The "Russian hoax" was no hoax at all.

[kentuck]

It was real.

There was collusion between the Trump Administration and Russia. There were numerous encounters that were not explained.

There were business deals being negotiated between Trump and Putin right up to the election. It is very possible that they continued after the election.

When he asked, "Russia, if you're listening..."? They were listening. They immediately released emails from Hillary and the DNC that were in their possession.

The "hoax" was no hoax at all. It was only a distraction from the truth that could not be told. That is why Bill Barr appointed a Special Prosecutor to "investigate the investigators". It was his favor to Trump for appointing him as his Attorney General.

But now, a jury has unanimously ruled the Durham investigation had no merit. The Hillary adviser that was charged by Durham for lying to the FBI was declared innocent.

The "Russian hoax" has died on the vine. It is finally time for Durham to resign or to be fired. The charade has gone on long enough.

[Wounded Bear]

1. K & R...nt

[Scrivener7]

2. Of course it was. If only we had a government organization whose job it was to prosecute that

sort of thing...

But I guess the statute of limitations on recruiting a hostile foreign power to upend a national election has passed.

[sop]

4. They should call that government organization something catchy...like the Justice Department.

[anarch]

3. no shit - he literally would not have been put in office without their help

it was all brushed under the rug because the consensus wisdom was it would be too much for the public to bear, if they understood what had happened...that and a great many alignments of interest (and umm cash changing hands and all) among a whole bunch of our government officials with various foreign elements.

[DENVERPOPS]

14. YES

The NRA laundered tons of money from Russia to fund a large number of Republican U.S. Senators campaigns and those Senators knew damn well where the money was coming from.............Now they back Trump and the Republican Party and will say or do anything as a quid pro quo for Putin directly assisting them...............

The infiltration of Russia into our government was/is despicable.........The Russian people are laughing their asses off at how easily Putin accomplished bringing down the U.S. government and Democracy, without firing a single shot, starting a war, or firing a single rocket or missile.........

[Lonestarblue]

17. Along with the help of the NY FBI and James Comey.

Making his emails announcement right before the election did a great deal of damage to Hillary.

[DENVERPOPS]

48. Comey

single handedly flipped the winning amount of votes from Hillary to Trump.......

May he rot in hell forever.....................

[rubbersole]

21. We were warned...

Malcolm Nance wrote three books about Putin gaining influence over our politics and society in general. Two years before mainstream media coverage of any of it.

[MerryHolidays]

5. I am hoping that the January 6 hearings open all of this up again

I have NO doubt that Russia had involvement in January 6.

[machoneman]

8. Yes, even aside from the R's doing the Insurrection planning, I also hope the Russian...

...connections will be displayed. Action here besides the Insurrection backed by many leading R's needs to happen and soon!

[TheRealNorth]

6. And Manafort did deliver polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik

[Botany]

10. It was data analytics not just polling data

Russia knew where and by how much they had to rat fuck the elections in 2016.

[underpants]

7. I don't think Trump could restrain himself from mentioning the emails

He thinks he’s the smartest person ever. That’s very important to him. He just about flipped out in a debate when Biden mentioned his intelligence. His COVID response was basically trying to cover for himself because, as unexpected as it was, it implied that he didn’t see it coming. Even when staff 3-4 levels down made a mistake, he could abide that it reflected on him even if no one would really blame him.

He said. It happened the next day or within a week. I don’t know if any tangible link was leaked or reported but knowing him he wanted to make it a show of how smart all-knowing etc that he was.

[c-rational]

9. And we suffer the consequences of an illegitimate pResident,, and three Supreme Court Justices

who do not represent America, nor belong there.

[anarch]

36. expand the court

for one thing. I mean, it's not likely to happen, but that would be one way to at least mitigate some of the damage they've done to our judicial branch, but it goes all the way down to the lowest levels of the federal courts.

[c-rational]

38. +1

[cilla4progress]

11. THIS! (Apologies for the PTSD)...

In context of Manafort giving voting data to the Russians - DOCUMENTED!!!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/donald-trump-will-be-president-thanks-to-80000-people-in-three-states/

Three-weeks-plus after Election Day, there are still more votes to count in California than were cast in each of nine states and D.C. Most of the votes that have been (slowly, laboriously) counted in the state have been votes for Hillary Clinton, giving her a 4.1 million-vote lead in that state that's powering her 2.5 million-vote lead nationally. It takes Donald Trump's margins in the seven states where he saw the biggest vote advantages to make up Clinton's lead in California alone. (All of these figures thanks to Cook Political's Dave Wasserman

But, of course, none of this matters. All that matters is that Trump got more electoral college votes, thanks to having won more states. In many cases, those wins were much more narrow than Clinton's, which also helps power the gap between the electoral vote and the popular one. Trump won 18 states by fewer than 250,000 votes; Clinton, 13.

The most important states, though, were Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she'd have won the electoral vote, too.

[winagawaukee]

47. Hillary didn't show up

Hillary didn’t come to Wisconsin once in 2016 and barely campaigned in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Three key swing states and where was she?

[niyad]

12. KNR

[Pepsidog]

13. Only the hopelessly ignorant, stupid, and believers in an "alternate reality" believe that there

was a Russia Hoax. The tragically misinformed by Fox and RWNJ media outlets have turned a large portion of the population into literal information zombies. Their entire belief system is based on the most outlandishly dumb conspiracy theories that they have become completely detached from reality and short of shutting down their massive propaganda network, which is impossible, there isn’t much we can do to bring them back to reality. Never in my wildest dreams could I have ever imagine Americans of all socio-economic and educational levels could be so gullible. Really puts the rise of the Nazi party in perspective. Understand that the Nazi’s came to power through their appeal to rural Germans just like the rise of Trumpism and the Christian fascists evangelicals who have taken over and now rule over the majority of Americans. And even if we stomp on them at the ballot box there is no guarantee we can stop this downward spiral. But know this, we will not go down without a fight and unlike the 19 cowards in Ulvade we are well armed and not afraid to rush into action. Today’s pretenders shamed the memories of their heroes of The Alamo who I sincerely doubt would have stood in utter fear as small children’s bodies were being exploded by a mad-boy with a gun and a grudge. “Remember Ulvalde” should be the new Texas slogan.

[DBoon]

34. "you mean Eurasia wasn't always at war with Oceania"

"But Fox News says it is!"

[Kid Berwyn]

15. In the Oval Office in the merry month of May 2017

“I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job," Trump said, according to The Times. "I faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off.”

"I'm not under investigation," he added.



President Trump gestures to Russia's ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, as he speaks to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office on Wednesday, May 10, 2017. (Alexander Shcherbak/TASS/Getty Images)

Sources:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/10/527755991/trump-meets-with-russias-lavrov-at-the-white-house-today

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-nut-job-james-comey-russia-2017-5

No hoax in word or deed, kentuck.

[Probatim]

16. They played him like a violin.

Told him he's the smartest guy in the room. Laughed loudest at all his jokes. The richest billionaire they'd ever met.

He left that meeting validated and they left with state secrets.

JFC TFG is an idiot.

[Kid Berwyn]

18. He really is.

We wouldn’t know about the top Russian spies, er, diplomats in the Oval Office were it not for Trump showing off the photos via Twitter or Instagram.

No American news media were informed of the visit or invited to report on it.

After the Lavrov session had concluded, members of the U.S. media were allowed into the Oval Office, where they found the president sitting with Henry Kissinger, who served as President Richard Nixon's secretary of state. The meeting hadn't been listed on the president's official schedule.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/10/527755991/trump-meets-with-russias-lavrov-at-the-white-house-today

Then there’s that OTHER time…

"I aced the test."



IMPOTUS: "I actually took one when I -- very recently, when I -- when I was -- the radical left were saying, is he all there? Is he all there? And I proved I was all there, because I got -- I aced it. I aced the test. I took it at Walter Reed Medical Center in front of doctors. And they were very surprised. They said, that's an unbelievable thing. Rarely does anybody do what you just did."

Sources:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/10/politics/trump-hannity-coronavirus/index.html

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russias-state-tv-calls-trump-their-agent

What’s another word for being Putin’s Agent? Traitor.

[Probatim]

20. I don't recall Kissinger being in that meeting.

It sheds some light on his comments about Ukraine needing to make some concessions to Russia.

[Kid Berwyn]

23. I understand Hank "dropped in" after Lavrov & Kysliak

From CNN:

Excerpt…

A later meeting with Kissinger, however, wasn’t as restricted. The session didn’t appear on the President’s schedule earlier in the day, and members of the media were scrambled at the last minute to shoot a photo-op of the session.

Initially, the White House indicated the photo spray would be with Lavrov. Instead, it was Nixon’s former top diplomat in the chair next to Trump.

Trump said he was meeting with Kissinger to talk “about Russia and various other matters.”

Since he fired Comey, Trump has faced comparisons to Kissinger’s boss, whose dismissal of a special prosecutor in 1973 was a precursor to the Watergate scandal.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/10/politics/trump-meets-lavrov-kislyak-kissinger/index.html

No wonder Kissinger declined 9-11 government service rather than reveal his client list.

[Botany]

19. A New Report Adds Evidence That Trump Was a Russian Asset

A New Report Adds Evidence That Trump Was a Russian Asset
He helped Putin manipulate the U.S. election in 2020, as he did in 2016.



Share
Comment

Donald Trump was a tool in a long-running Russian campaign to weaken the United States. That’s been documented in Republican-led investigative reports, and now it has been updated with new evidence, thanks to the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of the 2020 election. The report, drafted by the CIA, the FBI, and several other agencies, was released in unclassified form on Tuesday, but it was presented in classified form on Jan. 7. In other words, it was compiled, written, and edited during Trump’s administration. It destroys his lies about the election, and it exposes him as a Russian asset.

The report debunks conspiracy theories, promoted by Trump and his lawyers, that hackers in other countries robbed him of victory. “We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to interfere in the 2020 US elections by altering any technical aspect of the voting process,” including “ballot casting, vote tabulation, or reporting results,” says the document. A separate analysis released by the Department of Justice reaches the same conclusion. The IC report adds that evidence of such operations, if they existed, would have shown up in U.S. surveillance or in “post-election audits of electronic results and paper backups.” The report implicitly mocks insinuations from Trump’s lawyers that former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, somehow rigged Trump’s defeat. “We have no information,” it notes drily, that “current or former Venezuelan regimes were involved in attempts to compromise US election infrastructure.”

snip

As to Russia, the report leaves no doubt: In 2020, as in 2016, “President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations” to help Trump and hurt his Democratic opponent. For example, “Shortly after the 2018 midterm elections, Russian intelligence cyber actors attempted to hack organizations primarily affiliated with the Democratic Party.” Then, in late 2019, Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, “conducted a phishing campaign against subsidiaries of Burisma holdings, likely in an attempt to gather information related to President Biden’s family.” Throughout the 2020 election, agents “connected to the Russian Federal Security Service,” FSB, planted negative stories about Biden. Internet operatives working for the Kremlin, including the troll farm that had boosted Trump in 2016, continued to promote “Trump and his commentary, including repeating his political messaging.”

Attacks on Biden and his son, Hunter, were part of this operation. Through “US officials and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration,” the report says Russia’s intelligence services “repeatedly spread unsubstantiated or misleading claims about President Biden and his family’s alleged wrongdoing related to Ukraine.” In this way, Trump’s circle “laundered” the Russian-planted stories, which were then recirculated—and promoted by Russia’s online proxies—as American news.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/03/trump-russian-asset-election-intelligence-community-report.html

[Botany]

33. And that report was from senate republicans too.

I think it covers some of what we haven't seen from the redacted parts of the Mueller Report. Every time
anybody brings up Hunter Biden and his lap top they are following what Vlad/Russia want spread.

FYI https://www.democraticunderground.com/100216752910 And this is news?

[Joinfortmill]

22. Amen. I hope lawsuits are coming.

[czarjak]

24. So, illegitimately installed! Who knew? W?

[Mr. Ected]

31. Coming Soon: The J6 Insurrection Hoax

For people who refuse to believe what they assuredly saw, heard and read, but prefer to accept a substitute construct that upholds their factually unsupportable belief system.

[geardaddy]

32. TFG knows the word "hoax" so well

Since his entire business dealings are hoaxes.

[kentuck]

35. It's truly amazing how thoroughly FOX News and Trump supporters picked up on the "Russian Hoax"

...after they had witnessed all of the Russian collusion and election shenanigans.

Out of thin air, from no one but Trump, the "Russian hoax" became their mantra.

[Deep State Witch]

37. I Still Want To Know

What the deal was with that Trump org server contacting AlfaBank.

[Evolve Dammit]

39. Good post Kentuck

[certainot]

40. there are still 1500 radio stations calling it a hoax so expecting truth and sanity is insane

until dems do something about it - like telling the 87 universities and dozens of pro sports teams they suck until they stop supporting hundreds of radio stations that think we need more machine guns to stop illegal immigrants from voting

[summer_in_TX]

41. The Senate Intelligence Committee Inquiry was widely ignored.

But it showed the Russian connections repeatedly and it assessed that it was more likely than not that Trump knew and was personally involved.

The report was over 900 pages and was put out when the committee chair was a Republican (Richard Burr) rather than Dem hands so it wasn't particularly publicized. Few reporters read the entire document.

But someone did when it was released in the summer of 2020 and worked hard to give an overview of its findings. Here's a good link to his thread. I read the linked threads the other day and found it compelling.

Link to tweet

[SunSeeker]

45. The Steele Dossier was NOT a hoax. Mueller confirmed its key claims.

No substantial part of the Steele Dossier was refuted. Most of it was in fact confirmed. The "pee tape" was never confirmed, nor refuted. Yet the media and right wingers continue to refer to it as the "controversial" or "debunked" dossier. Steele's key claim was correct, namely that Russia used "trusted agents of influence" to target Trump's inner circle. And he was correct to suspect there were secret contacts between Trump aides and Russian officials, even though Trump denied any Russian ties. Mueller and a bipartisan Senate inquiry concluded that Trump's team welcomed Russian help, and coordinated with the Russians on several fronts.

Welcome to DU.

[SunSeeker]

43. No substantial part of the Steele Dossier was refuted.

Most of it was in fact confirmed. Yet the media continues to refer to it as the "controversial" or "debunked" dossier. Steele was right that Russia used "trusted agents of influence" to target Trump's inner circle. And he was correct to suspect there were secret contacts between Trump aides and Russian officials, even though Trump denied any Russian ties. Mueller and a bipartisan Senate inquiry concluded that Trump's team welcomed Russian help, and coordinated with the Russians on several fronts.

[BootinUp]

44. You just gonna get me started kentuck,

Putin's playbook was fucking working.

[blue-wave]

46. There is no doubt

in my mind of collusion between tfg's administration/election campaign and Russia. The war in Ukraine is a result of the anti-American and anti-international rule of law deal that was struck between these parties.

Ukraine must win. Pooty and his evil cabal must be defeated. There is no other option.