Impeaching Trump: Make America Sane Again

[frank ryan]

He doesn't need to have any political affiliation or to conspire with anyone. All he needs to have is a personal bias against Trump. Hard to imagine he'd feel that way towards him isn't it? Or maybe Divine intervention. I'll admit it's a stretch, and probably just my own personal bias against him projecting here

What do you have against Mueller?

He's a respected professional. He's got a reputation for objectivity based on years of service. He doesn't need to conspire against Trump to cause him problems. He just has to do his job. I'm sure he doesn't like Trump. Trump is disliked by plenty of his own cabinet members. I've been following the investigation closely, it's neither a witchhunt, nor a nothingburger.

[Bo Diddley]

What do you have against Mueller?

He's a respected professional. He's got a reputation for objectivity based on years of service. He doesn't need to conspire against Trump to cause him problems. He just has to do his job. I'm sure he doesn't like Trump. Trump is disliked by plenty of his own cabinet members. I've been following the investigation closely, it's neither a witchhunt, nor a nothingburger.

No, I was projecting my bias against Trump.

[Topper]

What do you have against Mueller?

He's a respected professional. He's got a reputation for objectivity based on years of service. He doesn't need to conspire against Trump to cause him problems. He just has to do his job. I'm sure he doesn't like Trump. Trump is disliked by plenty of his own cabinet members. I've been following the investigation closely, it's neither a witchhunt, nor a nothingburger.

Some respect him, but this prosecution's length is ridiculous and the tools used by prosecutors are often unseemly. I realize the only thing that matters to you is to get Trump, damn the economy or anything, and that is Mueller's M.O. He seems like a typical prosecutor, with loose ethics willing to use tools that shouldn't be used.

[frank ryan]

No, I was projecting my bias against Trump.

Sorry, I never took you for a Trump fan, so I was confused.

Sounds like an indictment for Don Jr. should be coming soon.

[falafel]

He's a respected professional. He's got a reputation for objectivity based on years of service. He doesn't need to conspire against Trump to cause him problems. He just has to do his job. I'm sure he doesn't like Trump. Trump is disliked by plenty of his own cabinet members. I've been following the investigation closely, it's neither a witchhunt, nor a nothingburger.

I agree with this, but its pretty close to an disappointingly overcooked burger on a stale bun.

[frank ryan]

I agree with this, but its pretty close to an disappointingly overcooked burger on a stale bun.

I’m not sure how you could make that assessment right now, but whatever.

[tooblue]

Some respect him, but this prosecution's length is ridiculous and the tools used by prosecutors are often unseemly. I realize the only thing that matters to you is to get Trump, damn the economy or anything, and that is Mueller's M.O. He seems like a typical prosecutor, with loose ethics willing to use tools that shouldn't be used.

THE UNTOLD STORY OF ROBERT MUELLER'S TIME IN COMBAT

https://www.wired.com/story/robert-m...iV25_8hId0sOcc

[Walter Sobchak]

I agree with this, but its pretty close to an disappointingly overcooked burger on a stale bun.

Still no burger... just a bun and a smattering of condiments.

Mueller’s Investigation is Missing One Thing: A Crime

The core problem—at least that we know of—is that Mueller hasn’t found a crime connected with Russiagate that someone working for Trump might have committed. His investigation to date hasn’t been a search for the guilty party—Colonel Mustard in the library—so much as a search for an actual crime, some crime, any crime. Yet all he’s uncovered so far are some old financial misdealings by Manafort and chums, payoffs to Trump’s mistresses that are not in themselves illegal (despite what prosecutors simply assert in the Cohen sentencing report, someone will have to prove to a jury the money was from campaign funds and the transactions were “for the purpose of influencing” federal elections, not simply “protecting his family from shame”), and a bunch of people lying about unrelated matters.

And that’s the giveaway to Muller’s final report. There was no base crime as the starting point of the investigation. With Watergate, there was the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters. With Russiagate you had…Trump winning the election. (Remember too that the FBI concluded forever ago that the DNC hack crime was done by the Russians, no Mueller needed.)

Almost everything Mueller has, the perjury and lying cases, are crimes he created through the process of investigating. He’s Schrodinger’s Box: the infractions only exist when he tries to look at them. Mueller created most of his booked charges by asking questions he already knew the answers to, hoping his witness would lie and commit new crimes literally in front of him. Nobody should be proud of lying, but it seems a helluva way to contest a completed election as Trump enters the third year of his term.

Mueller’s end product, his report, will most likely claim that a lot of unsavory things went on. But it seems increasingly unlikely that he’ll have any evidence Trump worked with Russia to win the election, let alone that Trump is now under Putin’s control. If Mueller had a smoking gun, we’d be watching impeachment hearings by now.

Instead, Mueller will end up concluding that some people may have sort of maybe tried to interfere with an investigation into what turned out to be nothing, another “crime” that exists only because there was an investigation to trigger it. He’ll dump that steaming pile of legal ambiguity into the lap of the Democratic House to hold hearings on from now until global warming claims the city of Benghazi and returns it to the sea.

[frank ryan]

Some respect him, but this prosecution's length is ridiculous and the tools used by prosecutors are often unseemly. I realize the only thing that matters to you is to get Trump, damn the economy or anything, and that is Mueller's M.O.

This investigation is not ridiculously long compared to similar ones. Lol, at you thinking Mueller is a partisan hack, that just belies your weird protectiveness of Trump. Call me a partisan but don't pretend you're anything but. You are as rigidly GOP as they come.

[falafel]

I’m not sure how you could make that assessment right now, but whatever.

Well, its been what--two years? Maybe Mueller is saving the big juicy burger for last, or maybe he ran out of meat.

[tooblue]

Still no burger... just a bun and a smattering of condiments.

Mueller’s Investigation is Missing One Thing: A Crime

The core problem—at least that we know of—is that Mueller hasn’t found a crime connected with Russiagate that someone working for Trump might have committed. His investigation to date hasn’t been a search for the guilty party—Colonel Mustard in the library—so much as a search for an actual crime, some crime, any crime. Yet all he’s uncovered so far are some old financial misdealings by Manafort and chums, payoffs to Trump’s mistresses that are not in themselves illegal (despite what prosecutors simply assert in the Cohen sentencing report, someone will have to prove to a jury the money was from campaign funds and the transactions were “for the purpose of influencing” federal elections, not simply “protecting his family from shame”), and a bunch of people lying about unrelated matters.

And that’s the giveaway to Muller’s final report. There was no base crime as the starting point of the investigation. With Watergate, there was the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters. With Russiagate you had…Trump winning the election. (Remember too that the FBI concluded forever ago that the DNC hack crime was done by the Russians, no Mueller needed.)

Almost everything Mueller has, the perjury and lying cases, are crimes he created through the process of investigating. He’s Schrodinger’s Box: the infractions only exist when he tries to look at them. Mueller created most of his booked charges by asking questions he already knew the answers to, hoping his witness would lie and commit new crimes literally in front of him. Nobody should be proud of lying, but it seems a helluva way to contest a completed election as Trump enters the third year of his term.

Mueller’s end product, his report, will most likely claim that a lot of unsavory things went on. But it seems increasingly unlikely that he’ll have any evidence Trump worked with Russia to win the election, let alone that Trump is now under Putin’s control. If Mueller had a smoking gun, we’d be watching impeachment hearings by now.

Instead, Mueller will end up concluding that some people may have sort of maybe tried to interfere with an investigation into what turned out to be nothing, another “crime” that exists only because there was an investigation to trigger it. He’ll dump that steaming pile of legal ambiguity into the lap of the Democratic House to hold hearings on from now until global warming claims the city of Benghazi and returns it to the sea.

This has to be the dumbest thing I have read on the investigation to date. Mueller didn't create crimes, his job as investigator is to uncover crimes that were committed—he is supposed to ask questions, regardless of whether or not he may or may not know the answers. What's more, isn't it contradictory to state that Mueller is " ... missing one thing: a crime" and then declare that his investigation in fact uncovered many crimes? Good heavens, what kind of idiot reads the above and thinks it's illuminating.

[Walter Sobchak]

This has to be the dumbest thing I have read on the investigation to date. Mueller didn't create crimes, his job as investigator is to uncover crimes that were committed—he is supposed to ask questions, regardless of whether or not he may or may not know the answers. What's more, isn't it contradictory to state that Mueller is " ... missing one thing: a crime" and then declare that his investigation in fact uncovered many crimes? Good heavens, what kind of idiot reads the above and thinks it's illuminating.

There are two separate investigations. The one - the kind of important one - is that President Trump colluded with Russia/Moscow/Putin to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. That investigation has produced NOTHING. The only thing newly revealed in the latest hold-on-to-your-butt Mueller release is that Cohen spoke with an assistant to some Kremlin underling for 20 minutes on the phone to get a Trump Tower in Moscow... a deal that started before the campaign. The phone conversation went nowhere. Putin was never involved. Yeah, we finally see that Cohen hid from Congress the details of some conversations about a Trump Tower deal in Moscow that happened well into the campaign, but those conversations went nowhere. So where is the collusion to influence the election? No where to be found.

[Uncle Ted]

Mueller’s Got Nothing

His probe has yet to uncover evidence of actual criminal acts by the president.

The revelations of the last few days are, though disguised, the crash in ignominy of the Robert Mueller putsch. But they are far from the end of the story. While the sire of the Mueller hit-squad assault, former FBI director James Comey, declared 245 times at last Friday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing that he did not recall events that occurred in the last several years, the president’s official enemies confessed that the best they could do to show collusion between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign was that lawyer Michael Cohen, who had almost nothing to do with the campaign, had received a message in 2015 from someone promising “synergy” between Russia and a Trump presidency. Cohen did not respond to the message. There is no evidence of such collusion, as chief FBI bloodhound Peter Strzok acknowledged to his intimate colleague Lisa Page in 2016, and collusion is not a statutory offense anyway, unless it is for an illegal purpose. Despite 29 months of mighty investigative effort, not a shred of evidence of such wrongful collusion has been adduced.

Collusion to rig the presidential election was cited by Hillary Clinton, along with being “shivved three times by Jim Comey,” as the reasons for her election loss, in her post-electoral memoir, What Happened. The first didn’t occur, and of the three administrations of the shiv, two were dubious exonerations about which the former FBI director now, under oath, has suffered a merciless attack of amnesia. An optimist could at least celebrate the end of this malignant idiocy of impeaching Trump for collusion with Russia, but there is something about the Trump phenomenon that is only now becoming clear: His support is irreducible and his enemies are inexhaustible, so, in the worst imaginable application of the tired phrase, the show must go on. His enemies hate him so fanatically, they cannot accept the absence of evidence against him.

Carl Bernstein, who predicted almost two years ago that the Steele dossier would bring Trump down, and announced almost a year ago that the president qualified under the 25th Amendment as mentally incompetent to serve, was nodded to approvingly by CNN’s always mechanically anti-Trump Brian Stelter when Bernstein asseverated that Mueller was causing the world to “tremble” by the gravity of his revelations. Poor Anderson Cooper, television’s saddest person, thought the “synergy” message, which Cohen did not respond to, “could stick.” Stick to what? He and his fellow commentators, adhering to CNN’s rigorous policy of 100 percent partisan hatred of the president, thought the whole business seemed “collusiony.” I submit that this sort of mindless, biased drivel is an assault on reasonable standards of public information and thus in some measure constitutes a form of animosity to the people. This lends a color of right to Trump’s references to his more perfervid media critics as “enemies of the people.”
[...]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/...s-got-nothing/

[Walter Sobchak]

For those that have selective amnesia, remember what the original "collusion" charge was?

It was that the Trump campaign knowingly coordinated with Russian government operatives (who had allegedly "hacked" emails from the DNC and John Podesta) to release information that would cripple the Clinton campaign in the homestretch of the election.

Instead what we have is proof that the ethically-challenged Cohen, under the direction of candidate Trump, was trying to woo Russian government officials to land a Trump Tower in Moscow while Trump was simultaneously proposing policies as a candidate that would be favorable to Russia; i.e. the loosening of sanctions, re-opening diplomatic talks, and potentially pulling the U.S. out of NATO. A deal we now know went nowhere. The documentation Mueller produced about how the bumbling Cohen spam e-mailed general addresses at the Kremlin in the hopes of impressing Trump with his connections is comical.

Of course, a candidate for president violating campaign finance laws for hush money payments to his mistresses is a big deal. But that is LONG way from where this investigation started. Most other cases about campaign finance violations (*cough* Obama, *cough* Edwards*) end with some fines being paid. But like the Starr investigation before this one, we know how this story will end: a symbolic impeachment by the House followed by an acquittal in the Senate.

A big fat NOTHING burger.

[tooblue]

There are two separate investigations. The one - the kind of important one - is that President Trump colluded with Russia/Moscow/Putin to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. That investigation has produced NOTHING. The only thing newly revealed in the latest hold-on-to-your-butt Mueller release is that Cohen spoke with an assistant to some Kremlin underling for 20 minutes on the phone to get a Trump Tower in Moscow... a deal that started before the campaign. The phone conversation went nowhere. Putin was never involved. Yeah, we finally see that Cohen hid from Congress the details of some conversations about a Trump Tower deal in Moscow that happened well into the campaign, but those conversations went nowhere. So where is the collusion to influence the election? No where to be found.

That is all left to be seen isn't it—because we don't yet have the full report, so suggesting at this point there is no collusion is a "nothing burger."

With regards to the article, it is idiotic to state in the title there is no crime, and then proceed to site the crimes uncovered by the investigation, and then to state Mueller created said crimes ...



Mueller's report may well play out like the article suggests, but that is not a revelation. It's just common sense that that is one of the potential outcomes of the investigation.