The Art of the Supremely Corrupt Deal
Again, why is TPM ignoring Browder’s testimony? You realize we’re facing a manufactured counter-narrative that looks like this nonsense?
What I REALLY want to know is how this guy knows ANY of the shit he’s testifying to. In court, you need a foundation. People can’t just blabber what they think is the case. That’s rank speculation. They need to have actual, direct, personal knowledge of what they’re testifying to under oath. How would this Browder guy have actual, direct, personal knowledge of anything he’s saying? Did Putin promise to drop prosecuting him and let him have his $70M in Gazprom stock back?
What’s the over-under on the number of words that would accurately decribe Felix Sater before you get to “altruistic?”
How big is the dictionary?
I dunno…based on the Oxford English Dictionary there’s like 230K words in the English language if you include obsolete ones…so maybe 229,999?
Senate testimony is not a courtroom. He’s an expert witness, his role is to inform the Senate about things he’s knowledgeable about, to provide context, not to establish the base facts of the situation. The facts of the situation were established in a number of other ways, including court filings about FARA violations and Donnie Jr’s tweeted emails.
Sounds like the energy plan was a fiction and cover story for the meeting.
No, I’m sure that’s true. As sure as I am that Junior, Kush and Manafort met with Natasha and Co to discuss adoption of Russian orphans.
Browder seems like a credible witness. I don’t see any reason as to why he’d fabricate getting smeared by Fusion GPS when trying to get the Magnitsky Act passed. Certainly Putin had tried to throw up as many roadblocks as he could, and seeing how Fusion GPS is a gun-for-hire who will do oppo research for the highest bidder, I don’t see how their role materially changes anything.
The right wing strategy of attempting to smear and discredit Fusion GPS appears kind of pointless when you consider that the credibility of the Steele dossier will rise or fall on the merits of the FBI investigation that checked out its leads. At least that Fox report accurately characterized the dossier as mostly ‘unverified’ rather than ‘discredited’ as I’ve seen many right wingers attempt to do.