angrymnk wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Jophiel wrote:
Except the House GOP voted to block the official Democratic response to the memo
The entire Trump/Russia collaboration investigation ultimately rests on this one piece of political opposition research laundered through a few sources to the FBI, even then requiring those at the top of the FBI (and possibly folks at DoJ) to look the other way and just kinda not mention the fallacious source when going forward with said investigation. The whole point is that the people behind this
knew that it was all BS from the start, but went forward anyway.
Which is somewhat problematic.
I will admit your statement confused me so I maybe you could clarify it for me. By using word "ultimately" you are saying it is just that "opposition research" it was based on, or does it allow some wiggle room to say "of course, there is <blank>" later on.
As in "when we follow the train of action back to its source, it
ultimately ends up with a starting point of the fake dossier. I'm not sure why you've chosen to be confused by this pretty standard use of terminology. The starting point of the investigation was the dossier. The dossier was fake. The folks who used the dossier to launch the investigation
knew it was fake. They went forward with it anyway. The appearance of political side taking at the FBI and DoJ is pretty bad on this.
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Not to mention, I am not sure what you think "fallacious" means. Words have set definitions for a reason. Putting them together in haphazard fashion could be seen as somewhat problematic.
Fallacious, meaning "based on a mistaken belief". Synonyms: erroneous, false, untrue, wrong, incorrect, flawed, inaccurate, mistaken, misinformed, misguided.
Again. What about this is confusing you? The dossier was fake. It was designed to create a false impression of Trump, and his connections to and relations with the Russians. It was created by an opposition research group working for the DNC and/or Clinton campaign (both seem to have had their hands in this pie). It was released secretly to the FBI, and then also leaked to members of the media. It was the primary "source" of the claims about Trump and the Russians. Everything else followed from that.
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Cryst, G. Rs are already distancing themselves and you are still on last Friday's talking point. Didn't you get the memo ( ah-ha) ?
Who? What? Distancing themselves from the media strawman about what the memo might mean? Sure. If you assume that the purpose of the memo is to enable Trump to fire Mueller, and you go running off to Gowdy and ask him "OMGz! Does this mean that Trump is going to try to fire Mueller", and he says "nope. That's not what this is about", that's not in any way "distancing" themselves from the memo itself. The facts in the memo speak for themselves. What we do in response is a separate issue.
No one's arguing for Mueller to be fired, or the investigation to stop (well, not many people anyway). What we want is for the public to understand the background of the whole thing so they can put the investigation in context. Because that's what this whole thing is about, right? There is no actual criminal investigation going on, contrary to labeling. I've asked repeatedly if anyone on this forum knows what statutes are being investigated, or that they suspect were violated by the Trump campaign, or transition team, or even if they know anyone who knows, or think there's someone out there that knows. I've never gotten a response. I've never heard of anyone even pretending that they know the answer to this (so it's not about this forum btw).
There is no actual crime being investigated. The entire thing is about swaying public perception. Nothing more. So yeah, in that context, letting the public know that the whole thing derived from a Nixonian style dirty trick taking to the extreme, has value. And yeah, go ahead with the Mueller investigation, I'm sure it'll have no more results than the investigation into the alleged Plame outting. It's nonsense. But, on the other hand, maybe this will spark a second investigation of the actual Russian collusion that went on during the 2016 election. That between the DNC and Clinton campaign, and the Russians to create a false dossier to attack Trumps campaign. Then we can look into the abuse of power by the Obama administration by using the DoJ and the FBI to assist in using this false information to bring the intelligence services of the US government to bear against the opposing party's nominee for President.
Let's recall that Nixon's campaign merely hired a couple of spooks to do an off the books break in to try to get some intel about the plans of the Democrats in the 1972 election. That was the abuse of power that was alleged, and which was covered up, and which lead to Nixon resigning. If the allegations here are true, the Obama administration went well beyond that. They actually mobilized the FBI and the NSA to spy on the opposing party candidate in order to help their party candidate win. Does anyone actually doubt, given the sheer volume of classified wiretap info that was spread around during this time period and the unmasking of Trump targets during the same time period, that this wasn't done specifically to just happen to allow information to leak to DNC and Clinton campaign members?
We know that this wiretap data was spread around to members of the intelligence community who seemed perfectly willing to leak anything they found that could hurt someone on the GOP side. It's exactly what happened to Flynn, right? You honestly think this was the only case? It's the only one that got to the media and had a public effect. We can't know how much information about the Trump campaign's plans found its way to the Clinton camp or to the DNC which originated in the wiretaps.
Heck. Does anyone remember when Trump announced that his campaign was being tapped and everyone laughed and assumed he was being paranoid because, of course, it was totally absurd to think that the government would actually be spying on one or more members of the other party's campaign, right? It would be an unthinkable abuse of power to do that, right? Somehow, since then, we've moved from "that's a nutty conspiracy theory" to "it happened, but it was totally ok... somehow". Um... How's that? In what universe is this remotely acceptable? This kind of use of power by the ruling party against the candidates of the opposition is the kind of thing that goes on in banana republics around the world, not in the US.
But under the Obama administration, this was done. And even if you don't care about anything else, you should care about that. I would hope that we should all agree that this is the sort of thing which should not happen in our country, no matter what. But it did. The Mueller investigation doesn't matter really. Schiff's memo, whatever it contains, doesn't matter. Allegations about Trump don't matter. What should matter to us is this. Because this is not speculation, or rumor, or allegation. It's fact.
And that should concern us.