Today's Progressive Social Media Conniption: Trump Aides Had Contact Of a Non-Illegal Type With Russia, Which We Already Knew

This is not breaking news. This is news being re-"broken" for political effect.

Paul Manafort was already reported to have "ties" to Russian politicians. The media reported this all through May through August of last fucking year.

May 2, 2016, Politi"Fact": Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s top adviser, and his ties to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine

August 19, 2016, The National Laughinstock: Paul Manafort’s complicated ties to Ukraine, explained

The FBI looked into this back then. They apparently found nothing illegal (though Manafort was pushed out of the campaign.

This is not news.

But the Shadow Government that is determined to rule us is going to keep attempting their coup. So we get a replay of all these ages-old (in the quick pace of Trumpian time) stories again by a media determined to prove "We were right, and you were wrong!"

So here's the New York Times article that has the lunatics lunaticizing as usual.

Note that this account, which set the hair of the Blue Checkmark Mafia on Twitter on fire, contains two main types of information:

1. Statements of things which are evidenced, but are legal.

2. Insinuations of things which are illegal, but unevidenced.

Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.

But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton's emails and would make them public.

Note the Times just calls them her "emails," forgetting to note what we are talking about is her illegally hidden and illegally destroyed emails, which she was bound by law to make available to the government so it could, in turn (and in theory), disclose them if they were responsive to FOIA requests, or responsive to Congression subpoenas.

But anyway:

The officials said the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other associates of Mr. Trump. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the government outside of the intelligence services, they said. All of the current and former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the continuing investigation is classified.

They also spoke illegally.

Paul D. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
The officials said that one of the advisers picked up on the calls was Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump's campaign chairman for several months last year and had worked as a political consultant in Ukraine. The officials declined to identify the other Trump associates on the calls.

The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the F.B.I. is sifting through as it investigates the links between Mr. Trump's associates and the Russian government, as well as the hacking of the D.N.C., according to federal law enforcement officials. As part of its inquiry, the F.B.I. has obtained banking and travel records and conducted interviews, the officials said.

All of which we already knew. The only actual new information here is that their inquiry has produced no evidence of wrongdoing.

The article notes other unnamed "associates" of Trump had contacts with Russians, but notes that they had business in Russia, and that it's not unusual (obviously) for people doing business in Russia to speak to Russians, and that they don't even know if these were about the campaign, and further says it's "unclear" if the discussions even had anything to do with Trump.

So in other words: Nothing happened, but we're going to leave a lot of room for mystery and speculation so that the Blue Checkmark Mafia will go apeshit.

David Harsyani at the Federalist has a good piece telling the left that it needs to get a grip.

Here’s a strange thought for the Trump era (which is, remarkably enough, less than a month old): What if the Michael Flynn kerfuffle falls somewhere between being completely innocuous and being the worst foreign policy scandal of the past 40 years? It’s crazy, I know, but what if Flynn was a disastrous pick who made vague, inappropriate promises to the Russian ambassador, period? What if his resignation doesn’t signify that Donald Trump has handed over our foreign policy decisions to the KGB?

A person can believe that Trump’s footsie-playing with Vlad Putin is misguided and harmful, and that a politically motivated deep state that drops selective leaks meant to sink a national security advisor is also unhealthy for the republic. You don't have to like Donald Trump to understand that spooks shouldn’t use their power to undermine elected governments and that functionaries of a previous administration shouldn't sabotage new ones to preserve their Russia-approved Iran deals.

As John Podhoretz points out in the New York Post today:

Leftists have become fond of saying that Trump shouldn't be 'normalized.' That concern should now go both ways. Every American should be equally concerned at the potential ‘normalization’ of the tactics used by unnamed government officials to do Flynn in.

....

It also should be mentioned that, according to NBC, after an investigation of his contacts with Russia during the campaign, the FBI came to the conclusion that Flynn would not face any "legal jeopardy." Using this standard, something we were repeatedly told exonerated Hillary Clinton of any wrongdoing, Flynn is also in the clear.

The left and the diehard NeverTrumper sell-outs are in fact mad, and I don't mean angry, I mean insane, calling for all sorts of coups by the Shadow Government (and patting themselves on the back for invoking the Illegal Coup by a Shadow Government clause of the Constitution -- but more on that later).

Apparently we have to destroy democracy in order to save it. Or something.

Trump told us the game was "rigged" and the Shadow State was so offended they set out to prove he was right.

Don't let their lunacy infect you. Let them babble darkly and shit themselves and stew in their own private psychotic hells.

posted by Ace at 02:51 PM

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