US Politics XXI: Old Man 3-Way

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AG William Barr says Russia probe was started ‘without basis’
By Associated Press

April 9, 2020 | 11:50pm

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr believes the Russia investigation that shadowed President Donald Trump for the first two years of his administration was started without any basis and amounted to an effort to “sabotage the presidency,” he said in an interview with Fox News Channel that aired Thursday.

Barr offered no support for his assertion that the FBI lacked a basis for opening the investigation and made no mention of the fact that the bureau began its probe after a Trump campaign adviser purported to have early knowledge that Russia had dirt on Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

Barr, who has appointed a U.S. Attorney to lead an investigation into the origins of the Russia probe, said the Justice Department has evidence there was “something far more troubling” than just mistakes during the investigation that eventually morphed into special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.


“I think the president has every right to be frustrated because I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history,” Barr said in the interview with Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham.

The attorney general said the FBI launched its counterintelligence investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia “without any basis.”

“Even more concerning, actually, is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events while he was president,” Barr said. “To sabotage the presidency, and I think that — or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency.”

The Justice Department’s inspector general found the FBI was justified in opening an investigation into ties between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia — to protect against a national security threat — and found the bureau didn’t act with political bias.

Trump and his supporters are counting on different conclusions from the separate investigation led by John Durham, the U.S. attorney Barr selected to examine the early days of the Russia probe. Durham’s investigation is ongoing, and Barr did not provide any evidence about what Durham has found so far.

Mueller concluded that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election, but his investigation didn’t find sufficient evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Mueller also examined about a dozen possible instances of obstruction of justice and has pointedly said he could not exonerate the president.

The inspector general’s report identified significant problems with applications to receive and renew warrants to monitor the communications of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page in 2016 and 2017. Investigators were concerned about Page’s ties to Russia but never charged him with any wrongdoing. Inspector General Michael Horowitz told senators the FBI failed to follow its own standards for accuracy and completeness when it sought warrants from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Page’s communications.

The report detailed 17 errors and omissions during those wiretap applications, including failing to tell the court when questions were raised about the reliability of some of the information it had presented to receive the warrants. Those mistakes prompted internal changes within the FBI and spurred a congressional debate over whether the bureau’s surveillance tools should be reined in.

But Barr believes they were more than just mistakes, offering a personal view of the probe, a highly unusual move for a prosecutor in an ongoing investigation.

“My own view is that the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness,” he said. “There is something far more troubling here, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it.

The FBI opened its investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia on July 31, 2016.

By that point, Russian hackers had broken into the Clinton campaign and other Democratic email accounts and George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, had boasted to a professor in London that he was aware that Russia had derogatory information on Clinton.

Though Trump and Barr have seized on errors made during the surveillance of Page, the investigation had already been underway for months by the time the first application was filed.
 
if anyone is interested, Salon -- hardly a pro-Biden outfit -- has a really decent round-up of the single Biden rape accusation.

you can read the whole thing, but here's their conclusion:

Biden's communications director, Kate Bedingfield, said the allegations are false and issued this terse statement to Salon: "Women have a right to tell their story, and reporters have an obligation to rigorously vet those claims."

The story of Reade's allegations against Biden shows what can happen when the rigorous standards espoused by mainstream publications are sidestepped for a more credulous and politicized approach. The failure to vet this story methodically and to preemptively address its odder elements opened the door to a whirlwind of conspiracy theories and misinformation.

Some Sanders supporters are lobbing wild accusations of a cover-up by the mainstream media and Time's Up for not publicizing Reade's story. In turn, some Biden supporters are being reckless — whether by assuming Reade is lying, or by spreading ridiculous conspiracy theories about her, or both. No doubt some folks on either side of the political divide would be reacting the same way no matter what, but the situation has been made significantly worse because of the slipshod manner in which Reade's allegations were reported and released.

Organizations like Time's Up and mainstream journalists take great care with politically sensitive accusations like Reade's. That isn't because they're cowards. It's because they fear situations just like this, where piecemeal reporting and the perception of slanted coverage create a political food fight that ends up pushing what is supposed to be the central concern — resisting sexual harassment and violence — to the sidelines.

No matter how it may be interpreted, "believe women" has never been an injunction to publish every allegation of sexual abuse without hesitation or reservation. It's about taking these stories seriously on their own terms, instead of dismissing them as women's attempts to manipulate people and public opinion. For journalists, it means we must take stories of sexual abuse seriously and treat them carefully and thoroughly; as Rebecca Traister said on Twitter in 2017, that means publishing stories that are "reported, investigated, fact checked & backed up by the outlets reporting on them."

What can be said is that Reade's story is credible and compelling in some important ways, and also comes with a number of troubling red flags. For a variety of reasons it has not been taken seriously on a national level, but those reasons do not include a mainstream media conspiracy to protect Joe Biden. Rather than becoming the subject of serious investigation, this has instead become an occasion for die-hard supporters on both the Sanders and Biden sides to score points on one another online. Actual facts have been supplanted by reckless conspiracy theories spun by enthusiasts of both candidates. Whatever the facts of this case may be, the #MeToo movement deserves better than to be dragged into the sleaze like this.

https://www.salon.com/2020/03/31/a-...-hell-breaks-loose-online-heres-what-we-know/
 
Honestly Trump couldn't be a better headpiece for all of this. He causes such a distraction that the real evil people are using that as cover to produce their policies without most of us noticing.
 
Having read several posts now about how Biden will "likely lose" the election. I started thinking that time is more enjoyably spent looking at the upcoming election instead of focusing on one resident of Pennsylvania who has made up their mind about voting.

So, this all comes with caveats. Obviously the virus has turned this into a wildly unknown, on how the election will be run and if it will be more traditional or will there be major changes in voting procedures. Also, we all know Trump will play dirty, so I assume that part, but am not taking into consideration extraordinary corruption, like mass closings of polling places in key cities within key states, using the DOJ to and state AG's to disqualify huge amounts of ballots, etc... All those things are possible, but I am going to assess this without that in the mix.

So Trump won because of PA, MI, and WI. All of which had razor thin margins. Main reason was Clinton's weakness with white working class, and lower than expected African American turnout in urban areas.

We also know some more information from looking back at past elections and primaries. We know Clinton had a much larger portion of people that just plain hated her and this showed prominently when we saw states in this primary that had 15 to 25 point swings to Biden. This will be a major factor in the general. If Biden's strength in African American support and white working class holds up, paired with the blue wave that has swept across suburban areas across the country, there really is no hope for Trump.

State by state
I think PA is in the bag for Biden. Trump won by 45,000 votes. Taking the aforementioned trends into account, AA, WWC, Suburbs, along with Joe's ties to the state, this one is safe in my book.

MI - Trump won by less than 11,000 votes. Trumps war with the MI governor will hurt him here, and again, take the same factors in, and I think this one is also safe blue.

WI - tossup here. Trump won by 27,000 votes. Having lived here for many years, it is crazy to see how the state got overtaken by some of the most corrupt and shady pieces of GOP shit over the last 6-8 years. Dirty tricks will be played here. Biden has a good chance, but this is not a sure thing. Biden may pick Baldwin, which would most likely make it safe blue.

FL - My other long time home, Close, but leans Biden for me. Trump only won by a little over 1%. While it seems to infuriatingly slip slowly toward pink, I think this state is ripe for Biden. Latino and AA populations, elderly, white working class, sprawling suburbs. It's all here. And it won't take much a shift to put this in the blue column.

I think NC will easily go to Biden this time. I think AZ could flip, And I just have this feeling that GA may be a surprise win.

So it PA and MI go blue. It would only take one other state to get Trump out.

If Biden gets all the states above - even if WI stayed red, It would be 339 to 199 romping. Throw in WI, and it's 349 to 189.

For those saying that Biden will "likely lose" - what states would give Trump the win this time around? Same as last time? Or other scenarios?
 
The disinformation headed our way is going to make 2016 look like a test run.

This is very true. But I also think there is a solidifying of the camps that has happened over the last 3 years. Trump's meat and potatoes is polarizing people. But after a time, this can backfire.

Now, there are two camps. People that know the game that he plays, that he's full of shit, and aren't going there. And another group that knows the game he plays, knows he's full of shit, but likes that and wants to live in that reality.

luckily, as we've seen from 2018, Even with caravans, and a fabricated middle class tax cut, and fabricated health care plan, 2018 was a bloodbath for the GOP.
And it shows that there are people that were "taking a chance" on Trump last time, really hated Hillary, but now, they are not going there.

Trump has already played his biggest card against Biden. Burisma was thrown about in the news every day for months during impeachment, and any potency it had is gone for the non-cult members.

Yes, there will be more, and crazy shit of course. But I also think we are not remembering just how tired people are of this guy. It's why you see that swingable middle chunk of voters, swing left or at least away from Trump. They just don't want the daily circus anymore.

I may be very wrong, but I hope not.
 
A little over 1% is a lot in Florida.

Florida is a clean Trump state in 2020 - it is Trump’s de facto “home state.” Give up on it now. The old population in South Florida is incredibly susceptible to misinformation campaigns and big old time branding.
 
A little over 1% is a lot in Florida.

Florida is a clean Trump state in 2020 - it is Trump’s de facto “home state.” Give up on it now. The old population in South Florida is incredibly susceptible to misinformation campaigns and big old time branding.

I tend to agree. But Joe plays better with the old crowd than Hillary. And 25% of the state is over 60.
Also, another shift will be that Peurto Ricans hate Trump. And that is nearly 6% of the population.
The fact that Hillary did almost as well as Obama did in 2012, makes me think there is headroom for Biden here.
But yes, it's more of a wildcard, then i stated earlier.
 
I don't know the numbers like a lot of you do, so I'm not going to try to argue there. I just think the more non-traditional things get in terms of the election cycle, the more it favors Trump. Our lives will continue to be entirely or predominantly online for the foreseeable future, and that is a medium Trump completely dominates.
 
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