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The Russia Investigation: Trump Pardons Flynn (5 Viewers)

flapgreen said:
How much long will the clueless libs push this agenda now that most of Trump's cabinet is made of of people who don't like Russia?
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This isn't going to go away anytime soon, sorry flap. The allegations are as real and serious as Bannon's bout with alcoholism. 

In other news..

It looks like Spicer, in an attempt to silence leaks coming from his own staff, all but confirmed that the leaks are authentic as details of said attempt were leaked.  :lol:

 
flapgreen said:
How much long will the clueless libs push this agenda now that most of Trump's cabinet is made of of people who don't like Russia? 
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You know this won't end well, right?  You already are the clueless poster child of the alt-right for supporting a treasonous buffoon, but it will be looking so much worse on you in a few months.

 
SameSongNDance said:
Planespotting: Michael Cohen’s Amazing Journey
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Some good bits here IMO:


 


Mr. Cohen’s Story Is Provably Untrue


Cohen’s story unraveled immediately, in so far as he contradicted himself to the Wall Street Journal about ‘ever’ going to Prague. But perhaps he forgot, even though Prague is a very lovely city. Being generous, Mr. Cohen is a well-traveled man, who might indeed have forgotten a trip some 15 years ago. However, he made other, stupid slip-ups. He told Rosie Gray at the Atlantic:


Cohen said that he was in Los Angeles from the 23rd through the 29th of August, and that the rest of the month he was in New York.



However, Cohen’s own timeline includes a tweet that shows that on the 24th August he was at Newark airport.

...

Why would Cohen lie about this? He also makes strange statements on how it can be ‘verified’ that he was where he says he was later in the month; calling other people, etc. Frankly all Mr. Cohen would need to do would be to produce some credit card receipts or photographs of himself in the US. He has not done so, according to other journalists also working on substantiating the dossier.
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Inanely, CNN claimed that they had it “confirmed” that Michael Cohen was not in Prague, Czech Republic, when the dossier said he was.

They based this on the fact that, as they claimed, “a different Michael Cohen” had been in Prague around that time, according to a passport stamp. This has nothing to do with the matter one way or the other, and a little thought by CNN would have borne that out. The dossier alleged that Cohen went to Prague and another EU country; that was rated as low confidence as to both location and to exact timing. August, at one point; late August or early September at another point. Furthermore, Steele did not, contrary to CNN’s implication, present location or timing as a fact. It was secondhand; he reported as fact that Kremlin insiders said this, and Steele rated the exact location and timing as low confidence.

...

I posted on Twitter that ‘unverified’ and ‘unverifiable’ are not synonymous and I started looking for ways to verify the dossier. The first clue was that Cohen did not deny it. Rather, he gave fatuous and whataboutery excuses. To Rosie Gray of the Atlantic, Mr. Cohen stated that he had gone to Los Angeles from the 23rd August onwards. He then tweeted:


Feeling like a @RadarOnlineCom celebrity debunking the Russia connection…all thanks to my daughter’s Instagram



Radar Online is owned by Pecker, of ‘Trump loves Pecker’ fame. The piece tweeted by Cohen, who presumably handed Radar their lines, stated that there was “proof” that Cohen never left the USA in August based on metadata from his Twitter account:


Metadata from Cohen’s account confirms that he never posted from outside the United States in the entire month of August.



The piece also contains video of Cohen on the Sean Hannity show, which is instructional. Cohen says he has never been to Prague and ‘proved’ it to Mr. Trump by showing Mr. Trump his passport. Cohen also points Hannity to the ‘other Michael Cohen’ jumped on by CNN as ‘proof’ that Steele had got it wrong.


Breaking Down Cohen’s Statements and Inferring Why He Made Them


Cohen therefore wanted us to believe that:

a) his social media accounts could prove his whereabouts

b) the second Michael Cohen being in Prague meant that he himself could not also have been in Prague

c) The lack of a stamp in his passport proves he could not have left the country.

Taking as my starting point that Chris Steele is likely correct, I would treat all of the above as likely true on the face of it, but actually false in implied meaning; so that let us assume yes, a different Michael Cohen was in Prague; let us assume that Michael Cohen’s current passport has no stamp for Prague or out of the country at all in the month of August and September; and that his social media accounts do not have any nice easy ‘Sent from Prague’ or ‘sent from Moscow’ geotagging on them.

None of that would, however, disprove the allegations in the Steele dossier, which is the implication behind making those assertions.

It is disappointing that American media would treat the one as proving the other. CNN spoke with reverence of a ‘second Michael Cohen’ as if that somehow meant the first one could not have left the United States. A Twitter account I now believe to be a peddler of disinformation tried to feed out the line that Cohen had an Israeli passport with a single day’s difference, explained by the time difference, and that he used this. Now, it is certainly possible that there is only one Michael Cohen who was in Prague on an Israeli passport rather than an American one. But ‘Michael Cohen’ is a common enough name. And the dossier alleged that Cohen was meeting Russian intelligence in order to arrange payment for hackers of the election.

It is a fact, indeed, that a Russian hacker, Yvgeny Nikulin, came to Prague to be paid on October 5th and was picked up there by Czech intelligence on a red warrant from the FBI.

How likely is it that a lawyer representing Donald Trump and meeting with Russian intelligence, to pay off hackers that had attacked the US election on behalf of Russia, would have any stamps in his passport of any country? He would be trying for secrecy, and even if Mr. Cohen is a risible fool, as he is, adamantly denying he had ever been to Prague:


I have never been to Prague in my life. #fakenews



and then telling the Wall Street Journal that he had been to Prague in 2001; even if, as I say, Mr. Cohen was a bombastic fool, Russian intelligence were not fools, and they would, presumably, take good care to get Mr. Cohen into and out of the United States without any stamp in any passport he might legitimately own; and with no record of exit or entry into the United States.
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cobalt_27 said:
You know this won't end well, right?  You already are the clueless poster child of the alt-right for supporting a treasonous buffoon, but it will be looking so much worse on you in a few months.
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it may not end well, we still don't know.  I just wish it would get started!

 
SameSongNDance said:
Trump and everyone connected to him as it pertains to the dossier are constantly and consistently lying. They brazenly lie all the time, often times contradicting themselves within the week, day, and even sentence. 

Whenever I step back and look at everything, this scene from South Park plays in my head. It's just all too obvious.
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Are you saying Trump is probably innocent? Because both the Ramseys and Gary Condit, who are in that scene, were cleared.

 
Mr. Ham said:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-ourselves-to-death-neil-postman-trump-orwell-huxley

Not sure this belongs here, but extremely thought provoking and I promise worth the read.  

“For history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.” 

...

“An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan,” my father wrote. “Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us … [but] who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?”
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Right around or just after inauguration NPR had an interesting series of interviews with citizens across Russia of all stripes about Trump. I can't find it online now. But they interviewed farmers, city dwellers, politicians, broadcasters, interesting cross section. One woman told the story of going to her hairdresser and said that once they started talking politics, the hairdresser said it was like 1984 - when asked why she cried, and when asked why was she crying, the hairdresser said that "Because he [Trump] surrendered."

That of course is a reference to the end where Winston gives up and surrenders to the lies. Basically many people around the world look to the US to defeat the lies in their own country, it's important to know that out there there are people and nations who defend what is real, not the invented lies of the state.

 
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SaintsInDome2006 said:
No, although I think it is entirely possible of his own choosing he hasn't read the IC reports or the Flynn transcripts, so it makes his disbelief all the easier.

Like I said in the Trump thread just now I'm expecting Nunes will be creating a tribunal seeking out leakers to create a competing narrative with the Senate and IC investigations.
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All read I can get from this is they don't have sufficient info yet--that the briefings have been limited.  Not sure what has to happen for the FBI and other IC to spill the beans about what they have and where they're going, but it just doesn't sound like that's happened yet.

 
cobalt_27 said:
All read I can get from this is they don't have sufficient info yet--that the briefings have been limited.  Not sure what has to happen for the FBI and other IC to spill the beans about what they have and where they're going, but it just doesn't sound like that's happened yet.
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I wouldn't put it past the FBI-CIA to compartmentalize what they've disclosed to the various IC committees/investigations to see what filters up to the top.  

BTW, how the hell does Cohen become Trump's attorney.  FWIW, I know he was at USC for at least part of the time he says with respect to the Steele dossier, but everything else about this guy just screams "shady as hell".  He's certainly not the type of "white-shoe" family office GC you'd expect for a "billionaire" like Trump.  I'm going to do a really bad job of describing this, but there's just something off with a GC with his background and the type of stuff he was doing.  He should be contracting Trump's real estate deals, etc.  Instead it seems like he's his own little fiefdom.   It's just really, really weird for a "personal attorney" not to be working 100% of the time for the boss in a family office like Trump's.  

 
Sammy3469 said:
I wouldn't put it past the FBI-CIA to compartmentalize what they've disclosed to the various IC committees/investigations to see what filters up to the top.  

BTW, how the hell does Cohen become Trump's attorney.  FWIW, I know he was at USC for at least part of the time he says with respect to the Steele dossier, but everything else about this guy just screams "shady as hell".  He's certainly not the type of "white-shoe" family office GC you'd expect for a "billionaire" like Trump.  I'm going to do a really bad job of describing this, but there's just something off with a GC with his background and the type of stuff he was doing.  He should be contracting Trump's real estate deals, etc.  Instead it seems like he's his own little fiefdom.   It's just really, really weird for a "personal attorney" not to be working 100% of the time for the boss in a family office like Trump's.  
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A quick check of his wiki bio reveals he went to Thomas Cooley law school.

I had the fortune to work with a Cooley grad. Not ye olde sharpest knife in the drawer. Note they have satellite campuses. I'm not being a snoob to the Cooley grads out there (respect) but I believe the MI bar passage rate hovers around 25%. Not really an esteemed degree. I only mention that because as you say it's quite remarkable considering where he is today.

His wife is Ukrainian. He bought flats in Trump buildings. Otherwise it's a mystery how he landed where he did.

ETA - more here.

Apparently Cohen worked for a NY law firm employed by Trump, then moved over to directly work for Trump about 2010. Still as the article states Cohen is 'something of a cipher'.

 
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SaintsInDome2006 said:
A quick check of his wiki bio reveals he went to Thomas Cooley law school.

I had the fortune to work with a Cooley grad. Not ye olde sharpest knife in the drawer. Note they have satellite campuses. I'm not being a snoob to the Cooley grads out there (respect) but I believe the MI bar passage rate hovers around 25%. Not really an esteemed degree. I only mention that because as you say it's quite remarkable considering where he is today.

His wife is Ukrainian. He bought flats in Trump buildings. Otherwise it's a mystery how he landed where he did.
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FWIW his old law firm (decidedly not the type of real estate law or litigation firm you'd expect of a Trump special counsel) leases space in Kushner's building.  

 
Andrey Artemenko: "I got confirmation" from Felix Sater that my Russia-Ukraine plan was delivered to Michael Flynn

 
Natasha Bertrand‏[SIZE=.9em]Verified account[/SIZE] @NatashaBertrand  7h7 hours ago






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Artemenko told me he thinks he's facing treason charges because Kiev feels threatened by his "foreign allies, contacts, and supporters."
Natasha Bertrand‏[SIZE=.9em]Verified account[/SIZE] @NatashaBertrand  7h7 hours ago






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When I asked if he's still working to get his "peace plan" acknowledged by the Trump administration, he said Yes.
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Sammy3469 said:
SaintsInDome2006 said:
A quick check of his wiki bio reveals he went to Thomas Cooley law school.

I had the fortune to work with a Cooley grad. Not ye olde sharpest knife in the drawer. Note they have satellite campuses. I'm not being a snoob to the Cooley grads out there (respect) but I believe the MI bar passage rate hovers around 25%. Not really an esteemed degree. I only mention that because as you say it's quite remarkable considering where he is today.

His wife is Ukrainian. He bought flats in Trump buildings. Otherwise it's a mystery how he landed where he did.
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FWIW his old law firm (decidedly not the type of real estate law or litigation firm you'd expect of a Trump special counsel) leases space in Kushner's building.  
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“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., said at a real estate conference in 2008, according to a trade publication, eTurboNews.

 
Guys you've got to give context and links. We can't follow...

OMGZ (random media member) is doing great with (random Russian name) and (random Eastern European city and/or state) wow Trumps going down!

 
Maddow stretched a 5 minute segment into 20 minutes.  I really don't like her.

in a nutshell, Rybolovlev is a really rich oligarch.  He went through a nasty divorce and was looking to hide assets by paying too much for property, including paying Mr Trump $100M for a house purchased two and a half years earlier for $40M.

Also, Rybolovlev does a lot of banking in Cyprus, where Wilbur Ross sits on the board.  That bank is headed by the former Deutsche Bank head, where his bank had to pay a $650M penalty for laundering Russian money.

Trump and Rybolovlev allegedly never met.  The deal may or may not have been brokered by Ross.

Bonus: Manafort, Page, and Tillerson make no sense to Americans WRT advising Trumps candidacy and/or presidency, but make a ton of sense when viewed through a Russian prism.

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
Fwiw an important issue - or claim - is that Russian oligarchs and mafia types have been laundering money through NYC and So. Florida real estate, including Trump properties.
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we can also circle back to that Financial Times article (I think this thread, even) that claimed Russian Mob used Trump Casinos to launder money.  That is, lower level guys (I think), not even the oligarch types.

 
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