,” said Adav Noti, senior director of trial litigation and strategy at CLC and a former FECofficial. “Voters need campaign disclosure laws to be enforced so they can hold candidates accountable for how they raise and spend money. The FEC must investigate this apparent violation and take appropriate action.”
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As ever, I fully support the prosecution of anyone breaking election law, whether it be Republicans, Democrats, or anyone else.
 
jimbob said:
I hasn't even spotted the alternative in my reply in post above that.

Fabergé eggs are particularly appropriate to invoke in context, being bling enough for Trump and Russian.
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Say what?!! Trump is more of a Diamond Encrusted Mr. Potato Head kind of guy.
 
'To the manor born'. That has a similar meaning but stresses manorial birth, that is, it refers to someone born into the nobility.

Did he have to buy his furniture?
 
logger said:
Interesting
http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/26/f...ma-admin-threatened-my-client-and-his-career/
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Victoria Toensing
is a lawyer, and partner with her husband, Joseph DiGenova, in the Washington law firm DiGenova and Toensing. Her practice specializes in white-collar criminal defense, regulatory inquiries, and legislative advocacy...

Involvement in Valerie Plame scandal

In the brief, she "argued that the law couldn't have been broken when Valerie Plame's cover as a CIA agent was blown because her status wasn't really covert."
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Interesting...
 
The Justice Department official overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible complicity of President Donald Trump's campaign in Russian efforts to influence last year's election said in an interview released Wednesday that he doubts advertising by foreign countries would affect American voters.

“You know, American citizens are pretty savvy, and they decide who to vote for. I don’t think they’d be influenced by ads posted by foreign governments," Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told J.J. Green, a national security reporter for WTOP-FM. "I think people are more thoughtful about that in the way that they make their decisions. But nonetheless, you know, if we have foreign countries that are seeking to interfere in our elections, I think we need to take appropriate actions in response.”

Rosenstein's comments downplaying the potential impact of foreign government ads come as lawmakers are intently focused on how the Russian government allegedly used social media during the 2016 race. At least three congressional committees are scheduled to hold hearings next week with executives from tech giants Google, Facebook and Twitter to discuss Russian use of their platforms.
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https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/26/rod-rosenstein-foreign-ads-american-voters-244221

Yeah American voters are obviously a very reasonable lot hence why they elected Trump, the narcissistic liar who told more lies during his campaign than the every single major presidential campaign over the last century combined. I mean there's no shortage of Americans who believe that Obama wasn't an American citizen or that Climate Change is a "hoax".
 
Arcade22 said:
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/26/rod-rosenstein-foreign-ads-american-voters-244221

Yeah American voters are obviously a very reasonable lot hence why they elected Trump, the narcissistic liar who told more lies during his campaign than the every single major presidential campaign over the last century combined. I mean there's no shortage of Americans who believe that Obama wasn't an American citizen or that Climate Change is a "hoax".
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Evil propaganda only works when it's the Democrats doing it.
 
TheRealnz said:
Of course, just because it's illegal doesn't mean Hillary or any of the Teflon Democrats will get nailed for it.
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Should they get as severe a punishment as Jeff Sessions got for lying under oath during his confirmation hearing about his meetings with Russian officials? Or maybe as severe a punishment as Jared Kushner got for omitting his meetings with Russian officials from his security clearance application?

Truth is, this is concrete proof of collusion on a much higher level than what the Trump campaign allegedly did.
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For sure! Having someone contracted by a company that a law firm acting as your legal adviser contracted with to obtain information about a person's activities in a foreign country CLEARLY demonstrates a FAR higher level of collusion than merely having your senior campaign officials meet in person with officials and intelligence agents of a foreign country to obtain information collected by the foreign country's intelligence agents.
 
xjx388 said:
Wouldn’t it be proper to apply some skepticism to what’s in the dossier? The fact that some of it has been confirmed (what, exactly because I have not seen confirmation ?) does not in any way confirm by osmosis anything else.
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If only some things like that were posted in this very thread...

TheL8Elvis said:
And remember, parts of the Steele dossier have been confirmed
Also, NBC’s Ken Dilanian reminds us that PARTS of the Steele dossier seem to line up with known facts. For example, Dilanian notes:

The dossier discusses Trump’s attempts to secure business deals in Russia, saying, “Regarding TRUMP’s claimed minimal investment profile in Russia, a separate source with direct knowledge said this had not been for want of trying. TRUMP’s previous efforts had included exploring the real estate sector in St Petersburg as well as Moscow…” We now know that despite Trump saying he had no deals in Russia, his organization was trying to build Trump Tower Moscow during the Republican primaries.

The dossier says a “senior Russian diplomat withdrawn from Washington embassy on account of potential exposure in US presidential election operation/s.” According to McClatchy, Mikhail Kalugin was recalled from his post as head of the embassy’s economics section in August of 2016. BBC reported that U.S. government sources identified Kalugin as a spy, though NBC News has not confirmed this.

The dossier asserts that in early August 2016, “a Kremlin official involved in US relations commented on aspects of the Russian operation to date,” discussing attempts to compromise Jill STEIN of the Green Party; TRUMP foreign policy adviser Carter PAGE; and former DIA Director Michael Flynn, by inviting them to Moscow. Flynn and Stein spoke at the RT gala in 2015, Flynn having been paid. Page gave a Kremlin-friendly speech in Moscow in July 2016 while he was advising the Trump campaign.
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sunmaster14 said:
Having read the dossier, I can't see anything in there that has been confirmed which wasn't already public information as of the date-stamps on the dossier's sections. It's a mix of speculation and just reporting what was available in the news already. Most of the latter is accepted as true, but that's hardly meaningful.
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Examples are far more convincing than hand waving.

sunmaster14 said:
For example, if I wrote that "Michelle Obama was born a man, and she was first lady of the United States until January 20, 2017," you could say that half of my claims have been confirmed. The remainder is uncorroborated so far.
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Not that kind of example.

sunmaster14 said:
Well, I have literally never had egg on my face. Even figuratively, I have never had egg put on my face by this forum. I have over 9,500 posts, and I don't think I have ever claimed anything that I should have retracted. Admittedly, I've been lucky, but I also like to think that I'm very circumspect as well.
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This is my shocked face. :rolleyes:
 
TheRealnz said:
Um no, it's 100% important. Where did you get this idea that it would be legal for Hillary to fund it & then conceal the payments? It's illegal in ordinance with the FEC. Of course, just because it's illegal doesn't mean Hillary or any of the Teflon Democrats will get nailed for it. Truth is, this is concrete proof of collusion on a much higher level than what the Trump campaign allegedly did.

Also - something else to consider... If this phony dossier was used to obtain a FISA surveillance warrant on Trump campaign officials - then there could be legal issues here because that would mean that the warrant was obtained based on false information.

The complaint from the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center said the Democrats effectively hid the payments from public scrutiny, contrary to the requirements of federal law. By law, campaign and party committees must disclose the reason money is spent and its recipient.

“By filing misleading reports, the DNC and Clinton campaign undermined the vital public information role of campaign disclosures,” said Adav Noti, senior director of trial litigation and strategy at CLC and a former FECofficial. “Voters need campaign disclosure laws to be enforced so they can hold candidates accountable for how they raise and spend money. The FEC must investigate this apparent violation and take appropriate action.”
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So based on a claim, you've somehow already determined the payments were a violation of FEC laws and illegal.

OK :rolleyes:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/25/fec-complaint-accuses-clinton-dnc-violations/
“Questions about who paid for this dossier are the subject of intense public interest, and this is precisely the information that FEC reports are supposed to provide,” said Brendan Fischer, director of federal and FEC reform at CLC. “Payments by a campaign or party committee to an opposition research firm are legal, as long as those payments are accurately disclosed. But describing payments for opposition research as ‘legal services’ is entirely misleading and subverts the reporting requirements.”

And what sort of punishment does violating these FEC laws entail ? A fine ? \

Also, what collusion is this evidence of ?

I won't hold my breath waiting for answers...
 
Kremlin approved talking points.

But interviews and records show that in the months before the meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya had discussed the allegations with one of Russia’s most powerful officials, the prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika. And the memo she brought with her closely followed a document that Mr. Chaika’s office had given to an American congressman two months earlier, incorporating some paragraphs verbatim.

The coordination between the Trump Tower visitor and the Russian prosecutor general undercuts Ms. Veselnitskaya’s account that she was a purely independent actor when she sat down with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, then the Trump campaign chairman. It also suggests that emails from an intermediary to the younger Mr. Trump promising that Ms. Veselnitskaya would arrive with information from Russian prosecutors were rooted at least partly in fact — not mere “puffery,” as the president’s son later said.

In the past week, Ms. Veselnitskaya’s allegations — that major Democratic donors were guilty of financial fraud and tax evasion — have been embraced at the highest levels of the Russian government. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia repeated her charges at length last week at an annual conference of Western academics. A state-run television network recently made them the subject of two special reports, featuring interviews with Ms. Veselnitskaya and Mr. Chaika.

The matching messages point to a synchronized information campaign. Like some other Russian experts, Stephen Blank, a senior fellow with the nonprofit American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, said they indicate that Ms. Veselnitskaya’s actions “were coordinated from the very top.”
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varwoche said:
Funny, I didn't know that "ordinary Russian citizens" had their talking points overseen by the Kremlin.
Edited by Agatha: 
Edited moderated content
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I disagree. If I'm on a project independently, and it makes sense to coordinate with another group on messaging, I'm still independent and not on their behalf.
 
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This is truly amazing (my emphasis added):

In recent closed-door interviews with the Senate intelligence committee, Podesta and Wasserman Schultz said they did not know who had funded Fusion GPS, the intelligence firm that hired British Intelligence Officer Christopher Steele to compile the dossier on Trump, the sources said.

Podesta was asked in his September interview whether the Clinton campaign had a contractual agreement with Fusion GPS, and he said he was not aware of one, according to one of the sources.

Sitting next to Podesta during the interview: his attorney Marc Elias, who worked for the law firm that hired Fusion GPS to continue research on Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC, multiple sources said. Elias was only there in his capacity as Podesta's attorney and not as a witness.
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The scumbaggery here is mind-boggling. Marc Elias is, at a minimum, guilty of an egregious breach of ethics. More likely, Podesta is guilty of perjury, and Elias is guilty of suborning perjury.
 
sunmaster14 said:
This is truly amazing (my emphasis added):



The scumbaggery here is mind-boggling. Marc Elias is, at a minimum, guilty of an egregious breach of ethics. More likely, Podesta is guilty of perjury, and Elias is guilty of suborning perjury.
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I will accept podesta knew where I see evidence he knew.
 
sunmaster14 said:
This is truly amazing (my emphasis added):

The scumbaggery here is mind-boggling. Marc Elias is, at a minimum, guilty of an egregious breach of ethics. More likely, Podesta is guilty of perjury, and Elias is guilty of suborning perjury.
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You mean your cherry picking and aspersions , right ?

On Tuesday, that law firm, Perkins Coie, wrotein a letter thatit had retained Fusion GPS as part of its representation of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. The disclosure of the Democratic funding source for Fusion GPS is raising new questions for the congressional Russian investigators. The Perkins Coie letter suggested its clients -- the Clinton campaign and the DNC -- did not learn about the matter until recently.

But yeah, in your world Podesta is a perjurer.
 
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phiwum said:
Perhaps this is my bias showing, but I don't recall anyone arguing that everything in the dossier is fact. At best, some have argued that it can't be dismissed without investigation.

On the other hand, logger has said that the dossier notations nothing but lies.
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:confused: I don't believe I implied that anyone thought the entire dossier was fact? Also, I have no idea what logger says.
 
Emily's Cat said:
:confused: I don't believe I implied that anyone thought the entire dossier was fact? Also, I have no idea what logger says.
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Perhaps I am unclear what you meant when you said this:

Most of my objection in this thread has been to cases where that speculation has been treated as factual, and argued as such, in the absence of any supporting evidence.
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Aside from logger, I haven't seen any speculation treated as fact. Even Sunmaster, with whom I disagree and who I think has too much confidence in his speculations, called his theory "educated extrapolation".

I have not read every post, so it may be that I've missed whatever triggered your criticism.
 
phiwum said:
Aside from logger, I haven't seen any speculation treated as fact. Even Sunmaster, with whom I disagree and who I think has too much confidence in his speculations, called his theory "educated extrapolation".
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This is pretty hilarious:

TheL8Elvis: "And remember, parts of the Steele dossier have been confirmed "
First sentence of his following quote: "Also, NBC’s Ken Dilanian reminds us that PARTS of the Steele dossier seem to line up with known facts "
 
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TheL8Elvis said:
You mean your cherry picking and aspersions , right ?

On Tuesday, that law firm, Perkins Coie, wrotein a letter thatit had retained Fusion GPS as part of its representation of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. The disclosure of the Democratic funding source for Fusion GPS is raising new questions for the congressional Russian investigators. The Perkins Coie letter suggested its clients -- the Clinton campaign and the DNC -- did not learn about the matter until recently.
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The letter does nothing of the sort. It can be found here. Where does it suggest that its clients didn't learn about the matter until recently?

But yeah, in your world Podesta is a perjurer.
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Yes, in my world Podesta is a serial perjurer. That world is known as Earth to most people. It orbits around a star called Sun (or sometimes Sol) in the Milky Way galaxy.
 
Childlike Empress said:
This is pretty hilarious:

TheL8Elvis: "And remember, parts of the Steele dossier have been confirmed "
First sentence of his following quote: "Also, NBC’s Ken Dilanian reminds us that PARTS of the Steele dossier seem to line up with known facts "
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Yeah, those facts which had already been published in newspapers by the time Steele added them to the dossier. That Steele guy is so crafty. He should patent the idea of mixing truth with fiction in order to enhance the credibility of the fiction. Sort of like putting fudge sauce, whipcream, and little sprinkles on cow dung.
 
sunmaster14 said:
The letter does nothing of the sort. It can be found here. Where does it suggest that its clients didn't learn about the matter until recently?
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Let me spell it out for you:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/26/polit...ie-wasserman-schultz-trump-dossier/index.html
On Tuesday, that law firm, Perkins Coie, wrote in a letter that it had retained Fusion GPS as part of its representation of the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

Perkins Coie retained Fusion GPS - not the Clinton campaign and DNC. When asked previously,m the Clinton campaign and DNC denied knowledge. Now, apparently they don't deny knowledge. Presumably, that suggests they found our recently.

But please, if you have other evidence beyond your *snicker* "spidey senses" , do tell...

sunmaster14 said:
Yes, in my world Podesta is a serial perjurer. That world is known as Earth to most people. It orbits around a star called Sun (or sometimes Sol) in the Milky Way galaxy.
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I'll wait for you to provide evidence of Podesta being a serial perjurer....
 
sunmaster14 said:
Yeah, those facts which had already been published in newspapers by the time Steele added them to the dossier. That Steele guy is so crafty. He should patent the idea of mixing truth with fiction in order to enhance the credibility of the fiction. Sort of like putting fudge sauce, whipcream, and little sprinkles on cow dung.
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More naked assertions from you. *yawn*
 
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