a quick poll about Russia and Donald Trump

i was saying that i don't think trump is necessarily aware of the extent of the links between russia and his team.

and what was motivating them to advise him in the ways they did

It seems to me that there is just an absurd amount of noise around what is probably some kind of signal. The antics of people like Olbermann, Madoff, Louise Mensch, that twitter person whose name I forget who always prefaces that she "studied authoritarian regimes" have been embarrassing and cringeworthy. All the vague innuendos about "the Russians" and "ties to Russia" etc. Still, there is probably *something* here. If Trump's campaign actively colluded with whoever hacked Podesta that would probably implicate them in illegal activity. The fact that it's Russia almost seems secondary. And if Russia sponsored electoral dirty tricks that weren't actually illegal I'm not sure how much you can make out of it. We'll see.

trumplethinskin's second campaign manager, from right before he won the nomination through when he accepted it at the republican national convention, is one of putin's leading american lobbyists, paid $10,000,000 a year from 2006 till when? the only item on the RNC plank the trump campaign changed regarded arming resistance to putin in ukraine. the current secretary of state, the former CEO of exxon, has been awarded a russian medal of friendship. these are all unrelated coincidences

i think it's bizarre that someone like manafort was given such a high profile, official appointment in the campaign. this and the complimenting putin's decision to wait before retaliating to US sanctions was just so flagrant, it seems like donald doesn't understand how this looks or what he is supposed to have done wrong.

like, i think he is not involved, but that there has been an attempt by people in his inner circle to push him toward certain positions. and these people were actively cultivated by the russian government.

i think that rich people receive such affirmative action in this country, that he is effectively too dumb to understand, six bankruptcies into it, that he might ever suffer consequences for his behavior. i mean dude has golfed every weekend he's been president so far, even when major legislation needed the presidential push

If Trump's campaign actively colluded with whoever hacked Podesta

Roger Stone's only defense against collusion with Guccifer 2.0 is that just because you DM with a guy doesn't mean you colluded with them

well, i doubt he will suffer consequences for letting his campaign be infiltrated because i don't think he understood what was happening, what was proper or improper, etc. xp

Perhaps not, but he could suffer consequences for lying about what he knew and when he knew it. Assuming bulletproof obliviousness on his part doesn't hold up when he has to keep firing subordinates and playing "I don't know her" over this shit

Xp Tillerson's medal means jack shit. That's exactly what I'm talking about. You can't just take one meaningful connection and multiply it by a bunch of meaningless connections to get a conspiracy.

tillerson has jack shit diplomatic experience, unless you count being CEO of mega-major corporaration

Ok and Ben Carson has jack shit housing experience

man jack shit sounds like an amazing corporation

it's very diversified

now Paul Ryan is alleging he has new plans for another healthcare bill to start rolling out drafts of to sponsors by like this week's end?

man you gotta bluff better dude

can't wait for "All-American Mega Awesome Health Care Act"

i think it's bizarre that someone like manafort was given such a high profile, official appointment in the campaign

tbf, he was picked to run previous Republican campaigns after doing PR for Ferdinand Marcos and Angolan terrorists. Lobbying seems to be accepted as a completely amoral industry. Also worth noting that The Podesta Group has worked with a similar / overlapping client list. If any good comes of this it might be heavier regulation on crossing over from lobbying to electoral politics but I won't be holding my breath.

did the russian government commit crimes of cyber-warfare against podesta's opponents during a presidential election campaign?

"Crimes of cyber-warfare" is likely to be the worst phrase I read all week, and also for the month of March.

It seems to me that there is just an absurd amount of noise around what is probably some kind of signal. The antics of people like Olbermann, Madoff, Louise Mensch, that twitter person whose name I forget who always prefaces that she "studied authoritarian regimes" have been embarrassing and cringeworthy.

I don't think it's embarrassing, it's the natural result of running such an opaque, dishonest administration. Trump is a known con man who infamously makes everyone he ever comes into contact with sign an NDA, he steadfastly refused to divulge his tax returns under a cover that everyone knew was false, and he settled a massive fraud lawsuit weeks before being sworn in. This administration thus far has been a series of strange, unprecedented occurrences, for which the official explanation frequently makes things more confusing, not less. Certainly there's a possibility that the "bombshell" is just that Trump is such an incompetent that he didn't screen anyone and just offered jobs to whoever was willing to say nice things about him, and he's lying about it now because gaslighting anything that brings the slightest bit of heat is just in Trump's nature. But there just seems to be such an insane amount of smoke here, and that Steele dossier keeps getting corroborated, piece by piece. IDK how you can take anything off the table right now.

For some reason I don't think Trump himself would agree to a quid pro quo and put himself in such a compromised position.

What, the same dude who literally paid off an attorney general (with charity money) so she wouldn't investigate Trump U? The same guy who volunteered that he sexually assaulted women to a total stranger even though he knew there was a hot mic?

Xps

The point is that evidence of having worked for unsavoury characters in Eastern Europe - which Manafort has, as has Podesta, and CTI, and Finsbury, and Bell Pottinger and Akin Gump and Squire Patton Boggs etc, etc - is basically meaningless without evidence of collusion on the specific charges.

You could build a similar stack of 'dirt' about Clinton - pointing to oligarchs and their families donating the maximum allowable amounts to her campaign, to Viktor Pinchuk, multi-billionaire son-in-law of, corrupt, journalist-murdering former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma being one of the top donors to the Clinton Foundation, to donors and lobbyists with ties to crooked businessmen and politicians backing her, etc but it wouldn't mean she had done anything wrong by the standards of the game. The nature of the crossover between corrupt wealth, lobbying and politics is that almost everyone of any standing is about one degree of separation from gangsters.

If the specific evidence against Manafort being involved in a Russian-state backed campaign to push Kremlin interests stacks up, and this can be documented more recently than a few years ago - all of which Manafort denies - that is definitely of interest. In the absence of that, it barely even registers as suspicious by lobbing standards. It's a great argument for trying to break the link between lobbyists, politicians and business but there are few high horses.

well the difference is that the Clintons would likely say "this is all legal, here's the paperwork" while Trump would offer something like "I've never taken money from any foreign lobbyists, I don't know who any of these people are, shame on you for investigating a charitable operation"

tombot, i can do better! how about crimes of cyber-passion??

I'm still not buying Darth Putin's Evil Plan as the explanation, but you gotta admit, ShariVari, this doesn't help Trump's team look good at all in general:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-administration-sought-to-block-sally-yates-from-testifying-to-congress-on-russia/2017/03/28/82b73e18-13b4-11e7-9e4f-09aa75d3ec57_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.a0a4a3d8602f

"I've never taken money from any foreign lobbyists, I don't know who any of these people are, shame on you for investigating a charitable operation"

and let's not forget "and anyone who says otherwise has obtained information by means of illegal wire-tapping"

I don't think it's embarrassing

nah it's definitely embarrassing

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8AZ71tWkAE01L4.jpg:large

The likes of Abramson,Mensch should ignored obviously. But then again I still have to see people reference Greenwald on this issue as though he's not even more ridiculous.

the likes of donald trump should be in jail, not the white house

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/usa-today-trump-business-linked-to-russians-with-alleged-ties-organized-crime

here's what i don't get about the spiralling mysteries of kushner, trump, manafort, billion-dollar bailouts, dead witnesses, and the apparently maddeningly elusive "truth" that threads it all together, is that these guys are not exactly wily geniuses. their motivations are not murky. they are just greedy douchebags. it shouldn't be so hard to piece together a corruption case with such dimbulb perps. should it?

they aren't bright but they're pretty good at obfuscating the business side of things - doesn't Trump have hundreds of shadow corporations to funnel stuff through? that said the FBI seems to take their time with everything so it isn't surprising that we're all still in the dark.

xpost It's not hard, it's just a matter of more concrete info turning up, which increasingly it seems to be. And this is just what's known in public.

Leaving the conspiracy stuff aside, it would not have been possible for Trump and associates to operate borderline criminal activities and partner with irl criminals without a system set up to look the other way. The pearl clutching about the construction industry being funded by laundered money is absurd. Everyone has always known it, nobody has cared as long as the money was flowing to US / UK corporations and the appropriate wheels were being greased. The same goes for Manafort claiming he got paid peanuts for his multi-year contract with Yanukovich. It was never credible but nobody minded Ukraine was being looted as long as he was pulling them closer to the US orbit.

Imagine for a moment that the conspiracy is true, could there be any reason for it not to have been discovered other than an assumption that fake corporations, slush funds, opaque trades etc are the way business is always done?

xp plus it seems like the GOP, who have a supermajority right now, is doing everything they can to prevent people from testifying.

the whole thing is just so strange. based on what's publicly known it's hard to say if this is anything but typically shady business practices from the Trump side. in fact an objective look at the facts kinda leads that way. but the admin and top Republicans are acting as though they've all seen the pisstape and it's bad. Trump is speaking the same way and doing the same dumb deflection routine he always does when he's guilty. everyone's trying to distance themselves from people who apparently "did nothing wrong". there's no good explanation for the way Nunes is acting, given that he's the dude who's supposed to be investigating all this. the Flynn thing gets weirder every week. this administration is either guilty or even dumber than we all thought.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-30/fbi-agents-visit-office-of-saipan-casino-run-by-trump-protege

The casino, run by an executive who cut his teeth in Atlantic City casinos then owned by Donald Trump, enlisted a slate of luminary overseers including former leaders of both the Republican and Democratic national parties in the U.S.

Its board members include James Woolsey, who ran the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1990s and was among national-security advisers to Trump’s presidential campaign. Former FBI director Louis Freeh and Ed Rendell, a former Pennsylvania governor and Democratic National Committee chairman, sit on an advisory committee, as does Haley Barbour, the ex-Mississippi governor and Republican National Committee chairman who’s now a prominent lobbyist.

Woolsey, Freeh and Barbour didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Rendell, through a spokesman, said he wasn’t aware of any developments at Imperial Pacific facilities and said an “independent, prestigious account organization” had reviewed the company’s finances and found nothing improper.

In 2015, the company opened Best Sunshine Live in a mall between a laundromat and a cellphone shop. From its sleepy storefront, Best Sunshine Live has posted per-table revenues far greater than those at the largest resorts in Macau, Asia’s gambling capital.

to sum up, the FBI has just paid an unannounced visit to a sketchy casino in Saipan run by a former Trump employee, the "board" and "advisory committee" of which includes James Woolsey, Louis Freeh, Ed Rendell and Haley Barbour

and by sketchy casino we mean "a gambling den in a mall storefront between a Wash N Dry and a Carphone Warehouse that moves more money 'per table' than Sheldon Adelson's Macau joints" what shitty movie is this?!?

idk but Donald Sutherland is in it

joy reid is the best

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/31/the-political-walls-are-closing-in-on-donald-trump.html

More on that casino from last fall:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-11-13/obscure-casino-run-by-a-trump-protege-is-raising-big-questions

from russia, with love

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/31/michael-flynn-new-evidence-spy-chiefs-had-concerns-about-russian-ties

jesus christ

The Buzzfeed libel trial will be an interesting sideshow to this:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/apr/25/christopher-steele-admits-dossier-charge-unverifie/

Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the infamous anti-Donald Trump dossier, acknowledges that a sensational charge his sources made about a tech company CEO and Democratic Party hacking is unverified.

In a court filing, Mr. Steele also says his accusations against the president and his aides about a supposed Russian hacking conspiracy were never supposed to be made public, much less posted in full on a website for the world to see on Jan. 10.

He defends himself by saying he was betrayed by his client and that he followed proper internal channels by giving the dossier to Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, to alert the U.S. government.

I am surprised Gubarev didn't sue in London - where this would be pretty close to a slam-dunk - though i imagine the sweet, Hoganesque punitive damages would be worth any risk of losing in Florida.

i hope daddy has enough rubles to bail ivanka out of this shit : )

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/this-is-amazing-6

enormous untapped resource

It was so weird seeing Taibbi tweet out a Washington Times link yesterday.

maybe he owes putin bigly too? the eXile was not without its fans

curious if comrade combover called to congratulate his fellow putin puppet on the crackdown

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39716631

#MAGA#DUKESTILLSUCKS :)

I'm not saying Taibbi is compromised by Russia or anything I don't really believe that, it's just weird. Has he ever done that before? How often do you see anyone cite the WT?

maybe he owes putin bigly too?

qualmsley is Louise Mensch? or just Mordy?

the krazy kiddie table is over there ---------------->

neither louise mensch nor mordy, morbius. the table for the children of emmy award winning dad stans is probably not the best seat in the house

Shouldn't need pointing out Taibbi and Ames were harassed out of Russia by the government for their work critical of the rich and powerful.

The WT seems to be one of the only semi-legit publications reporting the pre-trial hearings beyond the cute title of the legal submission.