Had Trump admitted that Russia meddled, the headline would be "Trumps Admits Collusion"! " Election Results Altered"! He was not going to give them what they wanted. Did you see the 12 indictments handed down Friday ? No collusion mentioned and the Deputy AG stated that no Americans were willingly involved and no election results were altered. He also said the 12 were presumed to be innocent. There will never be a trial. Done deal.
Also, the IC has been trying to undermine Trump from the beginning of his campaign to this very day. Not sure I trust them much anymore either!
1. Actually, there are multiple parts of the indictment that imply or characterize behaviors as being conspiratorial or colluding.
2. False. Rosenstein didn't say anything of the kind. He spoke only about that particular indictment and was very careful to parse his statement as IN THIS indictment. If he had wanted to make a more blanket statement he would've done so. He wouldn't have caveated it.
Here are his direct quotes:
There’s no allegation
in this indictment that the Americans knew they were corresponding with Russian intelligence officers.
There’s no allegation
in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime.
3. Your buying into the conspiracy that Mueller's indictment of Concord Management has fallen apart because the attorneys representing Concord moved for discovery. This is a very popular conspiracy theory on the far-right (especially among hardcore Trump supporters), but falls apart with even a modicum of casual research or familiarity with Federal prosecutions. Most importantly, claims that Mueller was unprepared or backed himself into a corner were clearly proven to be false when Judge Friedrich denied Concord's request for full discovery (offering them only limited materials) and denied their request to share ANY material with Prigozhin. Essentially, Mueller's team won every argument on the merits before a Trump-appointed Federal Judge.
One additional aside: the argument that you are parroting (that the 12 will never go to trial with a nod toward the Concord Management case) is propaganda directly from the Kremlin. Putin himself made those identical arguments in Helsinki. It is rather ironic, too, considering one of the main places pushing the theory is The American Spectator. You're pretty familiar with them as you've posted several OPINION pieces from their site recently.
How does it feel to repeat propaganda directly from the Kremlin? You know what might prevent the 12 GRU agents from being tried? The fact that Russia doesn't cooperate with criminal warrants from other countries (especially the USA), and actually abuses the Interpol system to harass Kremlin critics (Bill Browder is but one example).
Fact is, Matt, there's actually zero doubt that the GRU conducted the DNC/DCCC hacks and also attempted to hack the Clinton campaign (wasn't successful because ironically Hillary had a good IT security team) along with county and state election sites. The information contained in the indictment is damning. It quotes specific people, dates, facts, places, along with internal communications, computer logs, emails, chat messages, ISP history, etc. They even tracked down the bitcoin trail back to the GRU agents and deanonymized their transactions.
There's no doubt here. Russia interfered with our election and with our democracy. But our President doesn't care, buys Putin's propaganda, and continues to score points for our enemies.
On Barack Obama's worst day he didn't score as many points for our enemies as Trump did in 5 minutes at Helsinki.
America first? Please. It's always been Trump first, Trump second, and Trump third. You know this, but you have to maintain the delusion out of necessity at this point.
