Is political bias on part of the FBI a fact or fiction?

He? Who is he? Which senior officials? Did any of the Russian dealings happen while these men were a part of the campaign team or was it all months or years before the campaign began? I heard that all the Russian dealings happened before the campaign began, before there was a Trump campaign team.

Flynn pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI about conversations with the Russian ambassador that took place during the transition (December 2016). Those conversations took place at the direction of and in coordination with an unnamed “senior official of the Presidential Transition Team”, who was advising him from Mar-a-Lago and was with other senior transition officials at the time of the direction and coordination. This is described in his guilty plea.

The investigation is to uncover collusion regarding the election process itself. Flynn was not accused of colluding with the Russians to tamper with the 2016 election. The charges stem from conversations after the fact of the election, once again AFTER the election, nothing pertains to the election process of co-conspiracy between Trump and Russia. I see what Flynn did as damage control to keep our country out of a 3rd world war with an economic and military power that far exceeds our countries abilities at this time. While Flynn lied, in my book, it was to keep Russia from kicking our dumb asses for sanctioning them unnecessarily. The Democrats, Obama, wanted to escalate a lie they had fabricated to explain away their loss of President in the White House. Once again, the head of the DHS said no votes were changed by Russia, so just how did they tamper with the election? Wikileaks released statements that the Hillary scandal emails did not come from Russians.

Carleas, offer something more substantial or wait until later when I get to say…I told you so.

Oh Jesus.
Look at the evidence.

This is why you lefties don’t exist. You can’t accept that there are such things as fact.

Thank heaven you lost. We’d all be gone thanks you.

Repent, open your eyes, start to exist.
Then you wil be worthy of us.

This poll does not mean to have built in political bias, as polls go, the proposition quoted is posed as a query and not a statement

As lefties go, that is merely a set word indicating degrees of separation from the center. There is no predisposition of political roles left and right , I believe even predisposed to claim any priority as far as which came first.

Anything between a centrist and an extreme liberal can also include moderate liberalism, which if pushed to its limit to the right right, cam claim a conservative point of view.

Labels are measures of degrees of separation, even if, this poll appears biased on its face.

Personally I have not claimed political alliance, and to take positions out of context, simply because of types of critiques at times pointing to political deficiencies on either side, would overstep the strong strain of pragmatism which can be inferred in questions of factual veracity.

A strong pragmatic bend does at times imply some kind of factual inauthenticity, and this is exactly what may be going on with the ever changing points of view in the current administration…

Times are currently politically dangerous and risking. being perceived as a fake, when that is the very perception being accused of, is indeed risky business.

No it isn’t. According to the order appointing Mueller, he is to investigate:

It isn’t limited to direct tampering in the election, or to communication that occurred during the campaign.

I agree that the charges to which Flynn pleaded guilty relate to conversations that took place after the election, but I don’t agree that they therefor don’t pertain to the election, campaign, or more generally to ongoing contacts between Trump and Russia.

First, the conversations acknowledged in the guilty plea aren’t necessarily the only ones. The plea was part of a deal to encourage Flynn’s cooperation with the investigation, and they may have traded lesser charges for more access/information.

Second, the acknowledged existence of illegal contacts between Flynn and the Russian government during the transition should significantly increase the expectation that there were other similar conversations during the campaign.

And Flynn is not the only one to be charged. Papadopolous pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about multiple contacts with multiple individuals connected to the Russian government during the campaign (March and April 2016):

I don’t think you’re wrong to assert that there’s a lot we don’t know, but the statements that have been acknowledge on the record, and for which two senior members of the Trump campaign have already pleaded guilty, clearly establish ongoing contacts between campaign officials and Russian government actors.

I read your link and yes, it is. The formation of the investigation team by bipartisan congress was to find out about Russian meddling in the 2016 election, later the efforts were focused specifically against Trump and his team directly which was traitor Congresses plan from the get-go to unseat Trump who was rattling their swamp scum cages.

For weeks, weeks, the security agencies couldn’t even get their stories straight about the scope or nature of this so called hacking of the election, the DNC, or the Republican Parties servers/emails. The RNC denied they were ever hacked. Podesta blamed his stupidity for giving away his password on some staffer’s bad advice. Guccifer 2.0, a Romanian citizen who claims no ties to Russia took credit for one of the hacks into the DNC server, but our security agencies say he’s with Russia, part of some complex Russian conspiracy to favor/help Trump in that 2016 election. DCLeaks is also Russian says US cybersecurity firms, firms who get their monies from the US defense department budget and threat gigs from our security agencies I’d bet.

Where’s proof that the public can believe? Did it mysteriously disappear like those 5 months of text messages between Mueller’s investigative team? Where’s this evidence that it was even the Russians? Our security agencies, who I don’t put any stock in at this point, can all align to say whatever they want and manufacture elaborate connections between non-existing persons, places, and things, there’s no one stopping their unified front against the little man to introduce falsified evidence. The security agencies have been lying from the get-go, having taken their cues from hysterical Hillary, dumdum Podesta, and the likes who support the Democratic party some of which are Republican’s in name only, such as John McCain and Mitch McConnell who are probably on Clinton’s crony payroll.

What is the law that forbids candidates from interacting with foreign governments during their campaign and transition into their elected office?

The Logan Act has to do with citizens meddling in US and foreign government affairs, but Flynn isn’t being charged with that, only lying about his conversations with the Russian Ambassador.

The investigation doesn’t add up and neither does the supposed evidence.

apnews.com/dea73efc01594839957c3c9a6c962b8a
From that article, we Americans are supposed to believe that the Russian government did not know who was actively involved in the DNC so they had to do a phishing deal with outdated information? We’re supposed to believe that the Russian superpower is so incompetent as to not have accurate information that’s available to the public about who is employed by Clinton’s 2016 campaign? :laughing: Sure, Russia’s full of mentally retarded KGB and cyber espionage experts. :laughing:

Like I said, our own government who supports the Democrat’s global agenda has betrayed our sitting President Trump with this ridiculous and absurd Russian scheme they themselves devised to first discredit him and eventually impeach him.

Which is exactly what they want to do to Trump: ask him 999 questions, 501 of them being the same question asked over and over in slightly different ways, until he eventually remembers something wrong or says something that conflicts with something else that he said earlier so they can cry “Contempt” or “Lying to FBI” and create a crime out of thin air because the crimes they are actually investigating don’t exist, and to be honest, were never credibly alleged to exist. They did the same thing to Scooter Libby. And Bill Clinton, come to think of it. That’s apparently all these special investigations are good for.

The only crimes they’ve found so far are crimes that were created by the investigation in the first place. But that only makes sense, since- and again this is super important- when it comes to Trump, no crime has even been alleged.

The collusion thing is a bunch of bullshit, since collusion isn’t a crime and we all know both campaigns were ‘guilty’ of it.

What’s your standard of evidence? Do the recent Dutch revelations do anything for you?

I’m not really sure what you’re claiming. Are you denying that there were ongoing contacts between members of the Trump campaign and the Russian government, or just that the members of the campaign that have pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about those contacts were trying to cover them u?

If the former, why would the the people being charged acknowledge that they had such contacts? If, as you seem to imply, the only crime was a misstatement of facts to the FBI, which is what they’re pleading guilty to, what are they getting out of the deal? They’re already pleading guilty to the worst charge you think they could be found guilty of, so what are they getting in exchange for going along with a story that is, by hypothesis, false?

If the latter, where prior to the guilty pleas did they acknowledge the contacts? The senior campaign staff repeatedly denied any contact between members of the campaign and the Russian government. If that was the party line, is it really plausible that when Papadopolous and Flynn lied to the FBI about their contacts with the Russian government, they did it by accident?

As for underlying crimes, both Flynn’s and Papadopolous’ contacts could well have been criminal independently of their having lied about them. Assuming that they were, we would be seeing basically what we’re seeing now: pleas to lesser charges in exchange for their continued cooperation. The fact that they’ve only been charged with the lesser offenses isn’t evidence that no more serious offenses were committed.

No, aspects of the story don’t add up.

What does that have to do with mid 2016 if AIVD were no longer in operation?

How could the Dutch team only last 1 year (2014) and still catch a hack that happened mid-2016. Error…slip up by writer?

No mention of the month and year? Where are the confirmational details?

Who is HE? and when did this occur?

The Dutch may have been spying on Russian cyber teams in the past but they are trying to link that past ability in 2014/15 to today’s more recent Russian attacks 2016 on. I don’t buy it in the least since this article is mentioning generalities about some HE? and some attack on the White House but WHEN? and AIVD lasting from 1 year which would have made their current help impossible.

Why would American intelligence agencies leak their help from the Dutch? Why would they screw up a great thing of the Dutch spying on Russians and feeding that intel to us? I believe that the story is only to prove that the Russians have tried to hack the USA before and AIVD had nothing to do with being in the know regarding the most recent 2016 DNC hack. I’d call this a misinformation piece since it leaves out a lot of important details that tie past Russian cyber warfare with more current Russian cyber warfare. We’re supposed to believe that the Dutch covered all the Russian activities as they breached US servers as far back as 2014 up until the 2016 DNC hack, but that is not what the article actually says, what we’re supposed to believe was implied, not stated with facts.

Your evidence is rejected, Carleas.

Again, what’s your standard of evidence? You’re rejecting credible reports connecting Russian hacking to the DNC email leak on the basis that there aren’t enough details in a story about literal international espionage. That, to me, seems like an unreasonable standard of evidence. Moreover, you seem applying a different standard to evidence that supports your preferred conclusion than to evidence that undermines it (e.g. do you have anything more than internet rumors as evidence that US intelligence agencies are acting at the direction of Hillary Clinton?).

Where does the report state that Dutch intelligence oversaw the Russian DNC hack? It doesn’t and that’s my point. By not giving out details, that connection to more current Russian hacks is implied only.

My standard for one would be that the evidence states detailed facts rather than implied connections and occurrences. Implications is a very liberal tactic.

Oh, it’s not just Clinton and her cronies the US security agencies are acting under, it’s the Democratic globalist agenda that Clinton and her cronies the world over support, you know world wide communism with the twist of corporatism running the one world government and enslaving all peoples under that unified authority.

And even if the Russian’s did hack the DNC, where’s the Trump connection other than implied? Papdopoulos and the Russian professor? :laughing: The stuff you quoted had nothing to do with Trump being involved with the election hack, even if the Russian professor was saying that he had access to DNC emails. Far fetched at best.

The Romanian who took credit for the hack says he’s not Russian or working for the Russians. How do you explain away his amateurish methods of hacking and his denouncement of Russian involvement? Yet your Dutch article gives a very sophisticated example of Russian hacking, not some Romanian with outdated information.

I’m denying that there’s anything even vaguely, tangentially criminal about ‘ongoing contacts between members of the Trump campaign and the Russian government’ such that it warrants us even talking seriously about it, and that the only crimes that have been committed or alleged have been manufactured by the investigation asking dozens of people thousands of questions until someone invariably gets a date wrong or denies something they have a reason to hide and is declared to have ‘lied to the FBI’.

Again, see Scooter Libby or Bill Clinton if you need examples of people who were punished for ‘perjuring themselves’ in investigations that had no firm reason to occur in the first place.

Well, it’s important to point out that the only reason you imagine there’s any sort of deal at all is because you watch CNN too much. In reality all we actually know is that Flynn was caught lying to the FBI and charged for it. Perhaps he was simply caught lying to the FBI, and there was no point in denying the charges because 1.) they go easier on you if you plead guilty and 2.) the evidence was overwhelming? If there is in fact a deal exists, it could be about literally anything; I mean, that’s why the idea of a deal has been put forward by the press, so we can fantasize about all the horrible dirt Flynn has on Trump.

Well yeah, we’ll never have evidence that more serious offenses weren’t committed, because it’s an impossibility. If we’re lucky, the special prosecution can go all the way to 2020 based purely on the strength of your “No evidence of a lack of a crime” line of reasoning.

Again, both campaigns were in open collusion with foreign Governments and everybody knows it. Nobody cared because it isn’t a crime, and when it was occurring, the narrative in which we pretend it’s a crime hadn’t been constructed yet. The fact that you ignored me saying this last time really underscores how much of a witch hunt this is. I point this out to Democrats all the time and none of them ever give two shits. The response should be “Holy shit! What do you mean!? This is a bombshell!” but of course it isn’t, because facts aren’t why we’re here…

The best you’re going to get is a finding that Trump obstructed an investigation (by firing Comey) into something that wasn’t a crime in the first place. Which will be another example of one of these special investigations creating a crime where none existed, just like the previous two high profile ones we had. Maybe if you get really lucky, Mueller will ask Trump about an affair Trump will feel the need to deny, and we’ll get a perjury charge. Either way, it will all be a consequence of an investigation that didn’t need to happen in the first place because it was based on scant evidence of activities that aren’t criminal.

On the other hand, not everyone shares this point of view:

politifact.com/punditfact/st … a-trump-c/

Still, there are folks [from both the left and the right] who insist that only their own take on all of this reflects the most rational frame of mind.

No doubt about it though: this reeks of “politics”.

We’ll just have to see how it all plays out. And, in the interim, squabble over what the actual facts are.

And, of course, which facts clearly count more than others: ours or theirs?

To the campaign finance laws listed in iambiguous’ link, I would add that if the Russians hacked the DNC, that would be a crime, and if the Trump campaign knowingly received the emails obtained from that hack, that would also be a crime. And if the Trump campaign knew in advance that the Russians were going to be hacking or attempting to hack anyone for the benefit of the Trump campaign, that could make them part of the conspiracy to hack (when I say “hack” here, I mean one of a number of criminal provisions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act covering unauthorized access to computer systems).

First, I imagine there’s a deal because there are court documents signed by Papadopolous and Flynn acknowledging that they are cooperating with the investigation, and that that cooperation will be taken into account at sentencing. I imagine there’s a deal because there are literally signed deals filed with the court.

And I imagine it involves providing information, active cooperation, and possibly testimony, because sentencing has been delayed, and, in the case of Papadopolous, the plea was entered under seal.

There’s two claims here: one is that there were no crimes committed related to the election. The other is that the crimes related to the election won’t be the crimes that ultimately bring Trump down. The former is implausible, given what Flynn and Papadopolous have acknowledged in their pleas, but I would not be surprised if the most damning crimes revealed by the investigation are not related to the campaign.

What I love about these kinds of conversations is watching the guys who prosecute Trayvon Martin because of his photos on Facebook, turn around and play defense attorney for Trump and deny all kinds of facts that are right in front of their faces. I guess some people either aren’t aware of the effects of their political bias on their ability to be rational, or they don’t think it’s wrong to rationalize toward their political biases in spite of the truth.

Well, shit, somebody needs to lock up Andersen Cooper then, because him and every other news anchor received the emails obtained from that hack. Or are we operating under the CNN “It’s different when we do it” doctrine? Yes, if Trump helped Russia hack the DNC, that would be a crime, but
1.) Russia doesn’t need anybody’s help to send a phishing email to John Podesta, and,
2.) Trump was in no position to provide aid in hacking the DNC servers, considering he’s, you know, not in the DNC, and
3.) There’s just as much reason to think it was spiteful Bernie supporters that did it, and they certainly had more access.

Collusion is not a crime, and “Yeah but what if…” is not a case.

Knew in advance of what? Taking a phone call from a Russian national? Being in the same room as a Russian ambassador for 15 minutes this one time at a fund raising party?

See, that train of thought might make sense if there was a man named “Russia” and that man was hacking the DNC computers while working with the Trump administration. But in reality, Russia is a country of 150 million people or so, and private citizens in the United States have complete freedom to talk to them about anything they like, even if a handful of those citizens are doing illegal things.

I mean, imagine how insane it would be if members of other Governments started assuming their officials were complicit in whatever you imagine Trump has done purely on the grounds that they spoke to an American.

Again, once you realize that getting campaign assistance from foreign nationals isn’t a crime and both campaigns flagrantly did it right in front of our eyes (which you seem to lack any curiosity about, considering how serious you pretend to take it), then the reason for this case to even exist evaporates.

That’s not a deal. That’s what you have to do to stay out of prison. Do you seriously think Flynn has the ability to say “Fuck you and fuck your investigation, I ain’t telling you shit”, when he’s subpoenaed by the FBI and already guilty of a crime? The first thing any party does any time they’re under the gun by law enforcement is release a statement about how fully cooperative they are. I’m sure OJ’s lawyer declared the same thing.

It’s Trump hate pure and simple, irrational and neverendingly full of false accusations…the liberal left in a nut shell that needs to be committed to the nuthouse.

The Democrats don’t even know what a credible accusation would be. The Hillary campaign and Trump campaign both colluded with, and recieved aid from foreign Governments right in front of our eyes and nobody cared. Things that everybody knows are perfectly acceptable are being called crimes for the purpose of this witchhunt. If collusion was a crime Trump and Hillary both would be in jail, or at the very least would have had to suspend their campaigns.

Like I said…blinding Trump hate. When’s the swamp draining to occur? I guess if Trump’s kept on the defensive, that can’t occur especially with most of Washington against his efforts to save the USA’s national sovereignty and values.