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The Robert Mueller Investigation


Hugo Stiglitz

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Did you even read the article?  They had a different plans and she told him to back off on his because they were going with the other one. 

 “He noted the White House cybersecurity team did continue working to respond to Russia, but with a smaller staff and a less aggressive approach.”

“It’s not accurate to say that all activity ceased at that point,” he said, declining to describe the activities in an unclassified hearing.”

 

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Obama mishandled the Russian interference but he was in a Comey-like position where any response would have significant political consequences.  If Obama had gone hard to the paint on Russia (like he should have IMO), it would have only fed into Trump’s narrative that “the whole thing is rigged”.

Trump would have used Obama’s response to Russia as a talking point and it would have been somewhat convincing at the time.  “You see! I told you this entire election is a sham!  Obama is abusing his power to interfere in this election, help Hillary, and blaming it on Russia.  They don’t know it was Russia, where’s their proof?”

Instead Obama put his faith in the American people to defend themselves from Russian Active Measures and Trump would lose anyway. Boy was he wrong.

The most disappointing thing:  Trump was so fucking obviously a Kremlin stooge from the beginning and the only person to call this out was Hillary Clinton.

Bernie didn’t say a fucking word.

Obama didn’t say a word.

No Republican said a word (they knew too). 

They all stood by and watched as Trump spouted the Kremlin talking points, used the emails Russia stole to help him, and protected Russia every step of the way by telling his supporters it wasn’t Russia.

There’s plenty of blame to go around on Russian interference but the ultimate blame falls on the shoulders of the American people who got pranked into voting for a complete fucking moron.

Edited by Hugo Stiglitz
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While we wait:

Sarah Netanyahu indicted for fraud.  "Charges follow collapse of plea deals."

Wonder what they have on Trump's soul mate, Bibi, whose indictment is reportedly imminent ?  

Recall the recent news about Israeli ex-Intel operations being linked to Trump for skulduggery reminiscent of ongoing Russian involvement.  Bibi's crimes are rumored to be for more local matters, but the timing highlights what appears to be an international noose tightening on actors linked by shared shadiness.

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1 minute ago, triplehorn said:

While we wait:

Sarah Netanyahu indicted for fraud.  "Charges follow collapse of plea deals."

Wonder what they have on Trump's soul mate, Bibi, whose indictment is reportedly imminent ?  

Recall the recent news about Israeli ex-Intel operations being linked to Trump for skulduggery reminiscent of ongoing Russian involvement.  Bibi's crimes are rumored to be for more local matters, but the timing highlights what appears to be an international noose tightening on actors linked by shared shadiness.

Yeah, seems we’ve been waiting for the Trump connection to Bibi corruption to emerge for a year now.  I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Same thing goes for a Jullian Assange development 

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7 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Yeah, seems we’ve been waiting for the Trump connection to Bibi corruption to emerge for a year now.  I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Same thing goes for a Jullian Assange development 

I've become a lot more comfortable being patient in this ordeal.  I believe a lot of the heavy lifting has been done for a good while.

 

Spoiler

maxresdefault.jpg

 

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51 minutes ago, Red Five said:

If Obama had really interfered in the election, and Hillary had won because of it, I’m sure that wouldn’t have caused any problems.

Yeah, it would have been even more of a clusterfuck. He had to choose between bad decisions. 

Still, the Russians mostly riled up Southern racists more than anything. The South is a lost cause anyway. The Russians didn't prevent Hillary from campaigning in the midwest. That was her own stupidity.

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I love the narrative . . . "we were planning our own response without approval from our superiors, and it turns out our superiors had other ideas, WTF?  How could this happen?  This must mean Obama was in bed with the Russians!  DO SOMETHING!!!".

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2 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

This changes everything 

Plus the Strzok texts aaahhha

1 hour ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Yeah, seems we’ve been waiting for the Trump connection to Bibi corruption to emerge for a year now.  I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Same thing goes for a Jullian Assange development 

JA has been dead since October 2016 bub.

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Then there’s Cambridge Analytica. The (now shuttered) British company did the Trump campaign’s data. Its speciality was ‘microtargeting’: individual messages tailored to individual voters, delivered by email, Facebook and Twitter. The US intelligence agencies believe that Russian internet ‘troll factories’ were also pushing out pro-Trump propaganda on social media: sometimes fake news, sometimes real news, such as the hacked contents of Clinton’s emails. The question is whether this was done in coordination with the Trump campaign. An American lawyer I know told me that he was approached by a Cambridge Analytica employee after the election. They had had the Clinton emails more than a month before they were published by WikiLeaks: ‘What should I do?’ Take this to Mueller, the lawyer replied.

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1 minute ago, Mojo Hand said:

  The lawyer who was approached by CA after the election? 

That’s my take.  It’s a British publication I never read with a high reputation of factual reporting that leans right in bias according to media bias watchdog sites.

So, I’m still a little skeptical 

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It wouldn’t surprise me if it was Cambridge Analytica that got the emails from the Russians and they deployed them through Wikileaks.

Everything that has come out about Cambridge Analytica indicates it’s a shadowy global black ops operation financed by billionaires, pretty much like an FSB outfit. 

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And there’s this story from about a year ago.

https://www.google.com/amp/thehill.com/homenews/campaign/357558-top-trump-donor-asked-data-firm-to-help-organize-hacked-wikileaks-emails%3famp

 

A top donor to President Trump's 2016 election effort asked the campaign's data firm if it could help organize hacked emails released by WikiLeaks on Hillary Clinton, according to a new report.

A source familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that Rebekah Mercer, a billionaire supporter of Trump, exchanged emails with Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix about the hacked emails.

The Journal reports that Mercer asked Nix if his firm could compile the hacked emails related to Clinton and make them more easily searchable after she received the suggestion from a person she met at a event supporting Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

The Cambridge CEO reportedly responded to Mercer's request, saying he had reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, asking him to pass along Clinton-related emails, according to the Journal.

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3 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Then there’s Cambridge Analytica. The (now shuttered) British company did the Trump campaign’s data. Its speciality was ‘microtargeting’: individual messages tailored to individual voters, delivered by email, Facebook and Twitter. The US intelligence agencies believe that Russian internet ‘troll factories’ were also pushing out pro-Trump propaganda on social media: sometimes fake news, sometimes real news, such as the hacked contents of Clinton’s emails. The question is whether this was done in coordination with the Trump campaign. An American lawyer I know told me that he was approached by a Cambridge Analytica employee after the election. They had had the Clinton emails more than a month before they were published by WikiLeaks: ‘What should I do?’ Take this to Mueller, the lawyer replied.

This is, at best, really imprecise wording on something that calls for precision.  As far as we know, Wikileaks never had "stolen Clinton emails."  There are four different sets of emails:

1. Emails which Clinton turned over as part of the investigation and where eventually released as part of the Freedom of Information Act.  They were public information before Wikileaks published them, because it took a while Wikileaks set them up as searchable.  So, it really wouldn't be a big deal if CA had access to them prior to Wikileaks publishing them. I'm guessing the "[stolen]" in the tweet is flat out wrong.

2. The emails hacked from the DNC, some of which referenced Clinton.  That would be a big deal if CA had these a month prior to Wikileaks published them, although some of them were published by a different source prior to Wikileaks.

3. The emails that were hacked from Podesta's account, many of which reference Clinton.  Same deal as #2.

4. The emails which Clinton claimed to be personal and were eventually destroyed.  While there was speculation that they may have been hacked, and Trump requested that the Russians provide them, nobody ever published them.

Edited by Tuco
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3 minutes ago, Tuco said:

This is, at best, really imprecise wording on something that really calls for precision.  As far as we know, Wikileaks never had "stolen Clinton emails."  There are four different sets of emails:

1. Emails which Clinton turned over as part of the investigation and where eventually released as part of the Freedom of Information Act.  They were public information before Wikileaks published them, because it took a while Wikileaks set them up as searchable.  So, it really wouldn't be a big deal if CA had access to them prior to Wikileaks publishing them. I'm guessing the "[stolen]" in the tweet is flat out wrong.

2. The emails hacked from the DNC, some of which referenced Clinton.  That would be a big deal if CA had these a month prior to Wikileaks published them, although some of them were published by a different source prior to Wikileaks.

3. The emails that were hacked from Podesta's account, many of which reference Clinton.  Same deal as #2.

4. The emails which Clinton claimed to be personal and were eventually destroyed.  While they were was speculation that they may have been hacked, and Trump requested that the Russians provide them, nobody ever published them.

British firm dealing with Trump on opposition research?  Is that right?

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51 minutes ago, zork said:

British firm dealing with Trump on opposition research?  Is that right?

No. Watch the Channel 4 videos to learn about Cambridge Analytica/SQL. They are utterly damning. 

"We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting," Nix says on the video. "We ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign, and our data informed all the strategy."

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/cambridge-analytica-claimed-firm-ran-digital-campaign-for-trump-report-says.html

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/379368-cambridge-analytica-executives-claim-they-ran-all-the-digital-campaign-for

 

Here's one of the Channel 4 videos. The above quote from Nix comes from this video. 

 

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Just now, Hugo Stiglitz said:

He doesn’t give a shit

I know. Just not letting his downplaying the significance of the illegality of CA/Trump campaign unaddressed for any neutral observers. 

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Britain is an ok foreign power, right?  Or is it you have to pay lawyers to use the British for your opposition research?  I didn't click the link.  So you are right I don't care, to a point.  

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6 minutes ago, zork said:

Britain is an ok foreign power, right?  Or is it you have to pay lawyers to use the British for your opposition research?  I didn't click the link.  So you are right I don't care, to a point.  

It is still illegal to hire foreigners in key campaign positions even if they are British and Canadian. Having Bannon as a figurehead did not make it legal. Cruz and Trump broke the law.

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9 minutes ago, zork said:

Britain is an ok foreign power, right?  Or is it you have to pay lawyers to use the British for your opposition research?  I didn't click the link.  So you are right I don't care, to a point.  

Translation: I’m a moron and I don’t care to not be one.

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Just now, RayDog said:

It is still illegal to hire foreigners in key campaign positions even if they are British and Canadian. Having Bannon as a figurehead did not make it legal. Cruz and Trump broke the law.

so if you have your lawyers hire them then it is ok,  that seems like a small fine should make it ok.  with a promise to not do it again.  what is the practical difference between hiring them and having your lawyer hire them on your behalf?(besides slight technical detail)

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The IG finds abundant evidence of corrupt motivation on behalf of the officials who were running the Clinton-emails investigation. And there is a plausible theory — indeed, a very persuasive one — that a corrupt motive (viz., political bias) drove the decision-making: The investigators wanted Clinton to win the election and feared a Trump presidency, so they tanked a solid criminal case against Clinton, then turned their dedicated attention to framing Trump as a traitor based on such “evidence” as the Clinton-campaign-generated Steele dossier.

 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/mueller-investigation-obstruction-ig-report-should-end/

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8 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

 

This part:

"Among them might be GCHQ’s intercepts of Trump’s associates talking to Russians. Some — credible — reports say the head of GCHQ flew to the US to hand-deliver this incendiary material to the CIA director. "

 

Like I posted earlier today, the heavy lifting in this investigation was complete a long time ago.  This was from March 2017:

 

 

 

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9 minutes ago, Equinox said:

Karol Cummins, citizen journalist?

Karol Cummins is a rando on Twitter. The article she posted is in the Spectator and was written by Paul Wood.What the rando that posted it on Twitter calls herself is irrelevant to whether Wood is correct in his article or not. 

 

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11 hours ago, David Dennison said:

We'll find out!

 

In this case, signals intelligence is classified information being used in an ongoing investigation which explains why it's being discussed glancingly by public figures in a position to know in terms that mask all the details needed for public certainty.  What this underscores is that the investigation did not start because of drunken story told at a cocktail party.  It's always been about intercepted foreign communications.  

Hugo posted above a view that I share that there is a process of our IC/FBI laying in the weeds in the run-up to the midterms and beyond.  There is a lot to learned about hostile tactics and long term strategy by not pouncing on the first whiff of lying or law breaking.  Moreover, this goes well beyond 'getting' Trump and involves an international reach in multiple avenues of criminality.

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Another excellent episode of The Daily today.

Quote

The 2018 World Cup is now underway in Russia. The story of how it ended up there involves some names you might recognize: James Comey, Robert Mueller and Christopher Steele.

Here's the Sunday Op-Ed that was the basis for the episode:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/opinion/sunday/world-cup-fifa-corruption-russia.html

Quote

By Ken Bensinger

Mr. Bensinger is the author of the forthcoming book, “Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World’s Biggest Sports Scandal.”

  • June 7, 2018
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In the spring of 2010, Christopher Steele, a former British spy with a shock of graying hair and a quiet, understated manner, received some alarming news: Vladimir Putin, a lifelong ice hockey fan, had taken a sudden interestin soccer.

This was years before Mr. Steele compiled his now famous dossier on Donald Trump, with its references to clandestine meetings in Prague and, of course, “the pee tape.” In 2010, Mr. Steele, regarded among those who knew him as a serious and levelheaded MI6 officer, had only recently retired and opened his private intelligence firm in London. He might have reasonably expected to be embarking on an uneventful, if lucrative, second career. But the story of what happened next would profoundly affect his and countless others’ lives, foreshadowing the Trump investigation and the shadowy role Russia plays in the modern world.

Among Mr. Steele’s first clients was a group of wealthy individuals and corporations supporting England’s bid to host the 2018 World Cup. The tournament hadn’t been held in England since 1966, and the country’s soccer-mad populace was desperate to do so again. England invented the modern-day game in the 19th century and, at the outset of the 21st, believed it was uniquely poised to host, with dozens of world-class stadiums, hotels, highways and airports ready. The British government chipped in £2.1 million of the bid’s more than £17 million total cost, and international celebrities including Prince William, David Beckham and David Cameron, then the prime minister, promoted the effort.

Mr. Steele had been hired, in large part, because of his expertise in Russia, one of six countries vying for the right to host the tournament. In the early 1990s, he had worked undercover in Moscow, and he maintained extensive contacts in Russian government and business circles. His mandate in the spring of 2010 was to find out anything he could about the competing bid. He was no stranger to Russia’s playbook. When it came to pursuing national objectives, the country had few if any compunctions about employing whatever means — collusive, corrupting, scandalous — might be necessary. And on its face, it was clear the Russian bid was going to need a lot of help.

 

[Receive arguments and opinions on the pressing social issues and hidden stories around the World Cup right in your inbox. Sign up for Offsides.]

In stark contrast to England, Russia appeared profoundly unqualified to host a monthlong tournament expected to draw well over three million spectators. For starters, Russia didn’t have a great soccer tradition; its team hadn’t even qualified to play in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, thanks to an embarrassing loss to Slovenia. More important, it didn’t have adequate stadiums or other infrastructure, and since it was already going to host the 2014 Winter Olympics, there were serious questions about how it could afford to build what was required. The International Federation of Association Football, or FIFA, the Swiss-based nonprofit that runs the World Cup and oversees world soccer, ultimately rated Russia’s bid riskiest for operational considerations among other contestants for the 2018 tournament.

To most observers, Russia didn’t seem like a serious threat to England’s hopes, but Mr. Steele’s confidential sources told a very different story. Mr. Putin, then serving a four-year term as prime minister, saw hosting the World Cup as a vital way to project his country’s power, and his own, around the world. He was determined, sources said, to win the bid at any cost.

Over the next few months, Mr. Steele collected a growing pile of intelligence suggesting that Russian government officials and oligarchs close to Mr. Putin had been enlisted to push the effort, cutting shadowy gas deals with other countries in exchange for votes, offering expensive gifts of art to FIFA voters and even dispatching Roman Abramovich, the billionaire who owns the London-based Chelsea Football Club, to South Africa to pressure Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s president. (A spokesman for Mr. Abramovich told The Sunday Times that there was nothing “untoward” in his involvement in the Russian bid.)

The retired spy handed his findings to his clients supporting the English bid, who had been swaggering through the campaign with blithe optimism and self-confidence. But in July 2010, five months before FIFA would hold its vote on where to host the 2018 World Cup, Mr. Steele also passed the information on to another party he thought might be interested in learning what Russia was up to: an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The F.B.I. didn’t much care whether England got the tournament, of course, but the agent, who supervised the F.B.I.’s Eurasian Organized Crime squad, had been looking for opportunities to chase down conspiracies emanating from Russia. After breaking the back of the Russian mob in New York, the squad had set its sights on border-crossing financial crimes involving oligarchs and mafia kingpins. Mr. Steele’s intelligence about Russian attempts to corrupt FIFA seemed to check all the boxes.

Thus began one of the largest and most ambitious investigations of international graft and money laundering in American history, one that would expose decades of deep-seated rot and corruption in global soccer. Over five years, a team of I.R.S. and F.B.I. agents, working under the direction of several ambitious young prosecutors, secretly dug into international soccer’s darkest corners, flipping officials and mining millions of financial records to build a convincing case that the beautiful game had become little more than a source of vast profits for an international organized crime syndicate.

The investigation finally broke into public view on May 27, 2015, with the sensational early morning arrests of seven soccer officials in Zurich. The world’s most popular game was shaken to its core: Multiple generations of FIFA administrators were brought down, accused of collectively taking hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes. In a matter of days, FIFA’s once -untouchable president, Mr. Blatter, announced that he would resign, and soon he was under criminal investigation as well. (Mr. Blatter was not among those indicted but he was ultimately banned from all soccer-related activities for six years.) To date, more than two dozen people and entities have been convicted of, or pleaded guilty to, racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering in the case, which continues.

The Department of Justice managed to do something that few if any of the sport’s billions of fans had ever believed possible: FIFA, nested high above Zurich and, its officials thought, beyond any kind of regulation or government interference, had finally been held accountable.

The investigation also forged a strong bond of trust between Mr. Steele and American law enforcement, one that led the former British spy, in July 2016, to hand the same F.B.I. agent a secret dossier he had assembled alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to interfere in the American presidential elections, among other even more lurid claims.

 

By nearly every measure, the FIFA case had been a tremendous success, showcasing brilliant, ambitious police work while underscoring the international leadership role of American rule of law. Investigators in a half-dozen other countries, chastened by what the United States had done to the world’s game, saw little choice but to open their own FIFA investigations.

 

But there is one glaring hole in what even the vanquished defense attorneys who had corrupt soccer officials as clients called a breathtakingly meticulous and exhaustive federal investigation and prosecution: any mention of Russia. Court records from the case run into the thousands of pages, and prosecutors spent weeks laying out every tangled intricacy of their digging in a six-week criminal trial in federal court in Brooklyn late last year. But Russia, strangely, seems to have been completely absent from any of it.

Mr. Putin’s campaign to win the right to host the World Cup ultimately proved successful. An attempt by FIFA itself to audit the bid after the fact was stymied when it was discovered that a football foundation linked to Mr. Abramovich, Mr. Putin’s oligarch pal, destroyed the Russia bid team’s computers. (A FIFA report released last year cleared the bid team of any wrongdoing.)

Following the successful World Cup bid campaign, Mr. Putin returned to Russia’s presidency amid a growing wave of nationalistic sentiment and was subsequently re-elected to a fourth term in March with more than 75 percent of the vote.

In the past few years, Russia has been accused of interfering in foreign elections, sponsoring cyberwarfare, poisoning enemies with nerve agents, invading Ukraine and abetting a murderous dictatorship in Syria. The country has somehow found a place at or near the center of nearly every geopolitical conspiracy, most of them considerably more insidious than where a quadrennial soccer tournament should be held.

On June 14, the Russian national soccer team will square off against Saudi Arabia in Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium for the opening match of the 2018 World Cup. Lacking talent in midfield, a viable scoring threat, an organized defense or a well-regarded coach, the Russian squad hasn’t had any notable success since 2008 and qualified this time because host nations get an automatic spot. Tellingly, Russia’s hopes rest on its captain, the coolheaded goalkeeper Igor Akinfeev, who presumably will be tasked with blocking an endless barrage of opponents’ shots. Russia’s is the second lowest ranked team in the tournament; in a recent poll, less than 20 percent of Russians said they believed it had a hope of advancing beyond the opening round.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world will tune in to watch that opening match, among them some of the same American law enforcement agents who built the FIFA case in the first place. Eight years since then, Russia is once again at the center of an American investigation of transnational corruption and collusion, this time led by the special counsel Robert Mueller, who was F.B.I. director when the FIFA case was opened. Many of those soccer-loving viewers doubtless will wonder how it could be possible that Russia, of all places, could be hosting the World Cup, an event that remains relentlessly popular despite the disgrace befallen the institution that organizes it. Few, if any, will wonder whether Russia can actually take home the glittering trophy when the tournament ends on July 15. The truth is that it doesn’t really matter what happens on the field.

Russia already won.


Ken Bensinger (@kenbensinger) is an investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and the author of the forthcoming “Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World’s Biggest Sports Scandal,” from which this essay is adapted.

 

Edited by DDD Dad
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12 hours ago, triplehorn said:

This part:

"Among them might be GCHQ’s intercepts of Trump’s associates talking to Russians. Some — credible — reports say the head of GCHQ flew to the US to hand-deliver this incendiary material to the CIA director. "

 

Like I posted earlier today, the heavy lifting in this investigation was complete a long time ago.  This was from March 2017:

 

 

 

So, just to be clear, you are continuing to go with this angle (and the usual retards are right there with you) that there is existing intel on this that has been out there for over a year now?  Seems unlikely.  Especially considering that the house and senate intel committees, by law, get to see all of that intel and, amazingly, none of them have ever acknowledged it.  Your boy Schiff?  Guy that wrote the rebuttal to Nunes' memo?  Not a word about any of this.  Shocking.  How about Feinstein and Warner and Munchin?  All of them are on the intel committee and none of them have said they have seen any collusion.  The most they will say is that they have think the trump jr meeting was an "attempt" to collude.

So there are only 2 possibilities, 1) the intel agencies have committed crimes by withholding info from the senate and house committees or 2) there is no secret intel that shows collusion and has been out there for over a year.

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