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‘Too Big to Fail’: Russia-gate One Year After VIPS Showed a Leak, Not a Hack

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Former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul:

Show me one quote/tweet from Trump personally (1) praising new sanctions on Russians, (2) endorsing lethal weapons to Ukraine (3) supporting more NATO troops near Russia's border (4) calling for Russia to leave Crimea or (5) criticizing Putin's anti-democratic policies. Just one. I support many dimensions of the Trump ADMINISTRATION's policy toward Russia. But Trump himself does not.
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https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1084341461988962306
 
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Badfishy1

Active member
gaiusmarius said:
i know Obama expelled some diplomats too, i said so. but Trump kicked out double as many as Obama





this refers to a very recent event, where 1 set of sanctions was to be lifted on 1 company. there are still hundreds of other sanctions active, 213 of which are since Trump



so the president of Russia and America had an off the record discussion. don't think thats so unusual. how can you discuss sensitive issues with a bunch of leaking staff sitting next to you. it proves nothing either way.



this is actually fake news, he didnt refuse to sign it, he just said he didnt think it was a good idea. he was trying to better relations again after all.

yes Obama closed 2 Russian buildings or compounds down, but Trump closed down 2 actual consulates, which are considered to be Russian territory. so it is significantly more harsh then closing private compounds of the Russian state.
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Yeah he expelled them then set up Gen. Flynn’s (ILLEGAL) wiretap conversation
 
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gaiusmarius

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beta said:
Former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul:



https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1084281909914390529

Trump has concealed details of his face-to-face encounters with Putin from senior officials in administration
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...f6686c-1434-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html
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i hate arguing Trumps side, he has done a lot of shit i really hate. but in all fairness, he was suffering from an extraordinary level of leaking in his admin at that time. so i can see why some discussions were kept confidential. nothing was signed, no official agreements made, in fact nothing came of any of the ideas they came up with at the meeting. in fact Trump reversed position 100% after that meet up, lol. remember would and wouldn't?

in the end i think presidents have private discussions with their counterparts all the time, they couldn't get anything done if every word was public. but thats my opinion, maybe American presidents are not allowed to speak with anyone privately? would seem a bit strange though.

mc faul is a foul Russophobe and war monger. he's practically an ukronazi himself, so yeah he hats Putin, no surprise, Putin was up on all his shenanigans and probably made his job as chief spy, oops i mean US ambassador, quite hard.
 
gaiusmarius

gaiusmarius

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the point is presidents sometimes disagree with congress. both Obama and Bush have used their executive power to do as they pleased despite congress. Bush was famous for adding signing statements that totally changed the nature of the laws he was supposed to sign. Obama was no different, using executive orders and singing statements to get around laws the congress passed.

but i will agree with a big point you quoted from foul mcfaul. Trump probably didnt want to implement all the sanctions on Russia, or close consulates etc. but he did do it, he didnt make executive orders to stop it, he didnt make signing statements to neutralize the intention. basically he went along with all of it, even if unhappily. but in the end he was voted in in part to make things better between the nuclear powers, he was campaigning on getting out of Syria, so he had a mandate you could say to make things better, but he didnt, he has let things go from bad to worse and worse.
 
gaiusmarius

gaiusmarius

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beta said:
This article is regarding a UN security council vote on UN sanctions. It does not have anything to do with the Obama administration refusing to implement sanctions that were lawfully passed by Congress or even the UN.
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whats so different? congress wanted to keep sanctions on iran and not have any deal with Iran. Obama went around congress by going to the UN directly despite the congress never agreeing to the deal being made with Iran. its why they never made a treaty, just an agreement, because the congress would never have ratified it.
 
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Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset

— Trump has a long financial history with Russia. As summarized by Jonathan Chait in an invaluable New York magazine article: “From 2003 to 2017, people from the former USSR made 86 all-cash purchases — a red flag of potential money laundering — of Trump properties, totaling $109 million. In 2010, the private-wealth division of Deutsche Bank also loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars during the same period it was laundering billions in Russian money. ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,’ said Donald Jr. in 2008. ‘We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia,’ boasted Eric Trump in 2014.” According to Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s guilty plea of lying to Congress, Trump was even pursuing his dream of building a Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign with the help of a Vladimir Putin aide. These are the kind of financial entanglements that intelligence services such as the FSB typically use to ensnare foreigners, and they could leave Trump vulnerable to blackmail.

— The Russians interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to help elect Trump president.

— Trump encouraged the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails on July 27, 2016 (“Russia, if you’re listening”), on the very day that Russian intelligence hackers tried to attack Clinton’s personal and campaign servers.

— There were, according to the Moscow Project, “101 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia linked operatives,” and “the Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.” The most infamous of these contacts was the June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower between the Trump campaign high command and a Kremlin emissary promising dirt on Clinton. Donald Trump Jr.’s reaction to the offer of Russian assistance? “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

— The Trump campaign was full of individuals, such as Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Michael Flynn, with suspiciously close links to Moscow.

— Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for free and was heavily in debt to a Russian oligarch, now admits to offering his Russian business partner, who is suspected of links to Russian intelligence, polling data that could have been used to target the Russian social media campaign on behalf of Trump.

— Trump associate Roger Stone, who was in contact with Russian conduit WikiLeaks, reportedly knew in advance that the Russians had hacked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails. (Stone has denied it .)

— Once in office, Trump fired Comey to stop the investigation of the “Russia thing” — and then bragged about having done so to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister while also sharing with them top-secret information. Later, Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions because he would not end the special counsel investigation that resulted after the firing of Comey. As Lawfare editor Benjamin Wittes argues, “the obstruction was the collusion” — Trump has been effectively protecting the Russians by trying to impede the investigation of their attack on the United States.

— Trump has refused to consistently acknowledge that Russia interfered in the U.S. election or mobilize a government-wide effort to stop future interference. He has accepted Putin’s protestations that the Russians did not meddle in the election over the “high confidence” assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that they did.

— Like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the Justice Department and the FBI (“a cancer in our country”) — two institutions that stand on the front lines of combatting Russian espionage and influence operations in the United States.

— Again, like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the European Union and NATO — he has suggested that France should leave the E.U. and that the United States should leave NATO, reportedly saying, “NATO is as bad as NAFTA.” The E.U. and NATO are the two major obstacles to Russian designs in Europe.

— Trump supports populist, pro-Russian leaders in Europe, such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France, just as the Russians do.

— Trump has praised Putin (“a strong leader”) while trashing just about everyone else from grade-B Hollywood celebrities to leaders of allied nations. Trump even praised Putin for expelling U.S. diplomats and, notwithstanding instruction from his aides (“DO NOT CONGRATULATE”), congratulated Putin on winning a rigged reelection.

— Trump was utterly supine in his meetings with Putin, principally in Hamburg and Helsinki. Even more suspicious, according to a Post article on Saturday, Trump “has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with . . . Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials . . . Several officials said they were never able to get a reliable readout of the president’s two-hour meeting in Helsinki.”

— Trump defends the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and repeats other pro-Russian talking points.

— Trump is pulling U.S. troops out of Syria, handing that country to Russia and its ally Iran.

— Trump has effectively done nothing in response to the Russian attack on Ukrainian ships in international waters, thereby encouraging greater Russian aggression.

— Trump is sowing chaos in the government, most recently with a record-breaking partial government shutdown and “acting” appointees in key posts such as the Defense Department and Justice Department, thus furthering a Russian objective of undermining its chief adversary.

Now that we’ve listed 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset, let’s look at the exculpatory evidence. . .

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I can’t think of anything that would exonerate Trump aside from the difficulty of grasping what once would have seemed unimaginable: that a president of the United States could actually have been compromised by a hostile foreign power.

In his own defense, Trump claims he has been tougher on Russia “than any other President,” but literally in the next sentence he says, “getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.” When the United States actually has taken steps to get tough with Russia in the past two years, it has usually been the work of Congress (the 2017 Russia sanctions bill) or Trump aides (expelling 60 Russian diplomats). The Post reports that Trump was “furious” when his administration was portrayed as being tough on Russia, and NBC News reports that he instructed subordinates never to publicly discuss plans to sell weapons to Ukraine.

This is hardly a “beyond a reasonable doubt” case that Trump is a Russian agent — certainly not in the way that Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames were. But it is a strong, circumstantial case that Trump is, as former acting CIA director Michael Morell and former CIA director Michael V. Hayden warned during the 2016 campaign, “an unwitting agent of the Russian federation” (Morell) or a “useful fool” who is “manipulated by Moscow” (Hayden). If Trump isn’t actually a Russian agent, he is doing a pretty good imitation of one.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...b1b250-174f-11e9-88fe-f9f77a3bcb6c_story.html
 
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MUELLER DRAFT REPORT SAYS TRUMP 'HELPED PUTIN DESTABILIZE THE UNITED STATES', WATERGATE JOURNALIST SAYS

Legendary Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein has said that he’s been told that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report will show how President Donald Trump helped Russia “destabilize the United States.”

“From a point of view of strength… rather, he has done what appears to be Putin’s goals. He has helped Putin destabilize the United States and interfere in the election, no matter whether it was purposeful or not,” the journalist added. He then explained that he knew from his own high-level sources that Mueller’s report would discuss this assessment.

“And that is part of what the draft of Mueller’s report, I’m told, is to be about,” he said. “We know there has been collusion by [former national security adviser Michael] Flynn. We know there has been collusion of some sort by [Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul] Manafort. The question is, yes, what did the president know and when did he know it?”
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xavier7995

I have been curious about that Bernstein story. Mueller has been pretty tight lipped, it really doesnt make a bit of sense to let slip the rough draft or any details of it. Along those lines...well yeah, that is what one would expect to be in such a report, i dont think he has any special insight.
 
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Trump Discussed Pulling U.S. From NATO, Aides Say Amid New Concerns Over Russia

There are few things that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia desires more than the weakening of NATO, the military alliance among the United States, Europe and Canada that has deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years.

Last year, President Trump suggested a move tantamount to destroying NATO: the withdrawal of the United States.

Senior administration officials told The New York Times that several times over the course of 2018, Mr. Trump privately said he wanted to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Current and former officials who support the alliance said they feared Mr. Trump could return to his threat as allied military spending continued to lag behind the goals the president had set.

In the days around a tumultuous NATO summit meeting last summer, they said, Mr. Trump told his top national security officials that he did not see the point of the military alliance, which he presented as a drain on the United States.

At the time, Mr. Trump’s national security team, including Jim Mattis, then the defense secretary, and John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, scrambled to keep American strategy on track without mention of a withdrawal that would drastically reduce Washington’s influence in Europe and could embolden Russia for decades.

Now, the president’s repeatedly stated desire to withdraw from NATO is raising new worries among national security officials amid growing concern about Mr. Trump’s efforts to keep his meetings with Mr. Putin secret from even his own aides, and an F.B.I. investigation into the administration’s Russia ties.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/us/politics/nato-president-trump.html
 
stadanko

stadanko

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gaiusmarius said:
holy shit man! if that ends up being true it will be officially, absolutely and undeniably massively fucking CRAZY! it will stand the world on it's head. can you imagine it, a sitting US president getting caught red handed, handcuffed and led away for treason in national tv!
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better tighten up your tubesocks, it's gonna be a wild ride
 
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Trump, a reluctant hawk, has battled his top aides on Russia and lost

The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian officials — far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on.

The president, who seemed to believe that other individual countries would largely equal the United States, was furious that his administration was being portrayed in the media as taking by far the toughest stance on Russia.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...1e850a-3f1b-11e8-974f-aacd97698cef_story.html
 
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