Cont: Breaking: Mueller Grand Jury charges filed, arrests as soon as Monday pt 2

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BobTheCoward said:
This is the law from page 68 that the conversation has focused on these last few pages.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=12392127&postcount=2681

As an aside, this thread vacillates between being a thread about legal questions and general questions of what happened outside of trial standards of proof. It is interesting.
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Thanks. That's helpful.

Yes, Bob, a lot of this thread is about what we don't know.

I thought I found a Bloomberg report that explained the difference between Trump's team and Hillary's, but it wasn't all that clear. Paying for the info appeared to make a difference. That the statute does not distinguish between foreign nationals and foreign governments was interesting to me.

The whole thing could have just been bait to see how interested Trump would be in the information. He apparently wasn't enthralled with the "dirt" uncovered. Manafort, Junior and Jared may have each been told to keep an eye on the others. So whatever was presented at the meeting, we don't have any reason to believe it was a bombshell. Of course the meeting could have been simply to test the waters. We, the public, don't know whether more meetings were agreed to.

But we do know Trump & Co. freaked out and starting lying their butts off, often contradicting themselves. And I think it's permissible for Mueller to ask questions about why such an edifice of lies was constructed. There may never be a satisfactory answer.
 
PhantomWolf said:
It really boils down to a case of what did Trump know, and when did he know it, as far as the Russian activities were concerned. This is the same issue that was put before Nixon over Watergate, and it has a lot of parallels, with the only real differences being that instead of a physical intrusion by American burglars, it is a case of electronic intrusion by Russian Hackers.
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100% this.

The only real differences are the foreign nation factor and the electronic rather than physical nature of the break in.
 
smartcooky said:
100% this.

The only real differences are the foreign nation factor and the electronic rather than physical nature of the break in.
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The foreign nation/national factor might be similar, too:

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1986/05/24/Watergate-A-Greek-connection/7123517291200/

The magazine reports that hitherto unpublished material from the Watergate prosecutors' office showed that Pappas, despite his denials to investigative committees, contributed up to $400,000 to Nixon's election campaign and solicited contributions from corporations and individuals, including foreign nationals, 'in clear violation of U.S. law forbidding such donations.'
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Hitchens went into great detail about his whole (elaborate, CIA-involving) theory about it in "The Trial of Henry Kissinger", but it's...not light reading, and I'm not sure I can even paraphrase it with much accuracy, but it's very interesting.

You can read it for here, free, if you want:
https://archive.org/details/trialofhenrykiss00hitc
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
One of the regular MSNBC pundits is a Watergate prosecutor. She has a lot to say including the fact that they took the evidence/work home with them at night because they feared Nixon would have it seized.

I hope Mueller and his team are doing the same.
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It has seemed to me that Mueller has stayed a couple months ahead of the rest of us. I suspect that, for the last half-year at least, a few key members of congress have been in possession of sealed envelopes containing drafts of Mueller's final report, and that every few weeks he gives them updated drafts. If Sessions reneged on his recusal and raided Mueller's office, confiscating everything and locking all of Mueller's people out of their own offices indefinitely, the report would still come out.

Actually, I sleep a little better because I think that.
 
dasmiller said:
It has seemed to me that Mueller has stayed a couple months ahead of the rest of us. I suspect that, for the last half-year at least, a few key members of congress have been in possession of sealed envelopes containing drafts of Mueller's final report, and that every few weeks he gives them updated drafts. If Sessions reneged on his recusal and raided Mueller's office, confiscating everything and locking all of Mueller's people out of their own offices indefinitely, the report would still come out.

Actually, I sleep a little better because I think that.
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I wonder how much our interpretation is influenced by what helps us sleep. I think a lot about all the evidence the same way all the evidence didn't amount to much in the malheur trials in getting members on conspiracy. I think some defense like "we were going to pay for it" will work about as well as "no employee tried to go to work."

I'm probably able to sleep better being insulated from disappointment.
 
BobTheCoward said:
To clarify for the second time, the legal I meant was in compliance with election law. It is either possible for a foreign principal to provide a document of some sort, or it is not. I'm leaning towards not.

I mean, technically speaking, the sensitive russian documents could have been a collection of news articles from the Clinton impeachment. It doesn't take much for a government document to gain a classification status. But even trying to send those over would probably be illegal.
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There's no reason to believe Jr. or others thought the Russian documents were culled from publicly available information. If they were, then he would not have been excited about the meeting. The White Houses's tune at the moment is that this was "dirt."
 
Cain said:
There's no reason to believe Jr. or others thought the Russian documents were culled from publicly available information. If they were, then he would not have been excited about the meeting. The White Houses's tune at the moment is that this was "dirt."
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But I think we are talking two different things here. I also don't think it is reasonable to believe. I also think it would work in preventing 12 jurors from reaching a guilty verdict.
 
BobTheCoward said:
But I think we are talking two different things here. I also don't think it is reasonable to believe. I also think it would work in preventing 12 jurors from reaching a guilty verdict.
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It was described as "official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and ... very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump."

I'm not seeing room for "reasonable doubt" regarding it maybe just being publicly available info.
 
kellyb said:
It was described as "official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and ... very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump."

I'm not seeing room for "reasonable doubt" regarding it maybe just being publicly available info.
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Governments classify things sometimes just based on subject matter.
 
BobTheCoward said:
Governments classify things sometimes just based on subject matter.
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You're stretching, Bob. Nothing about the exchange made it seem like publicly available information.

On the other hand, nothing about the exchange made it seem like it was obtained from hacking. If Hillary had dirty dealings with any Russians, then the Russian government could have obtained that dirt through legal means from the Russian side of those dealings.
 
Ziggurat said:
You're stretching, Bob. Nothing about the exchange made it seem like publicly available information.

On the other hand, nothing about the exchange made it seem like it was obtained from hacking. If Hillary had dirty dealings with any Russians, then the Russian government could have obtained that dirt through legal means from the Russian side of those dealings.
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High level and sensitive doesn't mean it isn't publically available. There is public information on highly classified military operations.
 
kellyb said:
It was described as "official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and ... very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump."

I'm not seeing room for "reasonable doubt" regarding it maybe just being publicly available info.
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Then the lawyers will stick with they were going to purchase it at market value. They have a few options.
 
BobTheCoward said:
High level and sensitive doesn't mean it isn't publically available. There is public information on highly classified military operations.
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The part that's public isn't "high level and sensitive", basically by definition.
 
BobTheCoward said:
Then the lawyers will stick with they were going to purchase it at market value. They have a few options.
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They're going to have a hard time getting around the specific statement that it was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump" in that case.
 
kellyb said:
The part that's public isn't "high level and sensitive", basically by definition.
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Things can get that label when it enters the government sphere. Passing a news article about a secret subject among high level officials can make it secret.
 
BobTheCoward said:
Then the lawyers will stick with they were going to purchase it at market value. They have a few options.
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You're ignoring that one of the few things we know about the meeting is that the Russians wanted to talk about the Magnitski Act sanctions... er, adoptions. That's why they went to the campaign with the dirt instead of the press. About the only defense seems to be claiming that DJTJ, Kusher, and Manafort were all too stupid to realize the Russians were looking for a very valuable quid pro quo for their dirt.
 
WilliamSeger said:
You're ignoring that one of the few things we know about the meeting is that the Russians wanted to talk about the Magnitski Act sanctions... er, adoptions. That's why they went to the campaign with the dirt instead of the press. About the only defense seems to be claiming that DJTJ, Kusher, and Manafort were all too stupid to realize the Russians were looking for a very valuable quid pro quo for their dirt.
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They didn't know it was about that before the meeting (supposedly). So their attending the meeting wouldn't be a conspiracy.
 
Ziggurat said:
You're stretching, Bob. Nothing about the exchange made it seem like publicly available information.

On the other hand, nothing about the exchange made it seem like it was obtained from hacking. If Hillary had dirty dealings with any Russians, then the Russian government could have obtained that dirt through legal means from the Russian side of those dealings.
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If it was hacked info or not doesn't seem relevant to the theoretical legal case we're discussing, I don't think.
 
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