Completely disagree. I didn't vote for Trump and don't like him, but the case is a real stretch at best. He has already been subject to so many politically-motivated investigations and procedures, and we now know the FBI already interferred with the 2020 election by refusing to investigate the Hunter Biden laptop and falsely suggesting it was fake, encouraging news organizations to suppress the story, which they dutifully did. The optics are terrible, and not just to Trump supporters.
Firstly, the FBI didn't suggest it was a fake. It was former executive branch officials and national security experts - who dutifully noted that they could not be certain, but that it looked bad. Because it did, even though they happened to be wrong.
In any event, the story was never "supressed". In fact Twitter's decision to label it misinformation almost immediately blew up in their face and the story got even more coverage and infamy than it otherwise would have. It is preposterous to suggest that it affected the outcome of the election because it somehow didn't reach people whose vote it would have changed. As far as relates to Joe Biden himself, the laptop has been a total dud, and the mainstream media was right to cautiously report the story as unconfirmed, because in reality it was another bullshit October surprise, a la Jim Comey informing Congress about the Huma Abdein emails out of an abundance of caution.
And no other investigation against Trump has been "politically motivated". Not to say that partisans weren't rooting for them, but no investigation into Trump has been shown to be unwarranted. The idea that they have is a distortion of reality by anti-MSM contrarians.
At the very least, the Mueller report, as well as the Inspector General report, established that the Russia investigation was well-founded, even if they couldn't find enough evidence to charge Trump with criminal conspiracy. Similarly, the congressional investigation into the Ukraine incident showed that there was indeed a quid-pro-quo (i.e. Trump attempted to extort Ukraine), and the Jan 6th incident and subsequent investigation have unequivocally shown that Trump attempted to corruptly seize power (as if that weren't obvious from watching it in real time, but the committee unearthed facts that countered even the most willfully naive rationalizations). The fact that Trump was acquitted in both situations can be attributed to his party's spinelessness, not because they were politically motivated witch hunts.
The FBI was leaning on the big social media giants to censor supposed "Russian disinformation." The story most certainly was suppressed--Twitter censored it completely, and Facebook throttled the story for the three weeks leading up to the election, which Zuckerberg just last week explictly said was connected to FBI pressure and their insinuation that it was fake.
The computer was recovered from a Wilmington, Del. repair shop in December 2019, and the FBI did nothing with it until after the election--reportedly, we are now learning from whistleblowers, because of pressure from on high in the FBI. This while he was under federal criminal investigation related to potential violations of tax and money laundering laws and his business dealings in foreign countries, along with illegal lobbying! HB, a complete moron who is not even qualified to wipe his own ass, was clearly trading access to his father for cash. The laptop was far from a "total dud" -- in fact we are still learning more about the whole sordid affair, which the FBI Director before congress called "deeply troubling."
The attempt to connect Trump to Russia, we now know, was fabricated by the Clinton campaign and laundered to federal investigators under false pretenses. An baseless investigation that clouded his presidency for years!
The FBI warned Facebook about Russian disinformation. They did NOT tell them to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. Facebook did that on their own because it fit a pattern - which it did. And Twitter reversed their labeling of the story almost immediately after a backlash. In no way can you say they successfully suppressed the story when it was all over the media by mid October.
There is a kerfuffle now about some CIA agent liking some posts on social media and supposedly a whistleblower saying he attempted to suppress information about the laptop embarrassing to Hunter. We don't have all the details, and it hardly matters. The Hunter Biden story was thrown out there right when it would cause maximal damage. If this Thibault guy really did suppress the story until October (which is what Wray was referring to with his quote, not "the whole sordid affair"), Trump's supporters should be thanking him, because it would have been long forgotten by election time had it come out when the FBI first received the laptop.
And seriously, what is it going to take to get you Trump apologists to understand that Hunter Biden was not running for President? It doesn't matter how much Hunter was trading on his dad's name - that's on Hunter, not Joe. What did you want Joe to do, sit him in a corner? If trading on your father's name is to be held against a Presidential candidate, Trump's kids would have gotten him impeached. Of course, since Trump's kids were actually running *his* company while he was President, it actually make sense in his case. That's what real corruption actually looks like.
Nonetheless, Joe was in no way involved with any of Hunter's business dealings. All of that has been debunked. The ridiculous Bobulinski story, touted by Kimberly Strassel, one of the WSJ's hack opinion writers, was debunked literally *minutes later* by the Journal's *actual journalists*, who deal with actual real facts. And the emails released later on confirmed that there was *nothing* in them implicating Joe Biden. That's what I mean when I say the laptop was a dud - it had none of the incriminating information about Joe that all of Trump's media toadies claimed it did.
As for your final claim, so help me God I am tired of explaining this to people, and I apologize for my exasperation if you aren't one of the people I've explained it to, but let me be clear. The attempt to link Trump to Russia *was not* fabricated by Hillary Clinton. That is a complete load of *bullshit* that was pushed by the Wall Street Journal and their hack editorial staff after a distortion of Robby Mook's testimony given during John Durham's completely frivolous attempt to prosecute an attorney who worked for Hillary's campaign - which Durham lost so badly the jury said it should have never been brought to trial.
At any rate, I detailed this in one of my other responses on this page - specifically my response to Robert's response to David O's comment. Read that if you want to know how badly you've been taken for a ride by the anti-anti-Trump world. The long and short of it is that the connections between Trump, his campaign, and Russia are not only real, they are so blatantly obvious it would have been an act of criminal negligence not to investigate them. And our knowledge is still incomplete because of all the ways that Trump successfully interfered with the Mueller investigation.
But if you'd like to see an example of a completely phony narrative of election interference by a foreign power, try reading up on the "Crowdstrike" conspiracy theory that Rudy Giuliani tried to push - the one that claimed that actually it was *Hillary*, working with the *Ukrainian* government to *keep* Trump from getting elected. (It's like the game of Clue, 2016 election version.) If there's one thing Trump's supporters do best, it's project. I'll be happy to supply resources.
They didn't have to tell them to suppress that particular story, the implication was clear. The Dems in Congress have called Dorsey and Zuckerberg in for hearings enough times to get the message across - censor more or else. It is still suppression even if it isn't entirely successful. It gave the false appearance of illegitimacy to the story. Whether it made a difference to the election, we'll never know.
Wray was indeed talking about how, according to multiple whistleblowers, a number of higher ups at the FBI instructed agents not only to not investigate the laptop, but to falsely suggest that it was not legitimate. That most certainly matters. Again, Hunter Biden was already under federal investigation, and he certainly puts his father under a well-deserved cloud.
The Trump companies may have their issues but they are legitimate companies with legitimate business interests. Hunter has no qualifications whatsoever to be on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, or sundry other sweet gigs he got. He is literally a crackhead. He is selling access to his father to foreign state and nonstate actors. And that doesn't happen without Joe's acquiescence. Of course voters might want to take that into consideration.
As for your Russiagate nonsense, TomB's reply to you below says it better than I could.
The idea that "the implication was clear" is a conveniently unfalsifiable assertion. Given the fact that the 2016 election was rife with misinformation - especially on Facebook - explicitly generated by the Internet Research Agency, basic prudence suggested that warning Zuckerberg was entirely appropriate as we approached a 2020 election in which Trump had long since been explicitly signaling his malign intent to defraud the electorate.
And you'll have to show me where multiple whistleblowers claimed that agents were being instructed to deny the legitimacy of the laptop. Wray certainly didn't say that - he was very circumspect about discussing details.
And with regard to Hunter Biden "selling access" to his father, this is where you are dead wrong. Taking advantage of his father's name is one thing, but there is *no* evidence that Hunter actually sold anyone access to his father. That's precisely what he was investigated for by Senate Republicans, and they found nothing. This is another narrative of presumption invented by the right. I suppose after carrying Trump's water long enough one can no longer fathom people having integrity.
As for Trump, his "legitimate businesses" were generating all kinds of money for him through patronage by foreign dignitaries. His kids were doing business for him in India while Trump was visiting with Modi. He ran the hotel down the street from the White House, despite the fact that the law specifically forbade it. He directed Federal workers to his hotels on official travel. Mar-a-lago was a persistent security threat with all of the foreign nationals that patronized it. The guy was selling access to himself.
And that's not even to mention that his son-in-law was running an extra-legal track of foreign diplomacy with the Saudis that actually interfered with the official foreign policy of the State Department, so that he could nab 2 billion (yes, that's billion with a 'b') from MBS for the foundation he represented, pocketing several million for himself in the process. That's blatant abuse of your position as a government official, in addition to profiting from access to his father-in-law, all with Trump's complete acquiescence and enablement. The fact that nobody is making much of anything about this scandal while being apoplectic over what Hunter Biden did as a private citizen just shows how utterly the bar has been lowered for Trump and how everyone else is held to a far higher standard.
And if you think all of Trump's businesses are legitimate, you haven't been paying attention to the guy. This is a man who treated his own charity as a slush fund and whose initial fortune was made as a result of his father's illegal tax schemes. In fact, his businesses have been under investigation and his longtime CFO just pled guilty to tax fraud and is going to flip on him. Maybe this time he'll face consequences - so far, everyone around him goes to jail, yet he walks away. But yeah, he's totally legit.
As for my Russiagate "nonsense", I'm going to reply to TomB, but it's frustrating that I keep enduring this same pattern. I do my best to respond to the substantive points of people's posts, yet when I provide a wealth of information making my case, I get a response that basically waves it all away and restates a preferred narrative. So be it then; that speaks for itself. I am confident my arguments withstand objective scrutiny far better than anyone's Russia denialism.
Russia spent a piddling amount on facebook content in an election that was awash in billions of dollars of spending. To pretend that was of any consequence, or a justification for the security state to lean on private actors to censor more, is ridiculous. Far from unfalsifiable, it is incontestable that this is happening. Biden even attempted to appoint a Minster of Truth, for godsakes.
I never suggested Trump was free of corruption or that everything all of his business do is legitimate. But both investigators and the press have been digging nonstop to pin anything and everything they can on him, while the Bidens are getting both media and Deep State protection. I've known who Trump is for 40 years and I hold him in low regard. But he is getting scrutinized and investigated closely. If they have the goods on him, they should not have needed to fabricate so much baseless crap that is hyped to the heavens and then quietly amounts to nothing.
Speaking of your Russiagate nonsense, waiving away substantive points with your preferred narrative is exactly what you do.
Correct, no one is above the law, but we need to stop picking and choosing who is prosecuted based on their political alignment. I didn’t vote for Trump and don’t like the the guy, not even before he was a candidate. Until the same people who are demanding Trumps head, start demanding the heads of Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Anthony Fauci, Joe & Hunter Biden you have no credibility. Jan 6 was a disgrace, as were the BLM riots, Antifa and proud boys. I have very little respect for republican leadership, but over the last 6 years, I have even less respect for democrat hypocrisy. The Jan 6 hearings had potential to change minds and be meaningful IF it shed light on the shenanigans that involved both parties, the DOJ and FBI. Now it is just more ridiculous Trump Derangement Syndrome that turns off independent thinking liberals like myself. If democrats are to ever regain the trust of the working class, we need to clean up and clean out our own house before we try to clean up the republicans. But what does a commoner like me know.
Exactly what should Jim Comey, Anthony Fauci, and Joe Biden be prosecuted for?
Firstly, you are aware that Senate Republicans actually investigated Joe Biden in 2020 (election year!) and found *nothing*. You can bet your ass they'd have been airing it out in public if they had. And if you're under the impression that Hunter Biden's laptop provided evidence of criminal activity by Joe Biden, you've been lied to.
And please identify a crime committed by Jim Comey or Anthony Fauci.
Yes I am aware of the Biden investigation, which was really a ploy by republicans to cover own tracks with their involvement with Ukraine. It is pretty obvious now that both republicans and democrats are heavily invested in Ukraine. How much of the 60 billion dollars sent to Ukraine is actually getting kicked back into republican and democrat “unrelated” business partners. And Do you really believe Republicans will ever let us know what is really on Hunter Bidens laptop. No. They have just as much to loose.
As far as Fauci, it is now clear he lied to congress about gain of function research, he lied about masks, he lied about natural immunity, he lied about children, he lied about vaccine efficiencies and his ties to big Pharma. This was my second major eye opening moment. Where those crimes? Probably not, but it is another example of just how corrupt our entire system is.
But you are right, I have been lied to. I bought hook line and sinker into what Adam Schiff and Rachel Maddow were pushing. When no smoking gun or any serious evidence was delivered, I felt humiliated. It was all a hoax and Comey appears to be in the middle of it. That humiliation open my eyes. Which was my point, it we don’t clean out our house, we can not clean out the republicans. The jan 6th hearings offered Democrats an opportunity by back some credibility and they are squandering it because they refuse to tarnish their own just as republicans refuse to tarnish their own.
While the country deteriorates into some 3rd world laughing stock, republicans and democrats are worried about protecting their own, while working class schmoes and the poor get hammered. We are being gaslit by both parties.
Appreciate your solid question and opportunity to think through it. Namaste.
Nobody is above the law except Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden, Peter Strozk, James Comey, and anyone in the woke mob. The Democrat double standard is breathtaking.
A compelling case for prosecution, but interesting that not a word about the application of such an argument to Hillary Clinton.
The failure to apply the same reasoning undercuts trust in the principle of equal treatment under the law and bolsters arguments for justice department political bias.
Trump did everything Hillary Clinton did, and much, much worse. There is no comparison.
Hillary's email scandal was effectively replicated by Trump years ago simply by having classified conversations on personal phones, and we aren't even talking about that anymore. Furthermore, Hillary turned over everything she had to investigators, sans emails deleted as a matter of course. Trump had highly classified documents that he was ordered to turn over and didn't, even after repeated prompting, necessitating the FBI's gentle, low-key, and entirely legal search of his premises to retain the documents his lawyers claimed he didn't have.
But that's nothing compared to the real crime this article addresses, which is Trump's corrupt attempt at an autogolpe (i.e. a "coup" to remain in power rather than seize it). Hillary did nothing even within the same universe. In fact, no political figure or government official that the anti-anti-Trump faction has obsessed over - even the ones whose "crimes" weren't entirely manufactured by right-wing media - did anything remotely comparable to Trump's undeniable acts of sedition.
"Trump did everything Hillary Clinton did, and much, much worse. There is no comparison." that is like saying Hillary only had 3 people assinated, but Trump had 15, so we shouldn't do anything about Hillary. They are both corrupt to the core. By all means dump on Trump, but the argument looses validity when you trivialize Hillarys wrong doing.
The DOJ and the United States writ large are in a pickle. Those of us without a legal education should probably quiet down and give thanks that we do not have to make these difficult decisions. We are living through anxious and historic days, trying to make sense of what is happening. Thank you for this article. Now we watch and wait.
From a moderate who believes in liberal democracy. Somebody get a rope! This man threatens our democracy, undermines it every chance he gets. He is a selfish, self centered, egomaniac that cares nothing for “our nation”. The most poignant of those being his complacency and inciting actions of Jan 6. He did both, was complacent and inciting. Again he threatens our democracy and the precedence that needs to be enshrined is that it won’t be tolerated.
Comparing what he did, has done to anything Hillary Clinton did is contemptible. I am no fan of Hillary Clinton, but she didn’t threaten our democracy.
Hillary Clinton colluded with a foreign agent with Russian ties to create a falsified document that she then released to the FBI and the liberal media who then collectively pushed the false narrative of Trump’s collusion with Russia, and that false narrative and its aftermath continues to haunt us as a nation to this day. It resulted in many on the left never conceding the 2016 election to Donald Trump. And because so many of them have Trump derangement syndrome and are hamstrung with a confirmation bias mindset, they won’t ever understand that Hillary Clinton literally did more to threaten our democracy than Donald Trump ever has.
No, she didn't. The Clinton campaign hired an oppo research firm to dig up info on Trump, and they procured the Steele Dossier - which, you will recall, her campaign *never used* because it was unconfirmable.
And Hillary didn't push it to anyone. The media and the FBI obtained it on their own, and nobody released it to the public, until after the election, when that most storied and venerable of mainstream media institutions, Buzzfeed News, splashed it all over their website, forcing real media to publicly acknowledge it.
You are probably thinking about the claim that Hillary fed the Alfa Bank story to the FBI - that's also a right wing fabrication. Hillary tipped off the media to the story, so that actual journalists could investigate it. When they did, she linked to the story - this is a time honored and entirely legitimate practice in political campaigns. Later on, a lawyer who worked for her campaign and also worked for a client with access to data from the White House tipped off the FBI about cell phone data from Russian phones - the FBI disregarded the information. Then John Durham tried to prosecute the lawyer for this, and failed miserably (with the jury stating it should never have even been brought to trial).
But during questioning, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook testified that he had alerted Clinton that they had tipped the media off to the Alfa Bank story, *after* they had already done it, and the hacks at the WSJ editorial board (run by one of Trump's friends) ran with it and treated it like proof that Hillary manufactured the whole Russia scandal (when in fact the Alfa Bank story was barely a blip on the radar, being quickly "debunked" by other media outlets and ultimately having little to do with the Russia allegations against Trump). This idea got brainlessly echoed by bozos like Elon Musk, and it has only added to the anti-anti-Trump mythos of the "Russia hoax".
And I'm sorry to tell you that the only people guilty of confirmation bias are the people still invested in this idea that Trump's ties to Russia were a "hoax". They weren't. Trump has innumerable financial interests to Russia, and his campaign was loaded with people with conspicuous political connections to Russia. Paul Manafort, a prolific political henchman of unctuous autocrats the world over, was a key advisor to the pre-Euromaidan pro-Russian president of Ukraine, and was Trump's campaign manager. There was Carter Page, whom the Russians had tried to recruit years earlier as a spy, and literally gave an anti-Western democracy speech in Moscow less than a month after the hack of the DNC. General Mike Flynn, the great American patriot who conveniently failed to inform the federal government that he was a foreign agent of Turkey, was at a Moscow dinner in support of Russian state media and sitting *right next to Vladimir Putin*. George Popadopolous spent months trying to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin, when he ended up blabbing to an Australian diplomat about Russia's interest in getting Trump elected (which is what actually began the Russia investigation - not the Steele Dossier). Meanwhile, Trump himself was pursuing a real-estate deal with the Russian government, all while lying and saying that he had no such conflicts.
And what we know for certain is that Russia attempted to get Trump elected and was in contact with various officials in Trump's campaign. Anyone who thinks this situation wasn't entirely worthy of an investigation is delusional, and I wouldn't trust them to tell me what time it was much less guard national security. Ultimately the Mueller report failed to find enough evidence to convict anyone of criminal conspiracy, but that does not mean that Trump was entirely innocent and it certainly doesn't mean the investigation was a hoax.
In fact, Trump successfully interfered in Mueller's investigation, barring them from looking into his past finances under threat of shutting down the probe, and dangling pardons to those who agreed not to squeal on him, which he dutifully delivered at the end of his term. So ultimately the probe could only tell us so much, but there was plenty of evidence of cooperation and yes, "collusion" is a reasonable term to use even if it's legally meaningless in this context. But criminal conspiracy has a very high bar for prosecution, and all the Mueller report told us was that they couldn't quite get there.
So no, Clinton did nothing to threaten our democracy - in fact she has responsibly acted and spoken correctly on the threat Trump poses as a Russian puppet. Which is undeniably true, from everything we learned not only through the Russia investigations, but as Trump openly demonstrated repeatedly throughout the campaign and his presidency. It is the confirmation bias of the American right and the extreme left, who have each long held vendettas against Clinton for various, mostly bogus, reasons, that have led to the "Russia hoax" hoax.
And regardless of how many Democrats considered Trump "illegitimate" in some sense, nobody ever accused the Republican Party of literally stealing the election, and then had Democratic candidates running up and down state tickets for office claiming that they would have acted to overturn the vote had they been in power in 2016. In fact, Democrats responded by effectively rallying politically against Trump, while Trump attempted to remain in office by pre-declaring himself the winner in the absence of massive voter fraud (the same bullshit claim he made in 2016 except that - oops, he won! Never mind ...) The idea that Hillary somehow did something worse than this simply by pointing out Trump having been elected with the help of Russian propaganda is the height of stubborn, partisan rationalization.
Yes, actually, she did. The Clinton campaign hired the oppo firm and then thought they could hide behind their attorneys as they distributed their lies to their complicit friends in the mainstream press. The fact that Buzzfeed News was the first to report it, which then allowed more mainstream outlets to report on *that* reporting, is a timeworn tactic that the American public is learning to see through.
The fact that Durham's prosecution of Michael Sussmann resulted in an acquittal is more a testament to the pliability of the D.C. jury than of Sussmann's innocence. Sussmann himself had, after all, admitted to what he was being accused of in writing. That's a confession.
As for the gymnastics you engage in regarding the Russia hoax, I have to say I am impressed. Your sentence that reads, "Ultimately the Mueller report failed to find enough evidence to convict anyone of criminal conspiracy, but that does not mean that Trump was entirely innocent and it certainly doesn't mean the investigation was a hoax." Instead of Mueller failing to find enough evidence, he found nothing. Not only was Trump innocent and the investigation was a hoax, but, as we are finding out now, the FBI knew it all along. Maybe that explains why Mueller's team illegally wiped their government issued phones.
Clinton, along with her co-conspirator Obama, planted this narrative deep within the DOJ and FBI to ensure it would consume the first few years of Trump's presidency. These efforts by the Deep State were not only attacks against Trump, but were attacks against the American people that elected him.
Instead of causing his downfall, these attacks have only caused the Deep State to be further drawn out of its many hiding places. It has exposed their operatives on both sides of the political aisle as well as within the many institutions where it lurks, feeding off of government cash. Instead of shrinking in the face of this onslaught, these attacks and smears have only made Trump stronger. This last fact has so enraged the Left that they couldn't help themselves but overplay their hand in the 2020 election.
The American people are awake to this crime against democracy.
Well, that is a very detailed summary of events, but you must admit you slip in a bit of speculation and your own bias along with your cataloguing of the historical timeline. You ultimately beg the question: is Trump an evil genius or a dubious puppet? Also, where do you think the deeply held hatred and disgust for all-things-Trump by both the left and the right comes from? I honestly don’t know. I’m a physician and real estate investor and followed Trump for a decade before 2016 when he jumped suddenly into politics. We can argue about whether or not he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth or created himself with his bootstraps, but he is obviously a political outsider and a shit-stirrer and a wholly apolitical maverick who gives no fucks, except as it relates to his own thin-skinned narcissism. As a proud maga republican, I don’t expect my president to be perfect, I don’t want him or her to always say the right things, always be nice to people, and always act presidential, just the opposite. Our government is broken, and the ultimate fix is to shrink it. Trump understands that. We need to realize that in America a large central government with all-consuming power and incalculable financial resources does not ultimately serve Americans well. We are a Republic, and local governance is how we will survive.
Excellent article. Clearly it was written even before the Department of Justice outlined the great lengths it took to obtain the highly secret documents carelessly placed at Mar A Lago, and the lying and obstruction of justice done by Trump and/or his representatives. I don't see how Trump can weasel out this time.
By a perfect synchronicity, I read the comments section just as I was finishing Garrett Graff's history of Watergate. Remembering how after the smoking gun tape even Nixon's most hardcore defenders stopped denying his guilt made quite the contrast to the words I was reading here.
Your article includes the quote, "when Trump spent months undermining public confidence in the presidential election". Untrue! What undermines public confidence in any election is when there is credible evidence of fraud and the entire election apparatus, in conjunction with our judicial system, goes overboard to bury their heads in the sand, look the other way, deflect and otherwise try to convince the public that there is nothing to see here. None of the lawsuits were adjudicated on their merits. They were dismissed by cowardly judges who did not want to find the truth. A dismissed suit is not an adjudicated suit. People are upset! This is what prompted the events of January 6th. Liz Cheney and her committee, the Department of Justice, mainstream media, and your article all miss the point.
Except that there was no credible evidence of fraud. Some of the lawsuits were, in fact, adjudicated on their merits, but most were dismissed for either lack of standing or lack of evidence. And even ones that were dismissed involved appearing before a judge, where Giuliani was typically laughed out of court. Ask any legal analyst who wasn't actively colluding with Trump's campaign - the lawsuits had no merits. They were utterly baseless.
And as the January 6th committee has shown, even most of the people in Trump's orbit told him that the claims of fraud were baseless. In fact, we know that Trump had planned on exploiting the red mirage / blue wave phenomenon (a virtual certainty after Trump exhorted his supporters not to use mail-in ballots, which in most states would be counted last) in order to declare himself the winner on election night. Numerous journalists and election experts predicted months in advance that he would pull this precise stunt, and he didn't disappoint.
So I'm sorry Tom, but nobody's missing the point. They know what Trump's apologists are claiming, but they're way ahead of them on the facts. They're long past arguing over the legitimacy of Trump's claims, which never had any plausible legitimacy to begin with.
The article was about mishandling of classified documents and whether Trump should be prosecuted for it. It WAS NOT about other potential crimes that he (or Hillary) may have committed. If you expand the scope of the debate so broadly, then the comparison will in fact be "apples to oranges".
I disagree emphatically with your perspective. The legal issues are beyond my competence, but the societal issues seem obvious. Criminal prosecution of a former President who retains nearly fanatic popularity within a large segment of the population is another step on the destruction of the American political system. The first impeachment effort against Trump was dangerous folly, that in my mind could not have possibly achieved a positive result. Criminal prosecution now would be far worse.
Completely disagree. I didn't vote for Trump and don't like him, but the case is a real stretch at best. He has already been subject to so many politically-motivated investigations and procedures, and we now know the FBI already interferred with the 2020 election by refusing to investigate the Hunter Biden laptop and falsely suggesting it was fake, encouraging news organizations to suppress the story, which they dutifully did. The optics are terrible, and not just to Trump supporters.
Firstly, the FBI didn't suggest it was a fake. It was former executive branch officials and national security experts - who dutifully noted that they could not be certain, but that it looked bad. Because it did, even though they happened to be wrong.
In any event, the story was never "supressed". In fact Twitter's decision to label it misinformation almost immediately blew up in their face and the story got even more coverage and infamy than it otherwise would have. It is preposterous to suggest that it affected the outcome of the election because it somehow didn't reach people whose vote it would have changed. As far as relates to Joe Biden himself, the laptop has been a total dud, and the mainstream media was right to cautiously report the story as unconfirmed, because in reality it was another bullshit October surprise, a la Jim Comey informing Congress about the Huma Abdein emails out of an abundance of caution.
And no other investigation against Trump has been "politically motivated". Not to say that partisans weren't rooting for them, but no investigation into Trump has been shown to be unwarranted. The idea that they have is a distortion of reality by anti-MSM contrarians.
At the very least, the Mueller report, as well as the Inspector General report, established that the Russia investigation was well-founded, even if they couldn't find enough evidence to charge Trump with criminal conspiracy. Similarly, the congressional investigation into the Ukraine incident showed that there was indeed a quid-pro-quo (i.e. Trump attempted to extort Ukraine), and the Jan 6th incident and subsequent investigation have unequivocally shown that Trump attempted to corruptly seize power (as if that weren't obvious from watching it in real time, but the committee unearthed facts that countered even the most willfully naive rationalizations). The fact that Trump was acquitted in both situations can be attributed to his party's spinelessness, not because they were politically motivated witch hunts.
The FBI was leaning on the big social media giants to censor supposed "Russian disinformation." The story most certainly was suppressed--Twitter censored it completely, and Facebook throttled the story for the three weeks leading up to the election, which Zuckerberg just last week explictly said was connected to FBI pressure and their insinuation that it was fake.
The computer was recovered from a Wilmington, Del. repair shop in December 2019, and the FBI did nothing with it until after the election--reportedly, we are now learning from whistleblowers, because of pressure from on high in the FBI. This while he was under federal criminal investigation related to potential violations of tax and money laundering laws and his business dealings in foreign countries, along with illegal lobbying! HB, a complete moron who is not even qualified to wipe his own ass, was clearly trading access to his father for cash. The laptop was far from a "total dud" -- in fact we are still learning more about the whole sordid affair, which the FBI Director before congress called "deeply troubling."
The attempt to connect Trump to Russia, we now know, was fabricated by the Clinton campaign and laundered to federal investigators under false pretenses. An baseless investigation that clouded his presidency for years!
The FBI warned Facebook about Russian disinformation. They did NOT tell them to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. Facebook did that on their own because it fit a pattern - which it did. And Twitter reversed their labeling of the story almost immediately after a backlash. In no way can you say they successfully suppressed the story when it was all over the media by mid October.
There is a kerfuffle now about some CIA agent liking some posts on social media and supposedly a whistleblower saying he attempted to suppress information about the laptop embarrassing to Hunter. We don't have all the details, and it hardly matters. The Hunter Biden story was thrown out there right when it would cause maximal damage. If this Thibault guy really did suppress the story until October (which is what Wray was referring to with his quote, not "the whole sordid affair"), Trump's supporters should be thanking him, because it would have been long forgotten by election time had it come out when the FBI first received the laptop.
And seriously, what is it going to take to get you Trump apologists to understand that Hunter Biden was not running for President? It doesn't matter how much Hunter was trading on his dad's name - that's on Hunter, not Joe. What did you want Joe to do, sit him in a corner? If trading on your father's name is to be held against a Presidential candidate, Trump's kids would have gotten him impeached. Of course, since Trump's kids were actually running *his* company while he was President, it actually make sense in his case. That's what real corruption actually looks like.
Nonetheless, Joe was in no way involved with any of Hunter's business dealings. All of that has been debunked. The ridiculous Bobulinski story, touted by Kimberly Strassel, one of the WSJ's hack opinion writers, was debunked literally *minutes later* by the Journal's *actual journalists*, who deal with actual real facts. And the emails released later on confirmed that there was *nothing* in them implicating Joe Biden. That's what I mean when I say the laptop was a dud - it had none of the incriminating information about Joe that all of Trump's media toadies claimed it did.
As for your final claim, so help me God I am tired of explaining this to people, and I apologize for my exasperation if you aren't one of the people I've explained it to, but let me be clear. The attempt to link Trump to Russia *was not* fabricated by Hillary Clinton. That is a complete load of *bullshit* that was pushed by the Wall Street Journal and their hack editorial staff after a distortion of Robby Mook's testimony given during John Durham's completely frivolous attempt to prosecute an attorney who worked for Hillary's campaign - which Durham lost so badly the jury said it should have never been brought to trial.
At any rate, I detailed this in one of my other responses on this page - specifically my response to Robert's response to David O's comment. Read that if you want to know how badly you've been taken for a ride by the anti-anti-Trump world. The long and short of it is that the connections between Trump, his campaign, and Russia are not only real, they are so blatantly obvious it would have been an act of criminal negligence not to investigate them. And our knowledge is still incomplete because of all the ways that Trump successfully interfered with the Mueller investigation.
But if you'd like to see an example of a completely phony narrative of election interference by a foreign power, try reading up on the "Crowdstrike" conspiracy theory that Rudy Giuliani tried to push - the one that claimed that actually it was *Hillary*, working with the *Ukrainian* government to *keep* Trump from getting elected. (It's like the game of Clue, 2016 election version.) If there's one thing Trump's supporters do best, it's project. I'll be happy to supply resources.
They didn't have to tell them to suppress that particular story, the implication was clear. The Dems in Congress have called Dorsey and Zuckerberg in for hearings enough times to get the message across - censor more or else. It is still suppression even if it isn't entirely successful. It gave the false appearance of illegitimacy to the story. Whether it made a difference to the election, we'll never know.
Wray was indeed talking about how, according to multiple whistleblowers, a number of higher ups at the FBI instructed agents not only to not investigate the laptop, but to falsely suggest that it was not legitimate. That most certainly matters. Again, Hunter Biden was already under federal investigation, and he certainly puts his father under a well-deserved cloud.
The Trump companies may have their issues but they are legitimate companies with legitimate business interests. Hunter has no qualifications whatsoever to be on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, or sundry other sweet gigs he got. He is literally a crackhead. He is selling access to his father to foreign state and nonstate actors. And that doesn't happen without Joe's acquiescence. Of course voters might want to take that into consideration.
As for your Russiagate nonsense, TomB's reply to you below says it better than I could.
The idea that "the implication was clear" is a conveniently unfalsifiable assertion. Given the fact that the 2016 election was rife with misinformation - especially on Facebook - explicitly generated by the Internet Research Agency, basic prudence suggested that warning Zuckerberg was entirely appropriate as we approached a 2020 election in which Trump had long since been explicitly signaling his malign intent to defraud the electorate.
And you'll have to show me where multiple whistleblowers claimed that agents were being instructed to deny the legitimacy of the laptop. Wray certainly didn't say that - he was very circumspect about discussing details.
And with regard to Hunter Biden "selling access" to his father, this is where you are dead wrong. Taking advantage of his father's name is one thing, but there is *no* evidence that Hunter actually sold anyone access to his father. That's precisely what he was investigated for by Senate Republicans, and they found nothing. This is another narrative of presumption invented by the right. I suppose after carrying Trump's water long enough one can no longer fathom people having integrity.
As for Trump, his "legitimate businesses" were generating all kinds of money for him through patronage by foreign dignitaries. His kids were doing business for him in India while Trump was visiting with Modi. He ran the hotel down the street from the White House, despite the fact that the law specifically forbade it. He directed Federal workers to his hotels on official travel. Mar-a-lago was a persistent security threat with all of the foreign nationals that patronized it. The guy was selling access to himself.
And that's not even to mention that his son-in-law was running an extra-legal track of foreign diplomacy with the Saudis that actually interfered with the official foreign policy of the State Department, so that he could nab 2 billion (yes, that's billion with a 'b') from MBS for the foundation he represented, pocketing several million for himself in the process. That's blatant abuse of your position as a government official, in addition to profiting from access to his father-in-law, all with Trump's complete acquiescence and enablement. The fact that nobody is making much of anything about this scandal while being apoplectic over what Hunter Biden did as a private citizen just shows how utterly the bar has been lowered for Trump and how everyone else is held to a far higher standard.
And if you think all of Trump's businesses are legitimate, you haven't been paying attention to the guy. This is a man who treated his own charity as a slush fund and whose initial fortune was made as a result of his father's illegal tax schemes. In fact, his businesses have been under investigation and his longtime CFO just pled guilty to tax fraud and is going to flip on him. Maybe this time he'll face consequences - so far, everyone around him goes to jail, yet he walks away. But yeah, he's totally legit.
As for my Russiagate "nonsense", I'm going to reply to TomB, but it's frustrating that I keep enduring this same pattern. I do my best to respond to the substantive points of people's posts, yet when I provide a wealth of information making my case, I get a response that basically waves it all away and restates a preferred narrative. So be it then; that speaks for itself. I am confident my arguments withstand objective scrutiny far better than anyone's Russia denialism.
Russia spent a piddling amount on facebook content in an election that was awash in billions of dollars of spending. To pretend that was of any consequence, or a justification for the security state to lean on private actors to censor more, is ridiculous. Far from unfalsifiable, it is incontestable that this is happening. Biden even attempted to appoint a Minster of Truth, for godsakes.
The whistleblower allegations are referred to in Senator Grassley's letter to the FBI Director: https://www.grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/grassley_to_justice_deptfbipoliticalbiasfollowup.pdf
I never suggested Trump was free of corruption or that everything all of his business do is legitimate. But both investigators and the press have been digging nonstop to pin anything and everything they can on him, while the Bidens are getting both media and Deep State protection. I've known who Trump is for 40 years and I hold him in low regard. But he is getting scrutinized and investigated closely. If they have the goods on him, they should not have needed to fabricate so much baseless crap that is hyped to the heavens and then quietly amounts to nothing.
Speaking of your Russiagate nonsense, waiving away substantive points with your preferred narrative is exactly what you do.
Correct, no one is above the law, but we need to stop picking and choosing who is prosecuted based on their political alignment. I didn’t vote for Trump and don’t like the the guy, not even before he was a candidate. Until the same people who are demanding Trumps head, start demanding the heads of Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Anthony Fauci, Joe & Hunter Biden you have no credibility. Jan 6 was a disgrace, as were the BLM riots, Antifa and proud boys. I have very little respect for republican leadership, but over the last 6 years, I have even less respect for democrat hypocrisy. The Jan 6 hearings had potential to change minds and be meaningful IF it shed light on the shenanigans that involved both parties, the DOJ and FBI. Now it is just more ridiculous Trump Derangement Syndrome that turns off independent thinking liberals like myself. If democrats are to ever regain the trust of the working class, we need to clean up and clean out our own house before we try to clean up the republicans. But what does a commoner like me know.
Exactly what should Jim Comey, Anthony Fauci, and Joe Biden be prosecuted for?
Firstly, you are aware that Senate Republicans actually investigated Joe Biden in 2020 (election year!) and found *nothing*. You can bet your ass they'd have been airing it out in public if they had. And if you're under the impression that Hunter Biden's laptop provided evidence of criminal activity by Joe Biden, you've been lied to.
And please identify a crime committed by Jim Comey or Anthony Fauci.
Yes I am aware of the Biden investigation, which was really a ploy by republicans to cover own tracks with their involvement with Ukraine. It is pretty obvious now that both republicans and democrats are heavily invested in Ukraine. How much of the 60 billion dollars sent to Ukraine is actually getting kicked back into republican and democrat “unrelated” business partners. And Do you really believe Republicans will ever let us know what is really on Hunter Bidens laptop. No. They have just as much to loose.
As far as Fauci, it is now clear he lied to congress about gain of function research, he lied about masks, he lied about natural immunity, he lied about children, he lied about vaccine efficiencies and his ties to big Pharma. This was my second major eye opening moment. Where those crimes? Probably not, but it is another example of just how corrupt our entire system is.
But you are right, I have been lied to. I bought hook line and sinker into what Adam Schiff and Rachel Maddow were pushing. When no smoking gun or any serious evidence was delivered, I felt humiliated. It was all a hoax and Comey appears to be in the middle of it. That humiliation open my eyes. Which was my point, it we don’t clean out our house, we can not clean out the republicans. The jan 6th hearings offered Democrats an opportunity by back some credibility and they are squandering it because they refuse to tarnish their own just as republicans refuse to tarnish their own.
While the country deteriorates into some 3rd world laughing stock, republicans and democrats are worried about protecting their own, while working class schmoes and the poor get hammered. We are being gaslit by both parties.
Appreciate your solid question and opportunity to think through it. Namaste.
Nice! Spoken like a true elitist. It looks like most of your comments are limited to a single word - ‘trash’ ...
Wow, did you really just post that. Must be why you keep your name hidden. Please refer to @Eric73 who provided a solid thought provoking question.
Nobody is above the law except Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden, Peter Strozk, James Comey, and anyone in the woke mob. The Democrat double standard is breathtaking.
A compelling case for prosecution, but interesting that not a word about the application of such an argument to Hillary Clinton.
The failure to apply the same reasoning undercuts trust in the principle of equal treatment under the law and bolsters arguments for justice department political bias.
Trump did everything Hillary Clinton did, and much, much worse. There is no comparison.
Hillary's email scandal was effectively replicated by Trump years ago simply by having classified conversations on personal phones, and we aren't even talking about that anymore. Furthermore, Hillary turned over everything she had to investigators, sans emails deleted as a matter of course. Trump had highly classified documents that he was ordered to turn over and didn't, even after repeated prompting, necessitating the FBI's gentle, low-key, and entirely legal search of his premises to retain the documents his lawyers claimed he didn't have.
But that's nothing compared to the real crime this article addresses, which is Trump's corrupt attempt at an autogolpe (i.e. a "coup" to remain in power rather than seize it). Hillary did nothing even within the same universe. In fact, no political figure or government official that the anti-anti-Trump faction has obsessed over - even the ones whose "crimes" weren't entirely manufactured by right-wing media - did anything remotely comparable to Trump's undeniable acts of sedition.
"Trump did everything Hillary Clinton did, and much, much worse. There is no comparison." that is like saying Hillary only had 3 people assinated, but Trump had 15, so we shouldn't do anything about Hillary. They are both corrupt to the core. By all means dump on Trump, but the argument looses validity when you trivialize Hillarys wrong doing.
Hillary wasn't President, she willingly turned over all her servers, and she testified under oath. So apples and oranges.
The DOJ and the United States writ large are in a pickle. Those of us without a legal education should probably quiet down and give thanks that we do not have to make these difficult decisions. We are living through anxious and historic days, trying to make sense of what is happening. Thank you for this article. Now we watch and wait.
From a moderate who believes in liberal democracy. Somebody get a rope! This man threatens our democracy, undermines it every chance he gets. He is a selfish, self centered, egomaniac that cares nothing for “our nation”. The most poignant of those being his complacency and inciting actions of Jan 6. He did both, was complacent and inciting. Again he threatens our democracy and the precedence that needs to be enshrined is that it won’t be tolerated.
Comparing what he did, has done to anything Hillary Clinton did is contemptible. I am no fan of Hillary Clinton, but she didn’t threaten our democracy.
Hillary Clinton colluded with a foreign agent with Russian ties to create a falsified document that she then released to the FBI and the liberal media who then collectively pushed the false narrative of Trump’s collusion with Russia, and that false narrative and its aftermath continues to haunt us as a nation to this day. It resulted in many on the left never conceding the 2016 election to Donald Trump. And because so many of them have Trump derangement syndrome and are hamstrung with a confirmation bias mindset, they won’t ever understand that Hillary Clinton literally did more to threaten our democracy than Donald Trump ever has.
No, she didn't. The Clinton campaign hired an oppo research firm to dig up info on Trump, and they procured the Steele Dossier - which, you will recall, her campaign *never used* because it was unconfirmable.
And Hillary didn't push it to anyone. The media and the FBI obtained it on their own, and nobody released it to the public, until after the election, when that most storied and venerable of mainstream media institutions, Buzzfeed News, splashed it all over their website, forcing real media to publicly acknowledge it.
You are probably thinking about the claim that Hillary fed the Alfa Bank story to the FBI - that's also a right wing fabrication. Hillary tipped off the media to the story, so that actual journalists could investigate it. When they did, she linked to the story - this is a time honored and entirely legitimate practice in political campaigns. Later on, a lawyer who worked for her campaign and also worked for a client with access to data from the White House tipped off the FBI about cell phone data from Russian phones - the FBI disregarded the information. Then John Durham tried to prosecute the lawyer for this, and failed miserably (with the jury stating it should never have even been brought to trial).
But during questioning, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook testified that he had alerted Clinton that they had tipped the media off to the Alfa Bank story, *after* they had already done it, and the hacks at the WSJ editorial board (run by one of Trump's friends) ran with it and treated it like proof that Hillary manufactured the whole Russia scandal (when in fact the Alfa Bank story was barely a blip on the radar, being quickly "debunked" by other media outlets and ultimately having little to do with the Russia allegations against Trump). This idea got brainlessly echoed by bozos like Elon Musk, and it has only added to the anti-anti-Trump mythos of the "Russia hoax".
And I'm sorry to tell you that the only people guilty of confirmation bias are the people still invested in this idea that Trump's ties to Russia were a "hoax". They weren't. Trump has innumerable financial interests to Russia, and his campaign was loaded with people with conspicuous political connections to Russia. Paul Manafort, a prolific political henchman of unctuous autocrats the world over, was a key advisor to the pre-Euromaidan pro-Russian president of Ukraine, and was Trump's campaign manager. There was Carter Page, whom the Russians had tried to recruit years earlier as a spy, and literally gave an anti-Western democracy speech in Moscow less than a month after the hack of the DNC. General Mike Flynn, the great American patriot who conveniently failed to inform the federal government that he was a foreign agent of Turkey, was at a Moscow dinner in support of Russian state media and sitting *right next to Vladimir Putin*. George Popadopolous spent months trying to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin, when he ended up blabbing to an Australian diplomat about Russia's interest in getting Trump elected (which is what actually began the Russia investigation - not the Steele Dossier). Meanwhile, Trump himself was pursuing a real-estate deal with the Russian government, all while lying and saying that he had no such conflicts.
And what we know for certain is that Russia attempted to get Trump elected and was in contact with various officials in Trump's campaign. Anyone who thinks this situation wasn't entirely worthy of an investigation is delusional, and I wouldn't trust them to tell me what time it was much less guard national security. Ultimately the Mueller report failed to find enough evidence to convict anyone of criminal conspiracy, but that does not mean that Trump was entirely innocent and it certainly doesn't mean the investigation was a hoax.
In fact, Trump successfully interfered in Mueller's investigation, barring them from looking into his past finances under threat of shutting down the probe, and dangling pardons to those who agreed not to squeal on him, which he dutifully delivered at the end of his term. So ultimately the probe could only tell us so much, but there was plenty of evidence of cooperation and yes, "collusion" is a reasonable term to use even if it's legally meaningless in this context. But criminal conspiracy has a very high bar for prosecution, and all the Mueller report told us was that they couldn't quite get there.
So no, Clinton did nothing to threaten our democracy - in fact she has responsibly acted and spoken correctly on the threat Trump poses as a Russian puppet. Which is undeniably true, from everything we learned not only through the Russia investigations, but as Trump openly demonstrated repeatedly throughout the campaign and his presidency. It is the confirmation bias of the American right and the extreme left, who have each long held vendettas against Clinton for various, mostly bogus, reasons, that have led to the "Russia hoax" hoax.
And regardless of how many Democrats considered Trump "illegitimate" in some sense, nobody ever accused the Republican Party of literally stealing the election, and then had Democratic candidates running up and down state tickets for office claiming that they would have acted to overturn the vote had they been in power in 2016. In fact, Democrats responded by effectively rallying politically against Trump, while Trump attempted to remain in office by pre-declaring himself the winner in the absence of massive voter fraud (the same bullshit claim he made in 2016 except that - oops, he won! Never mind ...) The idea that Hillary somehow did something worse than this simply by pointing out Trump having been elected with the help of Russian propaganda is the height of stubborn, partisan rationalization.
Yes, actually, she did. The Clinton campaign hired the oppo firm and then thought they could hide behind their attorneys as they distributed their lies to their complicit friends in the mainstream press. The fact that Buzzfeed News was the first to report it, which then allowed more mainstream outlets to report on *that* reporting, is a timeworn tactic that the American public is learning to see through.
The fact that Durham's prosecution of Michael Sussmann resulted in an acquittal is more a testament to the pliability of the D.C. jury than of Sussmann's innocence. Sussmann himself had, after all, admitted to what he was being accused of in writing. That's a confession.
As for the gymnastics you engage in regarding the Russia hoax, I have to say I am impressed. Your sentence that reads, "Ultimately the Mueller report failed to find enough evidence to convict anyone of criminal conspiracy, but that does not mean that Trump was entirely innocent and it certainly doesn't mean the investigation was a hoax." Instead of Mueller failing to find enough evidence, he found nothing. Not only was Trump innocent and the investigation was a hoax, but, as we are finding out now, the FBI knew it all along. Maybe that explains why Mueller's team illegally wiped their government issued phones.
Clinton, along with her co-conspirator Obama, planted this narrative deep within the DOJ and FBI to ensure it would consume the first few years of Trump's presidency. These efforts by the Deep State were not only attacks against Trump, but were attacks against the American people that elected him.
Instead of causing his downfall, these attacks have only caused the Deep State to be further drawn out of its many hiding places. It has exposed their operatives on both sides of the political aisle as well as within the many institutions where it lurks, feeding off of government cash. Instead of shrinking in the face of this onslaught, these attacks and smears have only made Trump stronger. This last fact has so enraged the Left that they couldn't help themselves but overplay their hand in the 2020 election.
The American people are awake to this crime against democracy.
Well, that is a very detailed summary of events, but you must admit you slip in a bit of speculation and your own bias along with your cataloguing of the historical timeline. You ultimately beg the question: is Trump an evil genius or a dubious puppet? Also, where do you think the deeply held hatred and disgust for all-things-Trump by both the left and the right comes from? I honestly don’t know. I’m a physician and real estate investor and followed Trump for a decade before 2016 when he jumped suddenly into politics. We can argue about whether or not he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth or created himself with his bootstraps, but he is obviously a political outsider and a shit-stirrer and a wholly apolitical maverick who gives no fucks, except as it relates to his own thin-skinned narcissism. As a proud maga republican, I don’t expect my president to be perfect, I don’t want him or her to always say the right things, always be nice to people, and always act presidential, just the opposite. Our government is broken, and the ultimate fix is to shrink it. Trump understands that. We need to realize that in America a large central government with all-consuming power and incalculable financial resources does not ultimately serve Americans well. We are a Republic, and local governance is how we will survive.
Excellent article. Clearly it was written even before the Department of Justice outlined the great lengths it took to obtain the highly secret documents carelessly placed at Mar A Lago, and the lying and obstruction of justice done by Trump and/or his representatives. I don't see how Trump can weasel out this time.
Excellent article!!
Are you responding to the right post here? He seems to agree with what you said above.
By a perfect synchronicity, I read the comments section just as I was finishing Garrett Graff's history of Watergate. Remembering how after the smoking gun tape even Nixon's most hardcore defenders stopped denying his guilt made quite the contrast to the words I was reading here.
Your article includes the quote, "when Trump spent months undermining public confidence in the presidential election". Untrue! What undermines public confidence in any election is when there is credible evidence of fraud and the entire election apparatus, in conjunction with our judicial system, goes overboard to bury their heads in the sand, look the other way, deflect and otherwise try to convince the public that there is nothing to see here. None of the lawsuits were adjudicated on their merits. They were dismissed by cowardly judges who did not want to find the truth. A dismissed suit is not an adjudicated suit. People are upset! This is what prompted the events of January 6th. Liz Cheney and her committee, the Department of Justice, mainstream media, and your article all miss the point.
Except that there was no credible evidence of fraud. Some of the lawsuits were, in fact, adjudicated on their merits, but most were dismissed for either lack of standing or lack of evidence. And even ones that were dismissed involved appearing before a judge, where Giuliani was typically laughed out of court. Ask any legal analyst who wasn't actively colluding with Trump's campaign - the lawsuits had no merits. They were utterly baseless.
And as the January 6th committee has shown, even most of the people in Trump's orbit told him that the claims of fraud were baseless. In fact, we know that Trump had planned on exploiting the red mirage / blue wave phenomenon (a virtual certainty after Trump exhorted his supporters not to use mail-in ballots, which in most states would be counted last) in order to declare himself the winner on election night. Numerous journalists and election experts predicted months in advance that he would pull this precise stunt, and he didn't disappoint.
So I'm sorry Tom, but nobody's missing the point. They know what Trump's apologists are claiming, but they're way ahead of them on the facts. They're long past arguing over the legitimacy of Trump's claims, which never had any plausible legitimacy to begin with.
In the unlikely event anyone doesn’t pick up on your political bent, deploy a phrase that includes the words “descended the escalator.”
Holy cow there seem to be a lot of Trumpsters on this thread. I don't see you guys in the discussion groups--why?
The article was about mishandling of classified documents and whether Trump should be prosecuted for it. It WAS NOT about other potential crimes that he (or Hillary) may have committed. If you expand the scope of the debate so broadly, then the comparison will in fact be "apples to oranges".
As for Sarah's claims about Hillary's veracity, see https://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/clintons-handling-of-classified-information/
I disagree emphatically with your perspective. The legal issues are beyond my competence, but the societal issues seem obvious. Criminal prosecution of a former President who retains nearly fanatic popularity within a large segment of the population is another step on the destruction of the American political system. The first impeachment effort against Trump was dangerous folly, that in my mind could not have possibly achieved a positive result. Criminal prosecution now would be far worse.