FBI still hiding key Russiagate details

[Legato]

12 hours ago, robosmith said:

So what? ^Means NOTHING.

To you....everyone else?.....well Ill leave that to your kaleidoscope imagination.

[Scott75]

1 minute ago, User said:

6 hours ago, Scott75 said:

12 hours ago, User said:

16 hours ago, Scott75 said:

16 hours ago, User said:

There was no collusion. The Mueller report spelled this out. 

I'm not sure if they spelled it out, but I think that if they really had anything, they would have said so. 

No, it was literally spelled out. 

"We applied the term coordination in that sense when stating in the report that the investigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

Your quote says that they didn't "establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election inteference activities". Left unsaid is that they didn't exonerate the Trump Campaign of doing this either. That being said, I've read about the "evidence" that was gathered against the Trump campaign. It's just bad and I strongly suspect that those who gathered it knew or at least suspected that it was bad, but gave it a pass anyway for political reasons.

Exhonorate them?

That is not what an investigation does. You are innocent until proven guilty and they couldn't even find any evidence. My quote is from the Mueller report and backs up exactly what I said.

It seems you forgot what you initially said in the post that started our discussion here. I'll quote you:

"There was no collusion. The Mueller report spelled this out."

I responded that I wasn't sure that Mueller's report spelled that out. In response, you took the following quote from the Mueller report:

"We applied the term coordination in that sense when stating in the report that the investigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

I pointed out that Mueller's report didn't exonerate Trump and you've now responded that that's not what investigation does. Did you see how you moved the goalpost? Your initially statement was that the Mueller report "spelled out" that there was no collusion. It didn't. It simply stated that Mueller's investigation "did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities".

In essence, the Mueller report said they found no substantive evidence that the Trump Campaign colluded with Russia. They never said they found compelling evidence that the Trump Campaign didn't collude with Russia.

In the end, I think we're focusing on the wrong thing here. Just because a federal investigation did or didn't find evidence for a given conjecture is less important in a debate then whether one or more of the debaters has found evidence one way or the other. From what I've seen, there was never any good evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russians. I have also seen good evidence suggesting that those who -did- accuse Trump and his campaign of these things used shoddy evidence. I -suspect- that this wasn't just an accident, given the fact that throwing shade on Trump and his campaign would directly benefit those who wanted to continue a civil war with Ukraine, one that has now erupted into the potential of a global war between the 2 nations on earth that could wipe out most if not all life on earth.

 

20 minutes ago, User said:

6 hours ago, Scott75 said:

I've read another article from Aaron Mate that was published shortly after Russia's military operation in Ukraine began that provides a possible motive for giving this bad intelligence a pass. Quoting from the introduction and conclusion:

**

On a warm October day in 2019, the eminent Russia studies professor Stephen F. Cohen and I sat down in Manhattan for what would be our last in-person interview (Cohen passed away in September 2020 at the age of 81).

The House was gearing up to impeach Donald Trump for freezing weapons shipments to Ukraine while pressuring its government to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The Beltway media was consumed with frenzy of a presidency in peril. But Professor Cohen, one of the leading Russia scholars in the United States, was concerned with what the impeachment spectacle in Washington meant for the long-running war between the US-backed Ukrainian government and Russian-backed rebels in the Donbas.

At that point, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky was just months into an upstart presidency that he had won on a pledge to end the Donbas conflict. Instead of supporting the Ukrainian leader’s peace mandate, Democrats in Congress were impeaching Trump for briefly impeding the flow of weapons that fueled the fight. As his Democratic allies now like to forget, President Obama refused to send these same weapons out of fear of prolonging the war and arming Nazis. By abandoning Obama’s policy, the Democrats, Cohen warned, threaten to sabotage peace and strengthen Ukraine’s far-right.

“Zelensky ran as a peace candidate,” Cohen explained. “He won an enormous mandate to make peace. So, that means he has to negotiate with Vladimir Putin.” But there was a major obstacle. Ukrainian fascists “have said that they will remove and kill Zelensky if he continues along this line of negotiating with Putin… His life is being threatened literally by a quasi-fascist movement in Ukraine.”

[snip]

While claiming to profess concern for Ukrainian lives, NATO policymakers have made plain their disregard for diplomacy. Instead, as retired senior US diplomat Chas Freeman recently told me, they have pursued a policy of fighting Russia “to the last Ukrainian.”

“Everything we are doing, rather than accelerate an end to the fighting and some compromise, seems to be aimed at prolonging the fighting,” Freeman, the former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, among a number of other senior positions, said.

Invoking Freeman’s warning, Noam Chomsky concurs that US policy amounts to a “death warrant” for Ukraine.

Indeed, on April 5, the Washington Post made clear the prevailing viewpoint in Washignton and Brussels: “For some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost to Kyiv and the rest of Europe.” While rhetorically claiming to support Ukrainian agency, in reality, the Post added, “there are limits to how many compromises some in NATO will support to win the peace.” This is undoubtedly the message being relayed to Zelensky from the White House in what National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan described as “near-daily contact” with Zelensky’s team about the negotiations with Russia.

In sabotaging Zelensky’s peace mandate to side with the Ukrainian far-right, the US pushed Ukraine into a calamity that Professor Cohen warned about nearly three years ago.

“There were moments in history, political history, when there’s an opportunity that is so good and wise and so often lost, the chance,” Cohen told me in October 2019. “So, the chance for Zelensky, the new president who had this very large victory, 70 plus percent to negotiate with Russia an end to that war, it’s got to be seized. And it requires the United States, basically, simply saying to Zelensky, ‘Go for it, we’ve got your back.’”

By choosing to ignore the pleas of lonely voices like Cohen to instead have the back of Ukraine’s far-right, Washington sabotaged a historic peace mandate and helped provoke a catastrophic war.

**

Full article:

https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/18/siding-with-ukraines-far-right-us-sabotaged-zelenskys-peace-mandate/

I have no idea what any of this has to do with anything I am talking about here. 

I was presenting evidence that might suggest why Trump's political opponents might try to smear him with these accusations of colluding with Russia.

 

[robosmith]

3 hours ago, Scott75 said:

I suspect that this is what the western mainstream media would have you believe. It's not the truth though. You may not be aware of this, but Ukraine started a civil war 8 years before Russia's military operation. That, in turn, only started after a massacre killing dozens of people in the capital in early 2014, which was swiftly blamed on the elected President of the time, Victor Yanukovych,  who in turn fled for his life to Russia.

A lot of evidence has since surfaced that Yanukovych was -not- responsible for that massacre. A good article on a lot of this evidence can be seen here:

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-hidden-truth-about-ukraine-italian-documentary-bombshell-evidence-kiev-euromaidan-snipers-kill-demonstrators/5619684

Anyway, as I said, after Yanukovych's flight to Russia and the takeover of the Ukrainian government by far right and neo nazi elements, those same elements almost immediately tried to denigrate the Russian language by forbidding it to be used in government institutions in all of Ukraine, despite the fact that it was the primary language for many eastern Ukrainians. This may well have been the final straw for the Crimeans, who held a referendum to rejoin Russia. After the referendum was in favour of rejoining, Russia accepted and annexed them back into Russia.

Much of the rest of eastern Ukraine, while never having been part of Russia in the past, still had strong linguistic and ethnic ties to Russia, and so began to engage protests in eastern Ukrainian cities, perhaps most notably in Odessa. The same far right elements I mentioned previously perpetrated a massacre there. Evgeny Norin, a Russian historian focused on Russia's wars and international politics, wrote a very good article on the whole thing, which can be seen here:

https://www.rt.com/russia/554860-burned-alive-2014-odessa/

Quoting from the article:

**

A total of 48 people died: two Maidan activists and 46 Kulikovo Field Anti-Maidan protesters – two on Grecheskaya Street, and 42 at Kulikovo Field Square. Eight people jumped from the building to their deaths, while others suffocated or died from burns. All were citizens of Ukraine. A total of 247 people requested medical help following the incident, of whom 27 had been wounded by gunfire.

Albu, the local politician and one of the leaders of the group, was among those who had taken cover in the building but survived. He later joined the LPR’s Prizrak Brigade in Donbass. Another leader, local MP Vyacheslav Markin, died the next morning from injuries sustained after jumping from the building to escape the fire.

Ashes

In the following years, not a single person responsible for the killings in Odessa was punished in any way. Many of the murderers acted openly, wearing no masks or disguises, and were very straightforward about their intentions. Only a handful even faced criminal investigation. But ultimately, not a single one was brought before the courts to answer for the crimes committed. Whatever hearings did manage to be scheduled were derailed by the so-called ‘patriots’. A number of judges were forced to recuse themselves from the cases after receiving threats from militants.

Meanwhile, high-ranking Ukrainian politicians were quick to identify the ‘culprits’. Ukraine’s acting President Oleksandr Turchinov said that the disturbances in Odessa “were coordinated from a single center located in Russia.” Sergey Pashinsky, acting head of the presidential administration, said that it was “an FSB provocation to divert attention from the [so-called] anti-terrorist operation [in the Donbass]”. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry declared that “the tragedy was a pre-planned and well-financed operation by the Russian special services.”

From the very beginning, the authorities in Odessa seemed to deliberately obstruct the investigation. By the morning of May 3, the area around Grecheskaya Street had been cleared by municipal workers, who quickly disposed of all the physical evidence. The Trade Unions building remained open to the public for the following month. Citizens could watch live streams from the smoldering ruins, with one cameraman referring to the corpses of a young pair as “Romeo and Juliet.” No attempt was made to preserve the crime scene. The weapons used to kill people were never found. And these are just a few examples of the investigation’s dismissive and negligent attitude toward the case. In September 2015, UN Special Rapporteur Christof Heyns acknowledged that the bulk of the evidence relating to the May 2 events was destroyed immediately after the crime.

Euromaidan activist Sergei Khodiyak, who fired at people with a hunting rifle, was released from custody, and the judge recused himself from the case under pressure from a group of Maidan activists led by Igor Mosiychuk, an MP from the nationalist Radical Party. Vsevolod Goncharevsky, who used a club to beat and finish off Kulikovo activists who had jumped out of the windows of the burning building, was released due to a “lack of evidence.” 

[snip]

In fact, Ukrainian social media did exactly what is commonly attributed to Russian propaganda. The piles of burnt corpses evoked feelings of horror, but also of rage. May 2014 was a breaking point: volunteers from Russia started to arrive in the breakaway republics en masse and even some men from Western Europe came to fight on their side. Slogans about autonomous status and the need to engage in talks with Kiev gave way to an unwavering resolve and determination to stand and fight to the bitter end. Just a few days after May 2, a Donbass rebel wrote on a destroyed and burned-out Ukrainian infantry fighting vehicle: “This is for Odessa, you bastards.”

**

Despite all of this, for 8 years, Russia tried to find a diplomatic solution to this civil war. Putin even mentioned this in the speech he gave on the day he started his military operation:

**

This brings me to the situation in Donbass. We can see that the forces that staged the coup in Ukraine in 2014 have seized power, are keeping it with the help of ornamental election procedures and have abandoned the path of a peaceful conflict settlement. For eight years, for eight endless years we have been doing everything possible to settle the situation by peaceful political means. Everything was in vain.

As I said in my previous address, you cannot look without compassion at what is happening there. It became impossible to tolerate it. We had to stop that atrocity, that genocide of the millions of people who live there and who pinned their hopes on Russia, on all of us. It is their aspirations, the feelings and pain of these people that were the main motivating force behind our decision to recognise the independence of the Donbass people’s republics.

**

Full transcript:

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/statements/67843

 

Do you seriously believe rt.com and kremlin.ru are credible news organizations instead of JUST PUTIN'S mouthpieces?

1 hour ago, Legato said:

To you....everyone else?.....well Ill leave that to your kaleidoscope imagination.

Unlike ^TROLL, I have a very strong grasp of REALITY. Do you even know what reality checking is? LMAO

[WestCanMan]

15 hours ago, Scott75 said:

I believe you're right regarding the FBI's claims, but I'd also like to point out that I haven't seen any evidence that robosmith has lied, by which I mean I haven't seen any evidence that he has tried to persuade anyone here of something that he himself doesn't believe to be true.

That's because his confirmation bias is cranked to "iron dome/Swiss cheese". He treats unwanted facts like scud missiles headed towards a packed elementary school, and anything that he wants to believe teleports past his cerebral cortex and gets scorched into his long-term memory bank.  

I've shown him the sworn testimony of Crowdstrike's CEO saying "We don't know for certain the servers were even hacked". He knows that Assange said that his source was a leak, not a hacker, and that Assange has never been caught lying about his sources in his hundreds, maybe thousands of leaks. Yet roboliar still makes declarative statements predicated on the knowledge that Assange got his info from hackers, based on nothing more than the opinion of known perjurers, and every time he does that, it qualifies as a lie. 

I personally don't know the server wasn't hacked, and I don't know that Assange wasn't lying, and I know that there's a chance that the FBI could really believe that the server was hacked by Russians regardless of how many other things the FBI lied about, but it's a simple fact that all of those maybes don't add up to even a single shred "evidence": it's all nothing more than a Russian collusion conspiracy theory until someone finds an actual trail of irrefutable forensic cookie crumbs.

The fact of the matter is that the FBI chose to slander Trump based on a set of allegations that can never be disproven, because it's impossible to prove the negative. It's the same for the slander against Kavanaugh, as well as E J Caroll's slander against Trump. All of those allegations are impossible to disprove. For example, if I say that someone raped me in 2017, how could they prove otherwise, without video of every single second of therr life in 2017? It is absolutely impossible. So the Dems/FBI have this little formula for slandering people that they can pull out of their pocket whenever they want, and Russian collusion is a perfect example of that. As long as the MSM is biased/corrupt enough to keep pimping the Dems'/FBI's lies as credible stories, we're gonna keep having slander presented to us as gospel truth. 

And one more thing: the Demis, MSM and their leftard cultists continually count it as "a lie" when Trump says "I never colluded with Russia."

Do the easy math on that one... Trump can absolutely know whether or not he colluded, and it doesn't require one iota of evidence, because if he did it would be in his memory. By contrast, all of the declarative statements that he did collude with Russia absolutely qualify as lies because CNN and MSNBC et al absolutely don't know that he colluded - they're just buying into a conspiracy theory that was created by known perjurers.  A factual statement from the MSM could be no more declarative than "Trump allegedly colluded with Russia", anything more direct than that is. a. lie.... period.

FACT: The MSM absolutely has LIED about Russian collusion tens of thousands of times, if not hundreds of thousands of times. 

No one has any proof that Trump lied about Russian collusion even once. 

[WestCanMan]

15 hours ago, robosmith said:

The US Senate says YOU'RE WRONG. And frankly you have ZERO credibility here because you are an IGNORANT CANUCK only PRETENDING to know what's going on here. YOU only know half the story AT BEST. LMAO

The Senate doesn't get to decide if unsubstantiated claims are evidence, and the Durham report proved beyond question that what the Senate approved was chock full of serious lies and even crimes. The fact that the FBI's head lackey was convicted of felony evidence tampering for their role in pimping that garbage as "evidence" is irrefutable proof that your vaunted "report" is "absolute garbage". It is absolutely, positively known to be garbage. 

Edited January 7 by WestCanMan

[CdnFox]

15 hours ago, robosmith said:

How would you know? LMAO

wow.  Sick burn.  Did you mime dropping a mike while you were typing that? 

[WestCanMan]

1 minute ago, CdnFox said:

wow.  Sick burn.  Did you mime dropping a mike while you were typing that? 

He just drops deuces all over the place here. He's like a human version of Black Dog. 

[CdnFox]

21 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:

He just drops deuces all over the place here. He's like a human version of Black Dog. 

That does make sense... someone asked him once what he prefers to wear when he posts here and he just said "depends".   I thought he meant it was contingent on the weather or something but perhaps he was being literal? 

[WestCanMan]

32 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:

That's because his confirmation bias is cranked to "iron dome/Swiss cheese". He treats unwanted facts like scud missiles headed towards a packed elementary school, and anything that he wants to believe teleports past his cerebral cortex and gets scorched into his long-term memory bank.  

I've shown him the sworn testimony of Crowdstrike's CEO saying "We don't know for certain the servers were even hacked". He knows that Assange said that his source was a leak, not a hacker, and that Assange has never been caught lying about his sources in his hundreds, maybe thousands of leaks. Yet roboliar still makes declarative statements predicated on the knowledge that Assange got his info from hackers, based on nothing more than the opinion of known perjurers, and every time he does that, it qualifies as a lie. 

I personally don't know the server wasn't hacked, and I don't know that Assange wasn't lying, and I know that there's a chance that the FBI could really believe that the server was hacked by Russians regardless of how many other things the FBI lied about, but it's a simple fact that all of those maybes don't add up to even a single shred "evidence": it's all nothing more than a Russian collusion conspiracy theory until someone finds an actual trail of irrefutable forensic cookie crumbs.

The fact of the matter is that the FBI chose to slander Trump based on a set of allegations that can never be disproven, because it's impossible to prove the negative. It's the same for the slander against Kavanaugh, as well as E J Caroll's slander against Trump. All of those allegations are impossible to disprove. For example, if I say that someone raped me in 2017, how could they prove otherwise, without video of every single second of therr life in 2017? It is absolutely impossible. So the Dems/FBI have this little formula for slandering people that they can pull out of their pocket whenever they want, and Russian collusion is a perfect example of that. As long as the MSM is biased/corrupt enough to keep pimping the Dems'/FBI's lies as credible stories, we're gonna keep having slander presented to us as gospel truth. 

And one more thing: the Demis, MSM and their leftard cultists continually count it as "a lie" when Trump says "I never colluded with Russia."

Do the easy math on that one... Trump can absolutely know whether or not he colluded, and it doesn't require one iota of evidence, because if he did it would be in his memory. By contrast, all of the declarative statements that he did collude with Russia absolutely qualify as lies because CNN and MSNBC et al absolutely don't know that he colluded - they're just buying into a conspiracy theory that was created by known perjurers.  A factual statement from the MSM could be no more declarative than "Trump allegedly colluded with Russia", anything more direct than that is. a. lie.... period.

FACT: The MSM absolutely has LIED about Russian collusion tens of thousands of times, if not hundreds of thousands of times. 

No one has any proof that Trump lied about Russian collusion even once. 

@robosmith read ^that^ and weep, you worthless little turd. 

[Legato]

2 hours ago, robosmith said:

Unlike ^TROLL, I have a very strong grasp of REALITY. Do you even know what reality checking is? LMAO

Of course, everyone knows.

Make sure the water supply is clean. Check all plumbing, electrickery etc. External...roof shingles cladding etc.

Are you selling your house? If so herbie has some good tips on using a credit card to increase it's value.

 

[WestCanMan]

Robo is running from this thread now. His confirmation bias just hit DefCon1 - Cocked Pistol.

[CdnFox]

9 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:

Robo is running from this thread now

Which is a pretty neat trick considering he didn't have a leg to stand on