Scoffing at notions of Russian interference?

Thom. Foolery

 

idiot egomaniac in chief 

 

 

I think we can all honestly say that we have no idea how far Putin's people were able to influence this election. My take is that dumb Americans were easily duped by smarter propaganda. What will continue to baffle me is the Rambo fueled, sweat suit, white reebok hightop wearing monkeys that now say "Russia? Putin? Great place, nice guy. Why the hatred?' Those same douches relived Red Dawn nightly in their dreams. In the 80's the Cold War was pretty luke warm. I wasn't hiding under my bed in fear of a nuclear attack.

There was obvious collusion, but it was between the DNC/HIllary campaign and the Russians.  Or doesn't paying for a dossier that is full of shit and used to justify domestic spying on the opposition candidate and then President Elect count?  There's a whole lot more evidence for that then anything Trump might have done. 

Trump has been involved in money laundering in Russia for decades.  

When the “net”  catches him, I hope there is no “neutrality “...

 

Thom, you really have your fox talking points down. But you forget to call for a second independent council.

 

 

 

Could you please run down the parts of the dossier that have been disproven. 

 

 

Ummm the dosier didn't come from the Russians there was just a lot of stuff in there about Russia because that is where the dirt is, and it was Republicans who got the ball rolling on the dossier not the DNC.

thom's right. its obvious there's nothing to see here....special counsels get appointed all the time....*eye roll*.

 

i'm sure the dnc is just as shady and corrupt, as has been proven by this past election cycle, as the republican and trump machines.

 

thom, i get you being a contrarian to popular consensus here, but how can you honestly support this administration at all? 

because...they are not democrats?

 

its just fucking baffling man.

 

Thom, Fusion GPS is an US company

...every passing month brings more leaks, revelations in the press, and more progress in the investigations, the Steele dossier has generally gained in credibility, rather than lost it.

Trump Tower meeting

One of the more striking recent developments was the disclosure of a meeting on 9 June 2016 in Trump Tower involving Trump’s son, Donald Jr, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with a Russian lawyer closely tied to the government, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

After the meeting was first reported on 8 July this year, the president’s son claimed (in a statement dictated, it turned out, by his father) that it had been about adoptions of Russian children by Americans.

Just 11 days after that meeting – but more than a year before it became public – Steele quoted a source as saying that “the Kremlin had been feeding Trump and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton”, for several years.

A later report, dated 19 July 2016, said: “Speaking in confidence to a compatriot in late July 2016, Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump, admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between them and the Russian leadership.”

The report said that such contacts were handled on Trump’s end by his then campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who participated in the 9 June Trump Tower meeting.

Manafort has denied taking part in any collusion with the Russian state, but registered himself as a foreign agent retroactively after it was revealed his firm received more than $17m working as a lobbyist for a pro-Russian Ukrainian party. He is a subject of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and in July the FBI raided his home in Virginia.

Other key protagonists in the Steele dossier have surfaced in subsequent disclosures and investigation. Two of them, an Azeri-Russian businessman Araz Agalarov and his son Emin, are described in emails released by Donald Trump Jr as offering to serve as intermediaries in passing on damaging material on Clinton and is reported to have help set up the Trump Tower meeting.

Carter Page

Another key figure in the Steele dossier is Carter Page, an energy consultant who Trump named as one of his foreign policy advisors. Steele’s sources describe him as an “intermediary” between Manafort and Moscow, who had met a Putin lieutenant and head of the Russian energy giant, Rosneft, and a senior Kremlin official, Igor Diveykin.

 

netheless, he has become a focus of investigation: it was reported in April that that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued an order last year for his communication to be monitored. To obtain the order, investigators would have to demonstrate “probable cause” to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power. Page has said he welcomed the news of the order as it demonstrated he was being made a scapegoat of the investigation.

Elsewhere, a Steele memo in September 2016 mentions a “Mikhail Kulagin” who had been withdrawn from the Russian embassy in Washington because of his “heavy involvement in the US presidential election operation”.

There was no diplomat of that name at the mission, but there was a Mikhail Kalugin; five months later, it emerged that he had left the embassy in August 2016.

McClatchy reported he was under investigation for his role in Russia’s interference in the campaign. The BBC reported that the US had identified Kalugin as a spy.

A Steele memo from August 2016 states that after Russia’s hand had been discovered in the hacking of Democratic party emails and passing them to WikiLeaks for publication, another avenue of influence would be explored.

The memo says “the tactics would be to spread rumours and misinformation about the content of what already had been leaked and make up new content”.

The Russian official alleged by Steele’s sources to be in charge of the operation, Sergei Ivanov – then Putin’s chief of staff – is quoted as saying: “The audience to be targeted by such operations was the educated youth in America as the PA [Russian Presidential Administration] assessed that there was still a chance they could be persuaded to vote for Republican candidate Donald Trump as a protest against the Washington establishment (in the form of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton).”

The Steele dossier said one of the aims of the Russian influence campaign was to peel off voters who had supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries and nudge them towards Trump.

Evidence has since emerged that Russians and eastern Europeans posing as Americans targeted Sanders supporters with divisive and anti-Clinton messages in the summer of 2016, after the primaries were over.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/07/trump-russia-steele-doss...

 

 

I'll bet Jr. had fun being grilled for 9 hours the other day.

Meeting with Russians in Trump tower then trying to arrange a follow-up?

Naw, nothing there. Blame Clinton and Obama.

Turtle thinking that Thom will answer… (eye roll)

To paraphrase some author on some talk show last week:

Russia didn't create the political divide in our country. Russia didn't create Trump. Russia didn't get Trump through the primaries. Russia didn't create a climate that could elect Trump. Russia didn't create our political system.

There's plenty wrong with the Trump/Russia shit, but let's not overlook the facts that our country has some real issues, and they have ZERO to do with Russia. Maybe we should also deal with them?

Some author's argument is a big ole balloon. Some author probably thought that Bernie Sanders would have won.

no, i actually don't expect any retort from thom.

jonas on my jock, *eyeroll*.

 

^ That scenario would result in a Revolution. (And, by Revolution I mean a bunch of people whining on the facebooks.)

maybe shoulda listened to mitt romney instead of laughing at him? "oh he thinks russia's a threat. hey, the cold war called from the 80's and wants that line back." russia seems to be the only thing y'all talk & think about.

T.O.D -- what's Bernies getting arrested for? I'm pretty sure that's not 'how it goes down' but only time will tell.

If not this term, maybe by the middle of the second term. 

Give it a rest guys; the Zonies are on

twittered:  https://twitter.com/dallasnews/status/941764751247466496

This is, to my best knowledge, from the Dallas Morning News, a notoriously right-wing publication prior to its 2016 endorsement of Mrs Clinton.

 

ps who tf is George Kelley?

a link would be divulging deep secrets?

#nyet

Too many "coincidences"?

The Clinton campaign generated the Steele dossier through lawyers who retained Fusion GPS. Fusion, in turn, hired Steele, a former British intelligence agent who had FBI contacts from prior collaborative investigations. The dossier was steered into the FBI’s hands as it began to be compiled in the summer of 2016. A Fusion Russia expert, Nellie Ohr, worked with Steele on Fusion’s anti-Trump research. She is the wife of Bruce Ohr, then the deputy associate attorney general — the top subordinate of Sally Yates, then Obama’s deputy attorney general (later acting AG). Ohr was a direct pipeline to Yates.

Burce Ohr met personally with Steele. And after Trump was elected, according to Fusion founder Glenn Simpson, he requested and got a meeting with Simpson to, as Simpson told the House Intelligence Committee, “discuss our findings regarding Russia and the election.” This, of course, was the precise time Democrats began peddling the public narrative of Trump-Russia collusion. It is the time frame during which Ohr’s boss, Yates, was pushing an absurd Logan Act investigation of Trump transition official Michael Flynn (then slotted to become Trump’s national-security adviser) over Flynn’s meetings with the Russian ambassador. Yates was ultimately fired by Trump for insubordinately refusing to enforce his “travel ban”; Ohr has been demoted for failing to disclose his meetings with Steele and Simpson.

Based on the publication this week of text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the FBI lawyer with whom he was having an extramarital affair, we have learned of a meeting convened in the office of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe (then and now the FBI’s No. 2 official) in mid-August 2016 — i.e., right around the time the Page FISA warrant was obtained. At the meeting, top national-security personnel discussed the prospect that Donald Trump could be elected president, which they regarded as frightening but highly unlikely. In the text, Strzok told Page, “I’m afraid we can’t take that risk” (of a Trump presidency).

Strzok suggested that the FBI needed “an insurance policy” against a Trump presidency despite its seeming improbability. The FBI and Justice Department have stonewalled the House Intelligence Committee’s attempts to probe investigators’ political bias against Trump and to learn whether the Steele dossier — again, a Clinton-campaign product — was used to obtain the FISA warrant. Thus, there is reason to be suspicious that the Steele dossier was used for this purpose.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454709/steele-dossier-source-fisa-...

https://twitter.com/Comey/status/941891146695012353

https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/942020647999430658

game set match...

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/365264-special-counsel-has-t...

 

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/365278-trump-lawyer-says-muel...

https://twitter.com/PressSec/status/942439157330268165

<<<<<<The Clinton campaign generated the Steele dossier through lawyers who retained Fusion GPS

Thom your forgetting the part about Bush/Cruz hired Fusion first who then hired Steele. None of the GOP candidates could get close to Trump to use it so they sold it to Clinton. Thom your overreaching!

Rich politicians want their taxes cut. The things they'll do for a sweaty wad of Koch brothers cash. Trumps draining the swamp of GOP candidates with the help of Bannon. 

Jill Stein, suckers.

 

 

 

 

I know...'but, Hillary!!!'