So Trump asks Russia to find and hack Hillary Clinton’s emails–and Russia does so. Russian operatives offer “dirt” on Hillary Clinton at a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting–and Donald Trump Jr. “loves it.” The president’s first national security advisor, General Mike Flynn, is convicted of lying to congress about his contacts with Russian oligarchs and their discussion of lifting sanctions. The president’s campaign manager leaks polling data to a Russian with ties to the Kremlin. The president lies about a Moscow construction project that would have netted him millions–a project that finally fizzled only after he had accepted his party’s nomination. And the Kremlin, avowedly, preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton.
All of this is collusion.
But, apparently–at least according to the attorney general’s interpretation of the Mueller report–they’re not conspiratorial. And it’s a conspiracy that would constitute criminality. Collusion amounts only to questionable behavior.
Still, we need to see the Mueller report and its associated evidence. It’s beyond absurd that we should take one man’s word for its conclusions. Congress should get the full unredacted enchilada. Because we require something more akin to a jury, it is that body which needs to interpret the report and decide on a course of action.
Is the whole collusion/conspiracy nonsense a matter of semantics?
“You like potato and I like potahto
You like tomato and I like tomahto…”
Possibly, although it’s important we have a high bar for establishing crimes. I don’t know what’s worse, the president’s questionable behavior or the possibility that he could be railroaded in the absence of that high bar.
It is clear from their many lies that the president and his circle–his family and campaign–have many things to hide. And I’m confident that, in time and under a watchful congressional eye, these will be revealed.
So, now, here we are. The Mueller report is in and, as we’ve loosely agreed upon as an electorate, we must abide by it. Because both major parties believe it will vindicate them, I say let’s have at it straight away. Let’s get this whole sordid mess behind us.
The collusion, that is.
There inconveniently remains the matter of obstruction of justice. Mueller’s report specifically did not exonerate the president in this regard. Neither did it conclude his guilt. So why not let congress get on with its constitutional duty of being a check on the president? Let’s get this mess behind us as well.
We have better things to do.
We still have a wall to build. We have Muslims to ban. We have more children to separate from their parents. We have Obamacare to kill. And, while we’re at it, there’s a middle class the taxman hasn’t finished eliminating. There remain sanctions on Russia to eliminate. There remains the longest running war in our history to yet wage. There are women to grope and groups–hell, all manner of people–to insult. Campaign rallies can never stop. There are dictators to have secret discussions with. There are inappropriate people to appoint to high positions and, apparently, there are too many people in the FBI. We still have coal to reconstitute as a source of energy. There’s a boatload of money to launder, and numerous banks to yet defraud. There are inappropriate people to grant security clearances to. Enough lies can never be told. There’s always an emergency to declare. And there conveniently remains a government to shut down.
“Things have come to a pretty pass
Our romance is growing flat
For you like this and the other
While I go for this and that”
Let’s call the whole thing off.
Joseph Oldenbourg
Joseph,
Shall we knock down every issue you’ve brought up? I think you would need to agree that Obama was still President when all these ‘investigations’ started against Trump.
Trump Jr meeting with the Russian at the tower, about adoption…..that is why he started making calls to get out of the room.
Funny how you don’t talk about the bugging of Trump Tower by the Democratic party.
Funny how Eric Holder never did go before Congress to be asked about Fast and Furious, and the death of Brian Terry.
Copied off wiki page, As a result of a dispute over the release of Justice Department documents related to the scandal, Attorney General Eric Holder became the first sitting member of the Cabinet of the United States to be held in contempt of Congress on June 28, 2012 in a vote largely along party lines in a Republican-controlled House.[17][18] At Holder’s request, President Barack Obama had invoked executive privilege for the first time in his presidency in order to withhold documents that “were not generated in the course of the conduct of Fast and Furious.
Funny how Hillary Clinton is now under investigation for her foundation and who and how donations were run through it. If you don’t think all those millions of dollars from Foreign Agencies weren’t a pay for play access, what were they for?
Hillary will be under investigation for Uranium One soon, along with Mueller since he’s the one who walked it into Russia.
Funny that there isn’t a good regular copy of Obama’s b/c…..or none of his transcripts are available to us, or that no one remembers him in college.
Speaking of his college, why did he get a foreign aid grant? Why did he bow and kiss the Saudi Kings ring?
Those aren’t conspiracy theories if they actually happened. (and they did)
Funny how it was fine to elect a community organizer to be President.
Let me add some real news to this reply,
Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) have put aside their differences with the president to join a bipartisan letter backing Trump’s announced plans to withdraw troops from Syria now that Islamic State has been defeated.
The 2015 introduction of U.S. military forces into hostilities in Syria was never approved by Congress, in violation of the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973. We believe that the stated intention of withdrawing our forces is appropriate, and we look forward to the orderly return of our service members from this theater of conflict.” This from the Noble Peace prize President Obama……so what should we do to Obama for going into an undeclared war?
You need to let some of your anger towards President Trump go Joseph…..Hate kills people, it makes people sick.
What a load of horse hockey.
Noam Chomsky did an interview on Democracy Now last year and he had this to say on election meddling:
“You can predict the outcome of a presidential or congressional election with remarkable precision by simply looking at campaign spending. That’s only one part of it. Lobbyists practically write legislation in congressional offices. In massive ways, the concentrated private capital, corporate sector, super wealth, intervene in our elections, massively, overwhelmingly, to the extent that the most elementary principles of democracy are undermined. Now, of course, all that is technically legal, but that tells you something about the way the society functions. So, if you’re concerned with our elections and how they operate and how they relate to what would happen in a democratic society, taking a look at Russian hacking is absolutely the wrong place to look. Well, you see occasionally some attention to these matters in the media, but very minor as compared with the extremely marginal question of Russian hacking.”
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/27/noam_chomsky_on_mass_media_obsession
Mr. Oldenbourg, in the online meta-political discourse, you are what we would call a “lib.” I moved to San Francisco for college thinking I would find a home in such an enlightened and progressive part of California as opposed to central California, but what I have experienced is the opposite. In my view, poor people have it just as bad, if not worse, in the “liberal” America as they do in the “conservative” America. As I am sure you will see in the comments, people have much more immediate and real concerns that they want their elected representatives to address than internet trolls which is what Chomsky is saying.
I agree there was a legitimate question as to whether Trump knowingly conspired with an adversarial foreign government to win the election, but I believe I speak for most of us when I say that deep down, we all knew a rich white man was not going to be held accountable for his crimes or held to the same standards that the rest of us poor have to abide by. Heck, Manafort lead an “otherwise blameless life” of laundering hundreds of millions in political blood money while teachers in Atlanta were sentenced to more than a decade in prison for allegedly altering standardized test scores. Even if the special counsel found the most incriminating evidence imaginable, maybe shooting a man in the middle of fifth avenue, it would not matter because impeachment is a political process. If it is not politically advantageous to hold the president accountable for his crimes, it is not going to happen.
Finding Russian collusion and imprisoning Trump is not going to free our government from corruption. It is not going to create jobs, increase my wages, lower my rent, or give me healthcare. There are so many political issues that unite democrat and republican voters, but Russian collusion is clearly not one of them.