Merged All things Trump + Russia

[Skeptic Ginger]

Think of it as 6 degrees of Vladimir Putin, that's as good as guilty for some.

Not sure how to interpret your "as good as guilty for some" comment. Try this: Putin isn't stupid. Of course he's going to build in some plausible separation.

 

[Elagabalus]

Think of it as 6 degrees of Vladimir Putin, that's as good as guilty for some.

Yes. Don't question the Russians. We believe everything they say. How the mighty hath fallen ....

 

[johnny karate]

I interpret that as "No, I have no evidence that she works for the Russians, therefore I will assume that she does"

Think of it as 6 degrees of Vladimir Putin, that's as good as guilty for some.

The two of you clearly glossed over missed this post:

It doesn't matter what the woman says or the Kremlin says. What we have is Donnie Jr, the Prince of the Alt-dot-Ukraine, and the Secretary-to-be-of-Everything gleefully meeting with someone they were given reason to believe was....

... going to give them dirt on Hillary, obtained by Russian security and with the tacit approval of the Russian government, at very high levels, who were working to get Donald J. Trump elected.

"Oh, well, we don't know what her actual status was...." is not even remotely germane to the case. We have mens rea - they intended to do wrong.

I'll be over here holding my breath waiting for either one of you to address it.

 

[Cain]

It doesn't matter what the woman says or the Kremlin says. What we have is Donnie Jr, the Prince of the Alt-dot-Ukraine, and the Secretary-to-be-of-Everything gleefully meeting with someone they were given reason to believe was....

This is exactly the point.

If Jr.'s wife hired an investigator to pose as a 23 year-old hottie on Facebook, and Little Donnie set up a tryst, is he seriously going to later defend himself saying, "Nothing happened! And besides, nothing COULD have happened because I was, in fact, talking to a middle-aged bald dude."

 

[Arcade22]

Unfortunately a large part of the republican voters, and more specifically the Trump true believers, are unlikely to find colluding with a foreign hostile power to get elected to be objectionable just because it happened to be "their guy". Why shouldn't he be conspiring with them to be winning against the hated Clinton?

He can still likely maintain about 1/4 and 1/3 support of the electorate perhaps indefinitely. In Americas broken political system this would be enough to maintain influence in red-states and counties so as to make many, but not all, Republicans unwilling to risk their elections by speaking out against his behavior publicly (which is what counts, nobody cares if Republicans are crying about Trump ruining America behind closed doors).

This means it's highly likely that the legislature can start holding Trump to account for his actions only after the 2018 elections even if there's enough evidence publicly available to prove that Trump himself was clearly aware and consented to collusion with Russia's influence operation.

 

[Babbylonian]

This is exactly the point.

If Jr.'s wife hired an investigator to pose as a 23 year-old hottie on Facebook, and Little Donnie set up a tryst, is he seriously going to later defend himself saying, "Nothing happened! And besides, nothing COULD have happened because I was, in fact, talking to a middle-aged bald dude."

To Catch a Trump.

 

[jimbob]

This doesn't indicate that the timezone is actually stored along with the timestamp. In fact, looking at the file format specification, there are only 4 bytes allocated to the file time (FTIME).

As far as I can tell, the timestamp, adjusted for the system's local time, would be stored, but not the timezone offset itself (let alone a DST flag). This is pretty crucial information if you want to know, accurately, the time that a timestamp represents (I've had to "deal with" "non-local local time" as part of my job). You would need to already know at what time the file was created or modified in order to make any educated guesses about the timezone offset.

It would also be trivial to set the timezone to wherever you wanted (and indeed the time). All that the lack of a Moscow timestamp indicstes is tgaf it wasn't a highly amateurish Russian hack.

 

[Lurch]

It's a chortle inducer to see attempts to minimize impact by focusing on peripheral desiterata. A *Russian National* offering to a US election team damaging info they *expressly desire* to obtain on that team's opponent is somehow not improper because said National is not working directly for the Russian State? As noted by others, mens rea applies because there was *intent* to do wrong on the part of Donnie Jr., and by implication his confederates in attendance, Manafort and Kushner.

 

[Arcade22]

I interpret that as "No, I have no evidence that she works for the Russians, therefore I will assume that she does"

Here you go:

MOSCOW — When American prosecutors accused a senior Russian official’s son of laundering $14 million by investing in Manhattan property and other assets, she was called to defend him. When Moscow regional officials battled Ikea over the Swedish retailer’s expansion, she took on their case.

Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. last year to discuss possible compromising material on the Democrats, has been widely depicted as a one-issue activist consumed with getting Congress to repeal sanctions against Russian businessmen.

But lawyers and others in Moscow’s legal community called her a trusted insider, one who could be counted on to argue and win important high-profile court cases that matter to the government and to one senior, well-connected official in particular.

Ms. Veselnitskaya, 42, earned her status as the go-to lawyer for the Moscow regional government. For years, she has been a lawyer for the Katsyv family, whose patriarch, Pyotr D. Katsyv, was minister of transportation of the Moscow region for more than a decade, and whose son was caught up in the New York money laundering case.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/...lnitskaya-donald-trump-jr-russian-lawyer.html

It's quite likely that she was just a go between and in fact it's quite possible that no "compromising material" (kompromat)^WP was exchanged during the meeting at Trump tower. That material might have been delivered at a later point.

 

[Cain]

Here you go:



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/...lnitskaya-donald-trump-jr-russian-lawyer.html

It's quite likely that she was just a go between and in fact it's quite possible that no "compromising material" (kompromat)^WP was exchanged during the meeting at Trump tower. That material might have been delivered at a later point.

Yeah, but then the argument becomes, "Well, was the information true?" If it was true, then American voters should be allowed to hear it. Remember, millions of people voted for Donald Trump. Tens of millions of people. So many people. Almost as many as Hillary.

 

[trustbutverify]

It's quite likely that she was just a go between and in fact it's quite possible that no "compromising material" (kompromat)^WP was exchanged during the meeting at Trump tower. That material might have been delivered at a later point.

Exactly.

 

[varwoche]

How about "Russian operative". The woman was interviewed and says she does not work for the Kremlin, and the Kremlin says the same. Perhaps they are lying but there is no evidence I am aware of to counter this.

She acted as an intermediary between the Russian government and Trump, operating on behalf of the Russian government.

Her claims of innocence are utterly meaningless. What do you expect her to say? I'm a Russian operative meddling in the US election system.

 

[Elagabalus]

Ah, the New York Post

http://nypost.com/2017/07/11/donald-trump-jr-is-an-idiot/


And WaPo

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...091478-664d-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Given how forthcoming Jr. has been with his mails, it looks to me like he's setting himself up to be the Fall-guy.
Like many have speculated, there must be even uglier skeletons in the closets of Trump Tower if they are willing to sacrifice the Eldest Son.

 

[Arcade22]

Given how forthcoming Jr. has been with his mails, it looks to me like he's setting himself up to be the Fall-guy.
Like many have speculated, there must be even uglier skeletons in the closets of Trump Tower if they are willing to sacrifice the Eldest Son.

What struck me about the email exchange is how casual and largely unsurprised junior seemed at hearing that someone working for the Russian government was willing to meet them and share material that might appear compromising to Clinton.

It appears to me that there's more to this than what has been revealed publicly. Like the nytimes oped says: with an administration this dishonest one can only wonder what else trump junior and senior is hiding?

 

[WilliamSeger]

Given how forthcoming Jr. has been with his mails, it looks to me like he's setting himself up to be the Fall-guy.
Like many have speculated, there must be even uglier skeletons in the closets of Trump Tower if they are willing to sacrifice the Eldest Son.

Jr. wasn't forthcoming until the NYT told him they had the emails, but I don't think it will save Kushner; he's toast for lying on his disclosures. There's just no way he can credibly claim to have forgotten this meeting, regardless of what was discussed. He may be able to avoid jail, but he will surely lose his security clearance, which means he can go back to running the family business into the ground.

Flynn is on the back burner for now, but that could boil over at any time, and I'm pretty sure that's where the real dirt is. Trump's "loyalty" to Flynn makes absolutely no sense. Yet.

 

[Aridas]

Jr. wasn't forthcoming until the NYT told him they had the emails, but I don't think it will save Kushner; he's toast for lying on his disclosures. There's just no way he can credibly claim to have forgotten this meeting, regardless of what was discussed. He may be able to avoid jail, but he will surely lose his security clearance, which means he can go back to running the family business into the ground.

Flynn is on the back burner for now, but that could boil over at any time, and I'm pretty sure that's where the real dirt is. Trump's "loyalty" to Flynn makes absolutely no sense. Yet.

As opposed to things like helping the Iranian Guard launder money into a terribly placed Azerbaijan location or that inexplicably high priced property sale to a Russian? There's a lot of options for the potential "real dirt."

 

[alfaniner]

“My son is a high-quality person, and I applaud his transparency,” Trump said, according to deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who read the statement to reporters at Tuesday's off-camera press briefing.

Before Predictive Text changed it, it read "My son is a high-quality person, and I applaud his parents.”

 

[Puppycow]

Can somebody explain to me what the crime was here?

I'm not a Trump defender or anything, I would like to see him gone ASAP. I just wonder what precisely is the crime.

 

[Aridas]

Can somebody explain to me what the crime was here?

I'm not a Trump defender or anything, I would like to see him gone ASAP. I just wonder what precisely is the crime.

There's a bit of debate, given the specifics. Going by the short version, campaign law forbids accepting or soliciting foreign money or other notable aid from foreign sources. Trump Jr. was fully intending to break that, given the e-mails, and Manafort and Kushner were apparently in on it directly. Fairly certainly Trump, himself, too, given his statements right after the e-mails. Supposedly, nothing of value was actually presented at the meeting itself, though, which gives a tiny bit of a defense regarding whether campaign law was actually directly broken or not.