Russia and our election

[hollodero]

(07-10-2017, 05:01 PM)michaelsean Wrote: I looked it up on wikipedia, and if that's accurate, then no way.  The vast majority of people are not white supremacists.

Alright alright, I retract my comment. The counterarguments are overwhelming. I never meant to equate alt-right with white supremacists, though. But the terminology doesn't fit to what I was getting at.

(07-10-2017, 04:07 PM)Dill Wrote: Last month I spent a week in rural Texas with my cousins (15 in number) who range in age from 54-72. 11 of that group voted for Trump, as did their spouses. I'm pretty sure none is alt-right.

What I was getting at was just that say more extreme movements have an easier way to power when half the country is apolitical. And those who aren't are so strongly bound to one side that they won't reject those more extreme movements. Which in a sense does make those republicans and nolens volens Trump supporters complicit to the rise of the alt-right. In a sense.

[BmorePat87]

(07-09-2017, 12:49 AM)NATI BENGALS Wrote: https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/07/08/trumps-campaign-team-met-with-a-russian-lawyer-believed-to-work/23022215/

Couple weeks after Trump won the nomination. Russian family lawyer for the people involved in some NYC real estate dirty business met with a couple of the kings sons.

Lets wrap another layer of wool over our eyes Trumpets!!

The family whose leader made sure they made money off of the kids with cancer was probably super interested in the adoption thing.

Just close your eyes and imagine tax cuts for the rich and repeat after me... Bigly great fantastic tremendous bigly great fantastic tremendous... Keep your minds closed and tune in to fox. America is in the best baby hands imaginable. The life long 71 year old con man finally changed his ways.

Pull that wool down tight and sleep good. The royal family loves you. They only lie to you to protect you.

At this point, it's just a waiting game for the Mueller investigation. This is a big flag, but most conservatives think any and all things Russia is "fake news". Donny Jr has admitted that he, the son in law turned advisor, and the campaign manager all sat down with a Kremlin linked lawyer on the pretense that this Russian had some information on Hillary they could use. So he tried to collude with Russia?

[GMDino]

(07-10-2017, 07:31 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: At this point, it's just a waiting game for the Mueller investigation. This is a big flag, but most conservatives think any and all things Russia is "fake news". Donny Jr has admitted that he, the son in law turned advisor, and the campaign manager all sat down with a Kremlin linked lawyer on the pretense that this Russian had some information on Hillary they could use. So he tried to collude with Russia?

But they didn't have the info so they just talked about foreign adoptions!

Soooo...ignore why he wanted to meet with them. 'K?

[StLucieBengal]

https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/07/10/be-careful-how-you-define-collusion-on-the-veselnitskaya-bombshell-and-the-steele-dossier/

Found this via Glenn Greenwald via his twitter feed and it was relevant due to the off the wall nature of how some of this Russia stuff is put out there by the leftist media.

He has updated with the Trump Jr email. But since no one has actually seen this email who knows what the NYT ran with .....

For those who prefer to not read the whole thing.

Quote:Be Careful How You Define Collusion: On the Veselnitskaya Bombshell and the Steele Dossier

emptywheelJuly 10, 2017
//in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Russian hacks /by
See update, below, which provides evidence that was not present when I wrote this post.

The NYT has a new bombshell showing that Don Jr. was willing to meet with someone to get Russian dirt on Hillary. It is damning. But Democrats should be very careful about calling it collusion, yet.

On Saturday, the NYT reported that Don Jr, Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met on June 9 with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who has worked to overturn the Magnitsky sanctions. In Don Jr’s first response to the NYT, he admitted to the meeting, but said it focused primarily on adoptions (which means it focused on the sanctions).

Then, yesterday, NYT reported that Don Jr took the meeting because he was promised Russia-related dirt on Hillary. With that new detail, Don Jr changed his story, admitting that’s why he took the meeting, though he claimed that the information Veselnitskaya offered “made no sense.”

In a statement on Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. said he had met with the Russian lawyer at the request of an acquaintance. “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”

He said she then turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The law so enraged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that he retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian children.

“It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Mr. Trump said.

WaPo revealed that the meeting was set up by music publicist Rob Goldstone, and hints that he may have done so at the behest of Emin Agalarov (which Goldstone has since confirmed).

He did not name the acquaintance, but in an interview Sunday, Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who is friendly with Trump Jr., told The Washington Post that he had arranged the meeting at the request of a Russian client and had attended it along with Veselnitskaya.

Goldstone has been active with the Miss Universe pageant and works as a manager for Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop star whose father is a wealthy Moscow developer who sponsored the pageant in the Russian capital in 2013.

This news is damning for several reasons. Kushner failed to disclose it at first in his clearance application, and Don Jr didn’t reveal it in past interviews about meeting with Russians. Everyone tried to hide this at first.

But thus far, it is not evidence of collusion, contrary to what a lot of people are saying.

That’s true, most obviously, because we only have the implicit offer of a quid pro quo: dirt on Hillary — the source of which is unknown — in exchange for sanctions relief. We don’t (yet) have evidence that Don Jr and his co-conspirators acted on that quid pro quo.

But it’s also true because if that’s the standard for collusion, then Hillary’s campaign is in trouble for doing the same.

Remember: A supporter of Hillary Clinton paid an opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, to hire a British spy who in turn paid money to Russians — including people even closer to the Kremlin than Veselnitskaya — for Russia-related dirt on Don Jr’s dad.

Yes, the Clinton campaign was full of adults, and so kept their Russian-paying oppo research far better removed from the key players on the campaign than Trump’s campaign, which was run by incompetents. But if obtaining dirt from Russians — even paying Russians to obtain dirt — is collusion, then a whole bunch of people colluded with Russians (and a bunch of other foreign entities, I’m sure), including whatever Republican originally paid Fusion for dirt on Trump.

Breaking: Our political process is sleazy as **** (but then, so are most of our politicians).

The claim that merely meeting with Veselnitskaya is collusion is all the more dangerous given that it invokes some weird details about the Fusion dossier. Most importantly, as Trump’s lawyer’s spox has pointed out (incoherently, at first), like whatever Clinton supporter retained the oppo research firm, Veselnitskaya also employed Fusion. An update to NYT’s Friday story laid some of this out, in the form of Mark Corallo’s more clever than you actually might think suggestion that the Democrats might have paid Fusion to set up this meeting.

In an interview, Mr. [Mark] Corallo explained that Ms. Veselnitskaya, in her anti-Magnitsky campaign, employs a private investigator whose firm, Fusion GPS, produced an intelligence dossier that contained unproven allegations against the president. In a statement, the firm said, “Fusion GPS learned about this meeting from news reports and had no prior knowledge of it. Any claim that Fusion GPS arranged or facilitated this meeting in any way is false.”

[snip]

One of Ms. Veselnitskaya’s clients is Denis Katsyv, the Russian owner of a Cyprus-based investment company called Prevezon Holdings. He is the son of Petr Katsyv, the vice president of the state-owned Russian Railways and a former deputy governor of the Moscow region. In a civil forfeiture case prosecuted by Mr. Bharara’s office, the Justice Department alleged that Prevezon had helped launder money tied to a $230 million corruption scheme exposed by Mr. Magnitsky by parking it in New York real estate and bank accounts. As a result, the government froze $14 million of its assets. Prevezon recently settled the case for $6 million without admitting wrongdoing.

[snip]

Besides the private investigator whose firm produced the Trump dossier, the lobbying team included Rinat Akhmetshin, an émigré to the United States who once served as a Soviet military officer and who has been called a Russian political gun for hire.

Republicans have already pointed to Akhmetshin’s work with Fusion as a way to discredit the Steele dossier. Now they are (or at least were, before the really damning bits came out) using it to attempt to discredit the most damning detail about Trump’s ties to Russians.

But there in one other interesting detail.

The first report (that we have) reflecting Christopher Steele’s work (and also the first report that some unknown Democrat paid for after earlier oppo research had been paid for by some Republican) is dated June 20.

The report, dated 11 days after the Veselnitskaya meeting, states that the Kremlin has a dossier on Clinton, but that it has not as yet been distributed abroad.



That claim is seemingly contradicted by the claims of Source A (a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure) and Source D. Indeed, Source D appears to have claimed, in June, that dirt from Russia was helpful.



Ultimately, though, the memo seems to credit Source B, “a former top level Russian intelligence officer” and Source G, a senior Kremlin official, who said the dossier, attributed here to the FSB, had not yet been shared with Trump or anyone else in America.



Consider: First, Akhmetshin himself qualifies as a former intelligence officer (though it’s not clear how senior he was). He might have reason to deny that intelligence he tried to pass was the intelligence in question. And he’d likely be right, given that the Clinton dossier was purportedly a FSB, not a GRU, product. But it’s even possible that he didn’t want Hillary to know that he or a colleague was dealing dirt, however bad.

Nevertheless, the senior-most Russian quoted in the dossier compiled for Hillary Clinton claimed — and Steele appears to have believed — that Russia’s dirt on Hillary Clinton had not yet been released.

Which doesn’t really help the treatment of this as a scandal.

Don’t get me wrong. I suspect there is more to this story. But I also note that Democrats should be really careful not to get too far ahead of this one, for fear of where it will lead.

Update: NYT’s latest provides evidence that gets you far closer to collusion than the previous evidence.

Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information. It does not elaborate on the wider effort by Moscow to help the Trump campaign. There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails.

[ballsofsteel]

Another diversion tactic, nothing more. IE, FAKE NEWS. All this so called "evidence" all of a sudden has nothing to do with the fact that Trump is in bed with the Russians and is a traitor. Him and his whole gang should be arrested for treason.





MTGT

[ballsofsteel]

(07-10-2017, 07:31 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: At this point, it's just a waiting game for the Mueller investigation. This is a big flag, but most conservatives think any and all things Russia is "fake news". Donny Jr has admitted that he, the son in law turned advisor, and the campaign manager all sat down with a Kremlin linked lawyer on the pretense that this Russian had some information on Hillary they could use. So he tried to collude with Russia?

Donny jr. aka Fredo, is a dumb ass. He can't even lie right. He ask Paul metawhore to attend the meeting that was about adoption. LOL. Divert, divert. You will see the BS from Sarah Suckabee really crank up now.
They're coming for you Orangie, its only a matter of time.

[GMDino]

Whether those meeting lead to "collusion" or not we will have to wait and see.

However it is the LYING about it that is drawing attention.  The "oh, I forgot that I was called to a meeting with the promise of dirt on Clinton" that makes it look bad.

And it's coming from multiple members of the Trump team and administration.

Maybe they only talked about adoption.  I'm sure Clinton only talked about his grand-kids on the tarmac.

[StLucieBengal]

(07-11-2017, 08:10 AM)GMDino Wrote: Whether those meeting lead to "collusion" or not we will have to wait and see.

However it is the LYING about it that is drawing attention.  The "oh, I forgot that I was called to a meeting with the promise of dirt on Clinton" that makes it look bad.

And it's coming from multiple members of the Trump team and administration.

Maybe they only talked about adoption.  I'm sure Clinton only talked about his grand-kids on the tarmac.

I agree that changing the story isn't good but since this email which no one is read exists...... I wonder how much the NYT is stretching this into a story.

We will see but defining this as collusion could spell trouble for everyone since they paid a foreign actor for the dossier.

[Belsnickel]

(07-11-2017, 09:26 AM)StLucieBengal Wrote: I agree that changing the story isn't good but since this email which no one is read exists...... I wonder how much the NYT is stretching this into a story.

We will see but defining this as collusion could spell trouble for everyone since they paid a foreign actor for the dossier.

I'm in favor of locking up every single one of them for it. Clinton and/or anyone in her team, any Republican that did it, all of them. But that's just me.

[StLucieBengal]

(07-11-2017, 10:02 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: I'm in favor of locking up every single one of them for it. Clinton and/or anyone in her team, any Republican that did it, all of them. But that's just me.

Agreed. But they will never do this.... that's why the lock her up was never going to happen. Politicians will protect each other so they can preserve themselves later if needed.

As far as I am concerned there are quite a few from the obama administration who should also be in jail for their actions.

[*michaelsean*]

Is this lady just a lawyer in Russia? I mean, if someone says they have dirt on your opponent, and you meet with them, I don't get the big deal where they come from.

[*michaelsean*]

(07-11-2017, 06:31 AM)ballsofsteel Wrote: Another diversion tactic, nothing more. IE, FAKE NEWS. All this so called "evidence" all of a sudden has nothing to do with the fact that Trump is in bed with the Russians and is a traitor. Him and his whole gang should be arrested for treason.





MTGT

What are they accused of that is treasonous?  Not your opinion of treason, but actual treason.

[Belsnickel]

(07-11-2017, 10:09 AM)michaelsean Wrote: Is this lady just a lawyer in Russia? I mean, if someone says they have dirt on your opponent, and you meet with them, I don't get the big deal where they come from.

She is well known to be a Kremlin connected attorney. I saw a Russia expert talking about it and saying it's one of those "worst kept secrets" types of things where they will deny it but everyone knows it to be true. So by working with her it would be working with a foreign government, and foreign government involvement in our elections process is (supposed to be) verbotten.

[StLucieBengal]

(07-11-2017, 10:09 AM)michaelsean Wrote: Is this lady just a lawyer in Russia? I mean, if someone says they have dirt on your opponent, and you meet with them, I don't get the big deal where they come from.

(07-11-2017, 10:16 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: She is well known to be a Kremlin connected attorney. I saw a Russia expert talking about it and saying it's one of those "worst kept secrets" types of things where they will deny it but everyone knows it to be true. So by working with her it would be working with a foreign government, and foreign government involvement in our elections process is (supposed to be) verbotten.

Getting dirt on an opponent would seem to be SOP for any campaign. What is questionable is the lengths some of these people will go.

If the meeting went as junior stated then it should be nothing but some democrat senators grand standing at a hearing.

[StLucieBengal]

Now the adoption angle is interesting because I know for a fact his is a real concern over there.

If it's anything like Don jr said then it should go away .

[Belsnickel]

(07-11-2017, 10:23 AM)StLucieBengal Wrote: Now the adoption angle is interesting because I know for a fact his is a real concern over there.

If it's anything like Don jr said then it should go away .

Really, everything about it right now is circumstantial, at least as far as what the public knows. This includes Priebus being at Trump Tower that day as well. I'd like the public and the media to just let Mueller do his job.

[StLucieBengal]

(07-11-2017, 10:25 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: Really, everything about it right now is circumstantial, at least as far as what the public knows. This includes Priebus being at Trump Tower that day as well. I'd like the public and the media to just let Mueller do his job.

Agreed. But CNN, NYT, and WaPo survives off Russia news.

[Goalpost]

I guess this woman was originally denied a visa, so they are looking into who approved her later for one.

[GMDino]

(07-11-2017, 10:25 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: Really, everything about it right now is circumstantial, at least as far as what the public knows. This includes Priebus being at Trump Tower that day as well. I'd like the public and the media to just let Mueller do his job.

765: # of days from Watergate break in to Nixon resignation.

121: # of days SO FAR in the Trump administration.#giveittime

— The Glenn (@3TProductions) July 10, 2017

[GMDino]