General Discussion

bigtree

(86,005 posts) Wed Feb 15, 2017, 11:16 AM Feb 2017

Martin O'Malley: 'There's a Bear in the Sit Room, a Trout in the Milk'

Link to tweet

A Trout in the Milk
Martin O'Malley - Feb 14

Many years ago, Henry David Thoreau once observed that “some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” It did not swim there by itself. Today with General Michael Flynn’s resignation, I say: there was a bear in the White House Situation Room, and the American people need to know how it got there.

The bear did not walk in on its own.

After just 24 days, Flynn, Trump’s National Security Advisor, resigned after the public learned he had lied to VP Pence and the American people.

The lie? After first denying it, Flynn was forced to admit that he had conversations with the Russian Ambassador about lifting U.S. sanctions. These sanctions were imposed on Russia for state interference in the U.S. presidential election. In particular — Russian espionage and the hacking of the email communications of the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign and her Party.

Every U.S. intelligence service, even the FBI, has now come to the conclusion that the Russian hacking of our election process was clearly intended to help elect Trump. Trump was the only candidate for President in modern times to call for a re-evaluation of the U.S. commitment to the NATO Alliance. Trump also made it clear that he has no problem with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In fact, the only plank in the GOP platform he changed was the one that took a hard-line against Russian military aggression in Ukraine; he watered it down.

Shortly after this bizarre re-write of Republican policy toward Russian aggression, his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had to abruptly resign. Why? Because newspaper reports revealed that Manafort likely accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars for advising Russian puppet politicians in the former eastern bloc of Europe.

Back to Flynn: the real offense isn’t that Flynn violated the Logan Act which prohibits citizens from undermining U.S. diplomacy or security efforts; the real offense against American Democracy is that Trump and his campaign had been communicating — and likely coordinating — with the Russians all through the campaign.

Flynn — and likely Manafort — maintained this channel of communication while Russia was deploying a sophisticated hacking and propaganda campaign to help Trump win.

Would he have won without it? Don’t know. Don’t care. The point is the Russians helped him. What they did was illegal. The troll farms spewing the Trump messages online while posing as American Joe Six-Pack. The cyber burglary of email accounts, releasing them through Wikileaks, and then dripping them out all through the campaign. The Russian media hiring former Bernie bloggers to attack Clinton throughout the general election.

And Trump was aware of all of it.

The circumstantial evidence of collusion was so overwhelming and obvious that Trump sought to cover it with something more sensational and outrageous. He publicly urged the Russians to do more of it at a televised rally. “So much offensive stuff, so little time.” It was the biggest and most under-reported story of the election. The truth itself was unbelievable; too hard to explain.

There is a bear in the Sit Room, and the American people need to know how it got there.

read: https://t.co/Q7EwUvCR9Q