US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9080

On October 30 2017 03:27 Slaughter wrote:


Not really. Unlike the caricature of the left that the right peddles most people don't think everyone who voted for Trump is deplorable like Trump himself is

On October 30 2017 04:45 xDaunt wrote:

Remember the stink over Donald Junior meeting with a Russian agent? This is that, but we know that money actually changed hands.

On October 30 2017 04:45 xDaunt wrote:

Remember the stink over Donald Junior meeting with a Russian agent? This is that, but we know that money actually changed hands.

Natalia V. Veselnitskaya arrived at a meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 hoping to interest top Trump campaign officials in the contents of a memo she believed contained information damaging to the Democratic Party and, by extension, Hillary Clinton. The material was the fruit of her research as a private lawyer, she has repeatedly said, and any suggestion that she was acting at the Kremlin’s behest that day is anti-Russia “hysteria.”

But interviews and records show that in the months before the meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya had discussed the allegations with one of Russia’s most powerful officials, the prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika. And the memo she brought with her closely followed a document that Mr. Chaika’s office had given to an American congressman two months earlier, incorporating some paragraphs verbatim.

On October 30 2017 04:51 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

This wouldn't be laundering.. I don't know of any reporting requirement that would make this mis-categorizing an expense either. Care to elaborate?

On October 30 2017 04:56 ChristianS wrote:

Okay, back up a few steps. What Russian agent did the Democrats meet with?

Part of my confusion here is that they're simultaneously claiming "The Dems paid the Russians to give them a bunch of information," and "none of the information was true." If none of the information was true, then why did the Dems need to pay Russians to make some shit up? Can they not just do that themselves?

On October 30 2017 04:45 xDaunt wrote:

Remember the stink over Donald Junior meeting with a Russian agent? This is that, but we know that money actually changed hands.

On October 30 2017 04:54 Danglars wrote:

You should really visit California.

You also won't personally call them deplorable (though I cop comments like that all the time), but you want to exile their Presidential choice. Right.

On October 30 2017 05:02 xDaunt wrote:

The relevant issues are who is Christopher Steele, who are his sources in the Kremlin that he cited, did Steele pay them anything, and what did the Clintons know.

On October 30 2017 05:10 WolfintheSheep wrote:

Donald Junior met with a Russian agent specifically about information on the opposition.

As far as I've read on the dossier thing, the DNC paid a UK firm to do research. And that firm hired someone who then found the stuff in the dossier (who then reported it to the FBI).

Hence why this is such a non-starter. A foreign agent got the information after money had changed hands, with a couple of degrees of separation from the initial payments, and then went through all the correct US channels after that.

On October 30 2017 05:14 xDaunt wrote:

If it was all above board, why all of the lying about it?

On October 30 2017 05:12 ChristianS wrote:

So let me see if I have the allegation straight: the DNC pays Marc Elias to fund some oppo research. Elias pays Fusion GPS to do oppo research on Trump. Fusion GPS pays Steele to investigate Trump's ties with Russia. Steele has sources in the Kremlin, whom he pays in exchange for information about Trump. But the Russians take his money and feed him a bunch of lies.

Is that even illegal? More to the point, do you get how that doesn't really look equivalent to a person contacting a member of the Trump campaign and saying "hey, I'm a representative of the Russian government and I want to offer you info on Hillary as part of Putin's support for your campaign," to which the Trump campaign member responds "yes, excellent, I want all of this"?

I spent almost thirty years producing what CIA calls “raw reporting” from human agents. At heart, this is what Orbis did. They were not producing finished analysis, but were passing on to a client distilled reporting that they had obtained in response to specific questions. The difference is crucial, for it is the one that American journalists routinely fail to understand. When disseminating a raw intelligence report, an intelligence agency is not vouching for the accuracy of the information provided by the report’s sources and/or subsources. Rather it is claiming that it has made strenuous efforts to validate that it is reporting accurately what the sources/subsources claim has happened. The onus for sorting out the veracity and for putting the reporting in context against other reporting – which may confirm or deny the new report – rests with the intelligence community’s professional analytic cadre.

Well before any public knowledge of these events, the Orbis report identified multiple elements of the Russian operation including a cyber campaign, leaked documents related to Hillary Clinton, and meetings with Paul Manafort and other Trump affiliates to discuss the receipt of stolen documents. Mr. Steele could not have known that the Russians stole information on Hillary Clinton, or that they were considering means to weaponize them in the U.S. election, all of which turned out to be stunningly accurate. The U.S. government only published its conclusions in January 2017, with an assessment of some elements in October 2016. It was also apparently news to investigators when the New York Times in July 2017 published Don Jr’s emails arranging for the receipt of information held by the Russians about Hillary Clinton. How could Steele and Orbis know in June 2016 that the Russians were working actively to elect Donald Trump and damage Hillary Clinton? How could Steele and Orbis have known about the Russian overtures to the Trump Team involving derogatory information on Clinton?

On October 30 2017 05:19 WolfintheSheep wrote:

What "all"? As has been mentioned in the last few posts, the most that's even been mentioned is that it wasn't filled out as "Opposition Research", or whatever the election regulations require.

I'm pretty sure it was confirmed that Steele contacted the FBI. Along with some US Senators, including McCain.

On October 30 2017 05:20 Wulfey_LA wrote:


I suggest reading a proper analysis of Steele's work before leaping to this framing. The big points in the memo: Russia work cultivating Trump, Russia providing dirt on HRC to Trump, Trump's extensive efforts at getting Russian business going, and certain predictions of certain business deals going down were very accurate.





https://www.justsecurity.org/44697/steele-dossier-knowing/

On October 30 2017 05:21 xDaunt wrote:

The law firm and Hillary campaign both lied about their involvement.

House Republicans are so desperate for a win on taxes that they’re agreeing to proposals that would have caused internal party warfare just a year or two ago.

They’re considering forgoing a big cut in the top income tax rate on the rich, offering moderate-income Americans so many tax breaks that many would be excused from paying taxes entirely and passing a potentially 1,000-page tax bill few have seen within a matter of weeks. Last week, they agreed to a budget that ignored their demands for deep cuts in federal spending just so they could pass a tax bill using a special procedure that enables them to move forward without any Democratic votes.

It’s an open question whether Republicans will be as flexible when party leaders release their entire tax bill, due Nov. 1, and everyone can see exactly who will be the losers under their plan. They already have some internal battles, with Republicans from high-tax states fighting a proposal to dump a long-standing deduction for state and local taxes.

But for now, once-controversial proposals are barely causing a stir, a sign lawmakers are willing to move beyond their party’s orthodoxy on taxes and into a more freewheeling debate on how to rewrite the code.

“The American people want us to get to ‘yes’ on tax reform,” said Rep. Jim Renacci (R-Ohio), who sits on the tax and budget committees.

It’s an indication of the pressure lawmakers feel to produce a win ahead of next year’s midterm elections after spending seven fruitless months trying to rescind the Affordable Care Act. Many are terrified at the prospect of facing voters next year with nothing to show for their time in power.

Even notoriously balky House conservatives are making nice.

“We’ve got to get the economy going — it’s all about wages going up — and if I can endure some short-term pain for long-term benefits, I’m willing to do that,” said Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), head of the chamber’s staunchly conservative Freedom Caucus.

The latest flexibility came with Thursday’s House adoption of a Senate budget plan. The annual fiscal blueprint used to be a big deal for House Republicans — Speaker Paul Ryan made his name as chairman of the Budget Committee, writing plans calling for drastic cuts in federal spending. And for years, House conservatives had demanded budgets balance the government’s books.

But the fiscal blueprint they adopted Thursday does no such thing, and some lawmakers question the importance of the budget, saying they agreed to it only in order to tap the all-important reconciliation process they intend to use to move tax legislation through the Senate.

“We don’t follow budgets anyway — it’s really just a mechanism to get tax reform done,” said Renacci.

They are also willing to compromise on their long-standing calls to cut the top income tax rate.

Just a few years ago, House Republicans walked away from a tax reform plan written by then-Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp in part because he cut the top rate only to 35 percent, from 39.6 percent. At the time, Republicans had been promising to cut the top rate to 25 percent — something they had pledged since they took over the House in 2011 — but Camp was unable to make the numbers work.

Now, Republicans are planning an even higher top rate. Their plans are still to be determined, but they may leave the top rate where it is, which President Barack Obama raised as part of the 2013 fiscal cliff agreement.

“I don’t think there’s anybody out there that is talking about NFL players needing a tax cut — I don’t think high-powered doctors and lawyers need a tax cut,” said Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.), who emphasized Republicans' plans to instead cut taxes on small and large businesses.

At the same time, they’re willing to take millions of Americans off the tax rolls entirely with their plans to double the standard deduction and expand a child tax credit. Just a few years ago, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney lamented that, at the time, 47 percent of Americans did not pay federal income taxes.

On October 30 2017 05:24 ChristianS wrote:

Is it even proven that the campaign was involved? Marc Elias was the client, but is there any evidence he told the campaign about it?

On October 30 2017 05:21 xDaunt wrote:

The law firm and Hillary campaign both lied about their involvement.

On October 30 2017 05:34 WolfintheSheep wrote:

I don't see anything saying the law firm (or, more accurately, the lawyer) lied. It looks like no one even asked, and I'm sure client-lawyer privileges means he didn't even need to answer, at least not before it went all public.

Clinton campaign didn't even have to lie, I'm sure. If they had any information at all during the campaign, it would've been used for sure (or they had the integrity to know not to use it, hah), and after the campaign Clinton's involvement dropped to zero.

On October 30 2017 05:33 xDaunt wrote:

Yep. The funds came from the Hillary campaign and the DNC. Attorneys don't front costs for their clients in these situations. And they aren't allowed to spend client money without authority to do so. Perkins Coie isn't a bush league outfit that would break these basic rules.