There's no bigger gaslighting liar than @JonathanTurley—he simply *will not stop* inappropriately using the word "collusion" when he's referring *narrowly* to the prospect of a before-the-fact Trump-Russia conspiracy to hack the DNC. Evidence of collusion *generally* is *legion*.
1/ And of course even as to the narrow question of whether there's evidence of a before-the-fact Trump-Russia conspiracy to hack the DNC, Turley's as squirrelly as you could possibly be—focusing only on what evidence existed at certain points in time, not the evidence at present.
2/ We can't begin to appreciate how carefully Trump's defenders parse their words when they defend him and attack the Trump-Russia probe. Ask them to explain how Stone knew WikiLeaks was going to have election-changing material *two months before the DNC hack*, they're silent.
3/ Ask them why the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs began work on a secret mid-campaign backchannel between Putin and Trump beginning in February 2016—at the *latest*—and ask why Trump supported establishing that secret backchannel, and they're silent. They're playing games.
4/ The entire Trump defense is a propaganda operation aimed at people who don't know the facts. People like Turley have turned the veritable cornucopia of inculpatory evidence against Carter Page into nothing more than a series a vague guesses no investigator would have credited.
5/ The Russian SVR intelligence unit had already proceeded several steps towards successfully recruiting Page as an asset when he began bragging he was a Kremlin adviser and having contacts with Russian officials he lied publicly about having. Contacts he had *on Trump's behalf*.
6/ The Steele dossier correctly memorialized some of Page's most obscure lies to the American public many months before they were revealed—including who he secretly met with from the Kremlin and when and what they discussed. Any law enforcement officer would've investigated Page.
7/ People like Turley have got us so in the weeds and so turned around and so focused on procedural tics that their attempt to get America to lose the forest for the trees and do so to obscure an *obscenity* of collusion from Trump and his team is a harrowing betrayal of America.
8/ The good news: none of these people, especially @JonathanTurley, have *any* expectation that their propaganda operation will hold up when historians review what happened over the last 5 years. All they're trying to do is ensure that Trump can be reelected in the next 5 months.
PS/ Always remember this simple maxim: no one ever accused Trump of a before-the-fact conspiracy with the Kremlin to hack the DNC. The accusations *actually* made against Trump and his team—which include bribery and fraud and aiding and abetting—are the ones his defenders ignore.
