Prepare To Hear That Collusion Was A Good Thing
There are three stages to Republican/conservative/ right wing denial of the "Russia thing". The first stage was that "there was no collusion" which Trump himself said over 50 times. And virtually all conservatives have said the same here and there over the past year and a half. The second phase is the operative phase today, offiically, from Trump's camp. His trusted mouthpiece Rudy Giuliani is now spending a lot of time saying "collusion is not a crime". That is the stage two position. I haven't read any of Trump's THIRTY tweets from over the weekend, so I am not sure if the president* himself has adopted the stage two "collusion is not a crime" stance, but if he hasn't yet he will soon. The first stage of denial, "there was no collusion", is being overrun by the facts and all good Trumpsters , including Trump himself, have to retrench.
And we are beginning to see stage three pop up in arguments on Trump's behalf. "It's good that Russia helped us, and we were able to keep that witch (with a 'b') out of the Oval Office and save America from socialism". For the time being stage three is only seen on twitter and in forums and on call in shows on C-Cpan
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"Fall back, fall back" General 'Patton' Trump shouts to his troops.
I think "General Mutton" is a better description of that Bag-o-Grease.
I've been trying to come up with WHO started using the word 'collusion' in the first place. Whoever it was did a HUGE disservice to the Mueller investigation. Mueller's appointment uses the word 'coordination', NOT collusion.
Why would Trump come out yesterday and admit that the meeting was for the purpose of getting dirt on Clinton?
It is a fall back position. He knows Mueller has already locked that down, and he wants to fall back to something more defensible. Eventually it will be "we did it (collude) but it was a good thing."
You left out the completely accurate complaint that the only proven case of collision so far has been between Hillary and Russia via Christopher Steele.
That was 'left out' because it's utter bullshit.
At least twenty Trumpsters had highly inappropriate conversations with Russian state operatives about colluding...
We know of. Not one of them reported what they heard to the FBI. Knowing of a crime & not reporting is criminal.
You mean besides the meeting in trump tower with Manafort, Kushner and Don Jr in attendance?
You must be in a RW bubble eyes shut, ears covered, screaming, "I don't hear you", to not know...
Keep on bringing up old news. "Russiagate" is truly the Benghazi of the left.
When did you stop plugging BENGHAZI!!!!! as Clinton's big scandal?
"When did you stop plugging BENGHAZI!!!!! as Clinton's big scandal?"
Whenever she got caught lying about her private server and mishandling classified info.
If Mueller gave a shit about that, it would have been leaked long ago followed by some sort of report from him. Seems like he doesn't give a shit.
Mueller and his task force don't leak.
Yea...OK..
LOL. From your citation:
FYI, it was the White House which leaked that list, not Mueller.
Sorry, but Newsweek and ABS News are just as anti Trump as any other run of the mill liberal. Just because somebody had something read to them does not mean they will leak it. I can assure you that if there was something truly negative against Trump that the Mueller team found, it would be leaked in minutes flat.
You're free to shoot the messenger and stick your head in the sand, but the analysis proves why the questions were not leaked by Mueller's office but by someone in the WH leaking extemporaneous notes which Trump's attorneys made during a conference call with Mueller's office.
Somewhere along the way one of Trump's reps (I think it was John Dowd) even admitted that's what happened. In any event it seems that Mueller's office is leak-proof while Trump's team keeps drilling holes in their own boat.
Yeah, I mean look at all those imaginary indictments of Clinton and Steele for the "collision" of putting the Giant Scumbag into office.
Sure, focus on a typo instead of admitting Steele was funded indirectly by Hillary and was played by his Russian handlers.
Trump will say colluding/cheating with Russians to win the presidency is "Politics as usual". It is not. It is a high crime...
It does seem that Trump's legal strategy has evolved from "I never colluded with that hostile foreign power" to "collusion with a hostile foreign power isn't a crime as long as it's consensual".
Or, "Hey, we did it out in the open so there can't be anything wrong with it now". Wrongo, again...
hat tip to Sister Mary Agnes-
Rudy Giuliani just obliterated the goal posts on Trump-Russia collusion
But rarely has it been so concentrated in one morning.
Trump's lawyer/spokesman Rudolph W. Giuliani appeared on Fox News's and CNN's morning shows on Monday to downplay the idea that colluding with the Russians would have even been illegal and to argue against strawmen.
The most notable portion of the interviews was when Giuliani rekindled the idea that collusion isn't even a crime. Trump's defenders have occasionally noted that the word doesn't appear in the criminal code — which is -- but Giuliani took it a step further: He basically suggested Trump would have had to pay for Russia to interfere on his behalf.
“I don't even know if that's a crime — colluding with Russians,” Giuliani said on CNN. “Hacking is the crime. The president didn't hack. He didn't pay for the hacking.”
In case you forgot, Trump himself has been arguing for more than a year not that collusion wasn't a crime, but that there simply was “no collusion.” Just like Trump's legal team has taken to arguing that a president , it's now arguing that the other side of the investigation that has to do with Trump — the collusion side — is also a bogus standard. Or at least that seems to be where this is headed.
Giuliani also seemed to offer a very narrow denial of what happened with the Trump Tower meeting. While discussing , Giuliani focused his defense on arguing not necessarily that Trump didn't know about it — but that he wasn't physically at meetings at which information from Russians was discussed. And he did it on both shows.
“Even this Russia meeting -- I'm happy to tell [Robert Mueller] he wasn't there; he wasn't at the meeting,” Giuliani said while arguing that Mueller doesn't need to interview Trump.
At other times, Giuliani appeared to say that Trump also was not present for a separate alleged meeting before the Trump Tower meeting in which the Trump Tower meeting was discussed. Cohen has reportedly indicated that others can vouch for the fact that Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting, but .
“He did not participate in any meeting about the Russia transaction ... the president did not,” Giuliani said. “And the other people at the meeting that [Cohen] claims he had without the president about it say he was never there.”
Update: Giuliani appeared on Fox News later Monday to clarify. He said he was indeed talking about an allegation of a second, earlier meeting that hasn't been made public -- but which he heard about from talking to reporters. Asked why he was debunking an allegation that hadn't been made, Giuliani said he was merely getting ahead of the story.
He reiterated: "The president didn’t know about that meeting beforehand."
The idea that Trump wasn't in a meeting isn't the question, though. Trump has denied having knowledge of it, and Donald Trump Jr. has said under oath that his father didn't know about it.
Of course, Cohen's reported allegation has thrown all of that into doubt. The president's former lawyer says there are other people who can vouch for the fact that Trump knew about the meeting in real time. With that potentially damning revelation emerging, Giuliani seems to be guarding against the idea that Trump actually did know about the meeting — by arguing that he wasn't in the room and even that working with the Russians wouldn't be criminal.
That's a pretty remarkable distance from .
This post has been updated.
A few minutes after one of his attorneys, Jay Sekulow, appeared on Fox and Friends this morning and said "collusion is not a crime", Trump tweeted this
Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion (except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats)!
President Trump's attorney, @ JaySekulow , begins interview on @ foxandfriends by lying about the Russia investigation, which he falsely claims "started off" with the dossier. Sekulow eventually gets around to reiterating Giuliani's point that "collusion is not a crime."
On his Meet The Press Daily show today Chuck Todd said pretty much what I was saying in this article - it seems like the Trump defenders are getting ready to say that collusion was a good thing because it kept Hillary out of office.
Facts develop is a summary statement of the Trump administration's attitude towards reality. By "develop," they mean "become whatever is most useful to as at this point, regardless of truth value." The question, as usual, is whether Sekulow was given bad information or cooked it up himself. Certainly, we'll be served a lot more of it before all this is over. How long until we learn that, Yes, the president approved the meeting in advance, but collusion to own the libs is good? This is already accepted among the kind of people who still show their face at one of his rallies—just look at these guys.