Uh Ohhh…
Mueller’s team also reportedly wants to determine whether Trump was involved in the release of the emails. At a campaign event not long before the emails were made public, Trump called on the Russians to hack his opponent Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Investigators are also inquiring about Trump confidante Roger Stone’s relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Roger Stone’s Secret Messages with WikiLeaks The Atlantic reported Tuesday that Stone and Assange were in communication in October 2016.
F’'me? No…F’ YOU!
While I still think we’re in this for the long haul, it definitely seems like the investigation has shifted into another gear.
Sure sounded like it, if the timeline of the TT meeting / speech that week is truthful.
Plus, he publicly invited the Russians to hack the Dems
YOU get a conspiracy, and YOU get a conspiracy, and YOU get a conspiracy.
This is from the department of ‘bigly’.
The gist of this article tends to confirm my working observation of Mueller’s working theory of the case: that Putin picked Trump first and then organized his election interference conspiracy and intel operation. There is no attack on our elections without Trump and there is no Trump without the RU election interference conspiracy intel operation.
Per NBC: “Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is asking witnesses pointed questions about whether Donald Trump was aware that Democratic emails had been stolen before that was publicly known, and whether he was involved in their strategic release, according to multiple people familiar with the probe.”
Also per NBC:
Mueller’s investigators have asked witnesses whether Trump was aware of plans for WikiLeaks to publish the emails. They have also asked about the relationship between GOP operative Roger Stone and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and why Trump took policy positions favorable to Russia.
The sources of info for NBC are witnesses who have been questioned by Mueller or the grand jury. That means Mueller is asking the right people. If any of them lie, they go to jail. The other thing is that Mueller doesn’t have to rely solely on someone’s word, because he has emails, texts, voice mails and intel intercepts. So if he’s asking you a question, it’s a good bet that he already knows the answer. Rick Gates found that out the hard way earlier this month.
That Mueller is inquiring into Trump’s statement begging Russia to find ‘those missing HRC emails’ tells me that he is looking seriously at a conspiracy to violate election laws. That he’s also looking at Roger Stone underscores this point.
The Internet research agency indictments open the door wide to scrutinizing and indicting Roger Stone. Mueller established in that indictment that an individual or nominally private entity that is working in concert or under the direction of an arm of the Russian government is indistinguishable from the Russian government for the purposes of establishing the conspiracy to violate US election laws by way of a Russian intelligence operation. They are essentially agents and it follows a standard agency concept well known in common law. Roger Stone communicated with Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks. By the standard the Mueller established in that Internet Research Agency indictment, Roger Stone was communicating directly with the the arms of the Russian government.
I also think this gets to the information that Michael Flynn may have provided investigators. Flynn was nominally in charge of managing efforts to connect with hacking groups to find those missing emails that Trump expressly desired to have Russia find and use for his benefit. So if Mueller is asking other witnesses whether Trump new about the hacked emails in advance and sought to use them, it’s because he has the answer to those questions already.
In addition, we know that Papadopoulos told the campaign that Russia had the emails. Therefore, Trump likely knew and Mueller is asking people questions to which he already knows the answer.
This is some bigly stuff.
Weather forecast:
Conflicting forces will result in both a shit storm and tweet storm. They are expected to develop overnight and last for at least several days.
I completely agree! What’s more is that tweety amin (credit @tiowally ) continues to tweet O-O-J evidence on the daily it seems.
Trump, “NO COLLUSION!!”
Mueller, “want to reconsider that statement, chump?”
His goose is well and truly cooked.
My question is: How could Putin think that Trump could possibly win? He had to defeat all of the primary candidates. I mean, of course, he did win … but what a long shot.
Strive to be of good cheer, you see,
the facts point toward conspiracy.
I think Putin correctly analyzed that the GOP was weak, that its voter base had shifted hard right after 7-8 years of stoking racial sentiment, and that a white nationalist like Trump could make a real play for the nomination. In Putin’s case, events in Ukraine had forced his hand and he didn’t want to deal with a President Hillary Clinton.
I doubt he did. But Trump is a sower of discord and chaos. He did it during the campaign; he would certainly have done it afterward. He’s bad for the country to the extent that he’s a prominent voice. So Putin would win either way.
Right question to ask, for sure. The enterprise could well have started out, as (I think) Josh has suggested, with broadly disruptive intentions, then gained focus as it became more successful.
Putin didn’t think PP would win. Putin’s goal was to hamstring the future Hillary administration.
You would think that if Putin is that shrewd, he would’ve also realized the disaster Trump would be as President … and how he’d be easily discovered. But I guess things were too late by then, and of course, those sanctions are still sitting on his desk.
The other kicker is Rudy Giuliani somehow having advanced notice of just about every sleazy, dishonest disclosure that was made.
Here, folks, is the end game for proving Trump knowingly coordinated with Russian spies. Excellent!
I’m waiting patiently for Giuliani’s time in the docks.
Implicit in this is that Putin understood the GOP better than the GOP did, and understood our political climate better than any prominent US students of the system did.
This may be true, but it stretches me to the limit of my credulity.
(Or maybe Putin made a dumb bet and he just got lucky? Our sample size is one.)