KindaSkolarly wrote:
Now we can get on to the real meat of the meal--how Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the heads of the FBI and the Dept of Justice tried to contain the Trump phenomenon. A mole was illegally sent into the Trump campaign.
I'm betting not a single law was broken. One thing we know for sure is that none of the "dirt" on Trump was released before the election. Of course this could be because there was so much already. Trump was on the record saying he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support. More plausibly, the DOJ wanted to gather information and see if there was anything really nefarious going on or just Manafort and Gates trying to meet their debts by dangling a little prospect of inside info.
KindaSkolarly wrote:Trump's opposition never thought he'd win, but they wanted "insurance" anyway. And Obama wanted "to know everything."
I don't find it plausible that anyone was "spying" as "insurance". Probably true that they thought he would lose. But in general, his track record of criminal and scurrilous behavior was sufficiently long to make it criminally irresponsible not to check on indications of inside relations with Moscow. What they were insuring against was probably the possibility of being sent to jail for failing to enforce the laws of the country.
KindaSkolarly wrote:The Inspector General will release his report on FISA abuses and other things connected to the coup before long. Mueller seemed to not even know what Fusion GPS or the Steele dossier were. Hillary Clinton used Fusion to pay for a fake dossier. The dossier was supposed to be proof that Russia tried to help Trump and hurt Clinton in the election.
After hearing all the Republican blather (none of which, by the way, even attempted to refute Dear Leader's obstruction of Justice, most obvious at the point of asking the White House counsel to lie for him, for which he could be disbarred if not sent to jail) I see no reason to believe there was anything abusive about the FISA process. If Barr sticks to form, he will claim that some of the behavior was untoward and suspect, and try to support the story of a plot, even though he has not a single legal leg to stand on.
I could be wrong, of course. Judges, Republican FBI agents, careerist law enforcement professionals (whose ethics so tower above Dear Leader's that one can simply not take seriously the President's word in any clash of claims about fact, any more than Putin's) could have had a sudden attack of politically motivated blindness and set aside their responsibilities to try to do in a fairly disgusting politician. Such things have happened. But so far I have not been given a single reason to believe the process was anything other than a by-the-book investigation that some obviously politically motivated people didn't like the results of.
The most interesting line of questioning, to me, concerned some suggestions that maybe Moscow manipulated the whole business, setting up a fraudulent meeting on the excuse of passing on dirt but actually just to have Dear Leader by the cojones. In this version, Steele was manipulated with kompromat planted by the Kremlin, and the suggestion would be that the Moscow Trump Tower deal was likewise dangled just to get Trump in a compromised position. It was kind of interesting to hear a Republican putting the dots out there that connect to their Dear Leader being an unwilling tool of the Kremlin, but maybe they figure with him meeting privately with Putin already, and destroying the notes of the interpreter, they have nothing more to lose from that set of implications. Of course the questioner wanted to imply that Mueller should have pursued these questions, and maybe he should have, but it is a much more plausible narrative than the deep state coup story.
KindaSkolarly wrote:Leftists were so mesmerized by the mainstream media's mis-reporting of this Big Lie that they never even asked how Trump hiring prostitutes to pee on his bed would help him in the race.
Umm, the claim is supposed to be that Trump is such a fool that he would go along with this honey trap just to see the bed soiled where Obama slept. In Woodward's book "Fear" this claim sounded implausible to me just because the hotel was known to be thoroughly bugged, and I had trouble believing that even Obama would stay in such a place. On the other hand, it may be that anyone of any consequence who visits Moscow just expects to be watched all the time. Still, is it plausible that Trump was that stupid? He has some very stupid spots in his picture of the world, but I would have said he was both too paranoid and too cagey to get caught in such a trap.
KindaSkolarly wrote:Atty General Barr appointed John Durham to look into Spygate, and his report should be coming out soon. We might see some indictments from that:
Don't get your hopes up.
KindaSkolarly wrote:And the Clintons' old buddy Jeffrey Epstein is in the news again. The pedophile with the island that Bill and Hillary liked to visit. He's locked up and has a hell of a black book of names. Some folks say he's foreign intelligence, and that may be, but he's in a lot of trouble. Attorney General Barr may be able to get some useful information out of him. We shall see.
One sick puppy, is our boy Jeffrey. Smooth, though, apparently. Good at sucking up to the rich and powerful, and some eye for the men with the weakness for, um, nubile flesh. Useful information? I don't think even Barr could get him to spill beans on Bill Clinton without also facing the prospect of his spilling beans on Dear Leader. Immunity doesn't work that way.