If Trump had hired Michael Cohen to enlist Cambridge Analytica to hire Michael Steele who paid Russian intermediaries who colluded with active Kremlin agents to receive the DNC emails and other opposition research on Hillary's campaign that came back up the chain to Trump with a 'purple monkey dishwasher' affixed to the end of it, would the obfuscation and delegation absolve Trump of any responsibility in colluding with Russia?

Hillary's campaign colluded with kremlin agents for dirt on Trump. They did it through a whole series of intermediaries. And those Russian intermediaries quite the opposite of 'putting their lives on the line' were being paid exorbitant amounts of money to peddle bullshit and keep Steele stringing along with a glimmer of rumor and innuendo because as long as they kept singing, they kept getting those Clinton campaign bucks.

I've heard that, but I don't know why it matters. It doesn't take a genius to know that during that time it'll be some Democrat funding the research.

Chris Steele colluded with Russian sources to potentially expose a compromised American... something the MI6 and CIA do all the time.

Your hypothetical is another false equivalence. And I'm laying out the facts, not skipping over them to make some weak partisan argument.

Chris Steele colluded with Russian sources to potentially expose a compromised American... something the MI6 and CIA do all the time. Intelligence agencies pay sources... it's not anything new, lol.

This post was edited by IceMage on Aug 6 2018 09:27am

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= collusion with Russia.

MI6 and the CIA are authorized to cooperate with their foreign counterparts for national security operations, like intelligence sharing with the GRU in counter-terrorism operations
Campaign staff and political guns-for-hire have no such authorization. Doing so is outside the bounds of normalcy if not illegal, and should be judged on its ethical grounds and scandalous content.

That's (BOLD) the important part that Trump cultists like to ignore.

Kogan is not a Russian government agent nor was he on any path of reciprocal data flow. He has about the same relevance as if Brad Parscale played a game of DOTA with some Russian guys on his team thanks to Valve's shitty matchmaking.
There is a considerable difference between those entities we know were within a structure of intelligence sharing and cooperation, versus desperately looking for any kind of association to the point people freak out that Cambridge Analytica was 'access from Russia' with no evidence that it was part of any larger effort. That's the 'Russian salad dressing' scenario. Based on what we know right now, you can at best wildly speculate completely baselessly whether he had any connections to anything.

>not a Russian government agent
>got grants from the RUSSIAN GOVERMENT

so the Kremlin was paying Kogan for perfectly benign reasons?

If I got a grant from the University of Minnesota to study social media datamining, does that make me a US government agent?