I think we all know the answer to this without reading the article. He would take it because wimpy, bullshit election laws do not apply to him.
29 thoughts on “What would DJ Trump do if Russia again offered dirt on an opponent”
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I think we all know the answer to this without reading the article. He would take it because wimpy, bullshit election laws do not apply to him.
Comments are closed.
Again you’re missing the obvious. No matter what you believe about their original motivation, one thing is completely clear: IF they knew of the existence of the dossier, they would have used it to win the election. Since they did not, it is obvious that they had no idea that such a thing existed. You can take that to the bank.
Hillary apparently went ballistic when she found out in January that the reports existed from two aides who read it on Buzzfeed. She realized that her campaign had indirectly financed the research, and yet never received the bombshell findings which presumably would have had a massive impact on the election.
Not only did they have no idea Steele’s reports existed, but Steele had no idea he was working for them until many weeks after he started the project. (I assume he would have given the info directly to them, had he known, but heaven only knows what motivates that guy. He’s a hard one to figure.)
Obviously, the law firm did not pay for the research out of the goodness of their hearts. They were paid a handsome fee by the Hillary campaign to facilitate research. (As I recall, it was more than a million dollars.) They employed others, in turn, and sometimes those other hired still others. This is SOP for consulting jobs. This is almost exactly what I did for a living. Many times when I was contracted by Shell for various purposes, I subcontracted to others, and they often subcontracted to still others in turn. And the most common reasons for this were consumer research and competition research in new territories (meaning new countries). I paid the subcontractors, but obviously not out of the goodness of my heart, but because I needed them to complete what Shell asked me to do, and thus earn my fee. This is all just standard business practice, especially when local expertise is needed in a foreign country. I once did a research project on Dick Cheney quite similar to the one these guys did on Trump. (It was in the 1995-1997 period when he was with Halliburton, and had nothing to do with politics. At that time it was believed he would remain entirely in the private sector.)
Finally, as to your question. If Trump hired somebody to do opposition research on (let’s say) Biden, and the researcher turned up evidence of Biden committing a crime or being beholden to a foreign power, you bet your ass they need to turn that over to the intelligence services for appropriate follow-up, be it tapped phones, or arrests, or whatever. That would be true even if Trump personally hired the researcher. The name of the person who ordered the research is irrelevant. What’s relevant is what the research finds!
I appreciate the explanation Scoop, and I totally agree with your last point. However, the “research” should have been verified before Comey used it as evidence. To date, the dossier is still unverified, and should not have been used as evidence in court, especially FISC.
According to the state dept, they received the first copy of the dossier in July 2016, and was widely circulated around Washington before the election. I dont believe Hillary would be left in the dark for 6 months by all her cronies who supported her.
Lastly, a state dept official, Kathleen Kavelec met with Steele on Oct 11, about a month before the election, and wrote a memo to alert the FBI that the dossier was politically motivated and unverifiable/false. Comey apparently ignored her advice and ran with the dossier and misrepresented the it to the judge.
Your mistake there is following the silly narrative of “all her cronies who supported her.” Those were people trying to do their jobs, chips fall where they may. Remember it was Comey who got Trump elected! He wasn’t a very good “crony” for Hillary.
But again you are missing the only point that really matters – IF Hillary knew that such allegations existed, THEN she would have used that to get elected. She did not use the info, ERGO she did not know of it. Case closed, with 100% certainty.
The fact you cite, that the info started to appear in June, would be further proof that Hillary had no knowledge of it! If she knew of any of it before the election, it would have been leaked. It would have appeared in Buzzfeed November 1, not in January.
Also, there was obviously no “political motivation,” since the ultimate political motivation would have been to use the info to win the election, but the FBI kept it all secret and pursued the criminal side of it. In fact, Steele was upset that the FBI did so little with the info. He felt the FBI was protecting Trump! (And the infamous Comey announcement tends to support that hypothesis.)
Keep in mind that it was Steele and Steele alone, on his own authority, who leaked all the info to his contacts in both British and American intelligence, and none of the parties gave the Democrats that info, which would probably have had a dramatic impact on the election.
The timeline and the facts of the case do not support any other take on it. The only way to spin it as “politically motivated” is to trace the indirect money line back from Steele to the Democrats, and that connection is genuine if anfractuous, but in fact that theory falls flat when you realize that the Democrats never got any of the Steele info, and you can be certain of that because they never used it to win the election. The Clinton campaign never learned anything about the info until October 31, and even then they did not know Steele’s name (Mother Jones article appeared), and they didn’t know the extent of his findings until January (Buzzfeed article appeared). Far from being a secret campaign weapon, Steele turned out to be a secret kept from the campaign.
There are three things the FBI could have done to swing the election to Hillary: (1) they could have forwarded the Steele memos to the Hillary campaign; (2) Comey could have kept his mouth shut about the re-opened Hillary investigation; (3) they could have leaked to the Dems that the F.B.I. had launched a counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump team’s ties to Russia. They did none of those things. Instead they simply and quietly followed the thread of suspected criminal or traitorous activity, as was their job.
What a nice law firm, they just forked out $168,000 out of the goodness of their hearts to purchase a fake dossier for Hillary. I’ve never known such generous lawyers.
If you believe that, then with all due respect, Scoop, you are the fool. She funneled the money through Perkins Cole.
And the dossier wasn’t about winning the election – it was needed for evidence to secure FISA warrants – for the spying they had been doing for over a year already!
I have to wonder…if Trump paid for opposition research from foreign agents, then that info was used against Biden or Sanders to obtain warrants to spy on them and their entire campaigns…am I to assume the dems would be fine with that?
I love the spin on the Steele Dossier. “Oh, the Dems didn’t know a thing about it!” What a crock.
Dude, don’t be a fool. It’s obvious that they couldn’t possibly have known anything about it.
If they did, they would have used it in the campaign!
Trump would be wrong to take a meeting like that. Given his sterling character and rock solid ethics, I don’t think there is much he would reject on moral grounds if he thought it would help him be reelected (or make a buck). I think most politicians today would be wary of collaborating with a hostile power simply because of how much public scrutiny there is of that issue. But prior to the 2016 election, we know for a fact that one presidential campaign did collude with people with known ties to the Russian government in an attempt to get dirt on their opponent. Hillary’s campaign and the DNC paid Christopher Steel to get dirt on Trump from agents of the Russian government, the infamous Steel memo. Honestly, I think Hillary is/was just as corrupt as Trump, but she has an IQ above room temperature. She at least TRIED to make her lies believable most of the time. Trump spews so much BS, making numerous statements that are obviously and demonstrably false, it almost has to be pathological. But other times he will make classical Washington gaffes. He’ll tell the truth about things just about any other politician would lie about. For instance, admitting he would listen to opposition research supplied by a foreign government.
Many inaccuracies there.
Let’s start with the obvious. Neither the DNC nor Hillary’s campaign hired Christoper Steele, nor were they even aware of his work during the Presidential campaign.
The DNC hired the law firm of Perkins Coie to work on opposition research. PC contracted with Fusion GPS, a well-known research firm which had done opposition studies on many people, including Donald Trump during the primaries. Perkins Coie made that decision. Fusion GPS, being good at their jobs and knowing that Trump’s greatest vulnerability was with Russia, subcontracted to the firm headed by the one former British intelligence agent who knew the most about Russia, Christopher Steele. In order to find out about Trump’s activities in Russia, Steele of course had to ask some Russians.
At no time, neither during nor after the election, did anyone from the DNC pay Russians or Steele or even Fusion GPS for anything.
In fact, no officials from the Clinton campaign or the D.N.C. were even aware that Perkins Coie had commissioned the research on their behalf. Similarly, Steele never knew the trail of responsibility led back to the Clinton campaign until it was public knowledge. (That’s obvious. He was so concerned by the troubling info that he would undoubtedly have communicated directly with Hillary’s campaign if he had some inkling that they were entitled to the information. Instead, he passed it to intelligence agencies, thinking that to be the correct process.)
As for Hillary, she found out about Steele’s research after I did! She learned of it from Buzzfeed, and I saw it about five minutes after Buzzfeed published it, so she had to be behind me.
How do you know that Hillary and her campaign staffers are telling the truth? Obvious. You can be 100% certain of it because if they knew of the dossier, they would have leaked it in early November.
In fact, when Clinton’s staffers told her about the Buzzfeed article in January, she was allegedly “quite disappointed” (read “apoplectic”) that such reports existed, indirectly funded by her campaign, but were not released during the campaign.
The truly weird part of the story is that the connection was so indirect that Steele produced some of the most valuable opposition research in the history of campaigning, but his ultimate client was never even aware of it. If Hillary and the DNC had hired Steele, he would obviously have been aware that they were the client, and would have provided the info to them. Worded another way, if what you said had been true, “Hillary’s campaign and the DNC paid Christopher Steel (sic) to get dirt on Trump,” Trump would have lost the election!
Sadly, it is not true. I wish it were.
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Also noteworthy:
Steele bypassed his own clients when he released some of this research to intelligence agencies. He was concerned with the implications of what he had found, and he felt that global security was the most important consideration. He was a total boy scout.
After election day, the money to Fusion GPS stopped cold, but Fusion and Steele continued to do the research on their own dimes. Steele was especially hacked off that the FBI seemed to be ignoring his findings.
This was exactly my earlier point. It doesn’t matter how many intermediaries you go through in order to comply with election and campaign law, politicians are getting and using dirt on their political enemies from foreign governments. They all do it (or have it done for them).
The only evidence of a foreign government offering help or providing help was the Trump Tower meeting, which was explicitly understood by all to be “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” (Per the e-mails that organized the meeting.)
Have you seen any other one?
The Steele dossier main sources were members of the kremlin. That isn’t in dispute. I’m not a trump supporter but I stand by my statement that no matter how many middlemen are used, any politician in any election will take dirt on a political rival from anyone, foreign government or otherwise. As mentioned previously, Schiff proved that when was pulled by a radio host.
It’s called CAMPAIGNING.
It is illegal.
It is also possible to campaign hard, but legally.
Let’s be honest here. ANY politician would take dirt and they have since the founding of the republic. One of the things people like about Trump is he says it like it is. Do we need to hear Elizabeth warren or Hillary Clinton tell the world they would never do such a thing while their people are begging for info?
I don’t think Warren or Hillary or any of their subordinates would have taken a meeting premised on “Russia and its government’s support for” their candidacy.
Perhaps I’m naive, but I think most American politicians will stop short of illegal collaboration with a presumed hostile power. If nothing else, they would suspect some ulterior motives.
(Granted it was not Trump personally who took that meeting, but his current statement says he would have.)
I’m certainly not saying they would collaborate or collude. I am just saying if someone has some dirt on their opponent, every politician will take it no matter where it comes from. Adam Schiff even proved that when he got scammed by a radio host pretending to be a Russian with dirt on trump. Schiff couldn’t jump fast enough.
Dan said: “Let’s be honest here. ANY politician would take dirt and they have since the founding of the republic. ”
This is a lie, and it says far more about you than it does anything else. It is disgustingly cynical. Remember, we are talking about dirt being offered BY FOREIGN ENEMIES OF AMERICA. Sure, Trump would take it – that’s the kind of guy he is. That’s why I call him human garbage. Name some other president, please. It will tell us more about you.
You sound very naive here. I’m not being cynical. It’s how it works. Politics is a sport. Those who make it to the top are hall of fame “athletes”. They win by playing politics and politics is dirty. They say what they have to say to win. After the dems and repubs spend all day passionately debating each other on the floor, they go out to steak dinners together paid for by lobbyists. It’s business not personal. I appreciate your rose colored glasses view of the world, however you are wrong. That’s not my opinion. That’s a fact. That’s why people become more conservative as they get older… they learn about the real world. “If you aren’t a liberal in your 20s you have no heart. If you aren’t a conservative in your 30s you have no brain.” Truer words were never spoken.
Pure nonsense.
And that’s why you will keep getting played by politicians who are playing a sport. You thought they actually cared about you? How cute.
It’s a myth that people get more conservative as they get older.
It’s a statistical fact.
That saying gets repeated a lot, it sounds vaguely Churchillian and is used as a substitute for actually arguing the merits. I’ve never met anyone who made a big paradigm shift in their outlook like that.
One of more ridiculous statements I’ve ever heard.
I’ve gotten more liberal in my 30s, because of the fact that I now DO see how the real world works. Dealing with corporations with directors who sit on their ass all day and know jack shit and wonder how they got there. They spend most of their day yucking it up or on conference calls giving meaningless irrelevant anecdotes about things. All because they knew someone in the right position, or filled a seat just long enough.
Corporate cronyism is the battle cry of the conservative. If you didn’t make it, well you just weren’t good enough. Then you don’t see them putting their spot up for grabs if someone better comes along. Convenient how that works right?
If you didn’t make it, then you weren’t good enough. And now the truth comes out. The left can’t face the fact that they weren’t good enough so they complain that it’s just not fair. I get it. If I had nothing and accomplished nothing and had a choice of accepting that I’m just not a success or being a liberal, I’d probably choose being a liberal too. It’s easier to get up in the morning with excuses and people to blame.
If you didn’t make it, you weren’t good enough at choosing your parents.
I actually do fine for myself Don, and I enjoy sticking it to human trash like yourself who think you’re so self important and God’s gift to whatever position you were granted by someone else. I enjoy taking a hammer to those perceptions, and will enjoy every bit of what you people get in life after Trump runs this economy into the ground. I hope each and every one of you people lose their jobs because of your hero, then you may finally have some much needed humility.
If your Republican corporate and political heroes are so damn good, why do they hide behind their position? It takes nothing to do what they do. Trump is a corrupt mob boss who’s failed at every business he’s owned and declared bankruptcy three times. He can’t even fucking speak or write correctly. He’s an ugly fat slob, with a two inch toad dick, who’s hair looks like melted plastic. Why in God’s name would anyone be jealous of him, or any of you human pieces of trash?
There was nothing Russia or anyone else could have offered Trump that he didn’t already have from the NSA. In fact, if it weren’t for Admiral Rogers and General Flynn, Trump would have been finished a long time ago. They informed Trump about the spying the Obama administration was conducting, and now AG Barr & John Durham have all the evidence.
A) The question here is not what did happen, but what Trump has said he would do with regard to obeying US laws pertaining to elections. As is usual with Trump supporters, you have changed the subject, because the actual subject cannot be made to look good for Trump.
B) Under Obama, US intelligence agencies kept tabs on Russian espionage activities in the United States. When Trump became a presidential candidate, this lead them straight to Trump. You seem to regard this as a crime by Obama, and not US intelligence agencies doing their sworn duty of protecting the United States. Is this because you are an agent of Russia?
C) Trump is human garbage. Defending him makes you human garbage. Why have you done that? For money?