Thread by @delmoi

https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1110693370542936064

Pod save boys are mad they can't just talk about Russia Russia Russia for the next 18 months because no one gives a shit now that we know there was no actual collusion

They were hoping for a Deus Ex that would sweep Trump out of power w/even republican senators voting to remove him from office. That's not happening now.

They've invested so much time into it though that giving it up would mean admitting they were completely wasting their time.

Apparently being a "adversarial journalist" means believing the opposite of whatever the government says even if they're confirming what you've believed and argued for the past 3 years, according to Nate Silver.

THE PEE TAPE WAS REAL ALL ALONG!

What's up with these weird irony people obsessed with "dunking" on glenn greenwald for being correct about Russiagate?

Here's the actual Mueller report if you want to read it yourself instead of just listening to morons lie about what it says: justice.gov/storage/report…

Heh

What does "Some hundred sheets" mean??

Made it to page 52!

Also Assange is a moron:

Interesting, though. Based on the Mueller report it sounds as if Assange didn't have any actual knowledge that the people he was working with were actually Russians, and they were the ones who reached out to "Guccifier 2.0"

report goes over Assange trying to imply that Seth Rich was the (or one of the) leakers.

This is definitely an example that people will point to of redacting the "good stuff," in this case Trump's reaction to hearing that the Russians were publishing Hillary's emails.

I guess the "ongoing matter" here is Jerome Corsi's trial?

Interesting, it sounds as though Corsi *claimed* to have advanced knowlege of both the wikileaks emails, and *also* the 'pussy grabbing' tape, but people who spoke to him claim he never talked about either, and is just making stuff up?

So for all the people who are like "Well if they're innocent why did they lie!?!?" - Here the guy seems to be lying about having done crimes that he didn't actually do.

Wonder who this "Jason Fishbien" guy is. Found this article, which doesn't say much: heavy.com/news/2019/04/j…

Sounds like some random Russian involved in florida realestate tried to scam roger stone with fake info, lol:

Lol, this is another crazy story. Apparently Trump demanded someone "get" Hillary's deleted emails and some people setup a consulting company and raised tens of thousands of dollars to try to 'get' them -

This apparently culminated in buying fake Hillary emails off the dark web, lmao. Complete gift and totally unrelated to what wikileaks was doing. This op could have been the source of a lot of the rumors, though.

Lol, another example of someone seemingly lying about doing crimes in order to impress people / scam money

The initial version of the trump tower deal seems to have fallen through in 2014 because the trump org got lazy responding to emails -

More completely inexplicable dunking from Russiagaters.

Heh

Section on Trump's opportunities to go to Russia during the campaign is extremely boring. A whole bunch of invitations and people who think going to Russia would be a great idea, help secure the deal and then nothing happening for various reasons

The closest thing is this popadopoulous thing, the dude wanted to setup a meeting between Trump and Russia, and knew about the hacked emails, and wanted to setup a meeting.

Problem is there's no evidence that he told anyone else in the campaign, and there was never a meeting.

They go into a lot of detail on popadopolous and it's all pretty boring. Like a spy novel where nothing actually happens.

Seems clear popadopolous "wanted" to collude on the emails, but his superiors on the Foreign Policy team weren't informed or seemed to have much interest.

Lol. So this is what all the liberals thought was going to bring down trump?

Yeah this is sooooo boring. it's clear Papadopoulos wants to setup a meeting but, again, higher ups in the campaign just aren't interested.

Again, clear that people above pops in the trump campaign weren't particularly interested in meeting w/Russia. In September his superiors say they should hold off on any meeting until after the election

Again, it's like a spy novel where nothing happens. There's *opportunities* for things to happen, but nothing actually does. I would imagine it would be pretty frustrating reading for someone who expected a bunch of disclosures about actually nefarious deeds.

Not really saying anything here other then amusing juxtaposition, lol.

More boring details. What's interesting about this is that Mueller goes into incredible details about these completely banal interactions. Like Trump and Sessions meeting the Russian ambassador for 2 minutes in public, then leaving for the airport

It's kind of hilarious. If you want to prove something happened, you only need the juicy bits. If you want to prove something *didn't* happen you need to go through every possible moment something bad could have happened and show that it didn't.

Lol, so much for all those people who thought Kushner was going down.

interesting how much "russiagate" was just hypothesizing wildly abt potential conversations that could have happened at meetings like this, whereas Mueller report goes through and shows they were all boring.

I'm on page 117 of 448 of the PDF.

first 10 pages were the index.

Only thing fun about it is imagining russiagaters getting more and more frustrated. they're so used to reading fiction that's designed to be entertaining, and this has so many *setups* for something w/o payoffs

Lol, summary page on the Trump tower meeting, reminder that what was being offered wasn't the emails, but rather a completely different fake russiagate story about Hillary

Which the Trump campaign didn't buy.

There are a bunch more pages that go into this in excruciating detail

Here's something somewhat interesting, Trump Jr.'s testimony contradict's Cohen's, who said he saw them talking about 'a meeting' in hushed tones.

Probably not enough to convict for a false statement, though

Interesting. The lawyer met with another group of people prior to the meeting, and shared with them the dirt that she was going to offer.

Apparently about some random Americans with business interests making donations to the DNC. Which is... not illegal, so...

Apparently she was claiming these two people where doing some crimes in Russia, and the money was going to the DNC, but that they couldn't prove anything because the money couldn't be traced.

Exciting stuff here. 🙄

Lmfao, cheapass trump agreed to hire Manafort because he offered to work for free.

Manafort lies about the (post election) meeting with 'frenemy' Deripaska- seemingly for no reason whatsoever.

Heh. So many of these completely banal details in this report.

"A asked B for a meeting. B declined/never responded up."

page 152 of the PDF is the end of the manfort section, and seems to be the end of the pre-election section (although manafort's "story" goes past the election, it starts before it)

Okay, so my main takeaway after reading first 152 pages of the Mueller report, which included pre-election contacts with Russia, is that the reason Russiagate always seemed "off" to me was right - all these "contacts" were disconnected, and uncoordinated, not a grand conspiracy

In other words all the "red lines" on the conspiracy board weren't connected to eachother. Russiagaters always operated on the assumption that all "Russians" were secretly working with eachother, i.e Deripaska and Trump tower lawyer must have known what Papadopoulos's source knew

But the pieces of the story never fit together logically - If Manafort was already conspiring with the Russians, why have the Trump tower meeting? if Veselnitskaya (trump tower lawyer) was the vector then howcome she offered something totally unrelated?

And if Papadopoulos was the vector of coordination, same thing. Why even have the Trump tower meeting? The Trump Tower meeting was the 'crown jewel' of Russiagate but it's actually the thing that made the whole rest of the 'conspiracy' totally implausible.

The other thing the Mueller report does is make it clear there was no path of communication between Papadopoulos and Manafort. Pops apparently didn't feel comfortable telling his immediate bosses about the emails, Manafort's leaks were just to impress Deripaska

The other thing that's fascinating, something that I ever even saw media/conspiracy theorists bring up (not that I was paying attention) was this outside group, independently funded that Trump setup to try to "get" the emails.

It's hilarious because they never even found anything and ended up getting scammed by someone with fake emails on the dark web, lmfao.

*But* if Papadopoulos had known about them he could have talked to them about what he knew. But obviously he didn't.

If Trump had sent out an email blast to all staff saying something like "Hey, this group is looking for the emails - if you hear about any leads contact them!" then perhaps Pops would have seen that and known where to go with his info.

This is why "big" conspiracies never actually happen, without being "obvious". In order to 'work' everyone has to be getting information about what to do, but the more people involved the more likely it is something will leak.

The "real" conspiracies are things like the Jeffrey Epstein thing where people in the media knew about it, and it was reported on once or twice but they all just ignored it.

Or the WMD lies where it was 'obvious' that 'something' was up before the war, but the media ignored it.

Also, when I googled just to check on the spelling of Pops' name I came across this interview he did just after the report came out.

He says he's surprised that the Mueller report actually told (what he says is) the truth about him: foxnews.com/politics/georg…

Also in the same interview, Pops claims he thinks Mifsud *wasn't* a Russian contact but was in fact a guy who was tight with US intelligence, and in fact claims that he thinks Mifsud actually set him up in a sort of 'sting' operation.

I.e. his theory is Mifsud tells him the Russians have the emails, then Mifsud would have told Australian intelligence, Aus Intel then sends a cable claiming their guy heard Pops claim the "trump campaign" knew about said emails.

It's an interesting theory, and according to the Mueller report the only person Pops recalled telling about the emails was possibly some Greek dude and he says he has a vague, uncertain memory of mentioning to his boss that Russians 'might' have emails and his boss getting pissed

So Pops own conspiracy theory about a sting operation fits with the data in the report, and only needs to involve two people: Mifsud and Alexander Downer the Australian ambassador.

Of course, it's also possible that this didn't happen and that Pops is just spinning a tale to make him look good and sell books to the right-wing and boost his profile, which the Mueller report makes clear was his main motivation during the campaign.

And the report does show strong evidence that Mifsud was in close contact with the Russians, including people who worked for the internet research agency.

On the other hand, they have some of the communications between them and didn't intercept any message about emails.

Like I said, according to the report, Pops only recalls telling one other person outside the campaign about the emails, and not Alexander Downer. Whereas Downer claimed Pops told him, which started the investigation.

So it does fit. Pretty interesting.

After the report came out Buzzfeed got a FOIA'd copy of the cable from Australia after the report came out, but everything in the cable is redacted except the title (they also included some out outlook calendar entries showing the meeting took place) buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/…

Not surprising that Barr is a huge racist, Sessions was too - and so is Trump, obviously.

But how wild is it that the supposed "anti-racist" position is that doing anything to potentially stop a prosecutor from doing whatever they want, even if you're their boss is "obstruction"

If stopping a prosecutor from doing whatever they want to do is "obstruction of justice,"

then he implicit assumption here is that "whatever a prosecutor wants to do" is "justice."

Anyway, back to the actual report. Kushner was so in deep with the Russians that... he didn't even remember the Ambassador's name, lmao

Here's the part about the "secure line" that was supposed to be such a huge part of this - which happened after the election, and was frequently brought up by Russiagaters without pointing out that it happened after the election.

It was basically one offhand comment. 🙄

Weird that the Russian Ambassador to the US wouldn't have a direct line to Putin.

Lol, this is the second time this Simes guy cock blocked potential contact between trump and Russia, This was after the election -

First time was actually in April 2016 when he says he spontaneously told Kushner that setting up any kind of back channel would be a bad idea.

Basically Putin asked this Aven guy (w/Alfa bank) to make contact with Trump, Aven asked Richard Burt who was on the board both LetterOne and CNI and then Burt went to Simes, who knew Kushner.

Simes then told Burt it was a bad idea to setup a backchannel during the transition

There's also contemporaneous documentation of this

Heh

Missing most the Mueller report discourse by reading the actual Mueller report.

Thing is it's like 400 pages so people are just saying whatever they want about it's contents.

400 pages and extremely boring.

here's the summary of the first 181 pages, lol.

Here's a part a lot of people have made note of, they say they didn't find evidence 'beyond a reasonable doubt' on Pops, Paige or Manafort being Russian agents, despite saying "no evidence" (whatsoever) about Collusion, which implies there is some evidence.

Also the 'sufficient to obtain/sustain' a conviction which seems like an even higher standard.

But anyway, whatever there is between Pops and Isreal isn't in the report, and they don't *present* any evidence about Pops being an "agent" of Russia.

Unless the argument is simply that by trying to get the meeting setup Papadopoulos was acting as an 'agent' of Russia because Russia wanted wanted a meeting and he was trying to get it - except that would apply to anyone acting as a liaison to another country.

Here's the section on the application of campaign finance law to the Trump tower meeting.

part of the problem is the difficulty in quantifying the actual value of the so-called "dirt"

Since the dirt was just some info about some DNC donors potentially violating some Russian law (which may not even have happened) it seems unlikely to have been 'worth' more then $2k

They say they couldn't prosecute Trump Jr. because the law requires 'willful' violation as well, i.e. they have to prove that Trump Jr. *knew* that it was illegal - which is the case with some laws. Given the way he was emailing about it, that seems unlikely

Here's a section on whether or not opposition research is 'a thing of value', prior they discussed things like donor lists, etc. But trying to make it illegal to simply tell people things that happened would obviously be problematic from a legal point of view

They point out that a willfulness is obviously harder to prove if the legal issue itself is ambiguous and based on an untested theory.

There's apparently some other potential campaign finance case which is completely censored out, but they also say it's unlikely to result in a conviction based on the wilfulness issue

Going into various lies people told, starting on page 199.

Apparently Pops lied about, among other things, talking to "anyone with a Russian accent" while he was working for the campaign. Not a very smart guy, clearly.

Obv he later flipped and only got 14 days in jail.

Interesting, they actually explain how Pops misstatements caused problems for them. Apparently this Mifsud dude also lied to them, which they didn't know at the time.

Made it to "Volume II"

Heh

Also, heh.

Second example of Trump wanting to interfere and his underlings just not doing it. In this case they didn't even tell him they didn't do it.

After asking McGahn to remove Mueller, he later asked McGahn to deny doing it. also got mad he took notes, which is I guess what his tweet was about. (Not really worth screen-capping, it's on page 218)

A) Huh, never heard that part about Trump's lawyer telling him to stay "on message" and

B) lmao at this second part.

🙄 *sigh* I apparently mixed up my threading so this tweet might not show up in sequence.

https://twitter.com/delmoi/status/1119408226569719808

(mixed up the threading here here's "volume ii" which is all about Trump and obstruction, mostly about legal theories.)

https://twitter.com/delmoi/status/1119414986433015808

Anyway, the rest of the report seems to mostly be about legal theories, rather then just the facts. It seems like it's going to be a pretty nuanced issue, and even more tedious to read then the sections about Russian contacts.

They do point out the fact that Trump's actual innocence w.r.t collusion makes the obstruction charges problematic, since it means other motives for his actions would have to be considered.

But, they point out you can still convict on obstruction w/o proving the underlying crime

This section gets a bit meta:

If the "second phase" of the investigation was potentially obstruction, because he was under investigation, for obstruction justice, how was he obstructing justice by firing Comey, which is what started the investigation?

Seems a bit paradoxical

I get the argument would be he was *potentially* trying to interfere with some other investigation Comey was doing (which one?) - or something.

This section is in the part about the legal reasoning as to whether or not Trump had "corrupt intent" with regard to Flynn. It's kind of weak, since obviously you can be frustrated w/someone's work conduct but also not want to see them thrown in jail

Here's their thing on how they define "corrupt."

It's certainly possible that trump wanted the charges dropped in order to get the issue to go away, and obviously anyone who viscerally hates trump will make that assumption. OTOH people who like him will view it the other way.

The point is that, although it will seem 'obvious' to partisans who have strong opinions on how trump thinks, there is obviously no way to "prove" to anyone what trump's emotional disposition was when he made the statement.

So, Trump asks Comey if he's personally under investigation, Comey says no, but then when he's asked in congress whether or not Trump is personally under investigation, he refuses to answer, leading to press speculation that he is.

What exactly was the point of not answering?

Trump complaining about people refusing to tell people that he wasn't under investigation.

Some amusing lines -

Comey is set to testify again and Trump says he'll fire him if he refuses to answer.

On may 3th Comey again refuses to answer. Also says he regrets nothing w/his letter about the investigation into Hillary's emails

Trump fires him 2 days later.

Somewhat interesting "inside the trump admin anecdote - apparently Jeff Sessions actually suggested firing Comey

Always amusing just how dumb Trump is

Although it is funny how the democrats constantly complained about Comey until he was fired, then he became the world's greatest lawman.

So, this is pretty interesting. Apparently Trump actually brought up the issue of firing Comey to Sessions and Rosenstein after he had decided to do it. Sessions said he thoguht it was a good idea and Rosenstein offered criticisms, didn't recommend against it.

This part is REALLY strange. Trump actually wanted the "Russia stuff" to be put in the memo about Comey, and Rosenstein decided to ignore him.

Rosenstein said he had other reasons why he thought Comey should go, and (as previously stated) knew Trump was going to fire him.

From what I remember about press reports when Comey was fired, it was sort of implied that Rosenstein didn't know Comey was going to be fired and had just been asked to provide a summary of complaints about him, without knowing the purpose.

The other weird thing is that it seems like a lot of other people in the whitehouse wanted to keep the actual reason for Trump wanting to fire Comey secret, whereas Trump was adamant that the actual reason be published.

Surprising!

Hahaha, omg. The section of Volume II on Comey is full of great "Trump being a total dumbass" anecdotes, if you like those.

Here's the Muller report's summary of Trump's NBC interview. What's fascinating about this is, as we now know at the initial meeting Trump actually wanted to say that he was firing Comey over Russia stuff and a bunch of his staff tried to get him to lie about it, initially.

The intent section is a huge mess. It's hard to know exactly what trump's intent was because his decisions were so idiotic, and he's inarticulate.

They list a couple different rationales and point out the evidence for them.

For example, that trump was mad about fact Comey refused to say if he was under investigation (evidence), whether or not he'd gotten lots of complaints from rank and file FBI agents (no evidence) etc.

Still slogging through, still very boring. Here's some amusing trumpism, though. Trump wanted Jeff Sessions to limit the scope of the russia investigations to 'future' meddling, gave him a hilarious speech to read:

Lmfao the sheer incompetence of these people.

This was always the most obvious reason the 'collusion' story was false, Trump and his guys were far too stupid to have run a sophisticated communication system, to Russia, undetected.

This is also pretty hilarious. Trump Jr. put out the statement about the tower meeting fully expecting the emails to leak (they had been sent to a congressional comittee), but he put out the statement his dad wrote for him anyway.

Btw, when this story came out, it was treated by the press it was some huge revelation that had been uncovered completely independently by the NYT's own research. In reality,it was turned over to a congressional committee after lawyers went through the campaign emails,then leaked