Trump Jr./Russian lawyer meeting: Jr. knew info was part of Russian Gov effort

[Virginiá]

I wonder if Mueller could find evidence of one or more of Trump's children engaging in some other crimes and use that to pressure them into flipping on papa Trump.

[Virginiá]

http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/341372-gop-rep-i-would-have-met-with-russian-national-for-opposition-research

You must be logged in to read this quote.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Translation: I have no principles and of course in politics you want to win at any cost, even if that means colluding with the enemy.

Rep. Yoho, from the party of the self-proclaimed "patriots"

[Virginiá]

Ew, that is disgusting, but sorry, "both sides do it" doesn't really cut it for me:

1. Russia was our biggest enemy for almost the entire latter half of the 20th century, and since the USSR dissolved they have been quietly working to undermine liberal democracy across the western world. They are still our enemy, and this is a big part of why Trump's possible connections were bad.

2. Russia attacked our presidential election and was involved in numerous attack vectors meant to tilt the election towards one candidate (I don't care if you don't believe that, because your opinion vs intelligence agencies and other information is worthless to me)

3. Ukraine is just "some country" compared to Russia. They are not really even a threat - except maybe if Russia absorbed them again.

But most of all:

4. Most of my post was directed at the GOP's incessant "patriotic" theme, where they constantly try and portray themselves as the "real Americans" who care about America above all else, all while calling Democrats literal spawns of Satan or unpatriotic commies at best, yet here they are, drinking from the Russian teet because they are desperate to win elections, having cast aside their morals and principles long, long ago. And they have the gall to waltz around, chests puffed high, acting like the only real patriots. Give me a break.


So don't give me that, EnglishPete. Anyone working with a foreign power to hurt their political opponent is pretty sleazy, but don't try and act like all sleaze comes in the same potency or flavor.

[Virginiá]

Nuclear Elmo plz?

[Virginiá]

Wait, what is this "Crown Prosecutor of Russia" business? Is he referring to the Prosecutor-General, I think it is?

Well Goldstone is from the UK, so he was probably just using his country's equivalent in place of Russia's (out of habit or a lack of understanding of Russia's titles)

[Virginiá]

https://www.axios.com/inside-the-white-house-scramble-on-the-trump-jr-emails-2457466929.html

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Seems like a reach, and trying to prosecute a former president and former high-level administration officials for something like that could get real dicey. Not to mention it sets a pretty bad precedent - when the scandal gets too much, just start prosecuting your political opponents!

[Virginiá]

Don Jr. on Hannity playing down the Russia meetings as just a favor he did for an acquaintance. Says that nothing substantive happened in the 20-minute meeting and he never told his father about it because it wasn't important.

Considering Trump announced a "big speech" on Hillary Clinton's misdeeds just hours after the meeting was confirmed, it sounds like junior is lying (not very surprising here)

[Virginiá]

With all due respect, I find it hard to take a blog called "weaponized autism" seriously

EnglishPete's perspective has to bend and twist beyond recognition to justify Trump's behavior, so it isn't surprising that he has to scrape the fringes of the Internet to back it up. I bet if you created a fake pro-Trump blog and started posting completely bogus theories on there rationalizing how Trump is innocent on any given scandal, EnglishPete would eventually start referencing it on here.

Pretty ironic how despite all his complaining about the biased fake news mainstream media, he chooses to read arguably the least reliable / most biased blogs/"news" sites on the Internet.

[Virginiá]

I notice you seem obsessed with the idea that I don't actually believe what I'm writing. You argue rather like a sectarian fanatic who likes to believe that those opposing him were arguing in bad faith because you don't want to accept the truth that others simply reject his dogmas in good faith.

Seriously, can you just leave this thread? You've made your points over and over again, and you know as well as I do that few people believe your arguments, especially when you try and back them up with random blogs or places like Infowars/Breitbart. All you're doing at this point is making pages and pages of this thread about arguments between you and various other posters. Why do you have to do this to so many Trump/Russia threads on here? Why can't you just make your point, carry on for a little while then move on?

[Virginiá]

There are a few anti-Trump posters who have posted only garbage in this thread. Ask them to leave first.

EnglishPete is one of the most consistent thread derailers this site has for his particular topic. He can't just spew some garbage and move on, instead, he makes page after page about back-and-forths between him and other posters here.

If that's all these threads will ever be, why not just make a giant "EnglishPete commentary megathread for Russia-related matters"?

[Virginiá]

It's actually about just one person sucking the oxygen out of the room rather than a group. I don't care for your views, but personally I have no issue with you posting so long as you allow other discussion in the thread to take place (and I mean that in more than just a technical sense). You are part of the reason big threads in the past have gotten locked - because you don't know when to stop.

Anyway, I've made my point, so I'm done here. But you and others should keep in mind that endless arguing helps drive other potential discussion away.

[Virginiá]

What does it take for you to believe there is a "possibility" of Trump-Russian collusion?

If everything that has happened so far isn't enough for some to even entertain the possibility that Trump is guilty of some sort of tom-foolerly with the Russians, then nothing will, except maybe video + audio of Trump hashing out the master plan with Putin himself, and even then, the most likely response would be a smooth transition from denial to acceptance and downplaying of its significance, as well as instant forgiveness. Most Republicans who deny this seem to have already written off the possibility of this entire scandal being true, and so they enter the discussion immediately assuming there is an innocent explanation for everything, even if they haven't thought of it yet. The side effect of this being that they tend to latch on to the first flimsy excuse offered, no matter how dumb, which in turn makes them look ridiculous.

The sad thing is, I don't recall the burden of proof nor the tolerance of scandal or incompetence being so substantial when it came to Democrats.

[Virginiá]

And that's all I plan to comment on the Russia-Trump stories.

What if Mueller ends up bringing indictments against a slew of people around Trump for actually colluding with Russia in some way or another? And if he recommends to the House impeachment against Trump?

What you're talking about kind of reminds me of the "grand conspiracies" people like to muse about, where a major conspiracy is so expertly and competently run that it is beyond movie quality - kind of like the 9/11 conspiracy. The government is really not that competent and doesn't seem to be able to keep secrets like that. Further, I don't get why a bumbling Trump-Russia conspiracy is even that unbelievable. Nixon committed treason in his pursuit of the presidency, so clearly we have some sort of history of candidates pulling all sorts of crap. I mean look at what kind of person Trump is - he is pretty much a sociopath - no morals, no ethics, says or does anything to get what he wants, treats people like garbage. This is really not something that is beneath him or his family, and it seems more and more evidence is coming out that is beyond what the deep state would be involved in.

[Virginiá]

Tl;dr Trump may have colluded with Russia, but Russia did not successfully hack our election or endanger our democracy. If collusion is proved, then he should be indicted and impeached. However, the motivation thus far by the deep state and Neoconservatives has been their staunch opposition to Trump's friendly approach to Russia, with which they want to create Cold War 2.0 and have been quite vocal about for years now. They've been making such noise about all this, and Democrats have been happy to aid them, for political purposes. It doesn't matter whether all these investigations amount to something or nothing; they want to destabilize and delegitimize the Trump Administration, not out of patriotism, but disagreements over foreign policy.

Right - sorry I wasn't intending to accuse you of being a 9/11 truther or something, but at the same time your post gave me the impression of some sort of malicious behavior by the intelligence community, to which my response was basically that often the people in our govt don't seem to be capable of executing the 'grand' conspiracies I was talking about, particularly against POTUS themselves, which would be a whole other level since that person would obviously install their people in the various agencies. I don't really have that must trust for them, but everything coming out makes it hard for me to believe Trump isn't guilty of at least a 3rd-rate scheme to beat Clinton using a little help from Russians.

Honestly, I don't know where the whole thing with Russia is going in regards to foreign policy, but I do know that they can't be screwing with our elections like this and we have to find a way to make sure they understand it. I'm not even sure to what extent we could even engage in Cold War 2.0 - Russia isn't nearly as strong, and they can't invade/occupy half/all of Europe again, at least as they are right now. In the end it comes down to nukes, and this has always been the case and will continue to be the case no matter what, especially since Russia has gotten a lot weaker and has acknowledged that they will use nuclear weapons far quicker if they feel threatened.

Further I don't think most people realize the extent to which China and Russia have been hacking us, stealing government secrets and proprietary I.P from the private sector. I like what Keith Alexander said about it, that it is the "greatest transfer of wealth in history." Perhaps he is exaggerating, but again, I don't think most people get how active and successful Chinese and Russian hacker groups are. As someone who did pay a lot of attention to the malware campaigns for a time in college, it's extremely infuriating to see Russia escalate this and to see our country seemingly do nothing in retaliation, mostly because our president was the guy they sought to get elected. If they did indeed do what has been alleged, we can't let them get away with this.

[Virginiá]

I just don't understand why people like EnglishPete are trying to "win" the discussion here. There is no winning to be had, and nothing you post here will have any impact on anything that happens. It'd be nice if we could have threads that don't get derailed from legitimate discussion about new developments in stories like these, but apparently we can't have that.

I feel like EnglishPete comes here solely to turn every thread about the Russia scandal into a CNN panel where he channels Jeffrey Lord in a bid to drive everyone's blood pressure up.

In that sense, his responses are predictable. For any revelation that comes out, it's just some variation of him disputing it, sometimes using random blogs and maybe Breitbart as his sources "interesting theories."

[Virginiá]

I mean that's all well and good, but what it tells me is maybe that we need to start booting more presidents out of office to establish an unambiguous message that corruption will not be tolerated. I'm willing to tolerate some shenanigans from both sides (not that I'd be happy with it or wouldn't want a censure perhaps in some cases), but I absolutely 100% draw the line when it comes to monkeying with our elections. If you feel you need to suppress voting by the opposition, break into your opponent's offices to steal documents and bug phones, do extensive GOTV in cemeteries and/or reach out to foreign adversaries for opposition research and smear campaigns, then you should never hold political office, nor should such crimes go unpunished.

[Virginiá]

@ProudModerate2

I think that probably the only point in responding to EnglishPete is to offer a counterpoint to his absurdity (if that is even needed) for other users to see. But anyone thinking they will ever change his mind about anything would be making a tragic mistake. At best, he's just a guy who has already formed his opinion about Trump before anything ever happened, and he enters into every discussion with the assumption that whatever happened is either fake, a conspiracy against Trump, misunderstood and actually completely innocent, or even more, nothing to be alarmed about because both sides do it (or something like that). At worst, he's a troll trying to rile people up by playing the role of the ironclad supporter in the mold of Jeffrey Lord. I wouldn't necessarily fault people for that, I mean what can you realistically expect if you're constantly posting links to random right-wing blogs and acting as if they are proof, or have "interesting theories." All it proves is that Pete will believe anything anyone writes on a blog/news site so long as it aligns with his beliefs, which I must say is pretty ironic given how obsessed with calling out the fake news mainstream media Pete is.


Anyway, this thread is all but dead. The only purpose it serves now is for EnglishPete to rant about conspiracies and for people to argue with him, with some posts here and there about actual Trump/Don Jr scandal stuff. That is basically the future of all Atlas Russia threads now. They will get some interest for a time, but Pete will quickly become engrossed with it, driving it into the ground with his mindless blather as he fires off countless posts on every page.

[Virginiá]

He says, in a crappy little 1-line hit and run post

Santander always takes the CNN-style approach to things like this - completely balanced. No singling out Pete without also including a liberal too.

[Virginiá]