Donald Trump News Dominates the Headlines & Not in a Good Way…The Russia scandal has really been ramping up since after the midterms. We can just sense the walls closing in on this presidency as more evidence becomes public on Russiagate, while numerous other investigations have opened up based on obvious signs of malfeasance that appears to be criminal. Our commentary, article links & excerpts below bring us up-to-date on the most pertinent Donald Trump news that’s happened the past few days. These are headlines the likes of which have never been seen before in American history. And yes, never before have we ever elected such a corrupt & criminalized president.
So we dedicate this part 1 section to Donald Trump news, since the President keeps dominating the headlines with unprecedented levels of scandal & chaos, plus here at The VORACS we’d like to see our blog site ranked on Google for the keyword phrase Donald Trump news. By the way, that’s the real reason we now place a limit on the number of live links, since too many outbound links can negatively impact our Google rankings. So we’re sorry about some articles that you might want to read, you’d need to search for.
I think one inconvenient truth Trumpeters have yet to come to grapple with, the opposition to Trump especially among us center-right conservatives who were formerly GOP supporters, for us it’s not so much party affiliation or ideologies. From a big picture overview, this is about a much much much bigger problem of an American President bringing corruption, deception, demagoguery, tyranny & criminality to the highest office. Even if a president were to bring about miracles, like rallying/uniting our divided nation, bringing about the actual greatest economy ever, & effectively promoting world peace, such a leader may be lionized as a hero, but would still need to be held accountable for their lawlessness & abuse of power. I think from what we’re seeing of Trumpian policies, it’s safe to assume he’ll never go down as a hero. But we do need to find out one way or the other whether he is a proven criminal. The latest Donald Trump news headlines don’t look good for him.
An Incredible Number of Active Investigations
So let’s get into important articles from the past few days. There are currently 17 ongoing criminal investigations involving Trump & his cronies! Think about that! It’s simply stunning! Of an American President! And they’re all based on viable evidence of wrongdoing. Maybe Trump should take a deal: chris-matthews-trump-breaking-point & also trump-could-resign-in-the-coming-weeks-predicts-msnbcs-chris-matthews. That number of probes is sure to rise even higher when the Dems take over the House. Here’s a list of those 17 investigations inside donald-trump-federal-state-local-investigations, while this next link has a more detailed description of the 17: heres-what-we-know-about-the-17-known-investigations-into-trump-campaign-russia.
The center of the Trump family charities fraud that’s being investigated in NY, the Trump Foundation, has just been dissolved. But there really is solid evidence they were stealing from their own charity & pocketing the money themselves!: trump-foundation-dissolves-investigation-continues. The more we learn, the more it’s looking like Trump was the mob boss over an entire criminal enterprise: donald-trump-cohen-campaign-mueller-obrien. Think it’s bad now with all these investigations hanging over the president’s head? Well, as I mentioned it’s bound to get a lot worse, with the Dems taking over the House investigatory committees & the evidence closing in on Trump personally. Posted here is the opening to personal-and-political-investigations-mount-for-trump:
Investigations now entangle Donald Trump’s White House, campaign, transition, inauguration, charity and business. For Trump, the political, the personal and the deeply personal are all under examination. Less than two years into Trump’s presidency, his business associates, political advisers and family members are being probed, along with the practices of his late father. On Saturday, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke became the fourth Cabinet member to leave under an ethical cloud, having sparked 17 investigations into his actions on the job, by one watchdog’s count. All of this with the first special counsel investigation against a president in 20 years hanging over Trump’s head, spinning out charges and strong-arming guilty pleas from underlings while keeping in suspense whether the president — “Individual 1” in prosecutor Robert Mueller’s coded legalese — will end up accused of criminal behavior himself.
Continuing on Today’s Theme of Donald Trump News
It was another bad few days of headlines for the prez, coming on the heels of several bad weeks of Donald Trump news. The bad news keeps piling up, as seen posted here in the opening to trump-turbulent-week-cohen-crisies:
After a week that could tally as one of the most turbulent of his presidency, Donald Trump and his embattled top aides have been hit with strong signs the worst is yet to come, in the form of tersely worded court documents and testimony. On Wednesday, Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen, whose job for 10 years was, in his own words, to cover up Donald Trump’s “dirty deeds”, stood before a US district judge and described how his once-bulletproof faith in Trump had been shattered. “I accepted the offer to work for a famous real estate mogul whose business acumen I truly admired,” Cohen, 52, said of the president. “In fact, I now know that there is little to be admired.”
But a less-noticed scene in court that day points to much bigger trouble ahead for Trump. Also present for the Cohen hearing was a member of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, the prosecutor Jeannie Rhee, who described how much help Cohen had been to the investigation into alleged collusion between the campaign and Moscow. “He has provided our office with credible information” about “core Russia issues”, Rhee told the court. “Mr Cohen has sought to tell us the truth, and that is of utmost value to us. “There’s only so much that we can say about the particulars at this time.” The “particulars” that the Mueller team declined to talk about almost certainly pertained to investigations with targets who ranked above Cohen, legal analysts said. Those could be one of relatively few figures at this point, experts agreed: probably one of the president’s children, his son-in-law, or Trump himself.
“There is no question in my mind that there is more to come from Robert Mueller,” the former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti, host of the #OnTopic podcast, told the Guardian. “Does it have the potential to be devastating for Trump? Yes. But we don’t know what Mueller has, exactly where he’s going, or how long it will take him to get there.” Lisa Griffin, a law professor at Duke University, said Trump was under pressure from many sides apart from Mueller, and that recent developments in the New York jurisdiction “are currently the more obvious source of jeopardy for the president”. “I think the recent developments have revealed clearly that this is not a one-front situation, that the southern district of New York is going to play a very significant role in the future of this presidency,” Griffin said. The list of legal crises that Trump, his family and associates need to worry about seemed to explode in the last week.
Definitely Not a Witch Hunt!
The crimes investigators are finding are real! The more we find out, the more we learn this is not a witch hunt as Trump keeps barking out. There’s actual substance to each one of these serious infractions sparking multiple investigations. These excerpts are the beginning to mounting-legal-threats-surround-trump-as-nearly-every-organization-he-has-led-is-under-investigation:
Two years after Donald Trump won the presidency, nearly every organization he has led in the past decade is under investigation. Trump’s private company is contending with civil suits digging into its business with foreign governments and with looming state inquiries into its tax practices. Trump’s 2016 campaign is under scrutiny by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, whose investigation into Russian interference has already led to guilty pleas by his campaign chairman and four advisers. Trump’s inaugural committee has been probed by Mueller for illegal foreign donations, a topic that the incoming House Intelligence Committee chairman plans to further investigate next year. Trump’s charity is locked in an ongoing suit with New York state, which has accused the foundation of “persistently illegal conduct.” The mounting inquiries are building into a cascade of legal challenges that threaten to dominate Trump’s third year in the White House. In a few weeks, Democrats will take over in the House and pursue their own investigations into all of the above — and more.
Gravity Will Sink Trump
More terrible Donald Trump news is seen here. The gravity of the legal troubles Trump is facing can be further read in excerpts from donald-trump-s-legal-vise-how-the-probes-have-proliferated:
As President Donald Trump and his lawyers turn toward the new year, they’ll have to contend with a legal narrative that’s taken fuller shape through a flurry of court filings and news reports that began landing about three weeks ago and extended through Friday afternoon: Members of Trump’s presidential campaign — and possibly “Individual 1” himself — may have orchestrated a number of criminal conspiracies that took root before and during the 2016 presidential campaign, continued after Trump won the election, and have tainted the White House’s policies and torn at its operations ever since. The breadth of investigations is so sweeping — as many on social media and reporters with the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Bloomberg News have already noted — that few of the worlds Trump inhabits have escaped prosecutors’ attention. The Trump Organization, the Trump Foundation, the Trump family, the Trump campaign, the Trump transition, the Trump inauguration, and the Trump White House are all being probed for wrongdoing. The Trump team’s possible collusion with Russia to sabotage and tilt the 2016 election, a probe spearheaded by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, pulls many strands of the investigations together. Trumplandia’s intersection with Russia may have started with business propositions more than a decade ago (such as the Trump SoHo hotel and condominium), and included more recent undertakings like a project in Moscow, before evolving into a political partnership during the 2016 campaign after Trump’s presidential prospects brightened.
But there are many other threads, some related to Russia and some not, that investigators are pulling on. The Trump inauguration raised $107 million, and $40 million of that amount remains unaccounted for; Ivanka Trump, according to a joint report from ProPublica and WNYC, refereed payments to Trump’s Washington hotel during the inauguration. The Wall Street Journal said last week that federal investigators are examining whether inauguration donors gave money in exchange for policy favors. Michael Cohen, a former Trump attorney, has told prosecutors that Trump directed him to violate campaign finance laws by paying hush-money to two alleged paramours during the 2016 campaign to keep Trump’s presidential bid alive. David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer, said he helped bury stories about Trump’s affairs for the same reason. New York law enforcement officials are probing how Trump managed his charitable foundation, and they and federal law enforcement officials have also corralled the president’s longtime accountant and chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, for questioning.
New Donald Trump News Stories from WaPo
If you can access articles from the Washington Post, do a search for any of these link titles below. We only have so much room to post excerpts along with a limit on the number of live links. But these are all excellent WaPo articles from the past couple days best read in their entirety, so they’re worth checking out. It all gives a real perspective on the trouble the prez is truly in:
americans-grow-weary-trump-turmoil
a-child-occupies-the-white-house–and-the-world-knows-it
signs-are-mounting-trump-has-been-badly-weakened-it-will-get-worse-him
how-various-investigations-into-trumps-world-overlap
we-learned-our-institutions-can-withstand-challenge
trumps-secrets-of-success-are-finally-failing-him
giuliani-stumbles-into-admitting-trumps-hush-money-payments-were-likely-illegal
russias-support-for-trumps-election-is-no-longer-disputable
its-undeniable-trump-russians-are-locked-hip
is-muellers-investigation-nearing-worst-case-scenario-garrett-graff-thinks-so
trump-agrees-to-shut-down-his-charity-amid-allegations-he-used-it-for-personal-and-political-benefit
are-trump-hush-money-payments-most-significant-campaign-finance-violation-ever
on-twitter-trump-comes-out-swinging-in-many-directions
Saving His Presidency might be the Least of His Worries
I repeat, this is not a witch hunt or some deep state conspiracy out to get Trump. These are about legitimate criminal investigations with hard evidence we’re dealing with the most lawless & corrupt president in our nation’s great history. Pulled from View-from-the-left-Prosecutors-are-going-to-obliterate-Trump-and-his-massive-criminal-enterprise, this first section is the beginning & last section the ending to the article, which at the end is a riveting explanation his entire brand & business empire may crumble under the weight of Trump’s criminal enterprise being exposed. In other words, it’s more very bad Donald Trump news:
Taken together, colluding with Russians and engaging in a conspiracy to silence women in order to steal the election would be plenty illegal and impeachable offenses. Yet they are just the beginning of the long drawn out nightmare that has begun to beset Donald Trump. We saw a virtual torrent of headlines this week related to Trump’s longtime fixer and lawyer Michael Cohen, his chief media maker David Pecker who oversees the National Enquirer property among others, an elaborate hush-money scheme to squelch negative press, false testimony to Congress run through the White House, a Russian agent who infiltrated GOP circles and made contact with Trump, and the Trump inaugural committee falling under federal scrutiny for misusing funds, some” of which went to Trump’s own businesses. At the heart of every one of those salacious and potentially illegal scandals is Trump himself. And yet despite the velocity and volume of the seedy Trump revelations bearing down on America, this week’s reports haven’t even begun to capture the scope of the criminality that will ultimately define Trump, his presidency, and the empire he built. As former federal prosecutor and NBC legal analyst Daniel Goldman explained on Thursday, collusion appears to be moving to the back burner in terms of the universe of criminality surrounding Trump—which isn’t to suggest that collusion didn’t transpire. “This might really be a much larger scheme related to sanctions and a massive cover up of really unparalleled proportions,” Goldman explained Thursday on MSNBC. “When you look at Michael Cohen coordinating with the White House to lie to Congress and you look at Michael Flynn lying about his transition contacts related to sanctions to Russia,” Goldman said, “it all starts at the top and trickles down and that’s how criminal conspiracies work.” But actually, that’s just one bucket of problems for Trump—the one that relates more urgently to his political survival and presidency. The other bucket is the work of his life—his family business, the Trump Organization. And that got a wakeup call this week when incoming New York Attorney General Letitia James gave her first interview and outlined an investigatory agenda that will dissect every area of Trump’s Manhattan-based business: Trump’s real estate holdings, the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians, any government subsidies Trump has received, any violations of the emoluments clause through his New York businesses, the Trump Foundation, and really any and everything else investigators turn up as they inspect every single foundational rock of Trump’s decades-long professional life in the Empire State.
MSNBC commentator Donny Deutsch summed up what that means for Trump and his family in a New York minute-and-a-half of riveting Cable TV. “What is going to put him in jail eventually, what is going to destroy everything he has ever built—and his children—is a 30-year dishonest criminal enterprise,” Deutsch told Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday, adding that Russia and the hush-money payments are the absolute least of Trump’s worries. As a fellow New York businessman, Deutsch said Trump was well known in the state’s real estate industry (which is inherently a bit sleazy from the start) as “the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the food chain—this is a criminal guy.” Taking Trump down has also become at once a law-enforcement imperative, a career maker, and a moral obligation for every prosecutor who can get their hands on some aspect of Trump’s case. “The political incentive for every U.S. Attorney in New York or Virginia to do it is: This guy tried to show up and undo 250 years of what people have been dying for in this country—who we are, what we stand for […] what our grandfathers died for,” Deutsch noted. “He singlehandedly is the first guy in our lifetime to try to undo that, and he is going to pay for that the rest of his life as they pick apart his criminal enterprise.” Anyone who has been following the Russia and SDNY investigations of Trump closely has likely had that revelatory moment of thinking, Good god, this is just so much bigger than we can even imagine. But it’s not simply the reach of the tentacles related to collusion and obstruction, it’s the umbrella under which they fall. It’s politics and business, it’s D.C. and Manhattan, it’s federal and state, it’s conspiracy and cover up, it’s now and then—and at the very tip of that voluminous umbrella is Donald Trump. Everything has trickled down from him, and prosecutors will be following those streams straight back to their source, indefinitely, until Trump is just a shriveled orange-hued lump of a being, his once-cushy opulent life destroyed beyond recognition.
This Disaster-in-the-Making has now simply become a Disaster
After riding down that escalator, it led to him winning the GOP nomination through unprecedented media coverage, boisterous circus-like rallies & unachievably bold campaign lies. As explained inside all-donald-trump-wanted-was-to-be-president-and-just-look-how-it-turned-out, it may end with Trump moving from the White House to the big house. I’ve always perceived Trump as a lifelong con man (see part 2) ruling over his empire like a mob boss, which the white-hot spotlight of the presidency has unveiled his criminal behavior.
Give Me the F****** Money & F*** the Law!
Let me preface this by saying I don’t know how true this is, but if the quote is accurate from inside Christie-snubs-Trump-on-chief-of-staff-post-payback-for-Trump-s-transition-greed, it looks like Trump went on a profanity-laced tirade demanding to steal & pocket inauguration funds. If so, no wonder federal prosecutors recently opened a criminal probe about that. There’s over $100 million involved here, about half of which seemed to go poof into thin air. And if he could do that with inauguration funds, it’s also easy to envision him raiding his own charity. So click on that previous link to read that awful quote attributed to Trump from inside a book by Michael Lewis, where Trump went on a rampage he wanted the money & didn’t care about the law. And it looks like stealing the money is more of a family affair: trump-inc-podcast-trumps-inauguration-paid-trumps-company-with-ivanka-in-the-middle.
Subpoena &/or Indictment?
Mueller still wants to talk: mueller-interview-trump-interest & there’s plenty of speculation from this bizarre episode mueller-investigation-allegedly-closes-entire-floor-of-washington-courthouse-for-mystery-grand-jury-testimony that Trump may be fighting a subpoena. And is it possible the prez might already be under a sealed indictment?: cnn-legal-analyst-paul-callan-says-trump-may-already-have-been-indicted-under-seal.
Whenever I hear media pundits say a GOP-controlled Senate would never convict Trump after being impeached by the House, I always find such opinions ridiculous. What is currently publicly known is only a fraction of what the various investigations will eventually reveal to us, so we have yet to know how bad the evidence of criminality will be. Nixon had strong support from GOP politicians & the base until the smoking gun was made public (those tapes), from which his support eroded away quickly. Despite his cult-like support now, that could vaporize for Trump with solid proof of crimes, so should that time come I have to think at least 20 GOP senators would do the right thing by upholding the rule of law: cnbcs-john-harwood-says-even-a-gop-led-senate-could-convict-on-impeachment-charges.
I’ve been saying all along Trump is going down, since there’s been too much smoke along the way with so much empirical evidence & incredibly conspicuous Russian connections. And it’s all those shady financial dealings which could really lead to his downfall. These excerpts from trump-fears-republicans-will-abandon-him-amid-legal-troubles-report certainly points toward things not ending well for the president. Yes, it is more horrible Donald Trump news for the prez. There are times I actually feel sorry for the guy, but then I’m reminded like anyone guilty of crimes, they must pay their dues to society:
As Donald Trump and his administration continue to be bogged down in federal and criminal investigations, the president is reportedly worried that Republican lawmakers and donors will begin to abandon him just two years into his term. In a report by the Los Angeles Times, several people who are close to the president said that Trump senses that he is losing respect in the White House and worries that he won’t have the support from donors and lawmakers for his 2020 re-election bid. “They’re still not saying it publicly, but most Republicans on the Hill understand … that it’s not going to end well, that it’s going to be bad,” a longtime Republican operative close to Trump said.
This week was a tumultuous one for the Trump administration as the president’s former “fixer” and personal attorney Michael Cohen repeatedly implicated the president in federal crimes. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for a slew of charges, one of which he says he was directed in by candidate Trump in 2016: violating campaign finance laws by paying off two women months before the election in an effort to prevent them alleging publicly that they had had affairs with Trump. “I am done with the lying. I am done being loyal to President Trump” Cohen told ABC in an exclusive interview this week. He also told the news outlet that “of course” Trump knew that paying off the women was wrong and illegal.
Cohen’s confessions, coupled with lawsuits and investigations into the conservative The National Enquirer alleging Trump was in the room when negotiations were being made about killing a story about the payments and extramarital affairs, has rattled Trump’s administration. The president’s Art of the Deal ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, told the Los Angeles Times that Trump’s behavior suggests that he is fearing abandonment but that he would never admit that to himself. “He doesn’t feel the ordinary human emotions most of us do,” Schwartz said. “For example, he’s free of shame because he has no conscience, nor any self-awareness. So while his behavior certainly suggests he feels increasing fear and isolation, he would be the last one to know it.”
Last Friday’s Cohen Interview
The highlights from Cohen’s interview on GMA are posted here from cohen-mueller-has-substantial-evidence-to-back-up-my-story, which the part that should most terrify the White House is Mueller has a substantial amount of info corroborating Cohen’s claims:
Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former fixer, says the candidate personally directed him to pay off Stormy Daniels because he thought it would help him to win the election. Trumpworld allies have tried to suggest the president ordered the secret payments for personal reasons—to keep Melania Trump in the dark about his affairs—rather than for electoral gain, which would potentially violate campaign-finance laws. Speaking for the first time since he was sentenced to three years imprisonment, Cohen told ABC’s Good Morning America early Thursday that Trump knew exactly what he was doing. “You have to remember at what point in time that this matter came about—two weeks or so before the election. Post the Billy Bush comments, so, yes, he was very concerned about how this would affect the election,” he said. George Stephanopoulos asked if Trump knew it was wrong to pay off the women. Cohen said: “Of course.”
The lawyer explained that Trump was intimately aware of all of the major decisions taken by his company, and ridiculed suggestions that Cohen may have been freelancing without Trump’s consent. “I don’t think there is anybody that believes that,” Cohen said. “First of all, nothing at the Trump Organization was ever done unless it was run through Mr. Trump. He directed me to make the payments, he directed me to become involved in these matters.” Cohen told GMA: “Here is the truth: People of the United States of America, people of the world, don’t believe what he is saying. The man doesn’t tell the truth. And it is sad that I should take responsibility for his dirty deeds.”
After being convicted of lying to Congress, tax evasion, and breaking campaign-finance laws, Cohen hardly makes the most reliable witness. He told ABC News that his latest version of events should be believed because it had been corroborated by further evidence in the hands of special counsel Robert Mueller. “The special counsel stated emphatically that the information that I gave to them is credible and helpful,” he said. “There’s a substantial amount of information that they possessed that corroborates the fact that I am telling the truth.” It remains unclear how much actionable information Cohen has given during hours of testimony to the Mueller probe, but asked if Trump has been telling the truth about his dealings with Russia, Cohen said “No.”
We Like to Turn to Rubin
For clarity we often offer the wise words of Jennifer Rubin, which here is posted the whole op-ed from all-things-trump-didnt-count, explaining Trump’s rebuttals are totally nonsensical in trying to ward off mounting legal troubles:
President Trump’s inability to respond to one charge emanating from one witness, a charge not even within the purview of the special counsel, suggests he will be entirely overwhelmed when the closet full of shoes starts dropping. He never knew about the payments, or he did, or it was Michael Cohen’s fault, or it wasn’t a crime, or if it was a crime it was no big deal. This might be the most inept response to allegations of presidential wrongdoing ever. Michael Cohen’s interview with ABC News underscores a critical point: His own credibility has been enhanced because prosecutors have so much information tying Trump to illegal payments and suggesting he knowingly made the payments in a way to avoid detection or harm to his campaign. (“There’s a substantial amount of information that they possess that corroborates the fact that I am telling the truth,” he said.)
Now consider all the other investigations out there — on collusion, the Trump Foundation and obstruction of justice. Each of those investigations represents a bevy of possible criminal charges. Under the umbrella of “obstruction,” there could be specific criminal violations for obstruction, witness tampering, perjury and conspiracy. Consider that Robert S. Mueller III and the Southern District of New York could have multiple witnesses, phone records, texts, financial records, Trump’s own words and, in some cases, recordings to bolster his case. The sheer weight of all that evidence would break even a stable defendant represented by the best counsel.
For Trump, it is becoming hard to imagine how he survives politically or legally. Even if he avoids impeachment or avoids removal, only about a third of the country (with a smidgen of the total universe of evidence available to them) thinks he’s innocent. When charge after charge piles up, each backed up by multiple pieces of evidence, it’s not impossible to imagine that elected Republicans will turn on him — or that Republican voters, who see his presidency at a standstill, will begin to look for alternatives for 2020. Remember that Trump never thought he’d really get elected — and then all this would come out. And once he got elected, he failed entirely to appreciate that he could not control investigators, witnesses, the press and even former associates. Cohen is right when he says that “the pressure of the job is much more than what he thought it was going to be. It’s not like the Trump Organization where he would bark out orders and people would blindly follow what he wanted done.”
Trump seems to have gotten a bunch of things wrong:
*He thought former attorney general Jeff Sessions would shut down the Russia probe;
*He thought the bullying and lies and congressional allies would impede investigators;
*He thought Cohen would never flip and would never have tapes and other evidence;
*He never thought Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg or American Media executives or David Pecker would cooperate with authorities;
*He never thought his tweets and public outbursts were helping to incriminate him;
*He never thought the shady operation of his foundation would draw the attention of the press, and in turn of New York state authorities;
*He never thought his pardon power would be so useless (If he pardons associates, the dam may break in Congress; if he tries to pardon himself it likely would be ineffective);
*He never thought he’d have to answer prosecutors’ questions, or that his written answers may have locked him into answers that could be disputed by multiple witnesses;
*He never thought he’d face Democrats in Congress with subpoena power; and
*He never thought his media circus would be entirely ineffective in stopping skilled prosecutors.
Trump’s presidency, his financial empire and even his freedom are at risk. (Presidents can be indicted after leaving office and cannot pass out pardons for state offenses.) He can be angry at Sessions or Cohen, but he is solely responsible for his own fate, which right now looks awfully bleak.
Russia Interference shown to be Worse than we ever realized
A new report reveals a lot more details about the massive disinformation campaign the Russians conducted on social media during the 2016 campaigns, expressly designed to favor Trump & disparage Hillary. Along with the leaking of hacked emails from the Dems, it’s easy to surmise the Russian manipulation efforts swayed the election when we consider fewer than 100,000 votes in 3 states was the deciding factor. And the messaging lined up with the same things Trump & his echo were saying. Suspicious? Yes. Coordinated? Maybe. It’s also easy to see the likely collusion going on behind the scenes with the Trump campaign, considering the numerous Russian contacts many Trump officials engaged with, & some even knowing in advance of the WikiLeaks email dump that was coming. There’s also Trump’s long sought business deals in Moscow & the inexplicable way he constantly kowtowed to Putin: mueller-exposes-putins-hold-over-trump.
It all points to the Trump campaign’s nefarious & perhaps illegal connections with shady Russians, along with the probability Putin had Trump compromised. That is at the heart of the Mueller probe, which it will be fascinating to see how all the dots were connected when Mueller releases his findings. The news about that new report showing the Russians infiltrating social media is seen below in this entire article posted from report-details-aggressive-social-media-push-by-russia-to-help-trump-to-win-election-in-2016, which the first paragraph has a link taking us to the original WaPo article. The extent of the Russian interference was far greater than we previously realized, with hundreds of millions of engagements & Americans seeing this false propaganda. So yes, it certainly calls into question the legitimacy of our president. Perhaps impeachment could become less painful to the nation if it’s widely understood he should have never been elected in the first place:
Russians sought to erode voters’ plans to vote against Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election by undermining their confidence in candidates like Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, a newly-released government report states. The report, obtained by the Washington Post and discussed in an article they published Sunday afternoon, is the most detailed explanation yet that sheds light on just how aggressive Russians were in attempting to sway the election in favor of Trump. Logging into every major social media site and blasting their messages daily, Russians continued their online support for Trump even into his presidency and well into 2017. Their efforts were curtailed when social media sites made efforts to ban known “bots” to their sites in that year, the report stated. One of the conclusions from the report also stated that the Russian bots that were prevalent on social media sought to engage and encourage Trump supporters based on issues they supported, such as gun rights and immigration. The bots also attempted to dissuade voters opposed to Trump from voting, such as suggesting to African-American voters that Clinton didn’t hold their interests at-heart, or attempting to confuse her supporters by spreading misinformation about how, where, and when to cast a vote.
The Senate report was clear in its findings: the efforts by the Russians were meant to benefit one party, as well as their presidential candidate. “[A]ll of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party — and specifically Donald Trump,” the report noted. “Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting.” It is illegal for foreign entities to try and sway an election toward a candidate that they prefer. Special counsel Robert Mueller last year charged 13 Russian citizens with attempting to do so, according to reporting from Tech Crunch. The report’s release comes on the same day that Trump spent most of his time online deriding the Russia investigation. Trump authored at least eight tweets on Sunday criticizing the inquiry, including four where he specifically called the investigation led by Mueller a “witch hunt” or some variant of that term, according to a search at the TrumpTwitterArchive. In the tweet Trump wrote just before the Washington Post’s article was published, Trump denounced the Russia investigation as an “insurance policy” by Democrats to use in the event he won the election in 2016. It should be noted that the document the Washington Post cited in its article was a bipartisan report finding.
For more news stories on the massive Russian attacks on our elections, you can copy/paste these links to do a search. The search engines should be able to bring these articles right up:
msn/yes-russian-trolls-helped-elect-trump
investigaterussia/russian-interference-far-wide-and-ongoing
theguardian/russian-propagandists-targeted-african-americans-2016-election
vox/russia-senate-report-african-american-ira-clinton-instagram
thehill/report-finds-russian-disinformation-campaign-targeted-mueller
nytimes/politics-russia-influence
A Bargain
As part of his fog campaign, Trump recently brought up the price tag on the Mueller probe. Factoring in fines & asset forfeitures which total nearly double the cost of the probe, especially seizing a large sum of Manafort’s assets, special counsel’s investigation has been turning a nice profit! It might be the only thing in the Trump presidency at the federal level with a budget surplus: at-a-reported-cost-of-25-million-mueller-probe-has-paid-for-itself. But Trump is trying anything to derail the probe that could nail him: mueller-ready-to-pounce-on-trumpworld-concessions-to-moscow.
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