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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDing ding... agree and I've thought this for awhile
mathGuyNTulsa Dec 30 · 04:49:08 PM
Here are more dots to connect. Papadopoulos guilty plea states that he first learned about Russias willingness to help rig the election on March 14th of 2016. Two days later, key Senate Republican John Cornyn announced that he intended to block the Merrick Garland nomination.
At the time, blocking the nomination was at best a peculiar move. Everyone expected HRC would win the election and nominate someone even more liberal than Garland for SCOTUS. Polling at the time also gave the Democrats a good chance of winning control of the Senate. Blocking Garland was a risky strategy with a low probability of actual payoff.
However, blocking the Garland nomination makes perfect sense if the Senate leadership knew, in March of 2016, that the Russians were going to rig the election. The path to that knowledge is easy to deduce: Papdopoulos to Helmsalready on the inside of the Trump campaign--to McConnell.
Proving all of this is another matter, but the circumstantial evidence is mounting that the 2016 election and all of its consequences was invalid.
comment from:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/12/30/1728716/-Did-Trump-now-about-Australia-s-spy-agency-notifying-the-FBI-from-the-start#comment_68821001
also remember THIS:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/paul-ryan-keeps-it-family-kevin-mccarthy-russia-trump
dalton99a
(81,468 posts)So did Ryan
lastlib
(23,222 posts)so he probly knew, as well. He might've told half the House GOPee.
They're all traitors, every last GOPher. Vote 'em out and then hang 'em for treason. Or the other way around, if you prefer.
Freethinker65
(10,015 posts)bronxiteforever
(9,287 posts)What a fake phoney fraud and now completely recognized as one.
The entire GOP establishment is rotten to the core.
Bernardo de La Paz
(49,001 posts)Big Seth Abramson Twitter thread (article) on NYT article points out that the dossier was useful but not sufficient to get the FISA warrant(s):
Good DU thread: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100210040791
The RW line is that Graham "confirmed" the dossier was the reason for the FISA warrant(s).
They then say that (falsely) since the dossier was 'fabricated by the oppo research company funded by the FBI and Hillary' (Fusion GPS) that it was garbage and completely false. They say further that this proves there is a nothing burger there.
They wish.
The twitter article (gadawful medium for one) points out that the dossier was useful but not sufficient to get the FISA warrant(s).
TrishaJ
(798 posts)Lindsay who now ignores the very concept?
He made his career with the "rule of law, rule of law, rule of law" mantra when he led the House impeachment fuckery against Bill Clinton. What say you NOW, "Graham Cracker??"
CRICKETS
erronis
(15,241 posts)That they all cave (or were always lying about their motives) at key points.
I wonder if we have a new split in the homo genus - the "sapiens" one which we probably identify with, and the "mendacial" one which seems to be the only that 'uglicans can spout.
Other than money (rubles, $s, bitcoins) paid under the table, does anyone have an idea on how the puppet-master have so taken control of the US government?
Pee-tapes don't seem to cover the whole lot. Lusting for other than one's own might be rampant among the power-grabbers. I doubt that any of them are really looking for redemption in some after-life.
Baitball Blogger
(46,703 posts)hedda_foil
(16,373 posts)Could that be why he's running their/their donors' agenda almost exclusively (mostly by executive order and dismantling regulations) and the R's are playing along with him? If he made a deal with Putin, why wouldn't he make a similar deal with his own supposed party; ie., They support him and he gives them everything they've dreamed of?
Baitball Blogger
(46,703 posts)They are passing along to each other information that allows them to reach the same conclusions. This isn't being done in an open forum. There must be conduits helping them. And this is the conclusion: Same mission, same duty.
So, yes, it's conspiracy. Just because they are all doing it doesn't make it beyond the reach of the law.
BSdetect
(8,998 posts)The evidence is in.
With this new clincher we know just how fast they all threw themselves into winning at any cost.
The election was corrupted and a liar "won" with the help of Russians and the GOP.
Gorsuch ought to be removed was we find out that he knew too.
The Constitution too has been found seriously wanting. How can we live with this situation?
Out with them all and void that result.
bucolic_frolic
(43,146 posts)AmericanActivist
(1,019 posts)Cornyns actions
rainin
(3,011 posts)I don't recall how Cornyn fit in here. Thanks in advance.
AmericanActivist
(1,019 posts)rainin
(3,011 posts)They are all guilty!!
Ferrets are Cool
(21,106 posts)Achilleaze
(15,543 posts)Have betrayed the United States of America, and disgraced themselves.
babylonsister
(171,057 posts)kimbutgar
(21,137 posts)I still think this will cause a constitutional crisis that we never imagined. Things are boiling now.
BigmanPigman
(51,589 posts)and nothing is done about getting the fucking moron out of office and nothing is done about protecting future elections? My sister told me today to be prepared to accept this as a possible outcome. What if nothing is really done except possibly getting Pence until 2020? I am very disheartened.
bucolic_frolic
(43,146 posts)If outrage is deep enough, and vocal enough, some kind of intermittent bipartisan governance could emerge.
I keep wondering what will happen if a couple dozen folks in Congress wind up in the slammer, tilting majorities to minorities.
BadgerMom
(2,771 posts)And Im willing to show others the way.
Cracklin Charlie
(12,904 posts)If they go before Trump, GOP not so strong, no more. Votes in Congress could go a whole lot different, tout suite.
ps...your sister is wise. There could be any number of possible outcomes. Be strong, we need your heart in the fight. I know you will be there.
bucolic_frolic
(43,146 posts)It's all fitting together like a puzzle. Everything the Trump administration has done is illegitimate and invalid if the election was crooked.
But Trump told us the truth for once. He told us the election was rigged. He knew. All along.
Skittles
(153,150 posts)they were assured Trump would win and that is why they would not allow Garland to be seated - they knew to wait for the chance to put a conservative hack in
fucking TRAITORS, ALL OF THEM
not fooled
(5,801 posts)chimpy was illegitimate, being installed by the puke SCOTUS members, and he stayed in for eight fuckin' years.
I sure hope this time turns out differently.
thesquanderer
(11,986 posts)If Hillary had won, they would have had hearings on Garland immediately after election day. So I don't see it as any evidence that anyone "knew" Trump would win.
shanny
(6,709 posts)I think they were just doing the usual thumbing their noses at Obama.
BadgerMom
(2,771 posts)The timing makes it suspect enough to warrant further investigation. I hope Mueller believes that, too.
shanny
(6,709 posts)this explanation of Cornyn's/Republican motives requires magically "knowing" the future, that Russian help would be given AND would swing the election to the "unelectable" tRump...long before he became the nominee. And iirc Cornyn declined to endorse anyone in the primaries...
A bridge too far IMO.
Skittles
(153,150 posts)they would never have risked a Hillary pick, and Hillary would not have picked Garland
thesquanderer
(11,986 posts)drray23
(7,627 posts)Hillary make her choice.
you nail it
they knew Hillary would never be president
mr_lebowski
(33,643 posts)is just going to admit it, and dare anyone to do anything about about it.
He believes he can just fire the whole Justice Department including everyone at the FBI if he so desires.
He knows that guys like Ryan and McConnell are also compromised up to their eyeballs, and won't risk pissing off his base and generally won't do shit.
He'll just say 'well I disagreed with Obama's Sanctions and believed they're bad for America, and I was told there was nothing wrong with getting this info from 'whoever' as long as we weren't the ones who hacked the computers (which we DIDN'T!) and in fact the sanctions are still there so ... NOTHINGBURGER! Also ... HER EMAILS!!!"
And the knuckle-dragging cult members will nod and totally understand and defend him, and the GOPpers in Congress will do nothing, and Russia will hack 2018 and make sure Dems don't get any power back.
And he knows the US population won't do shit, and if we try to, he'll have us arrested and put in jail.
The End.
Exposing a fatal flaw in what the FF's did: Should've been part of the Constitution that a SCOTUS judge needed 2/3 votes of BOTH Houses ... but that there is no way to delay voting on SCOTUS nominees, period.
We'd have a way out with a properly non-ideological SCOTUS, but we don't have one. Instead we have a guy who got his lifetime appt. with the votes of like 52 Senators, reflecting the way things have been run where every Justice has a clear ideological bias, typically based on who was in power at the time.
Bernardo de La Paz
(49,001 posts)VOX
(22,976 posts)Im at a loss. My head is like a beehive thinking about the possible reality of this. It would mean we and the entire world are in some extremely serious, very deep shit.
Itd be like suddenly waking up on an unknown planet. What are the laws? What are the rules? How do we work this?
Wow.
NastyRiffraff
(12,448 posts)and didn't say anything because 1) I had no proof; and 2) I dislike unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. But what we're learning about Papadopoulos puts it into a whole new light. It explains why Garland was blocked; that only makes sense if McConnell somehow knew that Hillary Clinton's campaign was in essence doomed.
And none dare call it treason.
ProudLib72
(17,984 posts)tRump has maintained that Papa was a bit player, of no consequence. If you are correct, that means GOP congress believed Papa's alliance with Russia was strong enough to risk blocking Garland. That was a HUGE move. They would not have tried that unless they trusted Papa completely.
Cracklin Charlie
(12,904 posts)I think there are other rats about.
We're gonna need a bigger trap.
joanbarnes
(1,722 posts)Cracklin Charlie
(12,904 posts)To me, anyway.
The Sessions appointment always struck me as a little odd. No recent law enforcement experience, sitting senator of some longevity in a Senate with every vote needed, etc. Just odd.
But, if Sessions was running information from the Trump campaign to the Senate (McConnell), then it would make more sense that Sessions should join the administration.
I believe I heard that Papadopoulos came to the campaign through Sessions. Sessions was made Attorney General to hide everything. Trump is really pissed that he recused.
I bet McConnell is pissed, too. His plausible deniability is evaporating like so much mist on the Potomac.
dweller
(23,629 posts)there is no such thing as coincidence ... 🤔
drip... drip... drip ..
Guilded Lilly
(5,591 posts)nothing has been enough to take the treasonous bastards down because there are so many of them
gathered protectively around the faucet.
Their base supporters (and I do mean base!) are fully embracing the treasonous acts or are too blinded by sheer ignorance and insidious, insecure hate.
For decades the Republican Party has obsessively supported and legislated the complete dumbing down of society. By any means, using gender, religion and race without conscience or morality. Those who have resisted have had their financial status and power chipped away...if they had any in the first place.
At this point we find ourselves relying on the decency and morality of a handful of Republicans who will have the character to resist.
This is one helluva war we must win.
Botany
(70,501 posts)Two days later, key Senate Republican John Cornyn announced that he intended to block the Merrick Garland nomination.
dlk
(11,561 posts)grantcart
(53,061 posts)This is how revisionism works. Look backwards and make all of the 1 In a million shots look like it was part of a plan.
At the time that Garland nomination was blocked the Republican establishment was united in stopping Trump.
Cronyn's good friend Jeb Bush had a hundred million in the bank. Cronyn's would be a major player in a Bush administration.
This is what happens when you try to look at 2016 events from a 2018 perspective with the expectation that it all fits together. At the time the Republicans were I. A full out civil war.
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)For me it's behind a pay wall.
The old-school Mafiosi are fading into the past, pale imitations of their pharaonic forefathers. As the late Murray Kempton, the greatest of all New York columnists, once wrote, Where are the scungilli of yesteryear? In the late nineties, federal agents insinuated an informer into the ranks of the DeCavalcante crime family, of New Jersey, and the resulting wiretaps and transcriptions revealed a dying language of secrecy, petty schemes, and blood oaths gone wrong. Sad old veterans of the Punic Wars of Essex County talked about selling old comic books and Viagra to make money, and yet they knew that they were losing touch with the new world.
They make money with the computer, a gangster named Joseph (Tin Ear) Sclafani said incredulously about the young. To which another associate replied, These [expletive] kidstwenty-five, twenty-six years oldwill teach you things you could not ever believe.
You know, Im computer-phobia, a DeCavalcante soldier named Lenny replies.
Thats the whole thing, another says. In this [expletive] life that we live, every day if you aint like a chameleon, if you cant change, youre finished.
I thought of this exquisite sampling of the DeCavalcante tapes after reading the riveting serio-comic report in the Washington Post by Adam Entous describing a meeting in June, 2016, on Capitol Hill, at which Republican Party leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, gathered to talk business. Lets not be unfair, much less libelous. Its not that the members of Congress present were involved in crimes or illegal activity of any kind; no, its that they seem so craven, cynical, and, ultimately small-time. They have sunk so low that they are willing to get behind a candidate for whom they clearly have no regard. Because, well, thats this [expletive] life that we live.
In the transcript published by the Post, McCarthy speculates that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committees computers and, in the process, discovered whatever opposition-research materials the Democrats had gathered on Trump.
Theres two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump, McCarthy said, according to Entous, a superb reporter who heard a tape recording of the colloquy. Swear to God.
Dana Rohrabacher is a Republican from California with a peculiar amalgam of views: pro-marijuana, dubious about climate change, pro-torture. For this last position, in 2007, Keith Olbermann awarded him his periodic Worst Person in the World award, on his old MSNBC show. Like Trump, Rohrabacher has been highly solicitous of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Last year, Politico ran an article on Rohrabacher called Putins Favorite Congressman.
In the Post piece, McCarthys remark is met with laughter, and Ryan cautions his colleagues, This is an off the record . . . No leaks! . . . All right?
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And then, amid more laughter, Ryan says, This is how we know were a real family here.
Thats how you know that were tight, Steve Scalise, the House Majority Whip, says.
Whats said in the family stays in the family, Ryan concludes.
Spokesmen for the various parties at first denied that the conversation took place. But when the Post apprised them of the audiotape, they went into an oh-well-it-was-just-a-joke mode. Another participant, Evan McMullin, an ex-C.I.A. operative, who ran for President last year as an independent, confirmed to the Post that the conversation took place. He attended as the policy director of the House Republican Conference.
In fairness, Entous makes clear in his report that there was laughter throughout the exchange, and it is entirely possible that McCarthy was not serious at all about his conjectures. And yet the tape and the transcript do deepen the impression of blithe hypocrisy when it comes to the business of electing an obviously erratic man as President. Almost everyone in the room endorsed Trump. McCarthy was so ardent in his support that Trump referred to him as my Kevin. Ryan made distancing gestures from time to time, expressing oblique disgust at Trumps hosannas for Putin and his pussy-grabbing braggadocio, but those faint stirrings of a moral conscience soon passed, and his endorsement of Trump before the nominating Convention and his fealty ever since have been consistent. Ryanlike Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnellcould hardly assume a position in immediate opposition to a President of his Party, and the leaders of the Republicans in Congress decided to muffle their misgivings and moments of revulsion in service of their conservative agenda: tax cuts, repeal and replace, and a generalized rollback of the Obama years.
These men must know that they are still defending the increasingly indefensible: an unstable and incompetent man flailing in the wind. Its hardly different at the White House. In the West Wing, senior aides have become increasingly disgusted by the behavior of the President, as he spends his days wallowing in fury, self-pity, self-aggrandizement, distraction, defensiveness, and delusion. During the campaign, President Obama routinely called Trump uniquely unfit to be Commander-in-Chief; now Trumps aides (some of them) and Republicans in Congress (some of them) seem to be reaching a similar conclusion. The political question that may matter most is this: At what point will private misgivings tip over into a withdrawal of support and a demand for an end to this prolonged emergency?
Meanwhile, Trump has gone from one graduation speech to the next, unloading his grievances at the podium. You have to put your head down and fight, fight, fight, he declared to the hopeful young. Look at the way Ive been treated lately, especially by the media. No politician in history, and I say with surety, has been treated worse, more unfairly. Sir Winston could not have said it better.
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In both reporting and thinking about the avalanche of information about the Trump Administration and its congressional supporters, it is essential to avoid getting ahead of what is known. Jokesif they were jokesare not evidence. Theories are not evidence. Whats needed is the deepest and most unprejudiced investigation possible of the campaign and this Presidencys possible crimes or misdemeanors. Whatever evidence James Comey or Paul Manafort or Carter Page or anyone else has to provide, it must be heard and seen.
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KPN
(15,643 posts)But hard to believe they knew they were going to take the WH, even with Russian assistance. More likely they thought they'd be able to stonewall Hillary as well -- at least to the point she selected a moderate.
The unfortunate thing is that even if it is true/correct, even if it could be proven, it probably can't be undone. I wonder though -- is it unrealistic to think that Gorsuch could be impeached?
triron
(21,999 posts)Honeycombe8
(37,648 posts)Totally disagree about that. People, incl myself, were wondering if they'd block, as they could, or if they would let it go forward. Many, incl myself, suspected they'd block it, given how important that position was.