Mueller indictment thread

I suspect he was up Putin's ass for years and becoming president didn't change that. Mueller may or may not have been able to pin something on him. But the fact he's denied over & over what our IC has said repeatedly about Russian troll farms meddling in the election means that he is totally unfit for president. Remove him via impeachment or in 2020, whatever. He's a train wreck for so many reasons.

 

I would be surprised and confused if the investigation didn't uncover wrongdoing, because even if Mueller had hired six-year-olds as investigators they probably could uncover some sort wrongdoing. This is Donald Trump we're talking about here.

Now, whether they found wrongdoing that was A. prosecutable as a federal crime and B. directly related to the Russian election interventions - that's a separate question. I've always doubted that Trump was directly involved in or clued into a specific Russian hacking conspiracy - why would the Russian intelligence services even bring him into the loop of something they were already carrying out on their own anyway? The level of knowledge of his sketchy associates like Manafort, Stone, and Page is more of an open question.

With Trump personally, the big questions are: What was he expecting to get in exchange for promising to tilt US foreign policy in a pro-Russia direction? And, what actions did he take to try to impede the investigation of the previous question? It's likely that he did some pretty bad things in this regard, but also possible that those things might also not be clear crimes that could be charged and proven in court.

 

TrumpCo. But the buck stops with the boss supposedly. He should've A) not hired many of these creeps B) fired them at the first whiff of sleaziness. He sees nothing wrong with it, though.

Maybe we were spoiled by a clean & "too serious" (that was a criticism...lmfao) Obama administration and are just unable to process all this malfeasance. The Trump financial crimes alone will keep prosecutors busy for years.

 

Those damned Independent Centrists!
Or, those double damned involuntary celibates.

 

We do not and cannot know that at this point.

 

Trump's real crimes, obviously, are financial.

It's been pretty clear for a while now that he hired trashbags who were happy to do stupid things with Russians, and they have paid the price. I have no doubt that Trump knew what was going on, but I doubt he planned much of this. Waved his hands, said sure, if this can hurt Hillary, why not?

Finances are another matter. He's deep, deep in the mire with tax fraud, money laundering, bribery, you name it. I don't know who could be pure doing international real-estate deals in the places where Trump does, and Trump of course is the last person to be pure. He hides everything he can about his finances for a reason.

He knows that he knew some things about his guys & Russia and that scared him. But not the sort of scare he would have if somebody got hold of his financials.

 

Great post here.

It's actually a relief that there's no new indictments because it means that Trump and his cabal weren't dumb enough to directly coordinate with Putin and ex-KGB to directly influence an election ,That's and leave a paper trail. legit good news because otherwise that closely approaches treason.

From there it gets a lot murkier. It's incredibly hard to indict someone on criminal coordination in an attempt to defraud a US election. You'd need hard evidence that there was intent to defraud such election - which means working with Russia to damage Clinton or getting dirt on her may not rise to that level because of intent.

Basically, you can still coordinate, have it be unethical as hell and still illegal, but leave enough doubt that a jury wouldn't convict. That's the bar Mueller had to think about.

Finally, are we all pretending that obstruction of Justice isn't a crime?

 

His campaign at the least. They had meetings with Russian intelligence with the express intent of damaging a political opponent. They were in contact with an organization that stole private documents from a political opponent, and attempted to work with them in how that data should be released to maximize the damage. They indirectly handed Russians data that their troll farm used to directly hack into our election - through cambridge analytica.

All of this we already know to be fact

 

You guys are missing that Trump is Individual #1 in the Stormy Daniels case of election finance fraud that is already sending Michael Cohen to prison. The only reason he isn't indicted is that he is President. And if he gets a second term and they don't change the law to fix the loophole, the statute of limitations will end possible prosecution.

 

Good posts by @appoo, @JohnR and @NGV. You guys pretty much said it all.

 

Worth noticing.....Won't be surprised that other investigations are farmed out.

So some of the “work” goes on, just elsewhere. https://t.co/ILb6g4bxLW

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) March 23, 2019

 

We won't get the tape recording of Trump saying "let's do this" to Vlad. However, there is enough malfeasance by this administration that if this was a Dem president or pre Clinton v Papey Bush, we would have the president indicted.

 

Pappy and there is a lot we could learn from Island. A friend says there Venison steaks are fantastic.

 

Who cares? Elks have traditionally been bigoted as all hell. Even their official decision to start allowing non-whites came with the proviso that if it ever became legal again to be whites only, they reserved the right to shift back.

 

F*ck elk.

"A moose once bit my sister."