Posted on 01/01/2018 9:54:09 PM PST by Oshkalaboomboom
There is no way to evaluate the trustworthiness of anonymous sources and unpublished documents, so why try?
At this point, it’s safe to say the publicly available reports muddle the Mueller investigation so much that the only thing we “know” is all sides have more than enough circumstantial evidence to justify their pre-existing hopes and dreams.
Left-wing partisans would have you believe that Mueller has the goods on Trump, and that conservative critiques of Mueller’s team or the Clinton campaign’s role in creating the so-called Steele dossier are nothing more than bad-faith attempts to discredit the investigation and undermine faith in the FBI.
Right-wing partisans would have you believe that the Mueller investigation is a partisan sham. They take the facts that the Steele dossier was a bought-and-paid-for product of the Clinton campaign, and that “Steele approached the FBI” just before agents initiated their investigation of the Trump campaign, as proof that the Bureau was blinded by partisan bias in its senior ranks and by its previous positive working relationship with Christopher Steele — that there was never any “there” there.
This weekend, the New York Times published a report that purported to blast a huge hole in the conservative narrative. In reality, according to the Times, George Papadopoulos was the “improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump administration.” In May, one month before the Democratic National Committee announced that Russian hackers had penetrated its files, Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, that “Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.”
As we know from the Statement of Offense articulating the basis of Papadopoulos’s guilty plea for lying to the FBI, he’d been told on April 26, 2016 — weeks before his meeting with Downer — that Russia had “thousands of emails” exposing “dirt” on Hillary. When Wikileaks began publishing emails from the DNC hack, Downer told American officials about his conversation with Papadopoulos, and it was that information, rather than the Steele dossier, which “so alarmed” the Obama Department of Justice that it began its investigation into the Trump campaign, according to the Times.
If you step back and look at the larger timeline of the investigation, there does seem to be a pattern of Russians attempting to offer the Trump camp “dirt” on Hillary before the release of the Wikileaks emails. In addition to the April conversation with Papadopoulos mentioned above, we also know that Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met in June with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya after being promised “official documents and information” that would “incriminate” Hillary. This information was allegedly part of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
In addition, the Times reports that the investigation was “also propelled by intelligence from other friendly governments, including the British and Dutch. A trip to Moscow by another adviser, Carter Page, also raised concerns at the F.B.I.” These various “strands” were enough to trigger an internal debate about “how aggressively to investigate the campaign’s Russia ties.”
To hear the Times tell it then, the Trump/Russia investigation wasn’t triggered by a salacious piece of Clinton opposition research but instead by conventional intelligence reports relaying empirically troubling information. Case closed, and a right-wing talking point blown out of the water, right?
Well, maybe. The article is based on the usual combination of unknown, anonymous sources and “documents” not available to the reader. That doesn’t mean it’s false. A number of stories about the Russia investigation have been based on anonymous sources and later proven to be entirely or largely correct. Others have been hotly disputed. Remember this report from the Times, published last February? Its allegations were explosive:
Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.
Former FBI director James Comey testified in June that the story, “in the main . . . was not true.”
As the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel argues, one doesn’t retract concerns about partisan foul play in the absence of proof more concrete than unsubstantiated, anonymous assertions. Moreover, as Byron York asked on Twitter, if Papadopoulos was central to the probe, did the FBI seek a surveillance warrant on him? After all, it had reportedly obtained a warrant on Carter Page, and it was Page who was implicated in the Steele dossier. In other words, the report should arouse skeptical curiosity. It should not, however, end the debate.
Some might wonder why these questions matter. After all, if the Mueller probe reveals real wrongdoing — and he’s already secured two indictments and two guilty pleas for lying to the FBI — then why does it matter what prompted the probe in the first place? Or, to put it another way, if a normal and proper investigation of Russian efforts to meddle in the election would have revealed the contacts outlined above between Trump officials and Russians, then wouldn’t the FBI have investigated the Trump campaign for collusion anyway?
The answer depends greatly on the outcome of the investigation. If the Mueller probe reveals meaningful, independently corroborated “collusion” — in other words, cooperation between senior Trump campaign officials and Russian intelligence operatives to influence the outcome of the 2016 election — then, as a practical matter, questions about the origin of the investigation would become a mere sideshow. The dossier would be reduced to a footnote to one of the worst political scandals in American history.
But so far evidence of actual collusion is thin on the ground. Neither Mueller’s indictments nor his guilty pleas have disclosed any evidence of actual cooperation between Russians and the Trump campaign. Yes, there is disturbing evidence that Donald Jr., Manafort, and Kushner seemed willing and eager to receive damaging information from the Russians even after being told it was part of a Kremlin plan to help their candidate. But so far there’s no publicly available evidence that anything came of those contacts.
If the Mueller investigation results in a series of indictments or convictions that are based not on underlying collusion but largely on lies about legal activity — like Michael Flynn’s proper, transition-period contacts with Russian officials — then American politics would have been turned upside-down on the basis of various cover-ups of no crime at all. If it also turns out that this drama was truly triggered not by proper intelligence work but rather by the Hillary campaign’s discredited opposition research, then the partisanship of 2017 will pale in comparison to the political detonation of the new year. Partisans on both sides will have ample reason for fury, and the public will wonder if there is anyone left to trust.
As Strassel rightly notes, the dossier is already “one of the dirtiest tricks in U.S. political history.” It has “yielded a vast payoff.” It colored perceptions of Trump in the press and in the public, and it may have colored perceptions of Trump in the highest echelons of American law enforcement. If it is proven to have been instrumental in triggering one of the most divisive investigations in modern American history, then we may have to coin a new term. “Dirty trick” won’t do it justice.
My colleague Andrew McCarthy has called for President Trump to “order the FBI and Justice Department, led by his appointees, to cooperate with Congress’s investigations” regarding the origin of the Russia investigation. The New York Times report only makes cooperation more important. Absent overwhelming national-security considerations — such as preventing disclosures that would undermine vital, ongoing intelligence operations — the administration should heed this call. Until then, the American public operates in a dangerous fog, with no way to know if reports like the Times’ are true and accurate or worse than no report at all.
They don't understand about the millions of Louisville Sluggers being wrapped in barbed wire & studded with 20d spikes.
A) collusion is not a crime
B) it ain’t illegal to get dirt on an opponent
C) what was illegal was paying for it.....like Hillary and the DNC did
David French is a certifiable idiot.
DYING OR NOT...THE MAN IS/WAS INVOLVED WITH THIS DOSSIER.
His family is quiet and not saying a word, as they prepare his Hollywood style funeral.
For certain he will lay in the Capital Building and it will be 24/7 news for weeks...I feel sad for a family losing a member of their family..It happens daily all across America. I have lost four family member in the past five months...so all families go through difficult times when a member leaves us...ENOUGH SAID...
John McCain made PROFESSIONAL POLITICS his life..It was all about him...Praying for it all to be over soon, so that the Country can get on the path of ‘draining the swamp’ and keeping the Government in Republican hands for the coming three years and beyond...
HAPPY NEW YEAR FREE REPUBLIC.
It’s amazing the mental contortions the never-trumpers put themselves through.
The cognitive dissonance must cause massive migraines
Sources of opposition research for Demonrats don’t matter, only for Republicans. These establishment fellating never Trumpers at NRO will believe Brennan and Comey before President Trump, and by extension Obama.
Eff them.
I wonder how many patriots will make the Hajj to defecate on his grave?
Apparently only Democrats are allowed to do opposition research without regard of the source.
also waiting for the IOG to report on the Clintoons receiving pre-election assistance from the Brits and the Ukrainians..
FLASHBACK: Hillary Allies Coordinated With Ukrainian Government During The Election
Was this any different from Donald Trump Jr.’s situation?
https://www.dailywire.com/news/18477/flashback-hillary-allies-coordinated-ukrainian-aaron-bandler
But he's ignoring two key pieces of the supposed timeline, pointed out by Byron York on the day that the NYT "blockbuster" hit the stands.
"Papadop's" alleged barroom brag occurred a month after the FBI attempted to obtain the first (failed) FISA warrant. That makes it highly unlikely (read: impossible) that his ravings were what kicked off the investigation.
The FBI regarded Papadop's story as so "central" to their investigation that they made absolutely no attempt to interview him until the investigation was already underway for eight months.
French's cautionary tale is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying ... nothing.
A very important read. Have a look: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455036/new-york-times-trump-russia-collusion-narrative-reset-george-papadopoulos-carter-page.
It's a good article. It also has been posted 2 times here on FR
We must remember and remind 0 that Hillary and the DNC were one and the same.
Remember how Donna Brazille was shocked at learning that Hillary had usurped the control of the DNC?
let's always link that
We must remember and remind 0 that Hillary and the DNC were one and the same.
Remember how Donna Brazille was shocked at learning that Hillary had usurped the control of the DNC?
let's always link that
You always assume that nothing the New York Times writes about or against Trump and his administration is TRUE.
Little Punch Sulzberger (Arthur Pinch Sulzberger Jr)was an avowed supporter of the Viet Cong and No. Vietnamese during the war and he has never stopped his war on America.
From Prof. Paul Kengor’s book “DUPES”, p. 289, comes this gem.
“Consider the case of Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr., who s in the 1960s was such a committed antiwar activist that he was twice arrested during protests. He was asked by his father, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, Sr, a simple question: “If a young American soldier comes upon a young North Vietnamese soldier, which one do you want to see get shot?”
Pinch responded without , saying this was “the dumbest question I ever heard in my life.” He answered: “I would want to see the American get shot. It’s the other guy’s country.” Ftnt 21 to Chapter 14 “Vietnam Dupes”.
Source is: Quoted in Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times” (New York, Back Bay Books, 1999,p. 499).
[MM: I have no idea if this “Alex Jones” is the same as the one with a radio show. If so, I would want more documentation on the original source of the above Pinch quote about Vietnam, though I know he was a hardcore leftist back then and still hates America today).
Agreed
“In May, one month before the Democratic National Committee announced that Russian hackers had penetrated its files, Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, that “Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.””
If Russia had the goods on Clinton, why wasn’t a dossier produced and given to the Trump campaign?
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