Tag: Trump-Russia

Categories
Donald Trump Russia Investigation

Trump And His Apologists Claim The Durham Report Exonerates Him – They’re Wrong

To hear former president Donald Trump and his supporters/apologists tell it, the report from Special Counsel John Durham that was released yesterday fully “exonerates” the twice-impeached former president and proves that the FBI tried to set him up so he wouldn’t win a second term in office.

Trump has been weighing in on his failing Truth Social site, screaming in ALL CAPS outrage about the Durham report.

THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY!

TREASON!!!

CONGRESS MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS. MUST NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN!

But while the disgraced ex-president and those who remain loyal to him may try to spin the Durham report in their favor, there are plenty of facts that suggest exoneration is the very last thing the special counsel did.

Ewan Palmer of Newsweek notes:

Some legal and political experts have argued that the Mueller investigation—which took over the FBI probe—did justify the agency examining alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 elections. They suggested that Trump does not stand fully exonerated.

Thomas Gift, an associate professor who heads the Center on U.S. Politics at University College London, U.K., told Newsweek: “Experts will get into the technical semantics of what the Durham report means legally, and there’s no doubt some have read between the lines (too much) in asserting that it ‘exonerates’ Trump or ‘proves’ the FBI was on a ‘witch-hunt.’ In fact, the document does neither.”

Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman was even harsher in his analysis of the Durham report, tweeting out, “There really is no precedent for the Durham report. Mueller’s long report explained precisely his reasons for his prosecutorial decisions. Durham just recycles old cavils about the launching of the Russia investigation that have zero connection to any alleged crime. It’s bogus.”

But perhaps the thing that most undercuts claims of Trump’s exoneration is that several people connected to his 2016 campaign who had contact with Russian nationals later pled guilty or were found guilty of lying to the FBI. Why lie if you did nothing wrong?

Paul Manafort was found guilty. Michael Flynn pled guilty.

Former FBI official Peter Strzok summed it up best with this tweet:

If there’s no fire, why was there so much damn smoke? Was the FBI just supposed to let people lie to them and do nothing? Again, lying suggests you have something to hide, and that’s probably why Donald Trump lies more than almost anyone currently alive.

Exoneration? Not even close. If anything, John Durham only served to reinforce what millions of us have long suspected: Trump cannot be trusted and neither can the liars he surrounds himself with. They all belong in prison, and it certainly looks like Trump is headed in that direction.

 

Categories
Donald Trump Justice Department

Russian State TV Host Is Furious That The DOJ May Put ‘Our Trump’ In Prison For His Crimes

In the clearest sign yet that Russia is indeed ready and willing to play whatever role it can in upcoming U.S. elections, a Russian state TV host is now bemoaning the fact that “our Trump” may wind up going to prison for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Julia Davis of The Daily Beast ran across video of Russian host Evegny Popov telling viewers:

“The Department of Justice opened a criminal case against our own Donald Trump! They’re investigating Trump’s actions before the storming of the Capitol last January and his attempts to nullify the outcome of a fake, unfair, falsified U.S. presidential election.”

Fake, unfair, and falsified, huh? Sounds almost word for word like the sort of thing Donald himself has been saying since it became clear he got curb stomped by President Joe Biden two years ago.

Popov also claimed that any prosecution of Trump would be purely political:

“They’re trying to pull it off by the midterms in order to put Trump behind bars by November. Otherwise, the Democrats have no chance of winning. So the Democrats have decided to eliminate their biggest competitor — our Trump.”

While he was at it, Popov also suggested that Democrats only care about “perverts, the sexual education of children and protections of the transgenders.”

While the Russians may be hell-bent on trying to keep Trump out of prison so they can help him get a second term in office, the country currently has its hands full in Ukraine. Its economy has also collapsed as a result of crippling international sanctions, leading to suggestions that Russian President Vladimir Putin may not be in power for much longer.

Here’s a thought: If the Russians love Donnie so much, why don’t the invite him for a visit and never let him leave? Most Americans would be just fine with that arrangement.

Categories
Donald Trump GOP Russia

Russian State TV Host Says His Country May Not Want To ‘Reinstall’ Trump In 2024

Even now, years after both the 2016 and 2020 elections have come and gone, failed, one-term former president Donald Trump cannot stop talking about what he calls the “Russia hoax” and claiming that he won six years ago without any help from the Russian government or Vladimir Putin, posting this July 4th message which sounds more like a confession than a denial:

He sounds totally obsessed with going down in history as the guy who only got elected because a foreign power helped tilt the balance in his favor, which the Mueller report clearly lays out.

How do the Russians feel about Trump possibly making another run for the White House? Based on what a host on Russian state TV said recently, it sounds like they’re tepid at best, with Newsweek reporting:

State television Olga Skabeeva host alleged in the clip that Trump “promised” the other day to “destroy the Russian Federation, to destroy [Russia President Vladimir] Putin’s hegemony, as he put it,” according to an English translation provided by Julia Davis, a columnist for The Daily Beast.

Alexander Kamkin, who was identified as a political scientist, responded: “That is excellent, if Trump becomes the president, we will know his geopolitical goals.” But Skabeeva interjected that Russia will “have to think whether to reinstall him again as the American president,” adding that the country has not “decided yet.”

Newsweek was not able to locate any instances in which Trump recently, or ever, promised to destroy Russia and “Putin’s hegemony.”

Don’t you have to install someone before you “reinstall” them? Of course you do, and this is a stunning admission from the official government television station that is only allowed to broadcast what the Kremlin approves.

What does this mean? Is Putin tired of Trump? Or has the politically damaged Donald served his usefulness and is therefore expendable?

Whatever the case may be, it’s fascinating to watch and listen as all the Trump-Russia connections are finally exposed.

No collusion, Donald? Your handlers in Moscow seem to disagree.

Categories
Donald Trump Elections Espionage Russia

DOJ Likely To Offer Assange A Deal For Proof Trump Conspired With Russia To Rig The 2016 Election: Report

Now that a British court has ruled Wikileaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited to the United States to face charges of espionage regarding the publication of State and Defense Department files provided by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, we may finally get to know the full details about just how much former President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign conspired with Russia to rig the presidential election.

What Julian Assange has to say, according to former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence Frank Figliuzi, may well lead to yet another legal headache for the failed, one-term, twice-impeached president:

Trump better hope that the notorious hacker and leaker never sets foot on U.S. soil. Because If the Department of Justice plays its cards right, it can make the case precisely about those Russian government hacks and WikiLeaks’ dissemination of the content of those hacks by offering a deal to Assange in return for what he knows.

For one thing, Assange could prove helpful in closing the gap between mere collusion and a criminal conspiracy. If crimes can be proven, the Justice Department could then indict anyone who participated in them, including Donald Trump and members of his family and/or campaign who helped Russia tamper with the 2016 election:

Assange got the Democratic National Committee data dump from an entity long suspected to be a front for the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service. In fact, WikiLeaks actively sought them out. Why? The Mueller team indicted 12 GRU officers for that hack. But what did candidate Trump know about the WikiLeaks–Russia connection, and when did he know it?

Obstruction of justice also remains on the table when it comes to Trump and others who were part of his inner circle during the 2016 presidential race:

During his last news conference before the 2016 election, in response to a question about the DNC hack, Trump infamously said, “Russia, if you’re listening — I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.” Trump says he was kidding, but the Russian intelligence service took him seriously. That same day, Russian intelligence targeted servers and domains related to Clinton and her campaign.

“If he (Trump) was lying to Mueller about his knowledge of any role WikiLeaks or Russia had in assisting his campaign, then he was lying to federal agents and committing a felony. Trump’s lies would also have obstructed the special counsel investigation.”

So while prosecutors in New York and Georgia continue to pursue investigations of Trump and the Trump Organization while the House Select Committee looks closer at Trump’s role in the Capitol insurrection, Assange’s return to the U.S. may wind up opening up another front on the Donald’s endless legal problems.

Categories
Donald Trump Elections Trump-China Trump-Russia

Former FBI Agent: With His Endless Election Lies, Trump Is Helping China And Russia Destroy Democracy

Even though he’s been out of office for five months now, failed, one-term former President Donald Trump continues to try and live in the past, a sort of alternate reality where he’s still president and even if he technically isn’t, he should be because he won the 2020 presidential race only to have it stolen from him.

Of course, the same thing could have been said about the 2016 election, which Trump only won thanks to massive foreign interference from Russia, Russian hackers, the Kremlin, and Vladimir Putin.

And yet, just this last weekend in North Carolina, CNN reports, Trump was back to spreading what has now become known as the “big lie” about how he won even though the numbers show he lost decisively:

“We’re not going to have a country — if you don’t have election integrity, and if you don’t have strong borders, our country can be run like a dictatorship and that’s what they’d like to do. They want to silence you. They want to silence your voice. Remember, I’m not the one trying to undermine American democracy. I’m the one that’s trying to save it.”

Donald Trump is trying to save American democracy? That’s rich! No one has done more to turn this country into an autocracy where one man is allowed to rule by fiat and destroy anyone who dares disagree with him.

All of Trump’s talk about how the U.S. electoral process cheated him is greatly appreciated and heartily applauded in totalitarian states such as China and Russia, according to Frank Figliuzzi, the former assistant director for counterintelligence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Figliuzzi told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace:

“We’re watching a slow-moving train wreck, and it needs to get derailed quickly or it’s going to crash. And the train that’s crashing is essentially our form of democracy. The insurrection’s not over in a very real sense. We’ve got a former president, a significant percentage of at least one party believes he is still the president. He is undermining democracy, our system, and again, from my national security lens, I cannot help but think that in bureaucratic offices throughout Moscow and Beijing, they are sitting back and smiling at a former U.S. president who is doing their work for them. Never before has it been this easy for an adversary to actually impact negatively the United States and our democracy because they have the ultimate insider, now outsider, in the form of Donald Trump.”

Of course, Figliuzzi is right. We have a former U.S. president working as a mole (deliberately or accidentally) for China and Russia in an effort to cast doubt on the American system of government, free and fair elections, and the most basic foundations of our republic. He might just as well be on their payroll, and for all we know, he is!

Hopefully, prosecutors will put Trump behind bars before he can do even more damage by running for president yet again in 2024. But if they don’t, we need to prepare ourselves for the maelstrom that awaits us.

They’re grinning from ear to ear in Beijing and Moscow because they’re on the verge of destroying the United States without having to fire a single shot.