But, you know, emails.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions met with Russian ambassador during Trump campaign but didn't disclose
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You might be on to something. Maybe Sessions didn’t “talk” with the Russian Ambassador. A knowing glance, a gesture or two. Words were not needed (nor possible) once the “meeting” progressed towards it’s climax.
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45 initiates operation CYA
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The bad news is the AG is in contact with Russian spies. The good news is that its a great pretext to bounce that sorry-ass KKK loving turd out of the Cabinet.
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Trolls and morons mostly.
People who either don’t give a damn about facts as long as “they get theirs” or people too clueless to bother to figure this stuff out for themselves. Among Republicans I would put the mix of trolls to ignorant dipshits at about 70% / 30%
The only people who can stop them are the American people and the democratic process.
How much faith do you have in that? And how do we make it better?
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I don’t think trump thought he could win, I think he understood the whole dog and pony show as a long advertisement for investing in trumpCorp so he and his surrogates were courting the shitheels who would cooperate (or continue cooperating) with such a shoddy set of people. That he won was icing on his Greedcake.
Second thought: the part highlighted will become the part they try using to say, “we spoke about relations between the US and RF, but that convo did not include any discussion ‘about’ the 2016 election”. Weasel words, as usual, but that seems a likely out for this pantheon of sheisty bigots.
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How about secret meetings with high level officials?
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Not a damn thing is going to happen. Pictures of Sessions and Putin in a hot tub together would still result in nothing happening. Nothing will happen until/if the mid-term elections change the power balance.
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You cannot prove a negative. That would be, like, just FAKE proof.
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That plan sounds disturbingly plausible, but at the same time, I don’t think anyone was expecting they’d be taken to task for what they did - in between not expecting Trump to win (to the point where some were setting up a “Producers” situation where they were counting on him losing), and looking at what he was getting away with during the campaign, he looked like he could get away with anything, without consequences. Plus there was general ignorance and idiocy - people doing things they should have known would be intercepted and lying about it, etc.
Normally with supposed conspiracies, I ascribe to the idea that incompetence is usually far more likely an explanation than Machiavellian scheming, and with Trump that’s doubly true - at the same time, we do have people in this administration that are scheming to destroy as much of the government as they can manage. So there’s this war between evil conspiracies and incompetence, where it’s hard to know which is the significant actor at any time.
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A fox for every hen house.
(That’s Kim Phiby, that is. He ran the Russian Desk for the British Secret Service while also being a spy for the Soviets).
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Philby wasn’t just a spy; he was a colonel in the KGB*. After he made it to Russia, he would claim that in fact he had spied on the US for the Soviet Union, and had shared the intelligence with the UK, because of his concern that the US would start a nuclear war. He claimed not to have spied on the UK for the Soviet Union. It is said that later on he ran the part of the KGB spy school specialising in infiltrating the US. The characters of Magnus and Bill Haydon in Le Carré’s books are partly based on Philby; if you don’t know them, may be worth a read remembering that Le Carré himself worked for SIS until his cover was blown. I am not always 100% reliable on these things because they are from memory, but my source was recognisable in one of Le Carré’s books and was furious when it was published, especially as there was absolutely nothing he could do about it because of the Official Secrets Act.
*Edit - generally by spies we mean “agents”, people employed by but not deeply involved in the various secret services, like James Bond who is just an operative, sent off to do a job involving muscle but not privy to any secrets outside the operation. Philby was an intelligence officer who was embedded in a foreign agency and was involved at the strategic level - an enormous coup for the USSR.
Edit edit - I have failed to bring out my point, which is that it is more likely that there is a US Philby somewhere than that this collection of rather incompetent meetings and denials comprises a big plot. Perhaps it’s all diversionary tactics. Perhaps the deputy head (safer) of one of the intelligence agencies is the one who is really leaking all the intel to St. Petersburg.
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If that was the plan of Trump and team, you have to wonder what the plan of the Russians was in this. I guess if their primary interest in America is to discredit it and make American democracy look like a farce then they pretty much win either way.
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I think Ben Carson might be the exception to that rule. He’s just a dolt who doesn’t realize he’s been promoted to the officer crew on the Titanic.
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by Philby, wasn’t it?
I was listening to a podcast recently (New Yorker politics, I think) where they were suggesting that the Russians were quite happy to undermine Clinton because they wanted her to be a weakened leader, but they didn’t expect Trump to win and it’s now causing them some problems they didn’t want.
This is quite amusing too:
https://twitter.com/charlescwcooke/status/837303885664563200
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