Shoehorning Lara Trump into co-chair of the RNC suggests you might be onto something.
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Spot the difference :
The whole Putin thing - ‘no way’ ‘way’
was hilarious, and what was that about Hiroshima and Nagasaki not being so bad?
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Why would you punish the Venezuelan people like that?
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God, what a fucking moron
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Marina Hyde pretty much nails it:
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Just like some other unpleasent stuff that floats… Quite apt really.
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Good thread connecting the dots on what benefit Sisi got for allegedly helping Trump get into power in 2016.
https://x.com/gm_silverman/status/1825356011554697630
TLDR - Egypt have benefited from a close relationship with the US for several generations, but that broke down in recent years after Morsi was removed by Sisi in a coup. Sisi knew that a Trump presidency was open for business and was a cheap investment for the legitimization a Trump admin would do of their “favourite dictator” if they just pad the entry fee.
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There’s no ‘de facto’ about it … he is one. When that dickhead was boasting about Orban singing his praises the other night , that came hot on the heels of a meeting between the two at Mar-a-Lago where it’s almost certain that Orban was acting a proxy for Putin who he had a meeting with a couple of weeks earlier.
It’s astounding to me that because Bill Barr was able to dismiss the Mueller investigation in such a deceptive way that people are still unwilling to admit what is patently obvious.
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Definitely a Russian asset, but not in the sense of recruited, trained, knowing… as McCabe said. But why so friendly to Putin?
At the least, it’s economic. There are lots of ways, and lots of reasons, why Putin could enrich Trump - business, natural resources, military secrets. And we all know that Trump likes money and will do anything to get it.
Beyond the most obvious, an old agent like Putin will know everything that any high profile western person ever did in Russia, and I’m certain he has the goods on Trump and could sink him without trace if he chose to reveal the evidence. Hotel rooms. Beauty pageants. I’m certain as can be Putin has footage.
And finally, Trump is a wannabe strongman, and he would love to be a dictator too, so there’s an affinity with Putin’s style that appeals to him.
Robert Mueller ran a lengthy and very detailed investigation, and it should have sank Trump but it was too much for the public to consume. We’ve been conditioned to bullet points and sound bites, and appallingly Barr hopped in at the end to give the most biased and sanitized take possible, and Trump got off scot free. Mueller was studious and detailed. He was from an era when people actually read, and were informed. A simple act of PR at the end undid the weight of his work.
Anyhow, Trump is definitely a Russian asset.
In terms of this election, Harris would do well to mobilize the hundreds of thousands of Poles who live in swing states, and let them know very clearly that if Putin is allowed to annex significant parts of Ukraine, it won’t be long before he is looking at Poland.
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Well, she’s already mentioned them in the debate, which is probably a first for that community.
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Swifties and Poles. Should be enough!
Because he helped him win the first time and he’s doing exactly the same this time around.
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Long before Barr did that the whole of the RW got on board with 2 different misinformation campaigns that would prepare the ground for such a brazen misdirection.
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They put a ton of effort into making people think the Russia investigations and the Steele dossier were the same thing. They knew they dossier could be discredited as not being rigorous enough to hang those sorts of allegations on and knew if they did that they would be able to discredit the entire investigation in the eyes of people who bought the conflation of the two things. But the investigation was never about the Steele Dossier. The FBI already had several lines of inquiry open before the dossier came to them and it played only a trivial role in directing or justifying any course they took. There are suggestions even that Russians gave this tactic to people in Trump world (Manafort) and the same people might even have made sure the most discreditable bits of the dossier got to Steele.
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A focus on collusion, despite Comey being very clear from as soon as the investigations became public that collusion was not a concern of the FBI and so was not the focus of the investigations. They knew that if they made everyone focus on collusion then no matter what the resulting investigations could demonstrate they would be seen to fail on its core intent and make it easier to wave away the actual findings. That is essentially how Barr, who knew collusion was not an FBI focus, approached his part in brushing the findings under the rug.
The latter of these is a fascinating case study because it only works if the media pick up on their collusion framing. But not only did they do it, it’s also how most democrats and even outlets like MSNBC spoke about the investigations. It is a fantastic example of how the RW is somehow able to set the framing of most political conversations.
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Trump was in discussions about a Trump Tower Moscow project during the campaign, but when it was raised he publicly denied it. Remember, this was during a period when people were supposedly taking seriously the issue of his need to divest from his businesses as previously thought required to be president, and was something he was paying lip services to agree to do. To get caught actively trying to officially entangle himself with Russian entities while running for president, in a cycle when there was clear evidence of their efforts to fuck with the election, would have been a properly major scandal.
Trump knew he had to protect that lie and that creates the opening for a legit influence operation. The ties to Russian intelligence may predate that, but that was the point where any deniability Trump may have had about what the relationship was between him and Russian contacts completely disappeared and he knew he was now being worked by them.
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I just read the Guardian piece and feel compelled to point this out
McCabe was part of FBI leadership, briefly as acting director, during investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and links between Trump and Moscow. Trump fired McCabe in March 2018, two days before he was due to retire. McCabe was then the subject of a criminal investigation, for allegedly lying about a media leak. The investigation was dropped in 2020.
Reporting like this is not helpful as it misses key details that really illustrate how bogus the case against him was. It was not related to his work on the Russia case that saw the charges filed as you might think from reading that. It was for allegedly “leaking” info to the press about the existence of the Clinton server investigation. Just like Comey, the target was put on him because of his role on the Russia case, but the pretext that was found to remove him was that his conduct in the Clinton case had unfairly impacted the Hillary campaign. It is even more laughable in McCabe’s case because Republicans had already spend 2 years pursuing him for allegedly helping Hilliary’s campaign by his role on that investigation.
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