^ The Barr Report
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It’s also settled that Julian Assange was happy to promote any type of leaked info from anyone as an admitted strategy to push Bernie supporters against Clinton, not for transparency’s sake, but because he specifically wanted Trump to win.
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Because the MAGA yokels and evangelicals love him. Also Congresspeople are frightened shitless that the Orange Globule might drop a mean tweet about them.
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Flynn. OMG. When and how did Trump decide that it was ok to give Flynn access to some of the most sensitive secrets we possess, when all the time he was (still) working for a foreign government, and with the goal to enrich himself, even when in government service?
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Technically correct, but the full legal determination seems to be a combination of “they didn’t actually collude because they were too incompetent to, and not because they didn’t actively try to” and “there’s no charges for obstruction because a sitting President cannot be indicted for a crime by the Justice Department.”
So in otherwords, he found his Roy Cohn.
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Does the house have the legal authority to compel discovery? It’s not a criminal trial and there is no judge…?
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Trump was probably just deferring to Jared’s advice on that one.
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I agree.
But I am not sure there is necessarily a “conspiracy to…” charge which can be attached to the myriad of crimes which fall under the aegis of “collusion”. If so, then the intent and active steps in pushing it forward would be enough.
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I thought there were supposed to be secret intelligence agencies that prevented existential threats to the country with some sort of vigorous action?
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Not without putting it in the presidential daily briefing first.
Nah - those are the on the books operations.
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all "When"s? no love for Where, Why, or, How? (lawyers make poor time travelers, y’see)
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Even the furries are already making fun of the redactions. NSWF…ish.
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That appears to be the problem. There was intent to do illegal things, and attempts to do illegal things. And even attempts to conspire to do illegal things. But enough people either refused to participate, or just plain forgot to do or blew off the illegal thing that there wasn’t actually a conspiracy. So no conspiracy charges. And since Mueller was rolling with the can’t indict or charge a sitting president consensus, and Trump is the person to charge sans conspiracy…
Basically the conclusion on the conspiracy front appears to be that these people were too stupid and awful to successfully conspire to do anything.
But you know. 10 likely instances of obstruction of justice and “corrupt abuses of executive power”. So VINDICATED. NO COLLUSION.
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Assange was also happy to imply that Seth Rich leaked the DNC documents to Wikileaks and was murdered in retaliation even though Assange had to have known that was false. I say he had to know because according to the Mueller report Wikileaks recieved the archive from Guccifer 2.0 on July 14, four days after Rich was murdered.
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To take your last point first, I don’t believe that Donald Trump sees anything wrong with wanting to enrich yourself while in government service. We’ve seen a steady trickle of cash flowing toward the Trump Organization from government coffers, and I assume that these direct transfers constitute only a small part of the cash cow that DJT intends to milk during his term of office.
With regard to Flynn’s security clearance, Trump has reportedly demanded that clearances be granted to a number of his appointees over the objections of the security staff responsible for vetting them. The most notable (aside from Trump himself) was probably Kushner, whose financial concerns leave him wide open to compromise by any foreign actor with sufficiently deep pockets, but there were others as well. But Trump is not concerned with national security; he is concerned with his own security, and if that means getting people loyal to him into positions of power at any cost, then the national interest can go hang.
I think it’s safe to assume that at least one of Trump’s appointees has already shared a few state secrets with interested parties, whether foreign or domestic. I think it’s also safe to assume that the US intelligence community has ways of detecting such activities, and that – given that the people Trump picks tend to be very greedy and not terribly smart – these actions will not go/have not gone unnoticed. If the wheels ever come off the Trump Train, we may see the word ‘espionage’ feature on a few indictments.
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Even if people think he was some kind of Katharine Graham for the Iraq leaks, it’s crystal clear that he wasn’t here.
Here, he was acting only as a Watergate burglar for Trump, with the same stated motivation: to destroy a single political enemy.
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I’ve not read through it yet. But I did read this and holy shit is it scary.
Germane:
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Yeah - some of those questions ought surely to have been ‘why’, not ‘when’.
