The Robert Mueller Investigation

[TwiceHorn 31452]

47 minutes ago, hobbes2702 said:

That’s the problem. You’re more concerned about a Supreme Court pick than the rule of law. Nothing this president does from now until he’s gone should even be considered by Congress.

I'd like prison reform to pass.

[Gil Bang 25945]

4 minutes ago, Iconoclast Texan said:

I didn’t vote for Trump. Voted for Gary Johnson. Wouldn’t vote for him in 2020. Would most likely stay at home as Subliminal wants. Still, I will take Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the bench. Selecting them was the most Presidential thing he has done. Fucking idiot could be riding 50% or higher approval with the economy humming as it is. His shit was bad for the country. Kavanaugh and Gorsuch are excellent jurists. Broken clock is right twice a day. He was right about those 2.

I call bullshit.  You voted for Trump, you're just too big of a pussy to admit it.

You will gladly vote for him again if you have the chance. 

[mdmost 43001]

Of course he voted for Trump. Trump is Iconoclast if he were elected president. 

[ndawg 1242]

6 minutes ago, Iconoclast Texan said:

Proving my point from a few weeks ago that liberals want to suppress votes too. I’m glad your not hiding it.

How did you type this out with a straight face? I mean, at some point when you were typing that, it must have dawned on you how stupid it was to equate telling a message board poster not to vote with state and local governments deliberately systemically reducing representation of entire segments of the voting population. So, what happened? Did you realize how stupid what you were saying was, but felt too invested in the sentence already, and decided to see it through to the end?

Because there's no way a functioning human brain actually arrived at the notion that telling someone not to vote is equivalent to voter suppression.

[Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand 13584]

3 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:

I call bullshit.  You voted for Trump, you're just too big of a pussy to admit it.

You will gladly vote for him again if you have the chance. 

Win At All Costs Guy would not lie on the internet. 

[SubliminalHorn 6786]

The “most presidential thing he’s done”

wtf? He picked from a list that was approved for him. Wow. Most impressive. 

 

[GHOSTUSER 361]

12 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:

I call bullshit.  You voted for Trump, you're just too big of a pussy to admit it.

You will gladly vote for him again if you have the chance. 

I would love to prove you wrong. Too bad we don’t get receipts when we leave the voting booth. If you see my posts about Trump, the words “fucking idiot” are always present. Nice try Will Monk

[Biff Tannen 45677]

1 hour ago, SubliminalHorn said:

The “most presidential thing he’s done”

wtf? He picked from a list that was approved for him. Wow. Most impressive. 

 

That's what cracks me up about the supreme court pick argument.  Any one of those 17 goons up on that republican stage would have made the same picks.  This wasn't dotus being some legal scholar and master of judgement.

[GHOSTUSER 361]

15 minutes ago, mdmost said:

Of course he voted for Trump. Trump is Iconoclast if he were elected president. 

I wouldn’t have enough money to pay everyone off like he has.

[WhatTheBuck 28777]

6 hours ago, Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand said:

The most interesting thing about the recording of Kevin McCarthy telling Paul Ryan that he believed Trump and Rohrabacher were being paid by the Russians was Ryan's response. There was no pushback from Ryan or inquisitive "why do you believe that?" Just a directive that they keep this in the familia. 

Also that he denied it ever happened until the recording came out. Then he changed his story and said he was joking. If he was joking, why didn't he say so in the first place? 

Because he wasn't joking, that's why. 

[ShaggyBevo RIP 3868]

1 hour ago, SubliminalHorn said:

Iconoclast is a moron. 

Who learned nothing from his family fleeing a country taken over by religious fundamentalists/zealots. 

[Radical Larry 28587]

Another Gary Johnson voter. How in the hell did he not win?

[atomheartbevo 89656]

2 hours ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

I’m in no way speculating that this is what happened BUT it would be amazing if a presidential campaign actually paid the Russian hacking/phishing teams that stole the emails and targeted key voters with fake news via social media.

I’d think you would get just as good of a return throwing money at a bunch of people sitting around on the chans and reddit to push fake news or conspiracies about Hillary. 

[Mojo Hand 4580]

1 hour ago, Iconoclast Texan said:

Bullshit. Do whatever it takes to get it done. Ignore any complaint of hypocrisy, etc. I want a 5-4 advantage for the next 20 years. It’s that important 

The things that your party has done in a desperate effort to keep 5-4 is more likely going to result in a 6-5 Dem majority on the Supreme Court sooner than that. 

[hayden_horn 11362]

1 hour ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

 

They’ve been consistent about denying Cohen being in Prague but they only answer that very specific question.

Follow up questions that remain unanswered:

Was Michael Cohen traveling in Europe in the Summer/Fall of 2016? 

When, where, and with whom?

Just because Cohen wasn’t in the city limits of Prague doesn’t make him innocent or all the Dossier claims false.

That's the thing. I traveled to Prague twice, once in the late 90s and once in the early Aughts. Both times an overnight train from Switzerland. Both times rolled out of bed for a passport check by from faced men with guns. Those days are long over after the EU formed. Cohen traveled to Prague. He did so from some plausibly denial city in Europe. I do not doubt it. It's so easy to travel in Europe. Trump's base would never know or believe it because they ain't been out of bugtussle. 

[J.R. 150]

2 hours ago, Iconoclast Texan said:

Trump is a fucking idiot for not paying Cohen’s legal bills. That’s what got him to turn against him. Trump is such a fucking idiot. I don’t want an impeachment circus to get in the way of 4%+ economic growth, biggest economic expansion since the 80s and the tightest labor market in years. Getting Kavanaugh confirmed before the Trump ship sinks is of utmost importance to me. I want the Republicans do whatever is necessary to get Kavanaugh confirmed. What is sad is that I love Trump’s SC Justice picks, his tough stance on Iran, calling China on the carpet for their bullshit. Unlike the sellouts before him, he actually stuck up for American working man. His negatives are off the charts and he has been bad for the country overall. Still, I hope that a smarter, nationalist candidate takes the positive, popular items from the Trump agenda without his stupidity. Think Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson. I’d vote for that.

Did you mean you like the way he stuck it up the working mans’ collective ass?  That would make more sense. Thanks for clarifying and please don’t vote. 

[Mdhorn 5948]

5 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

I really hope Erik Prince goes down.  He's a special kind of evil.

at another time, Erik Prince was SS material.  

Edited August 23, 2018 by Mdhorn

[swraith 346]

The things that your party has done in a desperate effort to keep 5-4 is more likely going to result in a 6-5 Dem majority on the Supreme Court sooner than that. 

This is my current line of thinking. If Dems get White House + majorities in both House and Senate at some point in the future, they likely appoint enough justices to take the majority on Supreme Court.

[ChiTownDoc 21152]

4 hours ago, mdmost said:

Of course he voted for Trump. Trump is Iconoclast if he were elected president. 

At least his suits would fit better...

[MaybeACoordinator 8349]

1 hour ago, swraith said:

This is my current line of thinking. If Dems get White House + majorities in both House and Senate at some point in the future, they likely appoint enough justices to take the majority on Supreme Court.

But given the wisdom and majority of our DC leadership, that scenario would get out of control. It would get out of control fast and we'd be lucky to live through it.

After the Dems add their two judges, the GOP comes back in and adds four more. Then the Dems throw in 8, and the Repubs roll out 16 and by 2451 AD SCOTUS will look like this:

[triplehorn 2664]

13 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

 

They’ve been consistent about denying Cohen being in Prague but they only answer that very specific question.

Follow up questions that remain unanswered:

Was Michael Cohen traveling in Europe in the Summer/Fall of 2016? 

When, where, and with whom?

Just because Cohen wasn’t in the city limits of Prague doesn’t make him innocent or all the Dossier claims false.

Whether Cohen was in Prague proper or a nearby place might be attributable to parsing, but Lanny Davis stating that all of the 13 dossier claims about Cohen are false lacks credulity.  I don't think Cohen is prepared to come fully clean.  I also expect he will be facing additional charges.

[Jiggy-Z 3432]

15 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

This was something else, likely more nefarious because they intended to conceal and are still concealing to a degree.

Checked in with Tea Pain angle on the data base replication. Trump server, Alpha Bank, Spectrum Health, Devos, Russians, this has it all and in its original packaging.  Interdasting.

Articles build on each other so start with the one on  the bottom for sequential understanding.

From June 2018

https://teapainusa.wordpress.com/2018/06/05/major-alfa-bank-trump-tower-breakthrough/

 

From July 2017

https://teapainusa.wordpress.com/2017/07/10/spectrum-healths-role-in-the-trump-russia-server-scandal/

 

From April 2017

 

https://teapainusa.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/debunking-trump-towers-alfa-bank-server-scandal-explanation/

[GHOSTUSER 361]

Excellent article which I agree with. Paying whores off to shut up is not a criminal offense in my opinion and is a time honored act of powerful men to keep dirt off of them. What the fuck has happened to the Cloak Room? Everyone seems to have a stick up their ass and there is a damned echo chamber in here. Where were y’all back during the run up to the Iraq War where we lost thousands of valiant soldiers and many more came home broken. I railed against that bullshit war during the hornfans days and was hated for it. We were committing torture. According to the press right now is the worst days of the Republic. Compare the disaster of W’s war to this bullshit and it’s not even the same ballpark when it comes to seriousness. Brisket has become a blowhard. Lighten the fuck up Francis, chill and laugh a bit.

Those payments to women were unseemly. That doesn’t mean they were illegal.

Bradley SmithAugust 22 at 6:35 PM

Bradley Smith, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, is chairman of the Institute for Free Speech and a visiting fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton.

If a candidate for public office decided to settle a private lawsuit to get it out of the news before Election Day, would that be a campaign expenditure? If a business owner ran for political office and decided to pay bonuses to his employees, in the hope that he would get good press and boost his stock as a candidate, would that be a campaign expenditure, payable from campaign funds?

Under the theory that then-candidate Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen violated campaign finance laws by arranging hush-money payments to women accusing Trump of affairs, the answer would seem to be yes. We should probably think twice before accepting that answer.

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York has extracted a guilty plea from Cohen for “knowingly and willfully” violating campaign finance laws by arranging for payments to two women accusing Trump of extramarital affairs. Cohen admitted he did so under the direction of “a candidate” — obviously referencing Trump — to “influence” an election. Cohen was facing multiple tax and fraud charges that could have landed him in jail for the rest of his life, even if he beat the campaign finance allegations. By pleading guilty, he limits his jail time to just a few years.

However, regardless of what Cohen agreed to in a plea bargain, hush-money payments to mistresses are not really campaign expenditures. It is true that “contribution” and “expenditure” are defined in the Federal Election Campaign Act as anything “for the purpose of influencing any election,” and it may have been intended and hoped that paying hush money would serve that end. The problem is that almost anything a candidate does can be interpreted as intended to “influence an election,” from buying a good watch to make sure he gets to places on time, to getting a massage so that he feels fit for the campaign trail, to buying a new suit so that he looks good on a debate stage. Yet having campaign donors pay for personal luxuries — such as expensive watches, massages and Brooks Brothers suits — seems more like bribery than funding campaign speech.

That’s why another part of the statute defines “personal use” as any expenditure “used to fulfill any commitment, obligation, or expense of a person that would exist irrespective of the candidate’s election campaign.” These may not be paid with campaign funds, even though the candidate might benefit from the expenditure. Not every expense that might benefit a candidate is an obligation that exists solely because the person is a candidate.

Suppose, for example, that Trump had told his lawyers, “Look, these complaints about Trump University have no merit, but they embarrass me as a candidate. Get them settled.” Are the settlements thus “campaign expenses”? The obvious answer is no, even though the payments were intended to benefit Trump as a candidate.

If the opposite were true and they were considered campaign expenses, then not only could Trump pay them with campaign funds, but also he would be required to pay these business expenses from campaign funds. Is that what campaign donations are for?

But let’s go in that direction. Suppose Trump had used campaign funds to pay off these women. Does anyone much doubt that many of the same people now after Trump for using corporate funds, and not reporting them as campaign expenditures, would then be claiming that Trump had illegally diverted campaign funds to “personal use”? Or that federal prosecutors would not have sought a guilty plea from Cohen on that count? And that gets us to a troubling nub of campaign finance laws: Too often, you can get your target coming or going.

Yes, those payments were unseemly, but unseemliness doesn’t make something illegal. At the very least, the law is murky about whether paying hush money to a mistress is a “campaign expense” or a personal expense. In such circumstances, we would not usually expect prosecutors to charge the individuals with a “knowing and willful” violation, leading to criminal charges and possible jail time. A civil fine would be the normal response.

But Cohen is not the normal defendant, and prosecutors almost certainly squeezed him to plead guilty on these charges, in part, for the purpose of building a case for possible criminal or impeachment charges against the president, or even, daresay, “influencing the reelection” of Trump.

Laws, once stretched from their limited language and proper purpose, are difficult to pound back into shape. We should proceed with caution here.

Edited August 23, 2018 by Iconoclast Texan

[SubliminalHorn 6786]

tl;dr

[Homercles 10205]

Uhh I thought it was because he did not use campaign funds for a cause that was meant to influence the campaign. Am I misunderstanding?

[Brisketexan 105098]

Y'all remember when we impeached a duly elected president -- who won both the electoral AND popular vote by stout margins -- because he lied about a blowjob?

Remember when that was our standard for impeachable conduct?  I'm looking at you, GOP and your fanboys -- remember that?  I remember.

Good times, good times.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

59 minutes ago, Jiggy-Z said:

Checked in with Tea Pain angle on the data base replication. Trump server, Alpha Bank, Spectrum Health, Devos, Russians, this has it all and in its original packaging.  Interdasting.

Articles build on each other so start with the one on  the bottom for sequential understanding.

From June 2018

https://teapainusa.wordpress.com/2018/06/05/major-alfa-bank-trump-tower-breakthrough/

 

From July 2017

https://teapainusa.wordpress.com/2017/07/10/spectrum-healths-role-in-the-trump-russia-server-scandal/

 

From April 2017

 

https://teapainusa.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/debunking-trump-towers-alfa-bank-server-scandal-explanation/

His theory is interesting but I don’t have much faith in it.

The big question is what information were they transferring? 

A few speculations include:

Voter info / targeting data?

Email addresses?

Campaign messaging instructions?

 

My armchair theory is it has something to do with the hacked emails and information warfare going on at the time. I looked at this through the lens of the last indictment of the Russians.

The Trump campaign/GOP would want to have their friendly information outlets prepared with carefully crafted stories around Hillary’s emails in advance so they could be deployed almost immediately upon Wikileaks dumping the documents.

The only way to really do that is to have some way to clandestinely transmit the emails from Russia to someone in the US inside the Trump campaign.

 The Trump Tower/Alpha server would be one way to do that.

I’ve come to accept we will probably never get the full story on this.

 

[DDD Dad 14335]

15 hours ago, Iconoclast Texan said:

I wouldn’t have enough money to pay everyone off like he has.

Narrator:  He doesn't.  He gets others to do it for him.

[DDD Dad 14335]

5 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Y'all remember when we impeached a duly elected president -- who won both the electoral AND popular vote by stout margins -- because he lied about a blowjob?

Remember when that was our standard for impeachable conduct?  I'm looking at you, GOP and your fanboys -- remember that?  I remember.

Good times, good times.

Let's not go there.  There was perjury, sexual harassment, and several other very troublesome aspects to Clinton's behavior that led to the impeachment.  Trump's admitted felonies are so far beyond the pale there's no need to use that to prove a point (and it weakens it).

[Brisketexan 105098]

1 minute ago, DDD Dad said:

Let's not go there.  There was perjury, sexual harassment, and several other very troublesome aspects to Clinton's behavior that led to the impeachment.  Trump's admitted felonies are so far beyond the pale there's no need to use that to prove a point (and it weakens it).

Actually, my point is that I was PISSED at Clinton.  The perjury angle alone was enough for me to be done with him.  I remember when conduct like that mattered.  It did then.  It does now.

Unless you're the GOPartyofTrump.  For them, it mattered then....but then 10X the misconduct....well, that doesn't matter now at all.

[Longhorn94 2448]

13 hours ago, Mdhorn said:

at another time, Erik Prince was SS material.  

I have met and worked with Erik Prince. This is spot on. Probably the most evil, corrupt, and frightening human being i have ever worked around. A truly bad man.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

David Pecker granted immunity in Cohen case

[jimmyjazz 45903]

Prince is evil, but his sister is a saint.

[Ted Lange 16084]

 

[RomaVicta 29906]

imgur>

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

 

[Anastasis 23469]

Now that shits funny. 

[BurntOrange&White 39931]

Is iconoclast the dude who sucked dick for drugs and from the Houston area?

[BrazilHorn 6589]

Cohen should have used Urban's cell phone message erase strategy. Then claim Viagra impacted his memory.

[Loco 3752]

2 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Y'all remember when we impeached a duly elected president -- who won both the electoral AND popular vote by stout margins -- because he lied about a blowjob?

Remember when that was our standard for impeachable conduct?  I'm looking at you, GOP and your fanboys -- remember that?  I remember.

Good times, good times.

I think they're on the same meds Urbs is on

[GHOSTUSER 361]

26 minutes ago, Bevo VIII said:

Is iconoclast the dude who sucked dick for drugs and from the Houston area?

That was your father 

[DDD Dad 14335]

29 minutes ago, Bevo VIII said:

Is iconoclast the dude who sucked dick for drugs and from the Houston area?

I'm not saying he is.

 

But I'm not saying he's not.

[Buzzrock 14918]

“Unseemly but necessarily illegal” probably describes 90 percent of Trump’s life. The question is how big the 10 percent turns out to be.

[DiceHands 349]

If Pecker has immunity, he must have something pretty good.  No one gets that deal without having a smoking gun. 

[Ten Bears 2481]

38 minutes ago, Bevo VIII said:

Is iconoclast the dude who sucked dick for drugs and from the Houston area?

It's ok though because he prayed the gay away.

[UncleCharlie 334]

8 minutes ago, DiceHands said:

If Pecker has immunity, he must have something pretty good.  No one gets that deal without having a smoking gun. 

He has a signed copy of the check.

[TornACL 7698]

17 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

That's what cracks me up about the supreme court pick argument.  Any one of those 17 goons up on that republican stage would have made the same picks.  This wasn't dotus being some legal scholar and master of judgement.

Only one of them would have ghost written the intro to the acceptance speech, where the claim was made that this was the most exhaustive search by any president in history. 

Blinking red Trumpy superlative tell right there. 

[SuingToGetAMessageBoard? 3861]

With Pecker's apparent flip, Mueller might actually have this wrapped up and a report on the president's conduct by Sept 1.

[Dahobbs 17534]

Just now, SuingToGetAMessageBoard? said:

With Pecker's apparent flip, Mueller might actually have this wrapped up and a report on the president's conduct by Sept 1.

Flipping is illegal. Trump out front should have told you. 

In related news, Trump administration to begin raiding cheer competitions. 

[Anastasis 23469]

Pecker has the pee pee tape.