Opinion | The Trump Campaign Accepted Russian Help to Win in 2016. Case Closed. - The New York Times
The verdict is in and Trump is GUILTY on all counts!
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
"Cooperation" or "collusion" or whatever. It was a plot against American democracy.
By The Editorial Board
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstandingvalues. It is separate from the newsroom.
- Aug. 19, 2020
Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
From the start, the Trump-Russia story has been both eye-glazingly complex and extraordinarily simple.
Who is Oleg Deripaska? What's the G.R.U. again? Who owed what to whom? The sheer number of crisscrossing characters and interlocking pieces of evidence — the phone calls, the emails, the texts, the clandestine international meet-ups — has bamboozled even those who spend their days teasing it all apart. It's no wonder average Americans tuned out long ago.
A bipartisan report released Tuesday by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee cuts through the chaff. The simplicity of the scheme has always been staring us in the face: Donald Trump's 2016 campaign sought and maintained close contacts with Russian government officials who were helping him get elected. The Trump campaign accepted their offers of help. The campaign secretly provided Russian officials with key polling data. The campaign coordinated the timing of the release of stolen information to hurt Hillary Clinton's campaign.
The Senate committee's report isn't telling this story for the first time, of course. (Was it only a year ago that Robert Mueller testified before Congress about his own damning, comprehensive investigation?) But it is the first to do so with the assent of Senate Republicans, who have mostly ignored the gravity of the Trump camp's actions or actively worked to cast doubt about the demonstrable facts in the case.
It's also a timely rebuke to the narrative that Attorney General William Barr has been hawking since before he took office early last year — that "Russiagate" is a "bogus" scandal. Mr. Barr and other Trump allies claim that the Russia investigation was begun without basis and carried out with the intent of "sabotaging the presidency." That argument has been debunked by every investigative body that has spent any time looking into what happened, including the nation's intelligence community, Mr. Mueller's team, the Justice Department's inspector general and now the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In fact, the committee report, which is nearly 1,000 pages long and is the fifth in a series examining Russian interference in 2016, goes further than Mr. Mueller's investigation.
For example, Mr. Mueller declined to say whether Mr. Trump had lied under oath when he said that he did not recall speaking with Roger Stone, his longtime aide and confidant, about WikiLeaks, which released the batches of emails stolen by the Russians. But the Senate committee found that the president "did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone's access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions."
The committee documented that, on Oct. 7, 2016, Mr. Stone received advance notice of the impending release of the "Access Hollywood" tape, in which Mr. Trump brags about sexually assaulting women. In response, Mr. Stone made at least two phone calls arranging for WikiLeaks to release stolen internal emails from the Democratic National Committee.
The report also found that Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime business associate of Mr. Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was a Russian intelligence officer, and may have been linked to the Russian military's hacking and leaking of the D.N.C. emails in the first place.
Mr. Trump and his allies will parse and prevaricate forever. Ignore them. If it wasn't already overwhelmingly clear what was going on, it is now. As the Democrats on the committee put it in an appendix to the report: "This is what collusion looks like." Alas, the Republicans refused to join in on this straightforward assessment, stating in their own appendix that "we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion." That is to insist that up is down.
But call it whatever you like: The Intelligence Committee report shows clear coordination between Russians and the Trump campaign, though there is no evidence of an explicit agreement. The evidence the report lays out suggests Mr. Trump knew this at the time. Whether or not it can be proved that he ordered this interference or violated the law in doing so, the fact remains that neither he nor anyone else in his campaign alerted federal law-enforcement authorities, as any loyal American should have.
And remember: Mr. Trump tried this scheme again. The president was impeached for his efforts to invite foreign interference in the 2020 election, this time by Ukraine, again on his behalf. Part of that requested interference involved an attempt to smear Joe Biden. But the other part involved pinning the 2016 election interference on Ukraine rather than on Russia. Who was "almost certainly" one of the primary sources spreading that claim in the media, according to the senators' report? None other than Konstantin Kilimnik.
There has never been any reliable evidence that Ukraine interfered in 2016; the Senate committee concluded as such, in line with all previous investigations.
Russia is now attempting to help Mr. Trump again this November, according to American intelligence assessments reported in The Times. For any normal president, that would be a top-of-mind concern, and he or she would be marshaling all available resources to thwart it. What has Mr. Trump done? On Sunday night, he retweeted Russian propaganda that the U.S. intelligence community had already flagged as part of that country's efforts to skew the election.
On Monday, Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, wrote that the president "showed vanishingly little interest in subjects of vital national security interest, including cybersecurity, domestic terrorism and malicious foreign interference in U.S. affairs." He added, "the country is less secure as a direct result of the president's actions."
There's no way to sugarcoat it. In less than three months, the American people could re-elect a man who received a foreign government's help to win one election and has shown neither remorse nor reservations about doing so again.
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Guilty Guilty Guilty! Guilty As Hell. Trump Is GUILTY...
Of course he is, but his sycophant supporters will still give him a pass because he tickles their ears and tells them what they want to hear. Like he said, he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose his base voters, he knows they don't give a shit about the law.
What laws has he broken?
Tickle our ears with credible facts, instead of baseless accusations
U.S. Code § 872: “ Extortion by officers or employees of the United States .
U.S. Code § 192, “ Refusal of witness to testify or produce papers ,”
U.S. Code § 610, “ Coercion of political activity .”
U.S. Code § 595, when a government official, “in connection with any activity which is financed in whole or in part by loans or grants made by the United States, or any department or agency thereof, uses his official authority for the purpose of interfering with, or affecting, the nomination or the election of any candidate for the office of President. ”
U.S. Code § 607, “ Place of solicitation ,”
U.S. Code § 30121, “ Contributions and donations by foreign nationals .”
He is also currently the unnamed co-conspirator in a felony campaign finance case where his co-conspirator has already been convicted and of which Trump will be indicted as soon as he leaves office sine the only reason he's not already in jail is because of the Justice Department policy of not indicting a sitting President. And what started out as just campaign finance laws broken have lead investigators to seek Trumps tax returns which, according to Trumps former lawyer, now a convicted felon for doing Trumps bidding, is that the prosecutors will find evidence of tax evasion, bank fraud and money laundering.
On top of that there were at least 10 counts of obstruction of justice clearly detailed in the Mueller report.
And lets not forget the findings of the bipartisan Senate investigation that " states flatly that Konstantin Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer" who was coordinating with Paul Manafort and ties "Kilimnik to the hack-and-leak operation, the most significant aspect of the Russian attack on 2016". There is also evidence that Trump lied in his written statement to Mueller which is also a crime. It also makes clear that Roger Stone did coordinate with wikileaks who was in fact coordinating with Russia providing illegal stolen documents and emails and that Stone was in regular contact with Trump giving him updates on the wikileaks/Russia coordination.
Doesn't it make the fact that the Democrats didn't charge him with even one of those counts when they ran their impeachment sham a little suspect?
Why didn't they?
Because US citizens have the attention span of a teeny weeny itzy bitzy teetzee fly, and can't process too much at once, as any Trump defender proves around here non stop. Barr spun it, Fox persistently spewed it, and ignorant frcks bought into LIE after LIE after LIE !
It really is that simple. It does NOT MATTER WHAT these people are shown as evidence, cause they are, evidently DENSER than so many points, squezzed down, and condenserred, to the point, where it is pointless, to more, than should have could have ever been FOOLED!
WTF does that have to do with the charges Democrats brought against Trump while impeaching him?
Anything, anything at all?
Inane.
they tried to keep it simple so dumb fckz might understand it this time, cause the Mueller report had too much for Trump supporters to understand and comprehend, comprehend ? Asz N E Won claiming NO COLLUSION has LOST
So Democrats tried to keep it simple so their own could understand?
Got it now, thanks, at least that actually makes some sense--at least more than the rest of the post.
BTW, WTF do Trump supporters have to do with the Democrats' crappy impeachment trial?
It was the senate republicans who let the orange traitor slide.
it was the damn Democrats who put on such a fucked up prosecution case.
Guilty of what? As usual, facts and details are in short supply.
The American people are fed up with this long running hoax
The New York Times Editorial Board. (AKA TDS driven sycophants to the Democratic Party)
Enough said.
Because of an opinion piece in the NYTimes.
Of course.
And so did the Clinton campaign. In fact, they sought it first. But it's ok for them. Yawn.