Quote (Goomshill @ Jan 18 2018 11:30pm)

What is Trump being accused of, colluding with Russia? We have a money and intel trail showing Hillary/DNC/Obama all paid russian operatives for (bogus) oppo on Trump. That's besides also having proof of colluding with the Ukrainian government directly via its embassy, that one was a doozy
And even you have to recognize how alarming it should be that they hid this money trail from campaign finance oversight by disguising it as millions of $ in ''legal services" to Perkins Coie that was then used to fund Fusion GPS and Crowdstrike. Those are the actions of someone who wants to keep their hands clean of the affair during the election and give themselves plausible deniability. Which only makes sense, given the sensitivity of paying russian sources (or at least, russian intermediaries who then one way or another get intel from those sources). Why weren't they just sending this money directly to Fusion GPS and Crowdstrike themselves? Why pass it through Marc Elias disguised as legal counsel?

But yeah the Obama campaign is an odd quirk, most people don't realize it but his campaign 'organizing for america' / 'obama for america' / 'organizing for action' still existed and rebranded after his 2012 election victory, at which point it was retooled as a political advocacy group in favor of his agenda. Same organization, three names, different structuring each time. It paid $972,000 to Perkins Coie alongside the DNC and Hillary's campaign for the same ostensible 'legal services'.
Specifically:

We know that HFA, DNC and OFA paid millions to Perkins Coie listed a 'legal services', who then in turn paid millions to Fusion GPS, who then in turn paid christopher steele, who then paid russian intermediaries, who may or may not have paid their sources on an ad hoc basis, who then passed information back to the intermediaries, who passed it to steele, who passed it to fusion gps, who passed it to perkins coie who passed it to the DNC/Hillary/Obama and the FBI, who then cited it while obtaining a FISA wiretap warrant on Trump's campaign manager, probably while he was still staying in Trump tower. And other Trump officials.

Quote (Goomshill @ Jan 18 2018 11:59pm)

its so many scandals out of left field I can't even keep them straight

• Disguising campaign payments to Perkins Coie as legal services
  
• Paying Russian state actors and/or active kremlin agents for oppo against Trump
  
• Colluding with the Ukrainian embassy for oppo against Manafort
  
• Wiretapping Trump's campaign via FISA
  
• Citing the DNC manufactured political oppo for the FISA application
  
• Unmasking that FISA intel
  
• Weaponizing and leaking that intel to attack Michael Flynn
  
• Hillary's email scandal's FBI handling
  
• Hillary's JFA giving her total control over the DNC prior to the primaries (via Donna Brazile)
  
• The DNC scheming with HRC to influence the primaries (via leaked emails, I mean its kind of redundant with above but technically scandals happened a year apart)
  
• The media colluding with Hillary's campaign
  
• DNC only letting Crowdstrike see its breached servers, not the FBI
  
• Whatever was going on with Imran Awan and Pakistan

I'm sure I'm missing some

Quote (IceMage @ Jan 19 2018 08:03am)

Are you trying to say Hillary intentionally paid for bogus oppo research? What evidence do you have of that? Also there's plenty of intelligence reports from Steele that are accurate, so calling them all bogus is simply untrue. The reality is that her campaign paid for oppo research on Trump, which included his foreign business ventures, which inevitably requires investigators to talk to knowledgeable people in those countries(including government officials). Saying "Hillary paid Russian intelligence officials for intelligence on Trump" is the sort of gross oversimplification that is usually reserved for shills like Hannity... but then again, shill is in your name.

The idea that the Hillary campaign paid Fusion GPS in some elaborate scheme to manufacture oppo on Trump which would trigger an FBI investigation is just... I can't even. I know you don't believe this yourself, you are just doing what any good Trump shill does, deflecting.

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As far as funneling the money through Perkins Cole for legal services, I have no idea. I'd need to hear from honest, objective political people about how strange that would be. Maybe it's not as unusual as you think.

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Joe Biden said Tuesday that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stopped the Obama administration from speaking out about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign by refusing to sign on to a bipartisan statement of condemnation.

That moment, the former Democratic vice president said, made him think “the die had been cast ... this was all about the political play.”

He expressed regret, in hindsight, given the intelligence he says came in after Election Day. "Had we known what we knew three weeks later, we may have done something more,” Biden, a potential 2020 presidential candidate, said.

Biden was speaking at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, a block from his old office at the Old Executive Office Building, to discuss his new article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, “How to Stand Up to the Kremlin.”

Biden said he and former President Barack Obama worried that without a united front of bipartisanship, speaking out before the election would undermine the legitimacy of the election and American institutions in a way that would play into the Russians’ larger ambitions.

“Can you imagine if the president called a press conference in October, with this fella, Bannon, and company, and said, ‘Tell you what: Russians are trying to interfere in our elections and we have to do something about it,’” Biden said. “What do you think would have happened? Would things have gotten better, or would it further look like we were trying to delegitimize the electoral process, because of our opponent?”

McConnell’s office disputed this account, pointing to a letter signed by all four congressional leaders in September 2016 and sent to the president of the National Association of State Election Directors, urging cybersecurity precautions in light of reports of attempted hacking.

That missive, however, did not address Russia specifically, or the larger topic of influence beyond voting systems.

“The Obama administration requested that the Congressional leaders send this letter and they all did. It’s publicly available on the Internet for all to see,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for McConnell.

But a former Obama White House official on Tuesday afternoon echoed Biden's frustration with the Senate majority leader, pointing to the way Obama's White House chief of staff Denis McDonough described the dispute in an op-ed last summer.

“Our administration's interest in making sure the response was bipartisan wasn't for the sake of being bipartisan. It was necessary because we needed the buy-in from state and local election administrators (many of whom were Republican partisans and/or skeptical of federal government),” the official argued in an email. “Unfortunately, as is well documented, Senator McConnell was unwilling to help — only making matters worse.”

Biden told Tuesday's gathering that there was a “constant tightrope,” with the Obama administration unable to decide what would count as saying too little or too much.

“The president and I would sit there literally after the [presidential daily briefing], after everyone had left the room, and say, ‘What the hell are we going to do?’” Biden recalled.

The Trump administration, Biden said, isn’t doing much to counter Russian interference in elections and other disruptive activity around the world. He accused the current administration of "abdicating" its responsibility in that regard and squandering its power as a result.

Biden told Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass that he wouldn’t call the current conflict with Russia a second Cold War, because it’s not a great ideological battle. Rather, Biden said, it's “just basically about a kleptocracy protecting itself.” Figuring out how to make that case, he added, had led to an internal debate within the Obama administration about whether to make public their estimate of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s self-worth, which Biden suggested would make clear he’d benefited massively from corruption. He said he’d been pushing to do so.

Confused and frustrated foreign leaders around the world have continued to turn to him over the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, Biden said, and he continues to take the calls.

“The questions across the board range from, ‘What the hell’s going on, Joe?’” he said, “to ‘What advice do you have for me?’”

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WASHINGTON — President Trump ordered the firing last June of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, according to four people told of the matter, but ultimately backed down after the White House counsel threatened to resign rather than carry out the directive.

The West Wing confrontation marks the first time Mr. Trump is known to have tried to fire the special counsel. Mr. Mueller learned about the episode in recent months as his investigators interviewed current and former senior White House officials in his inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice.

Amid the first wave of news media reports that Mr. Mueller was examining a possible obstruction case, the president began to argue that Mr. Mueller had three conflicts of interest that disqualified him from overseeing the investigation, two of the people said.

First, he claimed that a dispute years ago over fees at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., had prompted Mr. Mueller, the F.B.I. director at the time, to resign his membership. The president also said Mr. Mueller could not be impartial because he had most recently worked for the law firm that previously represented the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Finally, the president said, Mr. Mueller had been interviewed to return as the F.B.I. director the day before he was appointed special counsel in May.

After receiving the president’s order to fire Mr. Mueller, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, refused to ask the Justice Department to dismiss the special counsel, saying he would quit instead, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a continuing investigation.

Mr. McGahn disagreed with the president’s case and told senior White House officials that firing Mr. Mueller would have a catastrophic effect on Mr. Trump’s presidency. Mr. McGahn also told White House officials that Mr. Trump would not follow through on the dismissal on his own. The president then backed off.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/us/politics/trump-mueller-special-counsel-russia.html?mtrref=undefined

Quote (IceMage @ Jan 25 2018 11:13pm)

The failing New York Times with yet another scoop. Why can't the real journalists at RT(propaganda) and PBS(monotone voices) ever break these stories?

Some lulz though:

https://twitter.com/MEPFuller/status/956729170700259329

Quote (thundercock @ 26 Jan 2018 08:25)

He's the fucking worst.

Quote (IceMage @ 26 Jan 2018 08:13)

The failing New York Times with yet another scoop. Why can't the real journalists at RT(propaganda) and PBS(monotone voices) ever break these stories?
Some lulz though:
https://twitter.com/MEPFuller/status/956729170700259329

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In the Summer of 2015, Dutch intelligence services were the first to alert their American counterparts about the cyberintrusion of the Democratic National Committee by Cozy Bear, a hacking group believed to be tied to the Russian government. Intelligence hackers from Dutch AIVD (General Intelligence and Security Service) had penetrated the Cozy Bear computer servers as well as a security camera at the entrance of their working space, located in a university building adjacent to the Red Square in Moscow.

Over the course of a few months, they saw how the Russians penetrated several U.S. institutions, including the State Department, the White House, and the DNC. On all these occasions, the Dutch alerted the U.S. intelligence services, Dutch tv programme Nieuwsuur and de Volkskrant, a prominent newspaper in The Netherlands, jointly report on Thursday. This account is based on interviews with a dozen political, diplomatic and intelligence sources in The Netherlands and the U.S. with direct knowledge of the matter. None of them wanted to speak on the record, given the classified details of the matter.

Not only had Dutch intelligence penetrated the computer network of the hackers, they also managed to hack a security camera in the corridor. This allowed them to see exactly who entered the hacking room. Information about these individuals was shared with the US intelligence services. Dutch intelligence services consider Cozy Bear an extension of the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, which is firmly controlled by President Putin.

The information shared by The Netherlands about the hacks at the DNC ended up on the desk of Robert Mueller, the Special Prosecutor leading the FBI investigation into possible Russian interference in the American elections. As early as December, the New York Times reported that information from, among others, Australia, the United Kingdom and The Netherlands had propelled the FBI investigation.

Full story: https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2213767-dutch-intelligence-first-to-alert-u-s-about-russian-hack-of-democratic-party.html

Quote (IceMage @ Jan 26 2018 10:06am)

Trump has called the story fake news. So I guess now Fox News is fake news as well, since their sources confirmed the NYT reporting.


In other Russia-related news:

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Sources suggest that the openness of US intelligence sources, who in 2017 praised the help of a Western ally in news stories, may have ruined their operation. The openness caused great anger in The Hague and Zoetermeer. In the television programme College Tour, this month, AIVD director Bertholee stated that he is extra careful when it comes to sharing intelligence with the U.S., now that Donald Trump is President.