Dec 15, 2017

What is this? 1984?

 

Dec 16, 2017

Excuse the late reply. A lot of what we were discussing is months old and I'd forgotten too many important details to give a proper reply. I finally found the time to revisit a few articles to get back up to speed.

Why would Trump listen to Obama? He thought he was a s--- president, so why would he take his advice on anything?

What we also know — and what's more important — is that, once again, Manafort was fired by the Trump admin. You have a strange habit of forgetting this telling fact.

Comey had already admitted under oath that he was never pressured by anyone to close an investigation for political reasons.



Granted the question asked was specifically about the DOJ and not the POTUS, but Comey seemed to be saying that any pressure to halt an investigation was a “big deal” and never happened in his experience. Furthermore, Trump never asked him to do anything. There is nothing really damning or remarkable about Trump’s alleged comment. “I hope you can see your way clear to...letting Flynn go. He is a good guy” doesn’t sound like obstruction to me. Improper? Unprofessional? Maybe, but only a bitter partisan would read any further into it. What is suspect, though, is that Comey couldn’t even produce the memo that documented this utterance because he “lost” it. Could it be that he was lying and there was no memo to begin with?

At any rate, the FBI supposedly investigated Trump for obstruction of justice and none was found, so why are we talking about this months later?

But we now know from Comey's own testimony that he was sacked for repeatedly refusing to announce to the public that Trump was not under investigation (a courtesy that he provided Hillary Clinton numerous times during the campaign).

First of all, James Clapper is a known Russophobic racialist who is on record saying that Russians are “genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever” on one occasion and “It is in their genes to be…diametrically opposed to the United States and to Western democracies” on another, so when it comes to weighing in on matters pertaining to Russia all his credibility goes out the window. This is the same James Clapper, by the way, who as Director of National Intelligence “hand-picked” a couple dozen loyalists from three intelligence agencies to write a hurried and deeply flawed “assessment” accusing Russia of hacking Democratic emails and publishing them through WikiLeaks. Go figure.

Not necessarily. This could easily have fallen into a kind of legal grey area. Plus when you're dealing with the sort of bureaucratic legalese that goes on with diplomacy and political campaigns and so forth it's probably a lot easier than you might think to run afoul of the law. It's probably pretty easy to break U.S. code when it comes to such matters. Plus the FBI has long been a politicized arm of the establishment and this whole investigation has all the earmarks of a witch hunt. This argument gains force from the fact that Flynn's only crime was the thought crime of lying to the FBI. Ilana Mercer via The Mises Institute:

In a fit of pique in 2016, then-President Barack Obama expelled Russian diplomats from the United States. K. T. McFarland, Michael Flynn's deputy in the Trump transition team, worried that Obama's expulsion of the diplomats was aimed at "boxing Trump in diplomatically," making it impossible for the president to "improve relations with Russia," a promise he ran on. (For her perspicacity, McFarland has since been forced to lawyer-up in fear for her freedom.)

To defuse President Obama's spiteful maneuver, Flynn spoke to Ambassador Kislyak, the upshot of which was that Russia "retaliated" by inviting US diplomats and their families to the Kremlin for a New Year's bash.

Was a crime committed by Flynn in this exchange and subsequent meeting? Not according to the FBI. Laying the cornerstone for the president-elect's promised foreign policy —diplomacy with Russia — is not illegal.

Perversely, however, lying to the US Federal Government’s version of the KGB (the FBI) — which apparently does its own share of lying — is illegal.

An easy way for the government to create criminality where there is none is to make it a crime to lie to its agents, in this case the FBI, which is Deep State Central. The object of creating bogus categories of crime, naturally, is to leverage power over adversaries; to scare them.

Likewise was Martha Stewart imprisoned — not for the offense of insider trading, but for lying to her inquisitors. During interrogation, the poor woman had been so intimidated, so scared of conviction— wouldn't you? — that she fibbed. The lead federal prosecutor in her case was the now-notorious James B. Comey.

This kind of entrapment — the criminalization of the act of lying to the government, in Flynn's case about a non-crime — is facilitated under the unconstitutional Section 1001 of Title 18, in the United States Code. It makes it an offense to make "a materially false" statement to a federal official — even when one is not under oath.

…

https://mises.org/wire/non-crime-lying-fbi
​

“Whoops! I accidentally let a Russian agent take over the presidency, sorry about that folks!”



Didn't he also say that the election couldn't possibly be hacked, rigged, or tampered with in any way, shape or form? Now all of a sudden there's no faith whatever to be had in the Democratic process. How funny is that?

Spoiler alert: very little, if at all. This fishing expedition has been going on for a year now and there’s still not a shred of evidence that the Russian state materially influenced our election. Bombshell after bombshell followed by dead-end after dead-end. Now it’s come to Zuckerberg lying through his teeth that ten thousand dollars in Facebook ads might have swung a state, when in reality it probably changed all of 10 people’s votes. It’s getting more pathetic every day lol.

I’m not faulting the media for making honest mistakes, I’m calling them liars. And I’ve already seen that video. Pure sophistry. Trust the media because of its mistakes? Sounds almost Orwellian to me, and the analogy between reporters and astronomers was just bizarre. If the media cares about “bringing the truth to light,” why do they rely on false information to keep up their narrative? This example may stand for thousands and thousands:



Clapper Confirms: "17 Intelligence Agencies" Russia Story Was False
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/v...lligence_agencies_russia_story_was_false.html

 

Dec 16, 2017

 

Dec 16, 2017

Why would trump's opinion of Obama as a president matter? :s if a president tells you, "hey, stay away from this guy. He's a shady character being investigated by the justice department." The most logical/rational course of action would be to listen.

I never disputed this? That's kind of been the pattern here, hasn't it? Obama administration warns Trump of an individual in his camp and they ignore it until they realize the media is going to come bite them in the a---. It happened with Manafort and Flynn. Sally Yates warned Trump that Flynn had lied to the VP about communications with the Russians less than a week into his presidency. Instead of taking action immediately and firing him, Flynn remained in office for 18 more days after that. It wasn't until WaPo broke the story to the public that Trump took decisive action. It's clear this administration only cares about the optics of things. If they could get away with certain things, they would.

Well, you already refuted your own video here. He's talking about the justice department here first of all, not the president. Also, this statement was made BEFORE Comey was fired. So posting this video and suggesting, "see, comey said no one pressured him!" is really disingenuous of you. Especially when Comey said that he believes he was fired in order to stop the Russia inquiry. Combine that statement Trump made to the fact that he knew Flynn lied to the FBI and was warned that he misled Pence days into his presidency and did nothing about it until the press broke the story. Also, take into account the various private meetings/conversations that Trump made with then FBI Director Comey: continuing to ask him about the Russia investigation and advocating for him to let Flynn of the hook. All of this most definitely makes an argument for obstruction of justice which is still being investigated by the special counsel.

The trump administration's original reasoning for firing Comey was due to his handling of the Clinton emails instigation which makes no sense because Trump praised Comey of his handling of the investigation during the campaign:

So let's not trust the former director of national intelligence who's job it was to assess security threats both domestic and foreign but you're willing to believe the trump administration's half assed reasoning for firing comey, Flynn speaking to the Russians, and the continuous lying coming from various individuals in Trump's circle? Now you're accusing the CIA, FBI, NSA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence of conspiring against trump? It seems you're taking the trump stance here of "anyone who accuses me bad of anything is fake news!" You do realize that high ranking officials in Trump's own administration support the findings of the intelligence community, right? Trump may not but most people in his cabinet do and it's been a continuous issue for the administration. It's gotten to the point that they don't put anything Russia related in his intel briefings in fear he'll get mad.

Oh give me a break. Don't link me to some source that equates the FBI to the KGB and expect me to take that s--- seriously. Your sources throughout this convo have been questionable/unreliable but that's clearly propaganda nonsense. Also, your reasoning of "it could have been a legal grey area" and the article you cited contradict each other. Your article states that Flynn communicating with the Russians is indeed legal which I don't dispute. The big question still remains that IF it's legal, why lie? Why did he lie to Pence and the FBI? Why didn't the white house defend him when the story first broke instead of casting him as a "lonewolf" (which we now know is a lie too). Why? We may not know the answer to that question yet.

The investigation has been ongoing for a year and a half. Nixon was investigated for over 2 years before he was forced to step down if I'm not mistaken. Not saying that will be the conclusion here but these type of investigations take time. Also, here you go on your expedition of "everyone else is lying except the trump administration!" If that's the card you're going to play here then there's just no point in continuing this discussion. Everyone who's been apart of the investigation in some effort whether it be congress, FBI, NSA ect. has reiterated that Russia meddled in the election and did so with sophistication. All the information about to what extent Russia interfered is not available to the public. A lot of this involves sensitive and top secret information that can't be announced to the public so excuse me if I'm more inclined to believe them than some guy on a message board that knows no more than the ordinary person.

A woman on twitter (who I assume is a journalist?) doesn't represent the entirety of the media. Don't be ridiculous. You are faulting them for making mistakes. You do realize that one of the agencies that worked on the intelligence assessment (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) is an umbrella agency that oversees all 17 federal agencies. This is why the media originally reported that all 17 intelligence agencies confirmed Russia meddled in the 2016 election because the Office of the Director of National Intelligence which oversees and speaks on behalf of the intelligence community, was apart of that assessment. There only being 4 agencies instead of 17 doesn't diminish the accuracy or confidence of the conclusion though.

 

Dec 17, 2017

How so? Because they offer an alternative perspective to the usual bs you get from CNN? Unlike the old corporate media, the new alternative media is not beholden to a bunch of corporations, banks and multinational business people. For this reason alone I’d sooner trust a random independent commentator on YouTube rambling off the cuff over a CNN pundit any day. Besides, you don't need a journalism degree to know what you're doing when you're just analyzing anyway. Most of the coverage that you see of current events is opinion; it's not primary reporting. So how is someone like David Frum any more reliable or legitimate than any other person speculating on the same topic?

(Incidentally, however, many of Consortium News’ contributors include seasoned investigative journalists and historians.)

lol

Somehow I get the sense that if their roles were reversed you'd be more forgiving of Obama ignoring a warning from Trump.

None of this is compelling in the least. It just comes off as a half-baked conspiracy theory, sorry. All you really have at the end of the day is speculation and tangential evidence which barely meets the threshold for reasonable suspicion, let alone justifies a full year of nonstop headline sensationalism and phony investigations. In contrast, Fusion GPS is probably the biggest scandal we’ve seen since the NSA revelations and it’s already been effectively swept under the rug by the self-styled “free press,” simply because it doesn’t implicate Trump or anyone associated with him — but that just goes without saying, doesn’t it? Since he took office the media has had a one-track mind, and that’s undermining, delegitimizing and ultimately displacing our 45th president from office. No, the real threat to democracy is The New York Times and the CNNs of the world, not Trump. Trump lies far less than a group like CNN, makes fewer mistakes, and is less harmful to this nation than the old guard media, which has led us into wars and has covered up for the highest level of corruption over and over again way before Trump ever came into the picture, whether it's a neoliberal Democrat like Obama or a neocon Republican like Bush. They cover for these people's a----s time and time again, and when you people — viz., partisan Republicans and Democrats — regurgitate their bs propaganda you’re just being useful idiots for them. It’s really very sad that so many people in this country haven’t learned s--- from history.

This raises the question, though: if Trump did indeed pressure him, why didn’t Comey make a peep about it until after he was fired and publicly humiliated (no doubt a serious dereliction of duty on Comey’s end, by the way)? And again, where’s the memo? Sounds like sour grapes to me.

Irrelevant. The statement was made two months after their alleged conversation about Flynn. That’s all that matters.

The matter was settled anyway when Senator Jim Risch completely dismantled any hopes of an obstruction case in the following exchange:



And here's Comey confirming that neither Trump nor anyone else in his administration ever asked him to back down in the Russia investigation:

No it doesn’t. There's nothing to investigate here, and if there really is a serious investigation underway, which I sincerely doubt, I can guarantee you nothing will come of it. You’ll probably never hear about it again. So don't get your hopes up.

Probably both reasons factored into his decision. And rightly so. Besides, as president, Trump was within his purview to fire the FBI director as he saw fit.

So did the Democrats when he exonerated Hillary Clinton, then later they flayed him for reopening the email probe. This seems like a really lazy argument.

Yet I doubt you would trust the word of, let’s say, a Trump-nominated DNI who expressed similar sentiments about people of other nationalities, especially minorities. How are James Clapper’s psychotic remarks any different from something like “Jews are genetically driven to lie, cheat and steal”? Oh, I forgot. Anything is fair game when it comes to the evil, despicable Russians.

Not quite. Again, the conclusions weren’t drawn by those three additional agencies in full, but by a relatively small group of partisans cherry-picked by Clapper the Russophobe himself. As Robert Parry of Consortium News notes:

Yet, as any intelligence expert will tell you, if you “hand-pick” the analysts, you are really hand-picking the conclusion. For instance, if the analysts were known to be hard-liners on Russia or supporters of Hillary Clinton, they could be expected to deliver the one-sided report that they did.

In the history of U.S. intelligence, we have seen how this approach has worked, such as the determination of the Reagan administration to pin the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II and other acts of terror on the Soviet Union.

CIA Director William Casey and Deputy Director Robert Gates shepherded the desired findings through the process by putting the assessment under the control of pliable analysts and sidelining those who objected to this politicization of intelligence.

The point of enlisting the broader intelligence community – and incorporating dissents into a final report – is to guard against such “stove-piping” of intelligence that delivers the politically desired result but ultimately distorts reality.

Another painful example of politicized intelligence was President George W. Bush’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD that removed INR’s and other dissents from the declassified version that was given to the public.

The report also contained a warning about how unreliable these “assessments” could be: “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents.”

In other words, “assessing” in intelligence terms often equates with “guessing” – and if the guessers are hand-picked by political appointees – it shouldn’t be surprising that they would come up with an “assessment” that would please their bosses, in this case, President Obama and his appointees at CIA, NSA, FBI and ODNI.
​

So then what you have here is not so much a handful of intelligence agencies conspiring against Trump as a handful of Obama lackeys doing what they’re told.

Politifact is lying by omission, as usual.

[John] Brennan said the report “followed the general model of how you want to do something like this with some notable exceptions. It only involved the FBI, NSA and CIA as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It wasn’t a full inter-agency community assessment that was coordinated among the 17 agencies, and for good reason because of the nature and the sensitivity of the information trying, once again, to keep that tightly compartmented.”

But Brennan’s excuse about “tightly compartmented” information was somewhat disingenuous because other intelligence agencies, such as the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), could have been consulted in a limited fashion, based on their areas of expertise. For instance, INR could have weighed in on whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would have taken the risk of trying to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign, knowing that – if she won as expected and learned of the operation – she might have sought revenge against him and his country.

The Jan. 6 report argued one side of the case – that Putin had a motive for undermining Clinton because he objected to her work as Secretary of State when she encouraged anti-Putin protests inside Russia – but the report ignored the counter-argument that the usually cautious Putin might well have feared infuriating the incoming U.S. President if the anti-Clinton ploy failed to block her election.

A balanced intelligence assessment would have included not just arguments for believing that the Russians did supply the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks but the reasons to doubt that they did.
​

Most importantly, the report lacks evidence.

The Jan. 6 report – technically called an Intelligence Community Assessment (or ICA) – avoided the need to remove any dissents by excluding the intelligence agencies that might have dissented and by hand-picking the analysts who compiled the report.

However, like the declassified version of the Iraq NIE, the Russia-gate ICA lacked any solid evidence to support the conclusions. The ICA basically demanded that the American public “trust us” and got away with that bluff because much of the mainstream U.S. news media wanted to believe anything negative about then-President-elect Trump.

Because of that, the American people were repeatedly – and falsely – informed that the findings about Russian “hacking” reflected the collective judgment of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, making anyone who dared question the conclusion seem like a crackpot or a “Russian apologist.”

Yet, based on the testimonies of Clapper and Brennan, we now know that the ICA represented only a hand-picked selection of the intelligence community – four, not 17, agencies.

There were other biases reflected in the ICA, such as a bizarre appendix that excoriated RT, the Russian television network, for supposedly undermining Americans’ confidence in their democratic process.

This seven-page appendix, dating from 2012, accused RT of portraying “the US electoral process as undemocratic” and offered such “proof” as RT’s staging of a debate among third-party presidential candidates who had been excluded from the Republican-Democratic debates between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

“RT broadcast, hosted and advertised third-party candidate debates,” the report said, as if allowing political figures in the United States who were not part of the two-party system to express their views, was somehow anti-democratic, when you might think that letting Americans hear alternatives was the essence of democracy.

“The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a ‘sham,’” the report continued. Yet, polls have shown that large numbers of Americans would prefer more choices than the usual two candidates and, indeed, most Western democracies have multiple parties, So, the implicit RT criticism of the U.S. political process is certainly not out of the ordinary.

The report also took RT to task for covering the Occupy Wall Street movement and for reporting on the environmental dangers from “fracking,” topics cited as further proof that the Russian government was using RT to weaken U.S. public support for Washington’s policies (although, again, these are topics of genuine public interest).

…

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
​

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/23/new-cracks-in-russia-gate-assessment/

If you haven’t noticed, hyperbolic comparisons to Soviet-era tyranny (and hyperbole in general) have become all too common in political commentary.

I didn’t say it did, I said it could have (for all Flynn knew).

I’d be willing to bet that by a year and a half the Watergate investigation yielded enough leads/evidence to warrant its continued existence. This is not the case with Russiagate, which has had the character of a conspiracy theory / witch hunt since the beginning.

No, they didn’t. See the CN article above.

Not according to Russia specialist and NSA whistleblower William Binney, who resigned in 2001 after 30 years with the agency because of the politicization of intelligence that he saw in the Bush era. He says the people pushing this conspiracy in the intelligence community could provide truthful evidence to the public without violating anyone's rights or revealing any US national security info, so excuse me if I'm more disposed to believe him than I am Uncle Sam, who has betrayed and lied to the American people countless times.

“If the idiots in the intelligence community expect us to believe them after all the crap they have told us (like WMDs in Iraq and ‘no we don’t collect data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans’) then they need to give clear proof of what they say. So far, they have failed to prove anything.” — William Binney

In all honesty, Obama08 was their password on all of those emails. It doesn’t require Russian hackers to grab government data with this kind of ineptitude going on. All it takes is one half-assed phisher, one disgruntled lowly staffer who supported Bernie Sanders and decided to turn coat when they realized what was being done to him, or basically somebody who is capable of guessing a seven character password. Former NSA experts maintain that this was indeed the case — that it was a leak, not a hack.

https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/

Actually, Joy Reid is one of the media’s most visible faces. It’s a pretty big deal for somebody in her position to be deceiving her audience like that.

No. See the CN article I posted above.

Fine, but the report was debunked months ago. See the CN article above.

 

Dec 18, 2017

This is precisely the issue lol, This reads like an illuminati-esque youtube conspiracy. Which I guess makes sense since you're linking me pieces that equate the FBI to the KGB (lol) and to authors who publish books called "The Trump Revolution" and argue that Trump is our last hope to destroy our "tyrannical government." One of the "journalists" you cited, and I use that label lightly since she pretty much only posts on a glorified version of tumblr, published an article titled "Fascism Came to America Wrapped In A Rainbow Flag and Wearing A Pussyhat." I mean seriously? lol. These are the people I'd expect to see on doomsday preppers waiting for the next civil war to break out and you expect me to take their paranoid political input seriously? Also, since we're on the topic of journalism accuracy, who fact checks these people? I can't imagine these sites garner much traffic and they certainly aren't part of the mainstream media. h---, some of the sources you cited were straight up blogs. Who holds these individuals accountable? You said you'd trust some youtube commentator more than a CNN pundit which is pretty irrational considering CNN are held to certain standards while people can pretty much say whatever the h--- they want on their on youtube channel.

Uhhhh.... it's hard to be forgiving when you're: A) running for the highest office in the country. You should be vetting EVERYONE you hire and it's not like Manafort's shady past was hidden. It was well documented/noted & B ) You were warned by the current administration to stay away.

This is one big whataboutism lol. "Various trump officials lied to federal authorities and Trump did not take action until the media broke the story but who cares about that -- let's talk about this opposition research firm that funded the same dossier that the GOP did during the primaries." So the guy who claims, millions of illegals voted, muslims in New Jersey celebrated on rooftops on 9/11, Mexico sends over their bad people, and that Ted Cruz's dad was complicit in JFK's assassination, lies less than CNN and NYT? Okayyyyy dude lol. This conversation is going to go no where if we can't agree on any baseline facts. You're dismissing the findings of the intelligence community and painting the Russia inquiry as witch hunt even though several indictments have already come from it. I... just don't know what else to tell you.

Because there was an ongoing investigation into the connections between Trump's campaign and Russia. Comey did what most veteran detectives in his position would have done: he used himself as bait and recorded every conversation/meeting he had with the president as part of the ongoing investigation. Also, the memos were turned over to the FBI/Special Counsel and congressional committee investigating Russian interference. The memos weren't made public in fear that it would compromise the investigation.

It's not irrelevant :s the firing is what shifted the focus of the investigation into something else. Also, those statements you linked are referring to the various statements trump made. In regards to Comey being fired, he himself said that he felt he was fired in attempt to squash the Russia investigation. Also, there's no one statement that can prove obstruction of justice. It's typically a series of events/statements that allows a prosecutor to argue obstruction of justice. That's exactly what is being looked at by the special counsel. I mean trump himself said the Russia investigation played a role into his firing of Comey:

You're missing the point. This has nothing to do with the democrats. The point is the trump administration's reasoning for firing comey made no sense. They essentially fired him for the same thing the president had praised him of doing months earlier. That makes it seem even more so that Trump fired him in attempt to squash the Russia inquiry.

Clapper's actual comments: ""I have to say that, without specifically affirming or confirming these conversations — since, even though they’re in the public realm, they’re still classified — just from a theoretical standpoint, I will tell you that my dashboard warning light was clearly on and I think that was the case with all of us in the intelligence community, very concerned about the nature of these approaches to the Russians,” Clapper said during an exclusive interview on NBC’s "Meet The Press."

"If you put that in context with everything else we knew the Russians were doing to interfere with the election, and just the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So we were concerned.""

He's referring to Russia's method of diplomacy/espionage and how they always seek ways to put individuals in debt to them. He didn't even say they were genetically driven, he said they were "almost genetically driven."

You have a hidden bunker in the woods some where don't you? So you believe a disgruntled ex--NSA officer who is not only an open trump supporter (he goes on Fox News and other conservative media outlets to defend him fairly frequently) but he's friends with the president and has direct contact to him. Btw the "dissenting memo" that Binney put out through a group called VIPS consisting of former intelligence officials -- not all of them signed off on it. There was a split in the group that Binney's theory of the DNC hack being an "inside job" was feasible. If his own group doesn't even fully believe him, why should you or I? This is probably my last post to you because this is getting no where.

 

Dec 18, 2017

 

Dec 18, 2017

You completely ignored my article debunking the Russian intel ‘assessment,’ and instead of addressing the points in the other article you just poisoned the well. I don’t know why I bother, but this is probably my last reply to you.

Fine, but Manafort’s checkered past long predates Trump’s political ascent. It has absolutely nothing to do with him.

According to Trump’s harshest critics he’s just a bumbling buffoon who won the election by sheer dumb luck, so why not assume incompetence before malice? The aphorism "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” should apply especially to someone like Trump, right?

Please. Obama and Hillary Clinton surrounded themselves with their share of shady characters too. Case in point:

Manafort, Podesta Group highlight DC swamp culture
http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/357962-Manafort-Podesta-Group-highlight-DC-swamp-culture

Corruption is inherent in the system. The whole of DC is a swamp. I mean, there are emails showing that the Clinton camp and the DNC were colluding with MSNBC and CNN during the election. You’re just holding Trump to a higher standard because you obviously hate the guy and have a partisan ax to grind.

This is just more evidence for the swamp's existence.

I promise you there was no obstruction and none will be found. Probably this is no longer even being investigated. You're just setting yourself up for more disappointment.

What kind of sophistry is this? I don’t remember Trump ever praising Comey for clearing Hillary. Get f---ing real.

“But as far as our being intimate allies, trusting buds with the Russians that is just not going to happen. It is in their genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed to the United States and to Western democracies.” — James Clapper in a speech in Australia

Like I’m going to trust a deranged old lunatic drunk from Cold War nostalgia over a noble whistleblower who criticized both of the last two administrations for being corrupt for basically the same reasons. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say he probably supports Trump because they both apparently want to “drain the swamp,” not because he’s partial to the president or the GOP. The man gave up his 30+ year career in the NSA because of what the Bush admin was doing and instead of praising him for it and hearing him out you and the media are writing him off as a “disgruntled conspiracy theorist.” Disgraceful.

I'll just drop this here. From the Intercept, a source you used earlier so you can't poison the well:

The U.S. Media Suffered Its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages and Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened

Spoiler

Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, and countless pundits, commentators, and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.

...

There was just one small problem with this story: It was fundamentally false, in the most embarrassing way possible. Hours after CNN broadcast its story — and then hyped it over and over and over — the Washington Post reported that CNN got the key fact of the story wrong.

The email was not dated September 4, as CNN claimed, but rather September 14 — which means it was sent after WikiLeaks had already published access to the DNC emails online. Thus, rather than offering some sort of special access to Trump, “Michael J. Erickson” was simply some random person from the public encouraging the Trump family to look at the publicly available DNC emails that WikiLeaks — as everyone by then already knew — had publicly promoted. In other words, the email was the exact opposite of what CNN presented it as being.



How did CNN end up aggressively hyping such a spectacularly false story? They refuse to say. Many hours after their story got exposed as false, the journalist who originally presented it, congressional reporter Manu Raju, finally posted a tweet noting the correction. CNN’s P.R. department then claimed that “multiple sources” had provided CNN with the false date. And Raju went on CNN, in muted tones, to note the correction, explicitly claiming that “two sources” had each given him the false date on the email, while also making clear that CNN did not ever even see the email, but only had sources describe its purported contents:



All of this prompts the glaring, obvious, and critical question — one that CNN refuses to address: How did “multiple sources” all misread the date on this document, in exactly the same way and toward the same end, and then feed this false information to CNN?

It is, of course, completely plausible that one source might innocently misread a date on a document. But how is it remotely plausible that multiple sources could all innocently and in good faith misread the date in exactly the same way, all to cause the dissemination of a blockbuster revelation about Trump-Russia-WikiLeaks collusion? This is the critical question that CNN simply refuses to answer. In other words, CNN refuses to provide the most minimal transparency to enable the public to understand what happened here.

WHY DOES THIS matter so much? For so many significant reasons:

To begin with, it’s hard to overstate how fast, far, and wide this false story traveled. Democratic Party pundits, operatives, and journalists with huge social media platforms predictably jumped on the story immediately, announcing that it proved collusion between Trump and Russia (through WikiLeaks). One tweet from Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu, claiming that this proved evidence of criminal collusion, was retweeted thousands and thousands of times in just a few hours (Lieu quietly deleted the tweet after I noted its falsity, and long after it went very viral, without ever telling his followers that the CNN story, and therefore his accusation, had been debunked).



...

Incredibly, to this very moment — almost 24 hours after CNN’s story was debunked — Wittes has never noted to his more than 200,000 followers that the story he so excitedly promoted turned out to be utterly false, even though he returned to Twitter long after the story was debunked to tweet about other matters. He just left his false and inflammatory claims uncorrected.

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall believed the story was so significant that he used an image of an atomic bomb detonating at the top of his article discussing its implications, an article he tweeted to his roughly 250,000 followers. Only at night was an editor’s note finally added noting that the whole thing was false.

It’s hard to quantify exactly how many people were deceived — filled with false news and propaganda — by the CNN story. But thanks to Democratic-loyal journalists and operatives who decree every Trump-Russia claim to be true without seeing any evidence, it’s certainly safe to say that many hundreds of thousands of people, almost certainly millions, were exposed to these false claims.

Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy — which would presumably include all the people who have spent the last year lamenting Fake News, propaganda, Twitter bots, and the like — would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended up filling so many people’s brains with totally false news. That alone should prompt demands from CNN for an explanation about what happened here. No Russian Facebook ad or Twitter bot could possibly have anywhere near the impact as this CNN story had when it comes to deceiving people with blatantly inaccurate information.

Second, the “multiple sources” who fed CNN this false information did not confine themselves to that network. They were apparently very busy eagerly spreading the false information to as many media outlets as they could find. In the middle of the day, CBS News claimed that it had independently “confirmed” CNN’s story about the email and published its own breathless article discussing the grave implications of this discovered collusion.

Most embarrassing of all was what MSNBC did. You just have to watch this report from its “intelligence and national security correspondent” Ken Dilanian to believe it. Like CBS, Dilanian also claimed that he had independently “confirmed” the false CNN report from “two sources with direct knowledge of this.” Dilanian, whose career in the U.S. media continues to flourish the more he is exposed as someone who faithfully parrots what the CIA tells him to say (since that is one of the most coveted and valued attributes in U.S. journalism), spent three minutes mixing evidence-free CIA claims as fact with totally false assertions about what his multiple “sources with direct knowledge” told him about all this. Please watch this — again, not just the content but the tenor and tone of how they “report” — as it is Baghdad Bob-level embarrassing:

[video deleted]

Think about what this means. It means that at least two — and possibly more — sources, which these media outlets all assessed as credible in terms of having access to sensitive information, all fed the same false information to multiple news outlets at the same time. For multiple reasons, the probability is very high that these sources were Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee (or their high-level staff members), which is the committee that obtained access to Trump Jr.’s emails, although it’s certainly possible that it’s someone else. We won’t know until these news outlets deign to report this crucial information to the public: Which “multiple sources” acted jointly to disseminate incredibly inflammatory, false information to the nation’s largest news outlets?



Just last week, the Washington Post decided — to great applause (including mine) — to expose a source to whom they had promised anonymity and off-the-record protections because they discovered that she was purposely feeding them false information as part of a scheme by Project Veritas to discredit the Post. It’s a well-established principle of journalism — one that is rarely followed when it comes to powerful people in D.C. — that journalists should expose, rather than protect and conceal, sources who purposely feed them false information to be disseminated to the public.



Is that what happened here? Did these “multiple sources” who fed not just CNN, but also MSNBC and CBS completely false information do so deliberately and in bad faith? Until these news outlets provide an accounting of what happened — what one might call “minimal journalistic transparency” — it’s impossible to say for certain. But right now, it’s very difficult to imagine a scenario in which multiple sources all fed the wrong date to multiple media outlets innocently and in good faith.

If this were, in fact, a deliberate attempt to cause a false and highly inflammatory story to be reported, then these media outlets have an obligation to expose who the culprits are — just as the Washington Post did last week to the woman making false claims about Roy Moore (it was much easier in that case because the source they exposed was a nobody in D.C., rather than someone on whom they rely for a steady stream of stories, the way CNN and MSNBC rely on Democratic members of the Intelligence Committee). By contrast, if this were just an innocent mistake, then these media outlets should explain how such an implausible sequence of events could possibly have happened.

Thus far, these media corporations are doing the opposite of what journalists ought to do: Rather than informing the public about what happened and providing minimal transparency and accountability for themselves and the high-level officials who caused this to happen, they are hiding behind meaningless, obfuscating statements crafted by P.R. executives and lawyers.

How can journalists and news outlets so flamboyantly act offended when they’re attacked as being “Fake News” when this is the conduct behind which they hide when they get caught disseminating incredibly consequential false stories?

THE MORE SERIOUS you think the Trump-Russia story is, the more dangerous you think it is when Trump attacks the U.S. media as “Fake News,” the more you should be disturbed by what happened here, the more transparency and accountability you should be demanding. If you’re someone who thinks Trump’s attacks on the media are dangerous, then you should be first in line objecting when they act recklessly and demand transparency and accountability from them. It is debacles like this — and the subsequent corporate efforts to obfuscate — that have made the U.S. media so disliked and that fuel and empower Trump’s attacks on them.

Third, this type of recklessness and falsity is now a clear and highly disturbing trend — one could say a constant — when it comes to reporting on Trump, Russia, and WikiLeaks. I have spent a good part of the last year documenting the extraordinarily numerous, consequential, and reckless stories that have been published — and then corrected, rescinded, and retracted — by major media outlets when it comes to this story.

All media outlets, of course, will make mistakes. The Intercept certainly has made our share, as have all outlets. And it’s particularly natural, inevitable, for mistakes to be made on a highly complicated, opaque story like the question of the relationship between Trump and the Russians, and questions relating to how WikiLeaks obtained the DNC and Podesta emails. That is all to be expected.

But what one should expect with journalistic “mistakes” is that they sometimes go in one direction and other times go in the other direction. That’s exactly what has not happened here. Virtually every false story published goes only in one direction: to be as inflammatory and damaging as possible on the Trump-Russia story and about Russia particularly. At some point, once “mistakes” all start going in the same direction, toward advancing the same agenda, they cease looking like mistakes.

No matter your views on those political controversies, no matter how much you hate Trump or regard Russia as a grave villain and threat to our cherished democracy and freedoms, it has to be acknowledged that when the U.S. media is spewing constant false news about all of this, that, too, is a grave threat to our democracy and cherished freedom.

So numerous are the false stories about Russia and Trump over the last year that I literally cannot list them all. Just consider the ones from the last week alone, as enumerated by the New York Times yesterday in its news report on CNN’s embarrassment:

It was also yet another prominent reporting error at a time when news organizations are confronting a skeptical public, and a president who delights in attacking the media as “fake news.”

Last Saturday, ABC News suspended a star reporter, Brian Ross, after an inaccurate report that Donald Trump had instructed Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, to contact Russian officials during the presidential race.

The report fueled theories about coordination between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, and stocks dropped after the news. In fact, Mr. Trump’s instruction to Mr. Flynn came after he was president-elect.

Several news outlets, including Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, also inaccurately reported this week that Deutsche Bank had received a subpoena from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for President Trump’s financial records.

The president and his circle have not been shy about pointing out the errors.

That’s just the last week alone. Let’s just remind ourselves of how many times major media outlets have made humiliating, breathtaking errors on the Trump-Russia story, always in the same direction, toward the same political goals. Here is just a sample of incredibly inflammatory claims that traveled all over the internet before having to be corrected, walked back, or retracted — often long after the initial false claims spread, and where the corrections receive only a tiny fraction of the attention with which the initial false stories are lavished:

• Russia hacked into the U.S. electric grid to deprive Americans of heat during winter (Wash Post)
• An anonymous group (PropOrNot) documented how major U.S. political sites are Kremlin agents (Wash Post)
• WikiLeaks has a long, documented relationship with Putin (Guardian)
• A secret server between Trump and a Russian bank has been discovered (Slate)
• RT hacked C-SPAN and caused disruption in its broadcast (Fortune)
• Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app (Crowdstrike)
• Russians attempted to hack elections systems in 21 states (multiple news outlets, echoing Homeland Security)
• Links have been found between Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci and a Russian investment fund under investigation (CNN)

That really is just a small sample. So continually awful and misleading has this reporting been that even Vladimir Putin’s most devoted critics — such as Russian expatriate Masha Gessen, oppositional Russian journalists, and anti-Kremlin liberal activists in Moscow — are constantly warning that the U.S. media’s unhinged, ignorant, paranoid reporting on Russia is harming their cause in all sorts of ways, in the process destroying the credibility of the U.S. media in the eyes of Putin’s opposition (who — unlike Americans who have been fed a steady news and entertainment propaganda diet for decades about Russia — actually understand the realities of that country).






U.S. media outlets are very good at demanding respect. They love to imply, if not outright state, that being patriotic and a good American means that one must reject efforts to discredit them and their reporting because that’s how one defends press freedom.

But journalists also have the responsibility not just to demand respect and credibility but to earn it. That means that there shouldn’t be such a long list of abject humiliations, in which completely false stories are published to plaudits, traffic, and other rewards, only to fall apart upon minimal scrutiny. It certainly means that all of these “errors” shouldn’t be pointing in the same direction, pushing the same political outcome or journalistic conclusion.

But what it means most of all is that when media outlets are responsible for such grave and consequential errors as the spectacle we witnessed yesterday, they have to take responsibility for it by offering transparency and accountability. In this case, that can’t mean hiding behind P.R. and lawyer silence and waiting for this to just all blow away.

At minimum, these networks — CNN, MSNBC, and CBS — have to either identify who purposely fed them this blatantly false information or explain how it’s possible that “multiple sources” all got the same information wrong in innocence and good faith. Until they do that, their cries and protests the next time they’re attacked as “Fake News” should fall on deaf ears, since the real author of those attacks — the reason those attacks resonate — is themselves and their own conduct.

Update: Dec. 9, 2017
Hours after this article was published on Saturday — a full day and a half after his original tweets promoting the false CNN story with a “boom” and a cannon — Benjamin Wittes finally got around to noting that the CNN story he hyped has “serious problems”; needless to say, that acknowledgment received a fraction of retweets from his followers as his original tweets hyping the story attracted.

Highlights:

It’s hard to quantify exactly how many people were deceived — filled with false news and propaganda — by the CNN story. But thanks to Democratic-loyal journalists and operatives who decree every Trump-Russia claim to be true without seeing any evidence, it’s certainly safe to say that many hundreds of thousands of people, almost certainly millions, were exposed to these false claims.

Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy — which would presumably include all the people who have spent the last year lamenting Fake News, propaganda, Twitter bots, and the like — would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended up filling so many people’s brains with totally false news. That alone should prompt demands from CNN for an explanation about what happened here. No Russian Facebook ad or Twitter bot could possibly have anywhere near the impact as this CNN story had when it comes to deceiving people with blatantly inaccurate information.

...

All media outlets, of course, will make mistakes. The Intercept certainly has made our share, as have all outlets. And it’s particularly natural, inevitable, for mistakes to be made on a highly complicated, opaque story like the question of the relationship between Trump and the Russians, and questions relating to how WikiLeaks obtained the DNC and Podesta emails. That is all to be expected.

But what one should expect with journalistic “mistakes” is that they sometimes go in one direction and other times go in the other direction. That’s exactly what has not happened here. Virtually every false story published goes only in one direction: to be as inflammatory and damaging as possible on the Trump-Russia story and about Russia particularly. At some point, once “mistakes” all start going in the same direction, toward advancing the same agenda, they cease looking like mistakes.

No matter your views on those political controversies, no matter how much you hate Trump or regard Russia as a grave villain and threat to our cherished democracy and freedoms, it has to be acknowledged that when the U.S. media is spewing constant false news about all of this, that, too, is a grave threat to our democracy and cherished freedom.

...

At minimum, these networks — CNN, MSNBC, and CBS — have to either identify who purposely fed them this blatantly false information or explain how it’s possible that “multiple sources” all got the same information wrong in innocence and good faith. Until they do that, their cries and protests the next time they’re attacked as “Fake News” should fall on deaf ears, since the real author of those attacks — the reason those attacks resonate — is themselves and their own conduct.
​

But you should really read the whole article. Very informative.

 

Dec 19, 2017

You've gotta be reasonably autistic to still support Trump though. It's not even about being a snowflake liberal either. Trump is just a bad president lol

 

Dec 19, 2017

He's been average to decent so far. It's been a long time since we've had a truly good or great president, but after 16 years of Bush and Obama, who seemed to be competing for “worst president in modern history,” he's a godsend.

 

Dec 19, 2017

How

 

Dec 20, 2017

Republicans just passed a tax bill that will give big corporations permanent tax cuts & lower/middle-class people temporary tax cuts. Income inequality just got a lot worse in this country.

On top of this, they repeal obamacare’s Individual mandate which will result in 13 million people to not have health insurance & cause premiums to double.

This pretty much sums up where the GOP’s priorities are at:

 

Dec 21, 2017

UN just voted to condemn the U.S. & void trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

 

Dec 21, 2017

God it never f---ing stops does it, they're just slowly chipping away at the country.

 

Dec 21, 2017

Oh it gets worse, read this. This tax bill is another double-down of a failed economic theory that has proven not to work. Middle & lower class Americans will actually be paying more taxes in 10 years because of this tax bill (unless the tax cuts are extended by whichever party in power). The GOP has also stated these large tax cuts will pay for themselves via economic growth that will spawn as a result. They claim GDP will grow by 4%; most economists say this tax bill will have little to no effect on economic growth. So that means Republicans are going to cut social welfare programs (Medicare, Medicaid, social security, welfare, etc.) in order to lessen the burden that their own tax bill is going to have on the national debt. The scariest part is that big companies like Wells Fargo & Apple gave their employees “one time bonuses” and/or raised their minimum wage a dollar after the bill was passed in attempt to trick the public into thinking that giving large corporations tax breaks, will benefit the workers. Might want to think again:






They’re throwing the workers crumbs & expecting us to be content with just that.

 

Dec 21, 2017

Enigma or whoever I'm kinda confused and didn't read the bill yet or anything, but basically it's a tax cut for the majority for a few years and then an increase? I understand it's a permanent one for the wealthy and big corporations but if it's true it's a temporary cut and then increase for the rest, then what's the point of that? Just to fool people into thinking it's a good thing basically, or is there something I'm not getting?

 

Dec 21, 2017

Yeah, it’s a temporary tax cut for lower/middle class & permanent tax cuts for big corporations. The tax cuts for lower/middle class can be extended after 10 years but a lot can happen in that time. We don’t know what shape the economy will be in 10 years so to assume that those tax cuts will just be extended is foolish.

Republicans believe in trickle-down economics. It’s a theory that tax cuts for the wealthy will result in money trickling down the income ladder. Basically, the assumption is that wealthy business owners will then use that money to invest in their workers by raising their salaries, hiring more people, purchasing more materials for production etc. Throughout history, that has not happened though & rich CEOs usually hoard that money to themselves & their stock holders. Big business tends to donate heavily to Republican representatives during election cycles so this tax bill is basically a payment to them.

 

Dec 21, 2017

See here for an alternative point of view.



This guy also predicted Trump to win with uncanny accuracy.



cf.


https://realclearpolitics.com/elections/live_results/2016_general/president/map.html

 

Dec 21, 2017

Sean Hannity is such a dumb a---

 

Dec 22, 2017

f--- Jeff Sessions: