Quote (IceMage @ Jul 24 2019 12:24pm)
Yes... understanding the extent of the Russian interference in our election has no national security use at all. And why bother trying to determine whether a presidential campaign conspired with a foreign adversary? Or whether Russia has some sort of leverage over the president? Total waste of time.
So many hot takes today... let it all out guys.
Good idea, he should have understood the extent of Russian interference and its motives, methods, weaknesses, etc
And instead of doing that, he deliberated on process crimes.
As said, Mueller has been outright neglectful at pursuing leads on the actual Russian interference operation that still remaining unanswered. Great effort was made to look up whether Trump officials lied to him, but not the sources that sparked this nonsense. And great effort was made to examine the improprieties of Michael Cohen paying off a porn star over an affair, but we still don't know if Steele was being fed disinformation by the Russian government as a ploy to interfere in our election. We have learned extremely little about the actual Russian operation and its full extent that we didn't already know 3 years ago in full public view. But we sure do know who lied to who, who exaggerated what, who's roommate's uncles boyfriend's housekeeper thought about firing Mueller even if that would be a lawful exertion of executive powers.
Where this really boils over into farcical territory is the prosecution of Concord Management, where Mueller's team has had a complete disaster in court. To even make their case at all, they've relied upon an utterly insane legal overreach that reinterprets a statute to say that even if Concord's activities were protected by the first amendment and not regulated under campaign finance or election requirements, that the fact they posted anonymously deprived the FEC of its regulatory powers and thus constituted conspiracy to defraud the government. Its hard to even fathom how a serious lawyer could dream that up, because both you and I could be prosecuted under that statute for the posts we're making right now. What's my name? What's yours? We're online, we're anonymous, the FEC isn't regulating our posts, they could theoretically influence the election somehow even if there's no monetary value or underlying criminal violations. And then Mueller team's did a bunch of cheap stalling tactics like flooding discovery with terabytes of untranslated russian social media posts and when threatened with contempt, actually backed away and said they couldn't allege a relationship between the Russian troll farm and Russian government and could not present such evidence at trial. That's all without even getting into their discovery shenanigans.
Its clear enough that Mueller's team was woefully underprepared to actually take on the Russian interference operation itself. They didn't investigate it fully, they didn't find the evidence they needed to prosecute it, and they're bungling the one trial they got and trying to butcher the law. So how does this help our national security? I think Mueller did a very thorough job investigating if Trump farted on an elevator in 2017 while James Comey was within the reach of gaseous expansion and could present diagrams and charts of fluids in a closed chamber, but ask him why Russia hacked the DNC and he'd say 'dunno'