Treason could be a tough sell legally.
Money is where the crimes are.
Follow the money!
Start with the tax returns!
Evident that most of Congress (those who are woke) knows that the dirty b/w Trump and Russia has to do with oligarch- and Mafia-money washing, mostly in NYC real estate. I don’t see either House or Senate getting to the bottom of this. We need criminal investigations.
The Sater stuff immediately came to mind when they mentioned things that are more appropriate for closed session.
It won’t be much of an investigation if they don’t follow the money.
I wish I could have some confidence that this was really going to be a serious investigation. Sadly, I don’t.
And that trail leads right to the White House…let’s hope the GOP criminals don’t sabotage the Senate investigation. They have done a great job of stopping the House, with their stooge, Devin Nunes.
icymi - from the BBC “Trump Russia dossier key claim ‘verified’”
In the report, Steele spoke of an “established operational liaison between the TRUMP team and the Kremlin… an intelligence exchange had been running between them for at least 8 years.”
Members of the Obama administration believe, based on analysis they saw from the intelligence community, that the information exchange claimed by Steele continued into the election.
“This is a three-headed operation,” said one former official, setting out the case, based on the intelligence: Firstly, hackers steal damaging emails from senior Democrats. Secondly, the stories based on this hacked information appear on Twitter and Facebook, posted by thousands of automated “bots”, then on Russia’s English-language outlets, RT and Sputnik, then right-wing US “news” sites such as Infowars and Breitbart, then Fox and the mainstream media. Thirdly, Russia downloads the online voter rolls.
The voter rolls are said to fit into this because of “microtargeting”. Using email, Facebook and Twitter, political advertising can be tailored very precisely: individual messaging for individual voters.
“You are stealing the stuff and pushing it back into the US body politic,” said the former official, “you know where to target that stuff when you’re pushing it back.”
This would take co-operation with the Trump campaign, it is claimed.
If I were Christopher Steele, I’d be wearing a wig and bullet proof vest. This guy seems to be key.
Go Wyden!! I’ve been repeatedly impressed with our Oregon Senators.
Hang in there. We have your back.
Time to subpoena Trump and the IRS. I can have it drafted by 2pm today if they’d like to save the taxpayers some money.
I don’t think so. There are plenty of other sources on Trump and Russia.
“Follow the money?” No way! Follow Trump and his enablers’ daily distractions.
Looks like Manafort was really careless and sloppy about money.
That teenage girlfriend was draining him of all his ready cash, apparently:)
There will never be, and cannot be, a treason charge because we’re not at war with Russia. Under Article III, Sec. 3, and the treason statute, actual bullets have to be actually flying for it to be treason. What happened here is “treason” in the lay sense of the word, and it would be legal treason under the laws of pretty much every other nation, but it isn’t treason under U.S. law. And we all need to get our heads around that before it mutates into yet another unobtainable shiny bauble.
But the stuff alleged in the Steele Dossier constitutes violations of multiple sections of the Espionage Act of 1917, and that’s plenty bad.
Edit: Okay, I’m not necessarily sure about this, either. I suspect that classified information has been transferred to the Russians, but I don’t know it. Foreign Agent Registration Act violations, yes. (Five years, max.)
Fortunately, the American legal system has “Rosenberg Remedies” for this sort of thing.
He may know something we don’t and I’m not talking about Wyden specifically. But people who say “follow the money” as if it was axiomatic often think they’re being knowingly cynical and worldly wise when, in fact, they practicing a form of naiveté. There are four prime motivators, not just one: money, sex, power, and fame. And you will never find another person in whom all four are so unbridled and so crassly motivating as Trump.
And no, they’re not interchangeable and thus identical. More like different currencies with radically shifting exchange rates.
True. But as Dick Cheney would say, it depends on what the meaning of the word “war” is.
“Follow the Money” may LEAD to Treason charges (which are VERY hard to prove.) but never attribute to treason that which is more easily explained by GREED.
This whole sordid affair has it’s roots in Trump being willing to “look the other way” as Russian Mobsters ran money-laundering operations out of HIS PROPERTIES and how they paid him off by purchasing his empty properties for up to 300% OVER the going rates and got the Russian Oligarchs to loan him money at low rates to stave off a 6th bankruptcy.
THAT led to them having leverage on him in the political sphere and when the time was right the FSB-run “Psy-Ops” campaign to fuck-over the Western democracies had the perfect tool (snicker) in place in DJT.
They steered him to Manafort and Page (Roger Stone was always under their thumb) and Bannon and the rest is history.
AT MOST I think they can get him on Federal charges of money-laundering and obstruction of justice, but Treason? That requires intent and he was just doing what he was told (and he is too stupid to actually run anything like that.)
Now Manafort and Carter Page and Roger Stone and the others? Yes. Treason may be doable for them, but DJT can always claim he was forced into it and was too stupid to realize it (and that would probably be TRUE!)
Either way, impeachment is the logical end-game here and cannot be avoided for ALL of them, Trump, Pence, Ryan, Nunes, Chaffetz, etc. they were all in on it.
The first section of the act requires the transfer of “defense information” to a hostile power. That’s the one that sent the Rosenbergs to their death and that put Phillip Agee, John Walker, Robert Hansen, and, until he was pardoned, Jonathan Pollard into the very hardest supermax locked up alone most of the day time you can do in the federal prison system. But even the least draconian sections, e.g. acting as an agent of transmitting classified information that doesn’t meet the statutory definition of “defense information” to a foreign power, will get you ten years.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-37