a quick poll about Russia and Donald Trump

(that was to Hume obv)

like if they were saying things like this to quiet overzealous liberals who already want Trump in jail, that'd be one thing, but they like T seem to be saying because no definitive evidence has been uncovered in the first third of an investigation (and even if it had, wouldn't be public until much later), the investigation should stop. that's...not how it works.

i hope this doesn't mean vlad's through with don

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/06/25/russia_recalls_ambassador_sergey_kislyak_who_is_at_center_of_trump_collusion.html

maybe they just need a new virus protection program

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fbi-interviews-employees-russia-linked-cyber-security-firm-kaspersky-lab-n777571

. . . so . . . Putin controls the largest oil company in Russia. He made a $500 billion deal with the CEO of Exxon Mobil. Obama put sanctions in place which stopped that deal. Russia then hacked into our government in order to get Trump elected. When the CIA told Congress this in September (James Comey was also in that meeting), Mitch McConnell refused to tell the American people, blackmailing Obama, saying he would frame it as playing partisan politics during the election. Comey released the infamous no-information letter. Mitch McConnell's wife was picked for Trump's cabinet. The CEO of Exxon is now the Secretary of State. Wonder why our President has been so quick to dismiss the CIA's findings?

1) Trump owes Blackstone/ Bayrock group $560 million dollars (one of his largest debtors and the primary reason he won't reveal his tax returns)

2) Blackstone is owned wholly by Russian billionaires, who owe their position to Putin and have made billions from their work with the Russian government.

3) Other companies that have borrowed from Blackstone have claimed that owing money to them is like owing to the Russian mob and while you owe them, they own you for many favors.

4) The Russian economy is badly faltering under the weight of its over-dependence on raw materials which as you know have plummeted in the last 2 years leaving the Russian economy scrambling to pay its debts.

5) Russia has an impetus to influence our election to ensure the per barrel oil prices are above $65 ( they are currently hovering around $50)

6) Russia can't affordably get at 80% of its oil reserves and reduce its per barrel cost to compete with America at $45 or Saudi Arabia at $39. With Iranian sanctions being lifted Russia will find another inexpensive competitor increasing production and pushing Russia further down the list of suppliers.
As for Iranian sanctions, the 6 countries lifting them allowing Iran to collect on the billions it is owed for pumping oil but not being paid for it. These billions Iran can only get if the Iranian nuclear deal is signed. Trump spoke of ending the deals which would cause oil sales sanctions to be reimposed, which would make Russian oil more competitive.

7) Rex Tillerson (Trump's pick for Secretary of State) is the head of ExxonMobil, which is in possession of patented technology that could help Putin extract 45% more oil at a significant cost savings to Russia, helping Putin put money in the Russian coffers to help reconstitute its military and finally afford to mass produce the new and improved systems that it had invented before the Russian economy had slowed so much.

8) Putin cannot get access to these new cost saving technologies OR outside oil field development money, due to US sanctions on Russia, because of its involvement in Ukrainian civil war.

9) Look for Trump to end sanctions on Russia and to back out of the Iranian nuclear deal, to help Russia rebuild its economy, strengthen Putin and make Tillerson and Trump even richer, thus allowing Trump to satisfy his creditors at Blackstone.

10) With Trump's fabricated hatred of NATO and the U.N., the Russian military reconstituted, the threat to the Baltic states is real. Russia retaking their access to the Baltic Sea from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and threatening the shipping of millions of cubic feet of natural gas to lower Europe from Scandinavia, allowing Russia to make a good case for its oil and gas being piped into eastern Europe.

. . . now of course, I don't believe any of that, and anyone who would is paranoid, foolish, and unsophisticated, and probably takes her/himself too seriously, and has bad taste besides :)

I believe all of that

1) Trump owes Blackstone/ Bayrock group $560 million dollars (one of his largest debtors and the primary reason he won't reveal his tax returns)

what is the evidence for this one? if this is true the rest of it falls into place. we at least know what putin's objective was in getting trump elected and it raises more questions about why tillerson was appointed among other things.

who knows?

https://www.truthorfiction.com/donald-trump-owes-560-million-to-blackstonebayrock/

overall though it's a lot of money for a president to owe

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-businesses-owe-debt-18-billion-150-institutions-study-source-of-study-president-elect-a7512586.html

2) Blackstone is owned wholly by Russian billionaires, who owe their position to Putin and have made billions from their work with the Russian government.

This is transparently incorrect so i'd assume that they meant to write Bayrock. Blackstone is a publicly traded US company and its founder / part-owner is head of the Strategic and Policy Forum that Trump set up (the one that Elon Musk quit recently).

Some of the reporting around Bayrock has been relatively good, tbh, but it's not a Russian company and its directors don't "owe their position" to Putin. The key people behind it are Kyrgyz, Uzbek and Kazakh and have been immensely rich since the mid-90s due to their links to President Nazarbayev. The reason it should be a much bigger story isn't that it's part of a grand Russian plot, it's because it has almost certainly always served as a vehicle to rehouse money looted from Kazakh state assets. The MD, Felix Sater, was born in Russia but emigrated to Israel and then the US as a small child.

This isn't saying anything that hasn't already been reported extensively but it's on thin legal ice to go further. It's worth looking into Viktor Khrapunov's interviews for background, though. He is the former mayor of Almaty and a crook who was accused of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the state purse - he came out swinging at the President and Bayrock's primary investors when he got shunted out.

It's probably the single most obviously crooked thing Trump is closely associated with, imo.

Wonder why our President has been so quick to dismiss the CIA's findings?

which one? Obama could have told us if there was this huge treasonous plot. he was pretty quick to dismiss the findings.

Mitch McConnell refused to tell the American people, blackmailing Obama, saying he would frame it as playing partisan politics during the election

so it's ok that Obama didn't tell us because.... he was afraid it would be used against Hillary? how is this not "putting politics above country"? just to be clear i don't really care or hold it against Obama cos imo as president he has the right to make these choices. the President does not have to follow the orders of the Senate majority leader.

lol @ the oil stuff. right now they lead the world in oil production. this same motivation was used by Reagan to justify Afganistahn in the 80s. the lie that they were running out of oil turned out to be bullshit back then too.

"Yeah. All partisan snark aside, the president's and the political party that controls the legislative branch and most of the state governments' fairly flippant dismissal of a hostile foreign power interfering in our elections ought to be something we are all outraged by, regardless of party."

kayfabe covfefe :)

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/06/stop-assuming-trump-is-innocent-of-russian-collusion.html

you think our country's so innocent?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/gop-operative-sought-clinton-emails-from-hackers-implied-a-connection-to-flynn-1498770851

Maddow discussingg this story now in her weird, giddy way

The guy at the center of this story DIED

chait is worse than louise mensch and bill palmer, i've been assured by very reasonable people. dismiss!

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/now-we-have-a-roadmap-to-trump-campaigns-russia-collusion.html

That Tait essay is insane.

https://lawfareblog.com/time-i-got-recruited-collude-russians

fake news!

I am as irritated by him as anyone, but since so far Wittes is the only one whose specific intimations have clearly and explicitly come to pass:

More is coming, people.

— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) July 1, 2017

whatever the last straw is gonna be for the almost but not 100% deplorables to abandon comrade trump is gonna be interesting

It's going to be when Trump tweets something negative about French fries and Twenty One Pilots.

all his friends are heathens

don't worry though everybody -- andrew mccarthy sez nothing to see here!

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449161/trump-russia-collusion-nonsense

I'm convinced, they should stop looking into this immediately before they find something.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kwak5/the-same-twitter-bots-that-helped-trump-tried-to-sink-macron-researcher-says

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n14/david-bromwich/the-age-of-detesting-trump

it's interesting times when Vice and The Hill are covering the same stuff

http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/340844-research-links-pro-trump-anti-macron-twitter-bots

This Maddow story about forged Trump-Russia NSA documents someone tried to pass on to their show Is pretty interesting.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/maddow-to-news-orgs-heads-up-for-hoaxes-985491523709?cid=sm_npd_ms_tw_lw

"We look forward to a lot of very positive happenings for Russia, and for the United States, and for everybody concerned. And it's an honor to be with you."

I wonder if they have anything on Tillerson or if he's just playing a very long, single minded game to get favorable deals for Exxon. I have a hard time imagining how a guy like Tillerson thinks.

i have a hard time understanding why the CEO of exxon, whom trump had never met, is secretary of state in the first place. it's like there's no reasonable explanation that isn't outrageously fishy

they have similar fetishes

a reasonable explanation that's outrageously fetishy

damn, even the weekly standard is starting to call bullshit on donnie

http://www.weeklystandard.com/trump-caves-to-putin/article/2008751

I have a hard time imagining how a guy like Tillerson thinks.

"thinks"

not suspicious!

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/trump-campaign-leaders-met-kremlin-linked-lawyer-report.html

not suspicious at all that our president* and our UN ambassador disagree about russian interference in our election

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/08/haley-russia-election-meddling-240323

but either way -- no big deal!!!!!! got some voter fraud to investigate (nudge nudge wink wink), taxes (and health care) to cut, climate change to deny, and allies to alienate! USA!

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/trump-team-says-theres-no-collusion-to-see-here

Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.

The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.

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.

But the email is likely to be of keen interest to the Justice Department and congressional investigators, who are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government attempted to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-russia-email-candidacy.html

them trump boys sure were in a pickle this time

spare a thought for poor hapless eric, who it appears no-one thought about bringing in to this whole mess

This is AP reporter @jonlemire's tweet from same day Don Jr., Kushner, & Manafort met Russian lawyer.

They met in the Trump Tower. pic.twitter.com/I8PCwK2hzA

— ProPublica (@ProPublica) July 11, 2017

why does bill simmons hate america?

https://theringer.com/donald-trump-jr-emails-russia-politics-8ccceec40cf

i don't get it why is Russia an "aggressor"? i dont understand why we should be so concerned with them specifically when we have been funding and supplying weapons to several countries that openly fund the terrorism we have been at war with for over a dozen years now? how is hacking some emails for a campaign manager treason compared to that?aaaaaa

That's not the question. For me it's the extent to which foreign interests possibly own an American president in the form of debt. Obviously this presents enormous ethical problems. Nixon and Kissinger had similar problems. I don't understand how you can dismiss this shit while still thinking I'm not queasy about jingoism over Russia. For months, Adam, you've assumed we're too densen to understand the essential problem, or you've taken this "LOL both sides do it" cynicism. I don't need to be schooled on Reaganism or Clintonism -- I lived thru them, and a commenter has to be pretty fucking stupid not to see how Trump is different. Some of us called our congressman when Clinton's "welfare reform" was on the verge of passing with the entire political establishment backing him. So please spare me your detachment from events. I take It you're not gay, black, or a woman.

i don't get it why is Russia an "aggressor"?

Do you understand why Nixon and Kissinger backing a coup in Chile against Allende was aggression? Russia is an aggressor because they used illegitimate means, covertly spreading lies and propaganda, to attempt to control the destiny of the USA for their own interests and purposes and not the interests of the people of the USA. That's aggression and fuck it if you can't tell that it is.

Adam "how is it a challop if it's posed as a question?" Bru, with the trenchant foreign policy compare-and-contrast

xp to Aimless why Kissinger and Chile instead of Clinton and Honduras?