Although I agree with many of the points here, unfortunately the piece itself has made the same mistake as the media it criticises: it's jumping to conclusions a little prematurely.
Why read so much into the lack of indictments when Mueller's team have agreed to the standard that they cannot indict a sitting president? [1] Let's just wait and see -- I'm fed of speculation at this point.
Because to have collusion you need to have multiple parties colluding. They haven't indicted anymore Russians or any other members of the Trump campaign, and no existing indictment has been due to collusion.
So even though the President can't be indicted, the indication that no other indictments means that collusion is not a part of the report.
There may be other offenses that Trump have committed, but that is even MORE speculation.
You can't indict anybody for collusion, since it's not a crime.
What is a crime is, for example, conspiracy to hack DNC computers - for which several people, mostly Russians, were already indicted. Another example would be conspiracy to "impair, obstruct, or defeat the lawful function of any department of government", which is what the Internet Research Agency was indicted for.
Yet there could be sealed indictments that have yet to be unsealed. In fact, every single one of Mueller's indictments were originally sealed. Who's to say there aren't others that he's handed off to various federal prosecutors like at SDNY or EVDA? Assuming that Mueller has entirely cleared the president (or anyone around him) at this point is about as pointless as proving he's about to be arrested in the Oval Office.
Let it play out and see what happens. Regardless, I suspect Congress will inevitably get the truth out and eventually it will come out to the public. Like most things in a democracy, they're often slow and sometimes messy. This is a feature, not a bug!
As of November, there were three dozen sealed indictments in the federal D.C. circuit. [1] My theory on this is that the FBI has been investigating crimes not committed by the current administration, but which would, if prosecuted during the Mueller investigation, raise a cry of obstruction and interference, due to the people they target. The FBI has been letting the Mueller special counsel wind down before going after the real criminals.
A sitting president can not be indicted by the DoJ, per DoJ policy. There is no law whatsoever, but only a memo that makes a policy from the DoJ's OLC (Office Of Legal Opinion). If you think this is a law, you are mistaken.
Perhaps Trump can meet Barr in his private plane to discuss grandchildren prior to Russian collusion being found to be an inconsequential "matter" not requiring prosecution.
> and no existing indictment has been due to collusion.
The Pappadopolous indictment and conviction-by-guilty-plea was for (lying about) Trump-campaign initiated attempted collusion, in which Pappadopolous acted with the knowledge and approval of higher officials in the Trump campaign.
The Stone indictment is for (lying about) collusion with WikiLeaks on the release of information that, per other indictments, was being released as part of a Russian propaganda operation.
So, no, it's entirely false to say “no existing indictment has been due to collusion”.
> There may be other offenses that Trump have committed, but that is even MORE speculation.
That's not really speculation, either; it's not as if the identity of the unindicted coconspirator Individual 1 in the Cohen indictment out of SDNY is a mystery.
Pappadopolous was the victim of a con. He went to a couple of campaign staff meetings, so he was "on the campaign staff". Then some DS tool whispered something inconsequential in his ear. He got in trouble when he re-whispered that silly rumor in the ear of some other DS tool. That's all that happened. If he had a decent lawyer or any stones at all, he would never have plead guilty nor been convicted of anything.
> The Pappadopolous indictment and conviction-by-guilty-plea was for (lying about) Trump-campaign initiated attempted collusion, in which Pappadopolous acted with the knowledge and approval of higher officials in the Trump campaign.
The two week prison sentence Pappadopolous received gave little weight to his complicity, and seemed to me to be more a slap on the wrist for his not cooperating with the FBI.
> the indication that no other indictments means that collusion is not a part of the report.
This is incorrect.
"Collusion" isn't a specific crime, but rather, a euphemism for a family of crimes.
We've seen Trump associates charged with and convicted of those crimes, relating to improper communications, obstructing an investigation into foreign influence, lying to the government during an investigation, etc.
We've seen the Russians charged with the related crimes, such as hacking the DNC. We've seen Mueller trace out the connection between GRU and the campaign convicts, via Wikileaks. We've seen multiple Trump associates who lied under oath about their or Trump's financial dealings with Russia. Or in the case of Stone, about many many things.
We've seen additional evidence that Trump is the center of a vast criminal syndicate with ties to Russia, given the multiple branching investigations across jurisdictions, the related campaign finance crimes, and the testimony of his decade-long "fixer".
This is what is looks like when a criminal organization is prosecuted -- and the reason that Trump has not been charged with conspiracy relating to the criminal acts he ordered, acts for which others face jail terms, is policy against indicting a sitting president.
There's no speculation involved, and considerable evidence of their criminality.
What's fanciful is you ignoring all of the facts to say things like:
"Well, it doesn't matter if associates of his are going down for related crimes, and that he's the connecting feature between their criminal acts -- that he hasn't been charged with something made up means that nothing happened!"
(All of that aside, the media is a travesty and their coverage of this has been click-bait driven fantasy.)
Collusion, like "Crooked Hillary" are terms Trump used courtesy of Cambridge Analytica to control the narrative. The investigation was to look for coordination and links between Russia and the Trump campaign, along with obstruction of justice as well as "any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation."
Collusion is a euphemism, my point was noone was indicted for coordinating with the campaign, and noone was indicted in the campaign other than for tax fraud and processing crimes.
If you can point out who exactly you think coordinated with Trump that'd be great.
> noone was indicted in the campaign other than for tax fraud and processing crimes.
Pappadopolous was convicted for lying about his attempts, approved by higher ups in the campaign, to coordinate with Russia.
Stone was indicted for lying about his role in coordinating between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks about the DNC document release in which, from other indictments, WikiLeaks was acting as either an agent or dupe of Russian intelligence.
Irrelevant, the actual facts charged in the indictment involve collusion. “Collusion” isn't a legal charge, it's a fact pattern, and it's part of the fact pattern in both the Stone and Pappadopolous indictments. The claim that there are no indictments involving collusion is false.
> And Stone denies the accusation.
Which is irrelevant to any claims about the content of indictments of findings of the Mueller probe. It would be relevant if the claim was “no convictions involving collusion” or “no confessions involving collusion”, though Pappadopolous would still disprove both of those claims.
It is a “subjective viewpoint” only in the trivial sense in which every description using human language (including terms whose uses include named legal offenses) relies on the subjectivity of interpretation of definitions in context, and in which there are no actual discussable concrete fact claims.
On any other level, “collusion” is a word with a clear meaning, and the Stone and Pappadopolous indictments (the latter of which is subject of a conviction with guilty plea and detailed statement of the offense confirming this) involve what is unambiguously actual collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks (on a matter which the facts alleged in other indictments identify WikiLeaks as advancing a Russian propaganda operation) and attempted (from the Trump campaign side) collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia directly.
Everything that denied this is lies and sophistry to support lies.
Al Capone was only convicted of tax evasion. I am sure he denied that accusation at the time, and he also boasted about a plea bargain that the sentencing judge reminded him wasn’t between Al Capone and the court.
You can tie the loose ends together. No matter what the final report has the Stone indictment is incredibly damning with regard to his communication with Wikileaks in addition to the Trump tower meeting.
Saying that no indictment has been because of collusion isn't true, since Manafort was indicted in part for lying to investigators about his contacts with Kilimnik.
Surely you'd agree that Trump's campaign chair giving US polling data to a Russian cut-out counts as colluding.
I think the real problem in the US media is political bias. I think essentially the article is accusing the left leaning media of letting that bias color their views. Of course the article is equally guilty of that same thing. And I assume it does not see its own bias.
And sadly, the fact that the media is like this is largely a reflection of the population in general. And, as others point out, the media is probably like this because they are just chasing profit.
Confirmation bias explains a lot of what is going on with media. It's human nature to be biased. This doesn't have to be a big problem if we accept that we are all biased.
Biases are rooted in the computational limitations of the human mind. We have limited memory and communication bandwidth. Our brains use compression algorithms to record, store, and retrieve data.
> I think the real problem in the US media is political bias.
Absolutely not. As someone else notes to your comment, everyone is biased. I'm "biased" that people not dying is a good thing -- some would argue the universe would be better off without humanity. Bias is inevitable, and not the problem; the problem, as you state, is "letting that bias color their views." Or, rather, not so much "color" your views, but letting your personal bias override any other interpretation.
I personally believe Trump has done some very illegal things and it's just a question of finding a smoking gun. That doesn't mean he has done anything illegal regarding situation X (I don't know, let's say promoting Mar-A-Lago after he started running for office), and that's something I need to keep in mind when I read articles about him.
The article is trying to persuade us the press discredits itself when it correctly reports 37 indictments, several convictions, Russian meetings with Don jr. and a mind-boggling array of lies. It criticizes an accurately researched nyt list of Trump associates connected with Russians implying it has been refuted by the Mueller report which the author has not even seen.
Consider what the author is suggesting: these things should not be reported.
It intentionally blurs opinion pieces with factual reporting, and even then heavily paraphrases. It attributes words of others to papers that did not publish them. It implies someone's votive candles somehow reflects on the press.
All hinged on the the fact that there are no recommended indictments (beyond the dozens already being pursued). Additional indictments that would have to be for the theoretically unindictable offense of collusion.
It's not attempting to examine press malfeasance, it's attempting to discredit establish facts by vaguely lumping these unrelated things together. Mixed along with what is not explicitly stated in the unread Mueller report. And to do so preemptively to fix opinion about a report before it's even available publicly.
This article is neither reporting nor analysis, although it pretends to be. It is indistinguishable from countless others that appear in Turkey, Venezuela, Hungary and other nations in a similar state. The names are different and the language is English and that's all.
It is another attempt to de-legitimize the press using exactly the same techniques in every other nascent autocracy: blur one persons words with another, blur opinion pieces with reporting and wildly paraphrase them. Blend irrelevant errors over unconnected annoying fact. Do all this preemptively.
I think the old guard media has misstepped on this, not for ideological reasons but for clicks. More banal certainly, but somehow worse, I think. Even the conservative media continued to talk about it, railing against, because it drives clicks.
What we really need, and hopefully comes from this reckoning, is a new model of financing journalism that can be free to act in the public interest, and is built with that in its DNA.
Unfortunately, ideas on what's in the public interest are so vastly separated, I wonder if such a thing even makes sense to hope for.
No, it's pretty clear that a lot of reporters have compromised their ethics, or never had any. The article quotes several; it is in fact the entire point of the article. Of course you might also say that the _owners_ of the media don't care about this lack of ethics as long as they're making money. That's probably true, but it's not the same thing at all. The blame goes to the people who have no ethical standards, or who compromised them in favor of politics.
The entire notion of journalistic ethics has become totally self serving and delusional. It starts from the mistaken assumption that it’s possible to be free from the biases of one’s own ideology. The solution is embracing, and exposing oneself to, the opposing ideologies.
Is it a scandal if it isn't true? And you're right, Obama never had anything in this scope, it's worse, because people died from things he perpetuated.
1) Fast and Furious: Continued program that caused a border agent to be murdered with one of the many guns the US sold to the cartels.
2) Benghazi: We all know this disaster that killed 4 Americans. Severely understaffed embassy that should have never even been there. No support when requested. Blamed the whole thing on a video.
3) Iran Nuclear Deal: Pallets of unmarked Euros flown over to a sponsor of terrorism in the dead of night
4) Spied on conservative reporters
5) IRS Scandal: Targeted conservatives with the IRS
6) Private Email Server: Lied about knowledge of her server, turns out he had a pseudonym on it and received emails from it. He said he found out about it from the media, woops.
7) NSA Spying: Obama forever known as the spying President.
2) The State Dept. approved some requests for security upgrades, and denied others. If they had approved everything, would it have stopped the attacks? There's no way to know. Placing blame on Hillary or Obama specifically is problematic at best.
3) Before the revolution in 1979 the Iranian govt signed an arms contract with the US and paid money into a US account. Then the revolution happened and the equipment was never delivered. The cash flown over was just them getting their money back out of that account, with 30+ years of interest.
The rest I either know nothing about, or are too general to get into here.
For what it's worth, I'm not just an Obama apologist. I also think a lot of stuff he did was problematic, especially the unaccountable drone campaigns, and especially Anwar Al-Alwaki and his son, which should have been considered a major scandal.
2) The problem wasn't stopping it, it was fighting it back. They were too understaffed to make a defense. Given how long they held out with what they had is a good indicator that they could have repelled it with more defenses. Air support would have sufficed.
3) Fair enough, but how it was done that wasn't appropriate.
How many Obama campaign managers did they indict? How many Obama National Security Advisors did they indict and force to resign over Russian ties?
How many times did Obama deny that the Russians attacked American interests during an election only to be rebut by the FBI with a string of foreign indictments?
Well, the Obama administration were the ones who ignored the Russia meddling. They knew about this for months. But President Obama opted to not call Russia out on it publicly or inform the American people. In fact, his administration didn’t even draw public attention to this until October, just weeks before the election.
They also ignored violations of the nuclear treaty, various previous hacking attempts, cancelled missile defenses in Eastern Europe, allowed Russia to sell air defenses to Iran.
The Obama Administration was extremely soft on Russia.
> They knew about this for months. But President Obama opted to not call Russia out on it publicly or inform the American people. In fact, his administration didn’t even draw public attention to this until October, just weeks before the election.
Except the reporting was clear about the source since June. The President wanted to publicize it earlier to but McConell refused to sign a bipartisan condemnation. Even then the intelligence community was unequivocal.
McConnell's office disputed Biden's account, as reported by Politico, "pointing to a letter signed by all four congressional leaders in September 2016 and sent to the president of the National Association of State Election Directors, urging cybersecurity precautions in light of reports of attempted hacking."
Comey reportedly wanted to announce the active measures in an op-ed column, as Newsweek reported in March 2017. Two sources with knowledge about the matter told Newsweek that Obama administration officials blocked the effort.
Obama should have publicized it instead of sitting on it, regardless if everyone wanted to sign on or not. Putting it all off on McConnell isn't really acceptable when you're President, but to be fair Biden pushed the blame, not Obama, Obama doesn't think he would do anything differently.
The point of mueller was to determine if Trump worked with Russia to steal a us presidential election. I may just not know the evidence so I'm asking in total honesty - what indictments demonstrate that happened?
> The point of mueller was to determine if Trump worked with Russia to steal a us presidential election.
This is false, the charter was more broad than that. It investigated interference in the Russian election including this possibility.
This is why they also prosecuted cases against Russian intelligence officers that performed the hacking operations and individuals that lied to the FBI over their ties to Russian cutouts in Wikileaks (specifically Stone and Corsi, though they gave up on Corsi).
>After WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, released hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, the indictment says, a senior Trump campaign official “was directed” to contact Stone about additional releases and “what other damaging information” WikiLeaks had “regarding the Clinton campaign.” The indictment does not name the official or say who directed the outreach to Stone.
An indictment isn't proof of anything you said. Please look up what an indictment means. Also - muellers report is out and trump is clean. So clearly you're wrong. After 3 years its time to man up and accept that.
Why has there been a big turnover of the Trump administration these last two years? Is it perhaps that because Trump was an outsider, he went along with people saying hire this guy who'd be good for the job, and then later fired him when it turned out that guy wasn't on the team?
Trump has been cleaning house, getting rid of the liberal plants whose job was to smear and discredit the new administration. Look at the list of purges:
That's not what I was referring to. The article quotes journalists who thought about speaking up about something, but decided not to because it might help Trump. It sounds like they had a sense of ethics, but compromised that ethics because of politics. Or the journalists who spent weeks in Prague and failed to find any evidence there, and then failed to report on that failure. There's no evidence that this person ever had any ethical standards because they then joked about it while trying to sell their book. Perhaps this is less likely to be regarded as an ethical failure by journalists; even scientists are only recently pushing for pre-registration of medical trials in order to prevent unfavorable studies from being swept under the rug.
The click reasons, ideological reasons, and hate/fear reasons (of Trump as an interloper in the political class) fused into an alloy. It's impossible to separate these.
I agree with you. At least PBS news seems to honestly attempt to be impartial. Just my opinion but PBS is just on a higher level of honesty and fairness than MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, etc.
I am not from the USA, but regularly watch CNN and Fox News. For me they are entertainment and without informative value. They are not news, but political commentary.
From outside It is amazing to see that if you watched only one or the other, the USA appears to be in opposite types of catastrophes.
Similarly with r/politics and r/the_donald, the echo chamber in both of them is so strong, that it prevents rational conversation.
Personally I have seen that CBS News seems more moderate. However I think the best news for any country are the ones provided outside the country (like Aljazeera, BBC, France24, MDR, etc)
You're tautologically right, but not with the colloquial definition of "conservative" that gets used politically. So for your comment to mean anything, you have to make a larger point.
(I'd argue that the colloquial "branding" definitions are a part of the problem. eg "drain the swamp" isn't conservative rhetoric)
It seems ill-fitting to say the Washington Post, NYT, and Huffington Post are 'conservative', perhaps it'd be more accurate to say that they're entrenched in the status quo? You can see that pretty clearly when there newspapers write about companies that compete for attention. I don't think I've seen a favorable report about FAANGs out of the NYT since Tim Cook came out of the closet.
Huffington Post pretends to be very socially liberal, but really it's all about preserving the status quo which is ultimately a conservative position.
Also have you read any of those New York Times "editorial" pieces they crank out? "Trump isn't so bad" and "Why I voted Trump and I'd do it again, gosh darn it, and you should too" are typical fare.
The term "conservative" has shifted dramatically in the last 50 years. Some of today's "liberal" Democrats are further to the right of some Republicans in the 1960s. The most liberal of these large media institutions are at best hard-line centrists.
> Also have you read any of those New York Times "editorial" pieces they crank out? "Trump isn't so bad" and "Why I voted Trump and I'd do it again, gosh darn it, and you should too" are typical fare.
I haven't seen those, and I can't find them with a search. Do you have links?
I would argue that the US invasion of Iraq (WMD), the Vietnam War (Gulf of Tonkin), or the Spanish-American War (remember the Maine) have exposed the fallibility and blindness of mainstream press to counter-naratives in pursuit of being first / having an article about the issue of the day.
The broader point about clicks is that the economic model behind the US press changed from a subsidized press to a for-profit press... and yet everyone expected the work product to remain the same?
As a first approximation, about 20 years before the end of each century: pre-1880 for newsprint & pre-1980 for television.
All that is required for the press to function is that someone foots the bill.
They can do so for a variety of reasons. Supported by a political party (Fox is actually returning to earlier times here). Supported as a charity / pet project (the news barons, Bezos). And supported commercially from sales (CNN).
Generally, every news media form in the US has eventually moved to the last.
America does propaganda better than probably any other country on earth, because it’s so interwoven into the fabric of society. Freedom of the press, of speech, of creators is espoused at every opportunity.
And at the same time, the Pentagon is required to sign off on every movie script that shows any military buildings, or the White House. And they do make edits [1].
Military officials and commentators helped shape the narrative of the Iraq war, often with roles at the media outlets themselves. I’ll dig up the article I was thinking of when I get a chance. They helped shape the presentation after — any embeds had to run their footage by military editors before airing too.
What US propaganda does better than Chinese state propaganda for instance is that they don’t just tell the truth they want directly to your face even though it’s obviously and visibly wrong. They shape narratives. It’s an elegant, soft-touch approach. They make you want to hear and buy into their version of the truth. The press here hasn’t really been independent in a long time. I respect the game, tbh. It’s a free press so propaganda is impossible! Nothing to see here haha.
It’s also why I get my news from a couple of foreign sources and ideally it cancels out each providers biases. If you get a chance watch some Fox and CNN (I watch both) then compare to CBC and Al Jazeera English.
>And at the same time, the Pentagon is required to sign off on every movie script that shows any military buildings, or the White House. And they do make edits.
You're omitting a crucial detail and by doing so you make the situation you describe sound much more totalitarian. You're required to get the military to sign off on your script IF you want to use free or discounted military personal, equipment, or locations in your film. If you're making a movie where the heroes of the US military blow up some aliens, you'll be able to negotiate to use real tanks and planes for a reasonable cost in your fee. If you're talking about how the government kills people and is evil, you'll have to find another way to get your props. What you don't have to do is get government approval to make your film.
I think that’s the crux of my point. Yes of course it’s optional to make a movie with the White House in it. It’s optional to use war footage to report on the war. It’s optional to interview officials in your coverage. However if you don’t, nobody’s going to pay attention so your only choice in effect is to play ball. Who would watch media coverage of the war from the only network without footage/boots on the ground/military subject matter experts? You can say whatever you want but it doesn’t matter if nobody’s listening. In a true free country these would be available to you to do as you wish, wouldn’t they, with equal access provisions? (That’s not rhetorical I’m curious your thoughts)
That’s what I respect about it, and what makes it so powerful — the result is the same as under a totalitarian government but without the threats. And it’s still got freedom!
Either you have misunderstood something or I have.
You absolutely do not need government permission to show the White House or to show war footage. You need government permission to get to use their hardware for free.
If I want b-roll of the White House I can just walk over there and record or buy some online. I don't have to ask anybody anything and the government doesn't get to see my script. If I want tanks or planes in a movie that has a script the government doesn't like, I can always use the hardware from a different country, from a state militia, or private owner - or CGI or get the props department to build one, etc.
The government does have a subtle influence. If it's not important to your film, you may as well except minor edits and make the military look good - that way you get some expensive props for free (or for a small price). It's not as insidious as what you're describing though.
Sorry if I was unclear I was typing in a hurry before takeoff. Yes you can use B footage, etc. What you won’t get is access to embedding in units, you’ll get called on last if at all to ask questions and you won’t get interviews or other access if you don’t play ball. All combined it puts you at a big disadvantage compared to those who tow the line.
That said, you're right that there are a lot of things we should be on guard for, but that aren't falsifiable.
I suppose that's what the ~1850s quote "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" is about. That there is much in a healthy democracy that cannot be mandated or prohibited, but must constantly be observed, thought about, and judged publicly in an open exchange of ideas.
You’re very much correct that it’s not a falsifiable statement. It’s also hard to express one wherein you can make the claim that political discourse is unaffected by the status quo or parties interested in maintaining/furthering it.
Agreed wholeheartedly that eternal vigilance is the cost of freedom.
I’m something of an outsider to the US political system, albeit with significant experience, and I do pay a lot of attention to it out of personal interest. I can’t vote anywhere in the world due to where I choose to live. I observe and try to understand.
Propaganda carries a lot of negative connotations though that’s usually from those who disagree with what’s being disseminated. The US approach is powerful in my opinion because it convinces people that they want to do the dissemination instead of telling them they need to, if that makes sense. In Canada for instance, there’s very little self aggrandizing, to the extent that we’ve asked ourselves nationally why people don’t fly the flag. I’ve come to feel it’s from a place of confidence; that we know what we are and like it, and so need not proselytize.
The media has made many mistakes and continues to do so. But in the opposite direction.
In addition to the extraordinary number of people already indicted as part of the Special Counsel’s work, there is already ample documented public evidence of “russiagate.” Marcy Wheeler, the best reporter on this story, says “We know of at least five conversations at which various people entered into what I describe as a quid pro quo conspiracy.” 1
Russia and the Trump Campaign worked together to elect Trump as part of a quid pro quo conspiracy.
The media’s error was in anointing Mueller and his report as the savior and sword that would slay our villainous leader. The media has failed to convey reality to the public: in addition to crimes related to Russia, the president and his family have been shown to be awash in many, many kinds of crimes.
He cheated the non-profit system, lied about assets to secure loans, defrauded participants in his “university,” confessed on tape to a pattern of sexual assault corroborated by multiple credible first person accounts, committed tax fraud, helped his parents commit tax fraud, committed campaign finance violations, skirted White House anti-nepotism and ethics rules, publicly threatened witnesses, and has done many other things that are obviously disqualifying.
The failure of the press to convey the extent of Trump’s prolific criminal behavior before and after the 2016 election is this generation’s War in Iraq coverage.
All respect to Aaron's memory, but it hasn't aged that well. There's an implicit trust in books for authority, but those have been used on both sides of the Trump press war for political reasons. News is how you find out the candidate you might want to vote for is actually a hypocrite through undeniable audio/video evidence. By the time a book is written, printed, and distributed, most elections will have likely been decided already (except for Presidential election activities which seem to never end these days). You can't just bury your head in the sand on this but there are no good alternatives yet.
I still think I'm going to follow that prescription though: establishing trust has become even more difficult as fake accounts can establish a thin authority by pretending to trust each other. Information complexity and volume has only gone up and there is more information to digest, and establishing someone as a trustworthy source by yourself is time consuming.
The only way this changes is a) humans manage electronic volume/complexity more easily (enhanced brain and more available time) or b) by coincidence we happen to get news sources that are all unbiased and social media platforms with good moderation. (a) is far more likely IMHO.
It's going to be a hell of a ride if there's nothing more in Mueller's report. And yeah, I'm exhausted. I'm giving up my news habits either way it goes.
Taibbi is an interesting writer who is hard to pigeon hole politically. As far as I can tell, he mostly gets torqued off at people lying and does his best to call them out on it, be it the Pentagon, Wall Street, or his peers.
It's the same with Greenwald. I read him regularly. I'm pretty sure ideologically and politically he's a totally standard left leaning journalist, but he is willing to attack anyone if they're being inconsistent regardless of political affiliation, and he's been covering journalistic dishonesty for years now. There are good reasons the apparently rather libertarian and conservative Edward Snowden went to Greenwald with his story and not the many more mainstream alternatives.
Taibbi has mellowed, alas, but at least he can still do this:
"Imagine how tone-deaf you’d have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside without pants."
Just my opinion: I worked on Capitol Hill during the mid-2000's. As I got to know a lot of the older policy wonks, lobbyists, and former members, I found in ways both small and loud, they decried today's political atmosphere. Many trace it back to the Clinton's and Newt Gingrich.
The opinion, which I agree with, starts with the Clinton's response to the Republicans, and vice versa. It became personal, particularly after things got heated with Clinton's legal troubles.
Then comes Rep. Tom Delay, a.k.a. "The Hammer" who took it one step higher. When the Republicans took over, he worked to ram legislation through. Now everyone is looking at their cross-the-ailse counterparts and saying "I hate you. I want you to lose."
The business of governing broke down, and only exacerbated with Bush, Obama, Pelosi, etc. They are no longer working together, they are at war.
It notes the recent issue with Venezuela coverage at the end, although not noting that it took the New York Times more than two weeks to issue a correction while others outside the mainstream media pointed out the video evidence the day of the event.
"We could lose 90% of our journalists, those whose efforts are primarily focused toward sticking to their assigned scripts, and we would be both better-off and better-informed."
Everyone wants to have an opinion, and to publish said opinion, before they have any justification for an opinion. We’ve seen this over and over again, from both the left and the right, and yet it remains a blind-spot.
Recall the MAGA kids who brutalized the peaceful Native American. Recall Trump directly ordering Cohen to lie to congress. Recall any story where in the rush to gain clicks, everyone jumped to ill-informed conclusions.
The problem is not an idealogical press. That is capitalism at work. American history reveals muckracking as the norm rather than the exception.
The problem is the speed at which this now occurs. The true driver of ‘clicks’ is the astonishing efficiency of forming and disseminating opinions that stoke ideological mobs, mobs which are no longer limited by geography or synchronicity.
I’ve long believed that the only solution to a truth-based press is to replace opinion with primary sources. Now that there are networked cameras on every corner and in every pocket, this shouldn’t be far off. However, the advent of deep-fakes certainly throws a twist into this story.
Ultimately, those of us who value reason and logic should form our beliefs slowly, relying on primary sources as available. Although ideology and unreasonable conclusions dominate American politics, there is no reason for us to do the same. There is no urgency to form a conclusion here, unless your livelihood depends on publishing stories that will drive traffic.
Spending any mental energy on this, at the present moment, is a waste of time. The report will be out soon enough, and that will be the time to even entertain making judgments. More likely than not, however, the report will lead to more questions than answers. At least for those who value knowing the truth over making a buck.
Except that all the "mistakes" you mention, and I can think of a few others, are all against the same side of the political spectrum. If it was merely an apolitical click-baity reaction, it would be statistically impossible to end up with this level of political bias. I think it is good old fashion political propaganda, Pravda style.
Personally flagged this article. This is incredibly hyperbolic and ignores some very important facts. What surprised me was that the title here "Russiagate is a death-blow" may have been slightly less hyperbolic than the article's title.
If the purpose of journalism is to sort fact from fiction, and we clearly have a President that thrives on providing "fiction," seems to me journalism is doing alright here. Maybe a C+.
My wife and I are liberal, but I have been complaining to her for a half a year that it seemed like the news media was making a lot of opinionated or unsubstantiated statements as if they were 100% true (infinitely true!).
I think you know what I mean, when a news hour host makes statements in a tone of voice that implies there is no doubt about something.
For me, the main theme of this article was “None of this has been walked back.” - very few news outlets have admitted really sloppy reporting.
And, this all unfortunately plays into Trumps hands and increases his odds of winning in 2020.
I've been saying there's basically no difference now between many of the major left news outlets and straight up tabloids. Just more polishing. It's really sad. Rather than having rational discourse that could set up a strong 2020 dem pres bid, all anyone can talk about is how bad trump is. All exposure is good exposure.
This article seems rather premature. The Mueller report has not been released yet, and we know that the Justice Department prohibits indictment of a sitting president. We also know from court filings that President Trump personally directed his lawyer to violate campaign finance laws.
Trump cannot be indicted. We knew that from day 1. In addition, "collusion" is not even a real crime. The question is whether the Mueller report discovers sufficient evidence of crimes for Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings, the real mechanism for removing Trump from office.
However, I do agree with the author. The coverage of this issue has been relentless and actually did reach witch hunt proportions. The bias was there and everyone knew it.
The media is just entertainment now if you're in taking that crud you're literally being entertained that's not news. James traficant was right the American Media is under the control of foreign entities they should be the ones being investigated who owns these media outlets why do they seem to all have an agenda why are they so biased? Keep up the work because you just handed Trump another 4 years.
This is...utterly delusional, and totally disconnected from the evidence on record.
The President's campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, personal lawyer and National Security Advisor have either pled guilty or been convicted of felonies. Despite denying any contacts with Russia, we now know he'd been offered a deal to build the biggest tower in Europe, a payout worth $300 million, during the campaign. During the transition, his son-in-law met with the Russian ambassador and asked to use the Russian government's communication system to evade scrutiny by the American intelligence community. During sentencing, a federal judge told the President's former NSA that "arguably, you sold out your country".
On what earth does Taibbi live?
I grant that perhaps the media built up the Mueller report to a point that no actual product could satisfy. But what we know is so outrageous that it's quite strange to conclude that the people doing the irresponsible misleading are the news media. This is such a strange, bizarre, consequential, unprecedented story cloaked in classified details that it's pretty odd to expect a media to do a great job of contemporaneously reporting on it.
I used to have a lot of respect for Taibbi, and I suppose I still do, but this is deranged on his part.
I think you are purposefully ignoring facts, so that high level sentences match your narrative.
Flynn (security advisor for a couple of day) -- was setup.
There was no collusion with Russia to change 2016 election outcomes, that Flynn was accused of.
"... made materially false statements and
omissions during an interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") on January 24,
2017, in Washington, D.C. "
Roger Stone did not have his day in court, and the allegation were are not about directing Foreign powers to do anything.
Certainly hiring a foreign agent to write a document to be used trigger for FBI to initiate opposition party surveillances (like Clinton orchestrated) -- would have been a worthy avenue for Mueller to pursue, if he was about justice
The other indictments had nothing to do with 2016 election and happened for offenses outside 2016 election activities.
--- ---
In general, my definition of deep state is:
a shadow government (consisting of elected officials and hired bureaucrats), that performs illegal activities, but blames opposition exact same things they are guilty of.
Whether it is collusion with foreign powers to orchestrate a coup, or abuse of women, or anti-Semitism, or racism, launder money through charities, or get bribes for political favors.
The fact that left-wing media had zero interest in investigative reporting of the deep state, and the true collusions with foreign powers to orchestrate coup in this country --- in an indication of their actual profession (paid propagandists).
Lying to FBI is one thing Flynn pleaded guilty of, as part of his deal. But there were other charges, such as working for Turkey without registering as a foreign agent - the deal is pretty much the only reason why Flynn got out of it, by giving them enough evidence to convict his co-conspirators.
And while it's not Russia, it is still very much relevant to 2016 election, since Flynn's participation in the scheme happened while he was already the national security adviser for the Trump campaign.
Money laundering through charities you say? Blaming the opposition for the same things they are guilty of, you say? Well now, to me that is interesting.
> Flynn (security advisor for a couple of day) -- was setup
Uh...ok. Citations, please. That's quite an outlandish and unsupported claim.
> There was no collusion with Russia to change 2016 election outcomes, that Flynn was accused of.
Flynn was talking to the Russian ambassador during the transition, promising to lift sanctions that the then-President was imposing. He was convicted for lying to FBI agents about that.
Perhaps there's an innocent explanation for the incoming National Security Advisor lying to the FBI about secret conversations with the Russian ambassador to undermine the acting President during the transition. I'm curious what that might be.
> Roger Stone did not have his day in court, and the allegation were are not about directing Foreign powers to do anything.
Note how at no point did I mention Roger Stone.
> Roger Stone did not have his day in court, and the allegation were are not about directing Foreign powers to do anything.
Also not a thing I mentioned.
> The other indictments had nothing to do with 2016 election and happened for offenses outside 2016 election activities.
Al Capone was convicted on taxes. Let's read the report.
To your first point, it's easy to fall into a perjury trap. Noone in the campaign was indicted for conspiracy, they were indicted for lying.
Planning to build a hotel in a country is not a crime, even if it's Russia. It's smoke in the scheme of things, but if he's not guilty, then it's perfectly okay. Meeting with a Russian ambassador is not a crime, setting up a backchannel is not a crime. Many campaigns have done so in the past, again smoke, no fire.
All the things you list would be normal to do had there been no investigation or Russia meddling in the first place. If Trump would have known the Russia thing would have blown up how it did, I'm sure he would have strayed as far as way from Russia as possible.
Meeting with the Russian ambassador can indeed be a crime under the Logan Act. Private citizens don't get to make foreign policy, and none of Trump's team was in office at that point.
I suggest you read up on the Logan Act and the accusations that have been made under it previously. It's from 1799 and far too general. There's been many instances that technically fall under it. It's not just private citizens, it's unauthorized persons.
> his son-in-law met with the Russian ambassador and asked to use the Russian government's communication system to evade scrutiny by the American intelligence community
I'm just going to attack the weakest part of your post because it is egregious. I disagree with the rest to, but I think other comments do a good enough job of covering my points.
There is overwhelming evidence that Trump sees part of his job as being diplomat-in-chief, going to other countries and making/renegotiating deals. There is no way this attributed motivation of 'evad[ing] scrutiny by the American intelligence community' passes the Occam's Razor test of he wants a quiet place to talk before major public negotiations.
He wouldn't be the first or last president to have a quiet back-channel to a foreign country for negotiating purposes. It could be standard practice for all we know, it isn't a bad idea by any stretch.
> There is overwhelming evidence that Trump sees part of his job as being diplomat-in-chief, going to other countries and making/renegotiating deals.
Ok pal.
> There is no way this attributed motivation of 'evad[ing] scrutiny by the American intelligence community' passes the Occam's Razor test of he wants a quiet place to talk before major public negotiations.
Actual national security practitioners find this beyond laughable.
> He wouldn't be the first or last president to have a quiet back-channel to a foreign country for negotiating purposes. It could be standard practice for all we know, it isn't a bad idea by any stretch.
The practice of backchannels is not unusual. Everything else about this is extremely odd, to say the least.
There is no 'perhaps' about the media's outrage factory.
It distracts, causes unnecessary polarization and most importantly takes focus away from much bigger underlying issues - why voters turned to Trump, how to connect with them, the broken advertising/click/view maximizing model, campaign finance reform etc.
Taibbi is asking the important question of how is focus going to get back to the real stuff, when outrage and emotion and blame are the only tools being used?
Are there any factual claims in the article you take issue with or do you just disagree with the overall thesis that the media reported this issue irresponsibly?
"Despite denying any contacts with Russia, we now know he'd been offered a deal to build the biggest tower in Europe, a payout worth $300 million, during the campaign. "
This is a misrepresentation of the facts - it's exactly an example of the very problem mentioned in the article.
1) Donald Trump builds buildings, that's his business. Much like selling coffee Schultz's job. Trump has been trying for decades to build in Moscow, much like Starbucks, Tesla, IKEA, Volkswagen, Zara, Google etc. try to do business there.
Donald Trump has no business in Russia - but Howard Schultz has over 100 Starbucks locations in Russia. [1]
Howard Schultz has been materially 'doing business' with Russians for decades.
Given the mafia-like nature of some business activities in Russia (IKEA has to pay a kind of extortion to be in Moscow), how is it possible we are not screaming in outrage over Schultz's 'deep Russian business connections'?
Because making coffee is a normal part of his business, just like Trump builds buildings.
He's allowed to do that, it's normal, even if 'we hate him'.
2) There were no material plans to do anything in Russia, literally just some conversations. No contracts, no agreements. Just talk.
3) "a payout worth $300 million" - this is a fabrication. Not only was there not even the start of a deal - the '$300M' figure is a totally invented number.
4) 'During the campaign'? It's widely reported that Donald Trump did not want to be president, and that he was surprised he got the nomination, and everyone was surprised that he won. It's reasonable for a candidate to continue their business during the initial part of a campaign, especially if in all likelihood he would lose. As it became clear that Trump would win the GOP nomination, talks were abandoned.
Summary: Doing business in foreign country is normal. In some foreign countries, at a large scale, you will deal with the government. This is normal. Trump did not have any material activity in Russia, and it ended as it became clear Trump would be taking on a political nomination anyhow.
I could take your other comments and contextualize them in the same way: most of this has been utterly misrepresented.
Just because we loathe Trump, and I wouldn't put it past him for one second to 'kiss up to Putin' in hopes of a sweet future deal in Russia ... does not make him guilty of anything, certainly not to the degree the press has admonished him.
> Trump did not have any material activity in Russia, and it ended as it became clear Trump would be taking on a political nomination anyhow.
Michael Cohen testified that their claims of doing this was a lie, and they continued their business dealings after having claimed to have ceased as a candidate.
If they didn't feel they were doing anything improper, why did they lie to the American people and during subsequent testimony?
> If they didn't feel they were doing anything improper, why did they lie to the American people and during subsequent testimony?
One good reason would be that appearances are extremely important in nearly all circumstances, especially when running for office or while in office. People often lie for very dumb, shallow reasons, because of their fear of how something might look. Trump is all about image after all and always has been. His brand has always been his primary business.
Cohen's lie was simply to 'move back the date' of the end of the discussions from August, to mid Spring.
It was a campaign kind of lie, a lie of perceptions.
Cohen et. al. wanted to simply make it clear that the 'end of Russia discussions' was well before the nomination, and not near to it, purely for optics.
That's why it's an utterly stupid thing to do.
It was a stupid, needless like, just to avoid some possible bad news, that Cohen is going to go to jail for.
To me - this summarizes most of the Trump shenanigans: Trump and his crew of clowns do not have the sophistication to orchestrate anything with Russia!
Trump is 'just a guy'. He has a few family members, who are not professionals, help him out with stuff. This is not a 'operationalized, rigorous entity'. It's not like a bank, with policies, procedures, professional managers.
It's just a loud-mouth real-estate guy 'making deals' over the phone.
That's it.
I do not trust Trump one big, and it's good there is added scrutiny, and absolutely 100% the Russians will try to take advantage of Trump - in the same way they would try to take advantage of any president if they could.
But there's no attempt to undermine America, to do secret deals with Russian intelligence, no exchanging of secret information to alter the campaign. None of this.
Trump I think is a bad statesmen, who as a little to close to Russia for comfort, but there's no real smoking gun here, just a little bit of 'Cheech and Chong'.
> Cohen et. al. wanted to simply make it clear that the 'end of Russia discussions' was well before the nomination, and not near to it, purely for optics.
"Purely for optics."
Why would the optics look bad?
Because what they did was a way in which corruption often happens, eg a foreign government rewarding someone for losing an election but causing a political disturbance, and they lied about it because they knew it would look bad during an investigation. We can see the Chinese rewarding the Trumps with various favors, eg trademarks, for an example of how this kind of corruption actually happens, and why people would have been suspicious of the Trump dealings.
You're correct: each misdeed of the Trump organization could be explained by bumbling -- a coin-flip between incompetence and malice.
Unfortunately, there's a large number of such questionable practices, and the intersection of a high number of overlapping events is actually a large degree of certainty.
The simplest explanation is the preferred:
Trump is a career criminal, who committed multiple kinds of crimes during the presidential election, ranging from campaign finance violations to colluding with Russian intelligence operatives. He did this not because he's some kind of deep-sleeper agent from Russia, or whatever media narrative has formed, but rather because he's an out-of-touch sociopath who has been sheltered by wealth and legitimately doesn't understand why breaking national security law to enrich himself is wrong. But he did it, along with the other crimes, and knowingly orchestrated the whole series of crimes. As he's been doing for years, through the Trump Foundation, Trump University, his frequent defrauding of contractors, etc.
So yes, he "colluded", but out of stupidity and incompetence, not thoughtful malice.
None of the people were convicted on charges related to Russian collusion. Many people convicted/plead guilty to process crimes, for example, lying to the FBI.
I won't accuse of you of trying to mislead people, but the judge apologized for making the treason claim against Flynn:
That's because treason is an incredibly high bar to meet.
Nevertheless, we now know that Flynn was acting as a propaganda agent of Turkey - by his own testimony, used to convict his co-conspirators - without registering as such. Do you consider this a "process crime"?
Of course not, but it's not what he was charged with and it has nothing to do with the Russiagate narrative. Presumably that's why he wasn't charged with that.
> Many people convicted/plead guilty to process crimes, for example, lying to the FBI.
Yes, but that was lying in denying collusion in both the case of Pappadopolous (as a Trump campaign official and with support of higher ups, with Russia) and Stone (as a go-between for the Trump campaign, with WikiLeaks—described by the Trump campaign as a “hostile non-state intelligence service”—where WikiLeaks was, based on information in other indictments, either cooperating with or duped by a Russian intelligence operation.)
Yeah, he walked back the "treason" comment that I didn't mention, and said nothing to retract the "sold your country out" comment, because the two are in fact distinct claims.
"Collusion" isn't an actual crime, so of course nobody was convicted for it. But convicting people for illegal activity proximate to the collusion is exactly what happened. Al Capone was convicted for tax fraud, not being a gangster, because that was what they could prove in court.
Disclosure: I deeply loathe Trump, and I think he is unfit for office; very glad to see Mueller investigation initiated, because there was a lot of smoke and it needed to happen.
But the author is very correct.
A 'free press' is the 5th estate - an important part of civil society.
... but it only works if they have integrity.
Over the last two years it has become clear how narrow and biased they have become in their contempt for Trump and of course in search of 'more clicks'.
This is a deep wound for America that I do not think we can blame on Trump himself, however much some of us may loathe him.
Trump is a Loki who exposed a serious degradation in another part of the system and it has to remedied.
Sadly, I do not think they will admit their failures, and they will not reform, and as a result, we're going to be having wars over 'fake news' for a long time.
Post-Edit: I don't want this to take away from critiquing Trump for some of the awful things that he's said, or some of his questionable policies - my only point is 'the press broke' on this, and it's a legitimate concern. If the press lacks integrity, we lose the ability to hold people to account.
I concur. I dislike Trump's comments about Mexican immigrants as rapists, his recent annexation of Syria's Golan Heights and so on and so forth. My comment history will attest to this.
People on the left who are not part of the machine of the Democratic Party - Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, many lesser known people in that orbit, have said all along that this whole Trump/Russia thing has been overblown.
The Democrats lost the 2016 election. Trump railed against NAFTA and TPP and campaigned around working class people in the Midwest and said the US was in too many wars abroad and steel workers needed help. Hillary took money from Wall Street, initially supported TPP, didn't visit the Midwest despite Michael Moore's entreaties - he was saying at the time which states she could lose, all of which she did.
Nader said, paraphrasing - "The Democrats had unappealing policies in 2000 and lost, and in 2016 and lost. They could be self-critical and see US workers did not support their policies, and change them to be more appealing to US workers. Or they could keep taking corporate PAC money and find a scapegoat. They chose that option. The scapegoat was me (Nader) in 2000. In 2016 it was Putin."
In a move to try to be less appealing to voters, the DCCC just passed a number of policies trying to prevent local Democratic parties from running primaries against incumbents. They want control to be held by incumbents and corporate PACs and party hacks - any body other than the local Democratic voters who do all the leg work and voting.
I'm really curious if you really think he meant all Mexican immigrants are rapists? Have you read the stories what happens to those people who cross the border. The coyotes they pay, as well as people traveling with them, frequently rape them. There's many instances reported of this, even more going unreported due to the nature of the situation.
It's crazy in this #MeToo era that this issue isn't more in the spotlight.
1 in 3 women are raped when they make their way to the border.
Even Politifact had to agree, though they gave Trump a half-true because they used a sample instead of knowing every person who was raped and taking it "out of context", whatever that means lol.
Trump said, "One in three women is sexually assaulted on the dangerous journey north."
A 2017 report from Doctors Without Borders said 31.4 percent of women had been sexually abused during their transit through Mexico. That's based on a 2015 survey of more than 400 migrants interviewed in facilities where migrants seek assistance. (The majority of migrants interviewed were men.)
Doctors Without Borders said its report provided a snapshot in time of the perils migrants face, but said it wasn’t necessarily representative of the entire migrant population traveling through Mexico.
Trump’s statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. We rate it Half True.
Half the reason Trump got elected was that the media just couldn't shut up about him.
They're his best friends.
If anything, all this media coverage shows is that the US mainstream media is now spectacularly ineffective and irrelevant.
They might have brought down Nixon, but they can't bring down Trump.
Everybody on all sides already has their minds made up, and they only read the news for entertainment, to confirm their biases, and to find talking points.
It's 'acccess hollywood', and they were extensively covered in the last 4 weeks before the 2016 election. Maybe it would have had a bigger impact if it dropped earlier. One wonders if it was intentionally held back to be a last minute kill-shot, or if it was truly just discovered in October 2016:
> An NBC source said that an Access Hollywood producer remembered the conversation on Monday, October 3, and located it in the show's archives.[4][11] The celebrity news website TMZ reports a different chronology: when senior executives at NBC learned about the video, they thought it was too early in the presidential campaign season to release it with maximum effect, and (according to TMZ) those executives publicly said they learned of the video long after they actually learned about it.[12][13]
What were you watching, they were completely silent on the emails, even though a lot of them were really salacious.
They reiterated they were illegally obtained and wouldn't show them, or press anyone who wouldn't comment on them, but then they displayed leaks during the Trump Administration almost everyday...
The Hollywood access tape was covered for weeks, and it's not exactly political. We've all said things in private that would make us look bad if they were recorded and displayed to the world. He apologized for it.
I'm curious, do you think without your disclosure, people would have read your post differently?
Occasionally (both online and in real life) I feel that whatever I say tends to be interpreted in the binary: "are you with us or against us". This makes it hard to have a thoughtful discussion. Clarifying that I'm loyal to whatever cause the audience supports helps to some degree.
Politics is so heavily polarized that 'I assume they will assume'.
I would hope on a forum such as HN people wouldn't make assumptions ... but I think we all have an assumptive instinct on some level.
Intersectional issues (race/gender/class), some things about China, obviously religion - they're all so loaded it's hard to have a discussion.
Finally, even though I have very nuanced views of Trump, and don't think he's 'all bad' - and my own politics are utterly not on the American spectrum ... I just don't want to be associated with him frankly.
> Politics is so heavily polarized that 'I assume they will assume'. [...] Intersectional issues (race/gender/class), some things about China, obviously religion - they're all so loaded it's hard to have a discussion
Agreed...
That said, there are people who are happy to have an open discussion without judging everything on the basis of "friend" / "enemy". I wonder if there's a forum, online or offline, where ideas are shared and discussed in good faith.
Various satellite forums of slatestarcodex have grown and are around, and only the original Culture War thread is gone. That whole group seems to be politically mixed and at least partially vaccinated against the dangers of framing political disagreements in terms of tribes and dehumanising the outgroup/opponent.
As long as for-profit media has access to the broadcast spectrum in a way that non-profit, independent media does not, our 5th estate will be subject to perverse incentives that favor "click-based" content.
We made a choice, in this country, to give away our spectrum to the highest bidder, no questions asked. We used to restrict programs that called themselves "news" to have to present a balanced, reality-grounded perspective, but by the early 90s fear of alternatives like the internet provided the fodder to dismantle that regulation.
It wasn't necessarily bad foresight either. These days, influencers on YouTube regularly get the same viewership that cable news does. Only very recently[1] have we begun to grapple with the social decay and radicalization that results when their engagement-optimization algorithm meets vulnerable folks. Try searching for historical, economic or political content and see how quickly Related Videos draws you down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole.
But also this sort of fishing expedition can be triggered by both sides and is extremely unhelpful for democracy. For the moment it is a "winner gets investigated", just because of the opposition to Trump within the FBI and parts of the conservative party. But what's next? Looser gets investigated to ensure he cannot run again?
What strikes me is that this trend is global (International) and not local (US). Trump (and many other public figures in other countries) are the products of a situation and not the causes.
I disagree. The Trump administration has done everything from secretly meet in Trump tower with Russian officials and lie about it to firing the head of the FBI because of the Russian investigation.
In my mind, these two acts alone have warranted the last two years of coverage and investigation.
Simply imagine a world where these things were ignored. How untrustworthy would the press seem then?
Don’t most campaigns, senators, etc., meet with foreign diplomats? Kerry went and met with foreign leaders despite not being part of the government. Carter does the same albeit with tacit or explicit approval.
Also after Comey’s restart of the email investigation many Dems wanted him fired.
Do most candidates have clandestine meetings with diplomats, lie about their existence, then once discovered lie about the matters discussed? No, it's not very common. The closest would probably be Nixon extending the Vietnam war.
>Also after Comey’s restart of the email investigation many Dems wanted him fired.
> Practically promising collusion is another thing entirely.
The second (which is also a conviction by way of a guilty plea) and the final indictments made public were for collusion. Or, rather, for lying about collusion, but the collusion itself is part of the factual background of the indictments and a central and necessary one in each case.
If there is a media failure, it's in continuously reporting the Presidents claim that no collusion was indicated and either letting it stand or endorsing it when that is factually incorrect.
I can never seem to follow any of the assertions that the media's negative coverage of Trump is, on par, biased away from reality, underserved, or contributing unnecessarily to the American rift in comparison to the politically opposite media's treatment of Trump. There are certainly biased outlets that are hurting us, but they don't seem to have changed with the arrival of Trump, relative to his own extremity. In fact, when you look at what's really there to critique about Trump, the media's reaction, taken as a whole, seems almost restrained.
It is a pity you have to put the big disclosure at the top of your comment. But our media have made things very binary black and white.
Not buying into the 'red scare' means that in the eyes of some you must be a Trump supporter.
This is a failure of critical thinking and far too many people fall into this trap, thereby perpetuating things like 'RussiaGate' when it no longer makes sense to do so.
The suspicions won't die down amongst those that have been sat in front of their televisions feeding their imaginations with 'RussiaGate'. To them 'it happened but it could not be proven'. Their suspicions are still confirmed.
There is also a failure to take people at their word when it could be prudent to do so in this world of politics and lying. People have motivation for lying and people have motivation for being honest.
The leadership in Russia - Putin, Lavrov and others - have stated why it is that they have not secretly foisted Trump on the American people. But those that don't listen don't want to take them for their word on that.
Fundamentally the Kremlin see other nations as having national interests and, in the case of America, they have no need to care about who sits in the Oval Office as the national interests will be the same. The Pentagon isn't going to go away, the need for oil isn't going to go away, the need for the world to be using the dollar as the world currency isn't going to go away. American capitalism is always going to be what it is. American national interests are a constant as far as Russia is concerned. They cannot expect some external change, they have to be self-reliant and foster their own good relationships with traditional partners.
The Russian leadership have also stated why it is not in their interest to put 'their man' in the Oval Office. It is not due to any standards of conduct it is simpler than that. Thinking two moves ahead, what legitimacy would a puppet President hold, how long would he/she last and how would Russia be treated should the American people find out?
The Kremlin have thought this out. However, explaining to someone that the Russians are not motivated to influence the American elections also falls under the 'instant disclaimer'.
'So you must be a Putin fan?' is the expectation for proffering this explainer. But it is not about that, it is about understanding motivation and the Russian leadership are not motivated to influence American elections in some super-sneaky way.
There is a failure by the press that have pursued RussiaGate to empathise and understand others, whether they be the people that voted for Trump, the Russians, the Democrat machine or even themselves. It is because of this that you are correct, the press will not reform. It is not in their culture and they don't have the mindset to do so.
I appreciate the thought you put into this, but the naivete is his a bit off putting.
Diplomacy is a game of liars probing liars. Everyone at the table will tell you exactly what they know you can prove, and no one tells anyone everything they can prove since that would give away valuable information with regards to their own intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities. It's a game in which every comment spoken by a Diplomat, Ambassador, or Head of State is scrutinized and cross-checked against every participating country's models.
Outright deception is one of many tools that is employed, and even if Russia truly didn't have anything to gain from Trump ending up in the White House, they did get a chance to dry-run a potential doctrine against one of their biggest international rivals.
The press was right to be suspicious, and the ethical shortfalls of the President and his administration only amplified the situation in terms of the optics required.
Make no mistake. Intrigue happens. It's why diplomats love the phrase "Trust, but verify."
That's 496 citations and a warning "This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably".
In other words, there's overwhelming evidence that Russia interfered. Like, not even a question. Suggesting it's a made-up media frenzy is just... alternate universe.
The article is not the source of truth. The article is simply a collection of facts. A very large number of externally sourced and undisputed facts. Facts like "On December 29, 2016, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released an unclassified report[91] that gave new technical details regarding methods used by Russian intelligence services for affecting the U.S. election, government, political organizations and private sector.", to pick one virtually at random.
I'm not pointing to the length of the article or the number of citations as direct support - I'm simply showing how overwhelmingly the burden of proof is on the person claiming it's all made up. To suggest that there was no Russian election interference of any sort is on par with moon landing denial. Literally nobody seriously asserts that - not even Trump! (Not anymore, anyway). That bears repeating, if you think Russians didn't interfere with the 2016 presidential election, you have a weaker grasp of reality than Donald Trump. It's frightening post-truth wingnuttery.
It's highly disputed. We just don't hear about that outside alternative sources. Taibbi alludes to this in the OP:
I didn’t really address the case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for now. I was told early on that this piece of the story seemed “solid,” but even that assertion has remained un-bolstered since then, still based on an “assessment” by the intelligence services that always had issues, including the use of things like RT’s “anti-American” coverage of fracking as part of its case. The government didn’t even examine the DNC’s server, the kind of detail that used to make reporters nervous.
Words like "wingnuttery" and "moon landing" weaken your case. If you get enough publications to print something, you can make a terrifically long list of citations, but what does that prove? Quality matters, not quantity, and the quality of journalism devoted to this case has been astonishingly low, as Taibbi shows. As he says:
We won’t know how much of any of this to take seriously until the press gets out of bed with the security services and looks at this whole series of events all over again with fresh eyes, as journalists, not political actors.
I said what I needed to say with my original comment, however there is an important lesson here.
I can find you 496 citations that the Loch Ness Monster ate Freddie Starr's hamster. If this mattered as a matter of national security, would you prefer to simply ask Freddie Starr if someone is having a laugh?
There are precisely zero citations on that page to any Russian sources. There should be. With the original Russian and English translation. With those sources being official.
Why is this?
When I was at school my history teacher told me that we always had to check sources.
Am I to believe that it is beyond the wit of the journalist to link to words uttered by the Kremlin, posted onto an official Kremlin blog? So we can read the original denials verbatim and in context?
I checked the citations and I am only seeing articles by the media that have been advancing the RussiaGate agenda. Quality is not the same thing as quantity, 496 articles written by Western pundits does not magically make something true.
Not all of the people in those citations are Mother Theresa types. Luke Harding from the Guardian gets a mention in those citations but some Guardian readers know what Luke Harding's game really is. It has something to do with propaganda.
Any story can be made into something it isn't by being economical with the truth. Then we start believing and regurgitating our own falsehoods.
There were a few quips on there about what Putin and Lavrov had to say. Are these cherry picked to support a given narrative? Without links to the source words and the context, who can say?
We need to listen and understand our global neighbours, not live in a world where we only listen to the journalists that Tabibbi is lampooning.
When you can only view the world in terms of who to hold responsible and who to Blame, you get hit in two ways. The chances of producing a reaction, defensiveness etc increase and the chances of connecting and producing healthier outcomes decrease.
Blame takes focus away from where attention needs to be. Empathy does the opposite.
I am not trying to cause a flamewar here. Or to go off down on any rabbit holes.
Even the most odious of people can be taken at their word about some things. The heroin addict in the village might not be responsible for every burglary in the village even if they are responsible for 95% of them.
In England we have a tradition that people are innocent until proven guilty. RussiaGate and whatever happened in your linked story very much falls under that category.
My neighbor tells me they never let their dog defecate in my yard.
Guess what? With not even that much effort I can find out that their dog is outside and unattended most of the day. (Means/Opportunity)
I can infer they don't like to leash the dog, due to the frequency the dog can be found roaming the neighborhood. (Motive)
I've seem the neighbors unattended dog defecate in other neighbors yards. (Precedent)
I've even had to walk it home a couple of times as well. (more precedent)
I COULD go through the trouble of setting up a bunch of cameras to catch it red pawed as it were, however, that's kind of a moot point, because I know the neighbor has the means, motive, opportunity, and a history of prior behavior.
This is not only a preponderance of evidence, but in the absence of someone else's dog traipsing through my property, this could even be legally considered beyond a reasonable doubt.
After reading your various replies, I just want to leave you with a word of caution: not everyone is worth trusting, even in the absence of direct proof. Especially if you can collect a preponderance of evidence that suggests that an action isn't outside their expected behavioral envelope.
The biggest problem we face isn't a problem of unreliable sources, but a crisis of ease of manufacture of the blatantly untrue combined with an asymmetrical distribution of the necessary skills/tools to refute.
We're still well equipped to deal with this type of situation, but it requires an elevated level of skepticism until we solve the problem of information provenance.
If there is one thing we have, going for us, however, it is a large store of information recorded from times before misinformation was so trivially distributed and manufactured to work from, and the wherewithal to reason from it. Trust, I think, is going to develop into a completely different beast in the 21st century from what it was in the 20th.
> Over the last two years it has become clear how narrow and biased they have become in their contempt for Trump and of course in search of 'more clicks'.
> This is a deep wound for America that I do not think we can blame on Trump himself, however much some of us may loathe him.
> Trump is a Loki who exposed a serious degradation in another part of the system and it has to remedied.
Who are you? What is happening? This is totally deranged. "Trump is a Loki"!?
While I respect your dislike of the guy, I think that the fact that you consider his words so bad compared to what other recent leaders have said or done is a direct example of this propaganda machine. I mean what's the word he's said? Hillary said ~1/4 of Americans are deplorable, and also made the sexist claim that women are the primary victims of war. Bush put us into a nearly 20 year war entrapment. Clinton had unsavory sexual relations with an underlying.
Trump saying some bad things isn't enough for me. Unless you're also dissatisfied with the character of most presidents, I think your stance is the result of the propaganda machine.
So Viacom purchasing ad space on a video billboard in Times Square to push the 10 year old drag queen kid named Desmond, fits your version(definition) of conservative?
"Conservative" here meaning "content permissible within the narrow window of generally accepted social standards" and not "conservative" as in "the most extreme position expressed by religious firebrands".
In any case, what's wrong with ten year old drag queens? That sounds no worse than any typical beauty pageant and probably a lot more fun.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all. "
> Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting Mueller’s final report might leave audiences “disappointed,” as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.
That sums it up for me. People were desperate to believe their President was a criminal.
Agree; I am think Trump is a deeply flawed person. But he was prosecuted because by standing up to China, he was a threat to the profit margins of the mega-corporations like Disney (cheap labors to make their merchandises) - who owns ABC, ESPN, and now Fox. And a threat to the equity returns of wall street, who wants corporations to increase their short-term profits by outsourcing even more jobs to China, humanitarian rights and environmental rights be damned.
Take a look at this thread. Note all of the downvoted comments (many without replies), that critique the article, weigh-in negatively against Trump, or otherwise seem supportive of the idea that there is a Russia problem.
Seems we have a bit of a troll/bot/propaganda problem right here on HN.
You've broken more than one of the site guidelines in this thread, particularly the ones that ask you not to insinuate astroturfing and not to go further into flamewar. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and abstain from doing these things here, hard though that can be.
The internet reflex where people assume that only trolls, bots, or shills can explain something they dislike online, is off topic here. It has also become so self-parodically common that one can only hope it will jump the shark soon.
Sure. Will have a look at the guidelines and appreciate the pointer, as well as the job you have to do.
>The internet reflex where people assume that only trolls, bots, or shills can explain something they dislike online, is off topic here. It has also become so self-parodically common that one can only hope it will jump the shark soon.
But, I don't appreciate the additional editorializing and don't believe your attempt to ridicule me here stands up to your own guidelines. Add to that the fact that you are a moderator, and the standard to which you hold yourself should be even higher.
And, that speaks only to the style you chose here. On the substance, of course we know that my pointing to what I noted as an observable pattern vs merely "something I dislike online" are two entirely different matters. We also know that such things as trolls and shills continue to exist, even if some too readily make the claim that they are present. As for me, you will very rarely find those claims in my history here and, where I have applied it, you might even be surprised at the patterns were you to look more closely. Or not. I could certainly be wrong.
But, as it is, you've restated my position so as to trivialize it, then ridiculed it. In so doing, you've moved it from "hey, please don't do that here, as it's a violation" to "here's my opinion of your comment".
If you want to be part of the discussion to make some additional point about what you think of people who, say, display an "internet reflex" you disdain, then perhaps use a throwaway. But, as it is, I would have difficulty seeing how your comment doesn't "further a flamewar", apart from your position as a moderator precluding members from engaging with you in such.
I have spent many hours looking at this. From the data I've seen, there's zero evidence to back up the accusations of political astroturfing, shilling, and spying that users make against each other on HN, and plenty of evidence against it [1]. The only actual observable pattern is users posting comments that disagree with one another. Anything beyond that is an interpretation. I have not seen any data to support those interpretations [2].
When it comes to users accusing each other of astroturfing, shilling, spying, and so on, the only conclusion that fits the data is that people are imagining things. In reality, the community is simply divided and users have opposing views. Unfortunately, when my view is sufficiently obnoxious to your side or vice versa, the assumption of good faith evaporates and people reach for more sinister explanations. We can speculate about why, but it's clear that users are projecting those sinister explanations onto fellow users. The more divisive the topic, the more opposed people's views become and the more harshly they express them, leading to more projection, accusation, and division. A vicious loop.
This is especially toxic to HN because HN is a single community where everybody sees the same threads. Here you are more likely to run into views that you strongly dislike than you are on sites where communities partition into like-minded factions. Even when discussions on HN are more thoughtful than these other places, the fact that you're part of one big group—everybody, instead of mostly your own tribe—makes them feel less so.
When people post aggressive remarks to HN, they're not just bonding with their own tribe, they're simultaneously broadcasting to the other side, who take the harshness like a punch. All sides do this, so all sides feel punched. This is painful and one can't help but react internally. I believe that the accusatory reactions are self-protective. If you're a spy or a shill, that explains whatever you say and I needn't give it any credence. Unfortunately, these defensive reactions are also offensive ones, so we get an escalatory cycle. If HN is to avoid being ripped apart, we need a rule against such accusations. Therefore we do have such a rule.
1. There are other contexts on HN where we do find manipulation: usually startups or projects trying to promote themselves, but occasionally also more sophisticated astroturfing that appears to involve larger companies.
It's because you're literally pulling a conclusion out of thin air to claim there's something of a trump related "Russia problem". It's not a bot conspiracy - that's lazy propaganda that's been spoon fed to people who dislike trump. There are just a lot of people on HN who see through it, and it's telling that rather than discuss the possibility that trump is clean, you just call them trolls and bots.
>There are just a lot of people on HN who see through it
I have seen zero reputable people on HN expressing anything that supports this assertion.
>it's telling that rather than discuss the possibility that trump is clean, you just call them trolls and bots.
Discuss with whom? The "people" who just downvote anything perceived to be anti-Trump or anti-Russia? That's the point. This isn't the first time that pattern has emerged on HN. Obviously, an online community with HN's makeup is a prized target.
Or are you one of those who doesn't believe there have been any bots or trolls or other propaganda aimed at Americans? U.S. intelligence just made it up? Facebook and Twitter just made it up? It's all the Deep State is it? That, and liberal bias in social media?
Trump colluded out in the open and continues to do so. A foreign adversary plotted to help him and a byzantine maze of people around him and his campaign have been indicted, pled guilty, lied about contacts with Russia, etc. But, it's all a coincidence and has nothing to do with Trump, the ignorant beneficiary?
Meanwhile, Trump also oddly and consistently checks off the Russian dictator's bucket list, denigrating his own country (intel community, McCain, etc.) whenever it speaks ill of that dictator. In order to have people overlook all of this, he invents a conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Republicans and Democrats within the government is plotting against him. And, that neatly explains everything that is not pro-Trump.
Talk about lazy propaganda.
It'a absurd. But, in order to defend him as "clean", absurdity and inane conspiracy theories are required, right down to the complete denial of reality.
There can be Russian bots and they not be connected to trump. The fact that you don't understand that is exactly what I'm referring to.
He's clean. There's literally no evidence he's not. Muellers report is done and after the Intel agencies working for nearly 3 years - they got nothing.
It's probably hard for you to see, but you're literally doing the thing you're frantically and emphatically complaining is happening on the right.
>People who disagree with you aren't always trolls or bots
>There are people out there with differing views
Strawmen.
>And not like it justifies the Russians, but MediaMatters bots Reddit for the DNC
Citation? What's your point, anyway? This is just what-aboutism that has nothing to do with the question at-hand. Obviously.
>I don't think HackerNews is a big enough target for anyone tbh
The HN community is sizeable and traffic from articles posted on HN routinely knocks sites offline. Additionally, some of the sharpest technical minds online hang out here. Of course it's a rich target.
Your comment is all deflection and strawmen. Not much unlike the standard propaganda of the day.
Lol, you just yelled strawmen over and over and called my comment propaganda without furthering your point at all.
You're the one who speculated there are bots here. Just because there are comments without replies and downvotes. Unless you're psychic or you know Putin you don't have any proof of that, so it's wild speculation. My point was those are more than likely real people with differing views. That's way more likely than some bot being farmed on a random topic on HN.
It is bizarre when an opinion piece on the death of the American news media, makes the same mistakes as the news media i.e. blending facts and opinion as one and treating editorials as news. For E.g.
“There will be people protesting: the Mueller report doesn’t prove anything! What about the 37 indictments? The convictions? The Trump tower revelations? The lies! The meeting with Don, Jr.? The financial matters! There’s an ongoing grand jury investigation, and possible sealed indictments, and the House will still investigate, and…
Stop. Just stop. Any journalist who goes there is making it worse.”
This is actually factually wrong. It is persuasive but wrong because while Mueller isn’t pursuing more prosecutions, he has referred people on for more prosecutions and investigations.
Also no one is actually saying that the mueller report doesn’t prove anything, because no one has read it yet. And that position is a rhetorical flourish that makes no sense given that all of the indictments, prosecutorial referrals etc were done by Mueller.
The next few sentences aren’t true either;
“The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star. That’s a hell of a long way from what this business was supposedly about at the beginning, and shame on any reporter who tries to pretend this isn’t so.“
First of all, he plead guilty to charges by the SDNY. AFAICT, The WSJ broke the story, Common Cause then filed a lawsuit followed by Stormy Daniels, and then the FBI raid happened. So this claim is actually inaccurate.
He has a point to make and he is willing to throw facts into the blender to make it. He is also a part of what’s wrong with the media and seems to be unable to recognize that.
Edit: given the downvoting here are some citations;
Mueller's report could still recommend or build a case for impeachment, even if he does not formally charge Trump, since it's legally questionable whether a sitting President could be indicted for a crime while in office.
>For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in Washington hyped every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in. Now, even Nancy Pelosi has said impeachment is out, unless something “so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan” against Trump is uncovered it would be worth their political trouble to prosecut
Genuinely confused - is it not worse than Watergate? At least Watergate was done by Americans.
The Mueller investigation confirmed the source of the hacks and the propanda effort in nauseating detail that was denied and dismissed during the campaign.
Multiple senior members of a Presidential campaign have either pled guilty or been convicted of serious felonies, and you think the ones to blame are the FBI?
I mean I think the FBI has a lot to answer for, here and on plenty of other issues, but...
I don't know how to tell you this, because you won't believe it, but if you're sincere and not a troll then you have a very unhealthy media diet. Your take here is very disconnected from reality.
Would you please not cross into incivility and personal swipes, regardless of how wrong someone else is or how strongly you feel? Your comments have been increasingly breaking the site guidelines in this thread.
I know this is an issue on which views are both polarized and fixed. But that's why the guidelines say that comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
"even Nancy Pelosi has said impeachment is out, unless something "so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan" against Trump is uncovered it would be worth their political trouble to prosecute."
You know why impeachment is out? Because Republicans control the Senate, and because there are plenty of conservative Democrats too, so impeachment doesn't stand a chance.
If anti-Trump politicians controlled Congress, Trump would have been booted out long ago.
The only reason Trump is still in office is because plenty of Congressmen still support Trump, and many of them don't care what the evidence says.
He's nominated the judges they want. He's given gigantic tax cuts to the wealthy. He's pushing hard against immigration and pissing off liberals. That's clearly more than enough to get the support of most conservatives. If he had to cheat or lie or get Russian help to get in to office, that doesn't matter to his supporters because all they care about is that their agenda gets pushed.
His supporters also know if they admit he's committed impeachable offenses, they'll be politically stained along with him, and it'll be a gift to the anti-Trump camp. So they'll never admit it.
Just the things that are public about Trump should be disqualifying for an American President.
* failure to disclose tax returns
* failure to divest of his business interests
* blatant nepotism ( including issuing his son-in-law a security clearance against the advice of professional sta
ff )
* Owning a private club (Mar-a-lago) to which he sells memberships and visits at taxpayer expense where his customers have exclusive access to the President and his cabinet.
Add in his business interests in Russia and what looks an awful lot like a quid pro quo trade of favorable treatment for policy changes desired by the Russian leadership...
And you're gonna declare it's all just fine because there is no smoking gun evidence of campaign pay to play?
I really hope you all are more attentive to your own businesses; this is basically the political equivalent of your CFO suddenly developing a sports car and supermodel habit; maybe everything is fine, but you should probably get an outside audit.
I think you are making his point. Put all those things together, plus his loony policies, you have a better case against him - in 2020 (or perhaps sooner). This overblown Russian nonsense, which is a lot of smoke for so small a fire, distracts from the other things.
I've been saying for quite some time that the media has been making it quite certain this embarassment of a president will be reelected when Mueller comes up empty.
The religious voters will come out in droves to vote for him based on guilt alone for society having dragged his now irrefutably innocent name through the muck all these years. The poor man!
This headline could have been taken directly from Sputnik News or RT. It suggests that not only is America's democratically critical Fifth Estate now entirely disreputable, but it has essentially fallen at the hands of Russia.
The content of the article is pure propaganda that deliberately conflates news and opinion and conflates sources and information with reporting on sources and information.
This article is confused. Its assertion is that the press's reputation has been destroyed due to its reporting on Russiagate, yet it goes on to cite U.S. intelligence officials, politicos like HRC, and others who suggested that Russiagate is a thing.
Now, which is it? If the press is essentially reporting what prominent people--presumed to have inside information--are saying, then is it the press whose reputation has been destroyed?
I'll be the first to say that their breathless reporting and the 24-hour news cycle are exhausting, as is their click-baity ratings chase. But, with regard to reporting the substance, what else are they supposed to do when many believe POTUS is breaking laws in plain sight, and so-called experts are corroborating that crimes are being committed?
Why read so much into the lack of indictments when Mueller's team have agreed to the standard that they cannot indict a sitting president? [1] Let's just wait and see -- I'm fed of speculation at this point.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/muellers-team-told-t...
So even though the President can't be indicted, the indication that no other indictments means that collusion is not a part of the report.
There may be other offenses that Trump have committed, but that is even MORE speculation.
What is a crime is, for example, conspiracy to hack DNC computers - for which several people, mostly Russians, were already indicted. Another example would be conspiracy to "impair, obstruct, or defeat the lawful function of any department of government", which is what the Internet Research Agency was indicted for.
Let it play out and see what happens. Regardless, I suspect Congress will inevitably get the truth out and eventually it will come out to the public. Like most things in a democracy, they're often slow and sometimes messy. This is a feature, not a bug!
1. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/dozens-sealed-criminal-indic...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/special-counsel-mueller-has-...
A sitting president cannot be arrested by his administration, by law.
The Pappadopolous indictment and conviction-by-guilty-plea was for (lying about) Trump-campaign initiated attempted collusion, in which Pappadopolous acted with the knowledge and approval of higher officials in the Trump campaign.
The Stone indictment is for (lying about) collusion with WikiLeaks on the release of information that, per other indictments, was being released as part of a Russian propaganda operation.
So, no, it's entirely false to say “no existing indictment has been due to collusion”.
> There may be other offenses that Trump have committed, but that is even MORE speculation.
That's not really speculation, either; it's not as if the identity of the unindicted coconspirator Individual 1 in the Cohen indictment out of SDNY is a mystery.
The two week prison sentence Pappadopolous received gave little weight to his complicity, and seemed to me to be more a slap on the wrist for his not cooperating with the FBI.
This is incorrect.
"Collusion" isn't a specific crime, but rather, a euphemism for a family of crimes.
We've seen Trump associates charged with and convicted of those crimes, relating to improper communications, obstructing an investigation into foreign influence, lying to the government during an investigation, etc.
We've seen the Russians charged with the related crimes, such as hacking the DNC. We've seen Mueller trace out the connection between GRU and the campaign convicts, via Wikileaks. We've seen multiple Trump associates who lied under oath about their or Trump's financial dealings with Russia. Or in the case of Stone, about many many things.
We've seen additional evidence that Trump is the center of a vast criminal syndicate with ties to Russia, given the multiple branching investigations across jurisdictions, the related campaign finance crimes, and the testimony of his decade-long "fixer".
This is what is looks like when a criminal organization is prosecuted -- and the reason that Trump has not been charged with conspiracy relating to the criminal acts he ordered, acts for which others face jail terms, is policy against indicting a sitting president.
There's no speculation involved, and considerable evidence of their criminality.
What's fanciful is you ignoring all of the facts to say things like:
"Well, it doesn't matter if associates of his are going down for related crimes, and that he's the connecting feature between their criminal acts -- that he hasn't been charged with something made up means that nothing happened!"
(All of that aside, the media is a travesty and their coverage of this has been click-bait driven fantasy.)
If you can point out who exactly you think coordinated with Trump that'd be great.
Pappadopolous was convicted for lying about his attempts, approved by higher ups in the campaign, to coordinate with Russia.
Stone was indicted for lying about his role in coordinating between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks about the DNC document release in which, from other indictments, WikiLeaks was acting as either an agent or dupe of Russian intelligence.
Irrelevant, the actual facts charged in the indictment involve collusion. “Collusion” isn't a legal charge, it's a fact pattern, and it's part of the fact pattern in both the Stone and Pappadopolous indictments. The claim that there are no indictments involving collusion is false.
> And Stone denies the accusation.
Which is irrelevant to any claims about the content of indictments of findings of the Mueller probe. It would be relevant if the claim was “no convictions involving collusion” or “no confessions involving collusion”, though Pappadopolous would still disprove both of those claims.
As there is no actual crime of collusion for which a person can be indicted, this is a subjective viewpoint.
On any other level, “collusion” is a word with a clear meaning, and the Stone and Pappadopolous indictments (the latter of which is subject of a conviction with guilty plea and detailed statement of the offense confirming this) involve what is unambiguously actual collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks (on a matter which the facts alleged in other indictments identify WikiLeaks as advancing a Russian propaganda operation) and attempted (from the Trump campaign side) collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia directly.
Everything that denied this is lies and sophistry to support lies.
It seems to me that the lack of further Mueller indictments denies it. But, we could argue it either way, and that is what makes it subjective.
Surely you'd agree that Trump's campaign chair giving US polling data to a Russian cut-out counts as colluding.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/paul-manafort-trump-polling-da...
And sadly, the fact that the media is like this is largely a reflection of the population in general. And, as others point out, the media is probably like this because they are just chasing profit.
Biases are rooted in the computational limitations of the human mind. We have limited memory and communication bandwidth. Our brains use compression algorithms to record, store, and retrieve data.
Absolutely not. As someone else notes to your comment, everyone is biased. I'm "biased" that people not dying is a good thing -- some would argue the universe would be better off without humanity. Bias is inevitable, and not the problem; the problem, as you state, is "letting that bias color their views." Or, rather, not so much "color" your views, but letting your personal bias override any other interpretation.
I personally believe Trump has done some very illegal things and it's just a question of finding a smoking gun. That doesn't mean he has done anything illegal regarding situation X (I don't know, let's say promoting Mar-A-Lago after he started running for office), and that's something I need to keep in mind when I read articles about him.
The article is trying to persuade us the press discredits itself when it correctly reports 37 indictments, several convictions, Russian meetings with Don jr. and a mind-boggling array of lies. It criticizes an accurately researched nyt list of Trump associates connected with Russians implying it has been refuted by the Mueller report which the author has not even seen.
Consider what the author is suggesting: these things should not be reported.
It intentionally blurs opinion pieces with factual reporting, and even then heavily paraphrases. It attributes words of others to papers that did not publish them. It implies someone's votive candles somehow reflects on the press.
All hinged on the the fact that there are no recommended indictments (beyond the dozens already being pursued). Additional indictments that would have to be for the theoretically unindictable offense of collusion.
It's not attempting to examine press malfeasance, it's attempting to discredit establish facts by vaguely lumping these unrelated things together. Mixed along with what is not explicitly stated in the unread Mueller report. And to do so preemptively to fix opinion about a report before it's even available publicly.
This article is neither reporting nor analysis, although it pretends to be. It is indistinguishable from countless others that appear in Turkey, Venezuela, Hungary and other nations in a similar state. The names are different and the language is English and that's all.
It is another attempt to de-legitimize the press using exactly the same techniques in every other nascent autocracy: blur one persons words with another, blur opinion pieces with reporting and wildly paraphrase them. Blend irrelevant errors over unconnected annoying fact. Do all this preemptively.
What we really need, and hopefully comes from this reckoning, is a new model of financing journalism that can be free to act in the public interest, and is built with that in its DNA.
Unfortunately, ideas on what's in the public interest are so vastly separated, I wonder if such a thing even makes sense to hope for.
Obama never had anything similar in scope over 8 years.
1) Fast and Furious: Continued program that caused a border agent to be murdered with one of the many guns the US sold to the cartels.
2) Benghazi: We all know this disaster that killed 4 Americans. Severely understaffed embassy that should have never even been there. No support when requested. Blamed the whole thing on a video.
3) Iran Nuclear Deal: Pallets of unmarked Euros flown over to a sponsor of terrorism in the dead of night
4) Spied on conservative reporters
5) IRS Scandal: Targeted conservatives with the IRS
6) Private Email Server: Lied about knowledge of her server, turns out he had a pseudonym on it and received emails from it. He said he found out about it from the media, woops.
7) NSA Spying: Obama forever known as the spying President.
2) The State Dept. approved some requests for security upgrades, and denied others. If they had approved everything, would it have stopped the attacks? There's no way to know. Placing blame on Hillary or Obama specifically is problematic at best.
3) Before the revolution in 1979 the Iranian govt signed an arms contract with the US and paid money into a US account. Then the revolution happened and the equipment was never delivered. The cash flown over was just them getting their money back out of that account, with 30+ years of interest.
The rest I either know nothing about, or are too general to get into here.
For what it's worth, I'm not just an Obama apologist. I also think a lot of stuff he did was problematic, especially the unaccountable drone campaigns, and especially Anwar Al-Alwaki and his son, which should have been considered a major scandal.
3) Fair enough, but how it was done that wasn't appropriate.
The only reason a SCO investigation was pushed for in this case is because the media stoked for it.
1. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/strzok-page-and-the-fbi-tex...
How many times did Obama deny that the Russians attacked American interests during an election only to be rebut by the FBI with a string of foreign indictments?
They also ignored violations of the nuclear treaty, various previous hacking attempts, cancelled missile defenses in Eastern Europe, allowed Russia to sell air defenses to Iran. The Obama Administration was extremely soft on Russia.
Except the reporting was clear about the source since June. The President wanted to publicize it earlier to but McConell refused to sign a bipartisan condemnation. Even then the intelligence community was unequivocal.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/23/mitch-mcconnell-ru...
Comey reportedly wanted to announce the active measures in an op-ed column, as Newsweek reported in March 2017. Two sources with knowledge about the matter told Newsweek that Obama administration officials blocked the effort.
Obama should have publicized it instead of sitting on it, regardless if everyone wanted to sign on or not. Putting it all off on McConnell isn't really acceptable when you're President, but to be fair Biden pushed the blame, not Obama, Obama doesn't think he would do anything differently.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/us/politics/obama-putin-h...
I'm genuinely unsure of what would convince Matt Taibbi that Russiagate was a dud with so many indictments and such a consequential SCO investigation.
This is false, the charter was more broad than that. It investigated interference in the Russian election including this possibility.
This is why they also prosecuted cases against Russian intelligence officers that performed the hacking operations and individuals that lied to the FBI over their ties to Russian cutouts in Wikileaks (specifically Stone and Corsi, though they gave up on Corsi).
Stone: https://www.apnews.com/1dcac576e9964f3d98b96b8052f61f8c
>After WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, released hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, the indictment says, a senior Trump campaign official “was directed” to contact Stone about additional releases and “what other damaging information” WikiLeaks had “regarding the Clinton campaign.” The indictment does not name the official or say who directed the outreach to Stone.
Russian Intelligence: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/us/politics/mueller-indic...
> coordinated to release damaging information to sway the election under the names “DCLeaks” and “Guccifer 2.0.”
Meanwhile I'm old enough to remember people saying Guccifer 2.0 was an "inside source". How the tables turn.
Trump has been cleaning house, getting rid of the liberal plants whose job was to smear and discredit the new administration. Look at the list of purges:
https://abc7chicago.com/politics/bill-shine-and-other-notabl...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nuclear-summit-obama-medv...
From outside It is amazing to see that if you watched only one or the other, the USA appears to be in opposite types of catastrophes.
Similarly with r/politics and r/the_donald, the echo chamber in both of them is so strong, that it prevents rational conversation.
Personally I have seen that CBS News seems more moderate. However I think the best news for any country are the ones provided outside the country (like Aljazeera, BBC, France24, MDR, etc)
(I'd argue that the colloquial "branding" definitions are a part of the problem. eg "drain the swamp" isn't conservative rhetoric)
Also have you read any of those New York Times "editorial" pieces they crank out? "Trump isn't so bad" and "Why I voted Trump and I'd do it again, gosh darn it, and you should too" are typical fare.
The term "conservative" has shifted dramatically in the last 50 years. Some of today's "liberal" Democrats are further to the right of some Republicans in the 1960s. The most liberal of these large media institutions are at best hard-line centrists.
I haven't seen those, and I can't find them with a search. Do you have links?
The broader point about clicks is that the economic model behind the US press changed from a subsidized press to a for-profit press... and yet everyone expected the work product to remain the same?
All that is required for the press to function is that someone foots the bill.
They can do so for a variety of reasons. Supported by a political party (Fox is actually returning to earlier times here). Supported as a charity / pet project (the news barons, Bezos). And supported commercially from sales (CNN).
Generally, every news media form in the US has eventually moved to the last.
And at the same time, the Pentagon is required to sign off on every movie script that shows any military buildings, or the White House. And they do make edits [1].
Military officials and commentators helped shape the narrative of the Iraq war, often with roles at the media outlets themselves. I’ll dig up the article I was thinking of when I get a chance. They helped shape the presentation after — any embeds had to run their footage by military editors before airing too.
What US propaganda does better than Chinese state propaganda for instance is that they don’t just tell the truth they want directly to your face even though it’s obviously and visibly wrong. They shape narratives. It’s an elegant, soft-touch approach. They make you want to hear and buy into their version of the truth. The press here hasn’t really been independent in a long time. I respect the game, tbh. It’s a free press so propaganda is impossible! Nothing to see here haha.
It’s also why I get my news from a couple of foreign sources and ideally it cancels out each providers biases. If you get a chance watch some Fox and CNN (I watch both) then compare to CBC and Al Jazeera English.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/film/2008/n...
You're omitting a crucial detail and by doing so you make the situation you describe sound much more totalitarian. You're required to get the military to sign off on your script IF you want to use free or discounted military personal, equipment, or locations in your film. If you're making a movie where the heroes of the US military blow up some aliens, you'll be able to negotiate to use real tanks and planes for a reasonable cost in your fee. If you're talking about how the government kills people and is evil, you'll have to find another way to get your props. What you don't have to do is get government approval to make your film.
That’s what I respect about it, and what makes it so powerful — the result is the same as under a totalitarian government but without the threats. And it’s still got freedom!
You absolutely do not need government permission to show the White House or to show war footage. You need government permission to get to use their hardware for free.
If I want b-roll of the White House I can just walk over there and record or buy some online. I don't have to ask anybody anything and the government doesn't get to see my script. If I want tanks or planes in a movie that has a script the government doesn't like, I can always use the hardware from a different country, from a state militia, or private owner - or CGI or get the props department to build one, etc.
The government does have a subtle influence. If it's not important to your film, you may as well except minor edits and make the military look good - that way you get some expensive props for free (or for a small price). It's not as insidious as what you're describing though.
If the totalitarian government doesn't like your movie about their troops blowing up aliens, they can execute you. Not exactly the same results, IMHO.
How would you prove this isn't happening?
I suppose that's what the ~1850s quote "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" is about. That there is much in a healthy democracy that cannot be mandated or prohibited, but must constantly be observed, thought about, and judged publicly in an open exchange of ideas.
Agreed wholeheartedly that eternal vigilance is the cost of freedom.
I’m something of an outsider to the US political system, albeit with significant experience, and I do pay a lot of attention to it out of personal interest. I can’t vote anywhere in the world due to where I choose to live. I observe and try to understand.
Propaganda carries a lot of negative connotations though that’s usually from those who disagree with what’s being disseminated. The US approach is powerful in my opinion because it convinces people that they want to do the dissemination instead of telling them they need to, if that makes sense. In Canada for instance, there’s very little self aggrandizing, to the extent that we’ve asked ourselves nationally why people don’t fly the flag. I’ve come to feel it’s from a place of confidence; that we know what we are and like it, and so need not proselytize.
The media has made many mistakes and continues to do so. But in the opposite direction.
In addition to the extraordinary number of people already indicted as part of the Special Counsel’s work, there is already ample documented public evidence of “russiagate.” Marcy Wheeler, the best reporter on this story, says “We know of at least five conversations at which various people entered into what I describe as a quid pro quo conspiracy.” 1
Russia and the Trump Campaign worked together to elect Trump as part of a quid pro quo conspiracy.
The media’s error was in anointing Mueller and his report as the savior and sword that would slay our villainous leader. The media has failed to convey reality to the public: in addition to crimes related to Russia, the president and his family have been shown to be awash in many, many kinds of crimes.
He cheated the non-profit system, lied about assets to secure loans, defrauded participants in his “university,” confessed on tape to a pattern of sexual assault corroborated by multiple credible first person accounts, committed tax fraud, helped his parents commit tax fraud, committed campaign finance violations, skirted White House anti-nepotism and ethics rules, publicly threatened witnesses, and has done many other things that are obviously disqualifying.
The failure of the press to convey the extent of Trump’s prolific criminal behavior before and after the 2016 election is this generation’s War in Iraq coverage.
1 https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/02/24/quid-pro-quo-redux-par...
The HN community might find this interesting:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
I still think I'm going to follow that prescription though: establishing trust has become even more difficult as fake accounts can establish a thin authority by pretending to trust each other. Information complexity and volume has only gone up and there is more information to digest, and establishing someone as a trustworthy source by yourself is time consuming.
The only way this changes is a) humans manage electronic volume/complexity more easily (enhanced brain and more available time) or b) by coincidence we happen to get news sources that are all unbiased and social media platforms with good moderation. (a) is far more likely IMHO.
It's going to be a hell of a ride if there's nothing more in Mueller's report. And yeah, I'm exhausted. I'm giving up my news habits either way it goes.
At least they put their own reputation on the line.
For instance, I regularly watch Tim Pool and he seems to be completely unbiased and covers culture-related news for the US.
"Imagine how tone-deaf you’d have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside without pants."
The opinion, which I agree with, starts with the Clinton's response to the Republicans, and vice versa. It became personal, particularly after things got heated with Clinton's legal troubles.
Then comes Rep. Tom Delay, a.k.a. "The Hammer" who took it one step higher. When the Republicans took over, he worked to ram legislation through. Now everyone is looking at their cross-the-ailse counterparts and saying "I hate you. I want you to lose."
The business of governing broke down, and only exacerbated with Bush, Obama, Pelosi, etc. They are no longer working together, they are at war.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq...
It notes the recent issue with Venezuela coverage at the end, although not noting that it took the New York Times more than two weeks to issue a correction while others outside the mainstream media pointed out the video evidence the day of the event.
It is a difficult transition period but I am hopeful a better industry will emerged (in pain).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241730
Recall the MAGA kids who brutalized the peaceful Native American. Recall Trump directly ordering Cohen to lie to congress. Recall any story where in the rush to gain clicks, everyone jumped to ill-informed conclusions.
The problem is not an idealogical press. That is capitalism at work. American history reveals muckracking as the norm rather than the exception.
The problem is the speed at which this now occurs. The true driver of ‘clicks’ is the astonishing efficiency of forming and disseminating opinions that stoke ideological mobs, mobs which are no longer limited by geography or synchronicity.
I’ve long believed that the only solution to a truth-based press is to replace opinion with primary sources. Now that there are networked cameras on every corner and in every pocket, this shouldn’t be far off. However, the advent of deep-fakes certainly throws a twist into this story.
Ultimately, those of us who value reason and logic should form our beliefs slowly, relying on primary sources as available. Although ideology and unreasonable conclusions dominate American politics, there is no reason for us to do the same. There is no urgency to form a conclusion here, unless your livelihood depends on publishing stories that will drive traffic.
Spending any mental energy on this, at the present moment, is a waste of time. The report will be out soon enough, and that will be the time to even entertain making judgments. More likely than not, however, the report will lead to more questions than answers. At least for those who value knowing the truth over making a buck.
To wit https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-wh...
If the purpose of journalism is to sort fact from fiction, and we clearly have a President that thrives on providing "fiction," seems to me journalism is doing alright here. Maybe a C+.
I think you know what I mean, when a news hour host makes statements in a tone of voice that implies there is no doubt about something.
For me, the main theme of this article was “None of this has been walked back.” - very few news outlets have admitted really sloppy reporting.
And, this all unfortunately plays into Trumps hands and increases his odds of winning in 2020.
Trump cannot be indicted. We knew that from day 1. In addition, "collusion" is not even a real crime. The question is whether the Mueller report discovers sufficient evidence of crimes for Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings, the real mechanism for removing Trump from office.
However, I do agree with the author. The coverage of this issue has been relentless and actually did reach witch hunt proportions. The bias was there and everyone knew it.
The President's campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, personal lawyer and National Security Advisor have either pled guilty or been convicted of felonies. Despite denying any contacts with Russia, we now know he'd been offered a deal to build the biggest tower in Europe, a payout worth $300 million, during the campaign. During the transition, his son-in-law met with the Russian ambassador and asked to use the Russian government's communication system to evade scrutiny by the American intelligence community. During sentencing, a federal judge told the President's former NSA that "arguably, you sold out your country".
On what earth does Taibbi live?
I grant that perhaps the media built up the Mueller report to a point that no actual product could satisfy. But what we know is so outrageous that it's quite strange to conclude that the people doing the irresponsible misleading are the news media. This is such a strange, bizarre, consequential, unprecedented story cloaked in classified details that it's pretty odd to expect a media to do a great job of contemporaneously reporting on it.
I used to have a lot of respect for Taibbi, and I suppose I still do, but this is deranged on his part.
Flynn (security advisor for a couple of day) -- was setup. There was no collusion with Russia to change 2016 election outcomes, that Flynn was accused of.
"... made materially false statements and omissions during an interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") on January 24, 2017, in Washington, D.C. "
[1]https://www.justice.gov/file/1015126/download that's not collusion.
Roger Stone did not have his day in court, and the allegation were are not about directing Foreign powers to do anything.
Certainly hiring a foreign agent to write a document to be used trigger for FBI to initiate opposition party surveillances (like Clinton orchestrated) -- would have been a worthy avenue for Mueller to pursue, if he was about justice
The other indictments had nothing to do with 2016 election and happened for offenses outside 2016 election activities.
--- ---
In general, my definition of deep state is:
a shadow government (consisting of elected officials and hired bureaucrats), that performs illegal activities, but blames opposition exact same things they are guilty of.
Whether it is collusion with foreign powers to orchestrate a coup, or abuse of women, or anti-Semitism, or racism, launder money through charities, or get bribes for political favors.
The fact that left-wing media had zero interest in investigative reporting of the deep state, and the true collusions with foreign powers to orchestrate coup in this country --- in an indication of their actual profession (paid propagandists).
And while it's not Russia, it is still very much relevant to 2016 election, since Flynn's participation in the scheme happened while he was already the national security adviser for the Trump campaign.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/nyregion/ny-ag-underwood-...
Uh...ok. Citations, please. That's quite an outlandish and unsupported claim.
> There was no collusion with Russia to change 2016 election outcomes, that Flynn was accused of.
Flynn was talking to the Russian ambassador during the transition, promising to lift sanctions that the then-President was imposing. He was convicted for lying to FBI agents about that.
Perhaps there's an innocent explanation for the incoming National Security Advisor lying to the FBI about secret conversations with the Russian ambassador to undermine the acting President during the transition. I'm curious what that might be.
> Roger Stone did not have his day in court, and the allegation were are not about directing Foreign powers to do anything.
Note how at no point did I mention Roger Stone.
> Roger Stone did not have his day in court, and the allegation were are not about directing Foreign powers to do anything.
Also not a thing I mentioned.
> The other indictments had nothing to do with 2016 election and happened for offenses outside 2016 election activities.
Al Capone was convicted on taxes. Let's read the report.
Planning to build a hotel in a country is not a crime, even if it's Russia. It's smoke in the scheme of things, but if he's not guilty, then it's perfectly okay. Meeting with a Russian ambassador is not a crime, setting up a backchannel is not a crime. Many campaigns have done so in the past, again smoke, no fire.
All the things you list would be normal to do had there been no investigation or Russia meddling in the first place. If Trump would have known the Russia thing would have blown up how it did, I'm sure he would have strayed as far as way from Russia as possible.
It would be asinine to hand over the reigns of power as a cold start.
The Logan Act nonsense is a perfect example of the media’s abject failure.
Then when Kerry went to Iran to actively controvene and usurp Trump’s policies — where was the media citing the Logan act then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Act#Accusations_of_viola...
I'm just going to attack the weakest part of your post because it is egregious. I disagree with the rest to, but I think other comments do a good enough job of covering my points.
There is overwhelming evidence that Trump sees part of his job as being diplomat-in-chief, going to other countries and making/renegotiating deals. There is no way this attributed motivation of 'evad[ing] scrutiny by the American intelligence community' passes the Occam's Razor test of he wants a quiet place to talk before major public negotiations.
He wouldn't be the first or last president to have a quiet back-channel to a foreign country for negotiating purposes. It could be standard practice for all we know, it isn't a bad idea by any stretch.
Ok pal.
> There is no way this attributed motivation of 'evad[ing] scrutiny by the American intelligence community' passes the Occam's Razor test of he wants a quiet place to talk before major public negotiations.
Actual national security practitioners find this beyond laughable.
> He wouldn't be the first or last president to have a quiet back-channel to a foreign country for negotiating purposes. It could be standard practice for all we know, it isn't a bad idea by any stretch.
The practice of backchannels is not unusual. Everything else about this is extremely odd, to say the least.
It distracts, causes unnecessary polarization and most importantly takes focus away from much bigger underlying issues - why voters turned to Trump, how to connect with them, the broken advertising/click/view maximizing model, campaign finance reform etc.
Taibbi is asking the important question of how is focus going to get back to the real stuff, when outrage and emotion and blame are the only tools being used?
"Despite denying any contacts with Russia, we now know he'd been offered a deal to build the biggest tower in Europe, a payout worth $300 million, during the campaign. "
This is a misrepresentation of the facts - it's exactly an example of the very problem mentioned in the article.
1) Donald Trump builds buildings, that's his business. Much like selling coffee Schultz's job. Trump has been trying for decades to build in Moscow, much like Starbucks, Tesla, IKEA, Volkswagen, Zara, Google etc. try to do business there.
Donald Trump has no business in Russia - but Howard Schultz has over 100 Starbucks locations in Russia. [1]
Howard Schultz has been materially 'doing business' with Russians for decades.
Given the mafia-like nature of some business activities in Russia (IKEA has to pay a kind of extortion to be in Moscow), how is it possible we are not screaming in outrage over Schultz's 'deep Russian business connections'?
Because making coffee is a normal part of his business, just like Trump builds buildings.
He's allowed to do that, it's normal, even if 'we hate him'.
2) There were no material plans to do anything in Russia, literally just some conversations. No contracts, no agreements. Just talk.
3) "a payout worth $300 million" - this is a fabrication. Not only was there not even the start of a deal - the '$300M' figure is a totally invented number.
4) 'During the campaign'? It's widely reported that Donald Trump did not want to be president, and that he was surprised he got the nomination, and everyone was surprised that he won. It's reasonable for a candidate to continue their business during the initial part of a campaign, especially if in all likelihood he would lose. As it became clear that Trump would win the GOP nomination, talks were abandoned.
Summary: Doing business in foreign country is normal. In some foreign countries, at a large scale, you will deal with the government. This is normal. Trump did not have any material activity in Russia, and it ended as it became clear Trump would be taking on a political nomination anyhow.
I could take your other comments and contextualize them in the same way: most of this has been utterly misrepresented.
Just because we loathe Trump, and I wouldn't put it past him for one second to 'kiss up to Putin' in hopes of a sweet future deal in Russia ... does not make him guilty of anything, certainly not to the degree the press has admonished him.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/541629/number-of-starbuc...
Michael Cohen testified that their claims of doing this was a lie, and they continued their business dealings after having claimed to have ceased as a candidate.
If they didn't feel they were doing anything improper, why did they lie to the American people and during subsequent testimony?
One good reason would be that appearances are extremely important in nearly all circumstances, especially when running for office or while in office. People often lie for very dumb, shallow reasons, because of their fear of how something might look. Trump is all about image after all and always has been. His brand has always been his primary business.
Cohen's lie was simply to 'move back the date' of the end of the discussions from August, to mid Spring.
It was a campaign kind of lie, a lie of perceptions.
Cohen et. al. wanted to simply make it clear that the 'end of Russia discussions' was well before the nomination, and not near to it, purely for optics.
That's why it's an utterly stupid thing to do.
It was a stupid, needless like, just to avoid some possible bad news, that Cohen is going to go to jail for.
To me - this summarizes most of the Trump shenanigans: Trump and his crew of clowns do not have the sophistication to orchestrate anything with Russia!
Trump is 'just a guy'. He has a few family members, who are not professionals, help him out with stuff. This is not a 'operationalized, rigorous entity'. It's not like a bank, with policies, procedures, professional managers.
It's just a loud-mouth real-estate guy 'making deals' over the phone.
That's it.
I do not trust Trump one big, and it's good there is added scrutiny, and absolutely 100% the Russians will try to take advantage of Trump - in the same way they would try to take advantage of any president if they could.
But there's no attempt to undermine America, to do secret deals with Russian intelligence, no exchanging of secret information to alter the campaign. None of this.
Trump I think is a bad statesmen, who as a little to close to Russia for comfort, but there's no real smoking gun here, just a little bit of 'Cheech and Chong'.
"Purely for optics."
Why would the optics look bad?
Because what they did was a way in which corruption often happens, eg a foreign government rewarding someone for losing an election but causing a political disturbance, and they lied about it because they knew it would look bad during an investigation. We can see the Chinese rewarding the Trumps with various favors, eg trademarks, for an example of how this kind of corruption actually happens, and why people would have been suspicious of the Trump dealings.
You're correct: each misdeed of the Trump organization could be explained by bumbling -- a coin-flip between incompetence and malice.
Unfortunately, there's a large number of such questionable practices, and the intersection of a high number of overlapping events is actually a large degree of certainty.
The simplest explanation is the preferred:
Trump is a career criminal, who committed multiple kinds of crimes during the presidential election, ranging from campaign finance violations to colluding with Russian intelligence operatives. He did this not because he's some kind of deep-sleeper agent from Russia, or whatever media narrative has formed, but rather because he's an out-of-touch sociopath who has been sheltered by wealth and legitimately doesn't understand why breaking national security law to enrich himself is wrong. But he did it, along with the other crimes, and knowingly orchestrated the whole series of crimes. As he's been doing for years, through the Trump Foundation, Trump University, his frequent defrauding of contractors, etc.
So yes, he "colluded", but out of stupidity and incompetence, not thoughtful malice.
I won't accuse of you of trying to mislead people, but the judge apologized for making the treason claim against Flynn:
https://lawandcrime.com/awkward/judge-quickly-backtracks-apo...
Nevertheless, we now know that Flynn was acting as a propaganda agent of Turkey - by his own testimony, used to convict his co-conspirators - without registering as such. Do you consider this a "process crime"?
Yes, but that was lying in denying collusion in both the case of Pappadopolous (as a Trump campaign official and with support of higher ups, with Russia) and Stone (as a go-between for the Trump campaign, with WikiLeaks—described by the Trump campaign as a “hostile non-state intelligence service”—where WikiLeaks was, based on information in other indictments, either cooperating with or duped by a Russian intelligence operation.)
"Collusion" isn't an actual crime, so of course nobody was convicted for it. But convicting people for illegal activity proximate to the collusion is exactly what happened. Al Capone was convicted for tax fraud, not being a gangster, because that was what they could prove in court.
But the author is very correct.
A 'free press' is the 5th estate - an important part of civil society.
... but it only works if they have integrity.
Over the last two years it has become clear how narrow and biased they have become in their contempt for Trump and of course in search of 'more clicks'.
This is a deep wound for America that I do not think we can blame on Trump himself, however much some of us may loathe him.
Trump is a Loki who exposed a serious degradation in another part of the system and it has to remedied.
Sadly, I do not think they will admit their failures, and they will not reform, and as a result, we're going to be having wars over 'fake news' for a long time.
Post-Edit: I don't want this to take away from critiquing Trump for some of the awful things that he's said, or some of his questionable policies - my only point is 'the press broke' on this, and it's a legitimate concern. If the press lacks integrity, we lose the ability to hold people to account.
People on the left who are not part of the machine of the Democratic Party - Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, many lesser known people in that orbit, have said all along that this whole Trump/Russia thing has been overblown.
The Democrats lost the 2016 election. Trump railed against NAFTA and TPP and campaigned around working class people in the Midwest and said the US was in too many wars abroad and steel workers needed help. Hillary took money from Wall Street, initially supported TPP, didn't visit the Midwest despite Michael Moore's entreaties - he was saying at the time which states she could lose, all of which she did.
Nader said, paraphrasing - "The Democrats had unappealing policies in 2000 and lost, and in 2016 and lost. They could be self-critical and see US workers did not support their policies, and change them to be more appealing to US workers. Or they could keep taking corporate PAC money and find a scapegoat. They chose that option. The scapegoat was me (Nader) in 2000. In 2016 it was Putin."
In a move to try to be less appealing to voters, the DCCC just passed a number of policies trying to prevent local Democratic parties from running primaries against incumbents. They want control to be held by incumbents and corporate PACs and party hacks - any body other than the local Democratic voters who do all the leg work and voting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/us/border-rapes-migrant-w...
It's crazy in this #MeToo era that this issue isn't more in the spotlight.
1 in 3 women are raped when they make their way to the border. Even Politifact had to agree, though they gave Trump a half-true because they used a sample instead of knowing every person who was raped and taking it "out of context", whatever that means lol.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/jan...
Trump said, "One in three women is sexually assaulted on the dangerous journey north."
A 2017 report from Doctors Without Borders said 31.4 percent of women had been sexually abused during their transit through Mexico. That's based on a 2015 survey of more than 400 migrants interviewed in facilities where migrants seek assistance. (The majority of migrants interviewed were men.)
Doctors Without Borders said its report provided a snapshot in time of the perils migrants face, but said it wasn’t necessarily representative of the entire migrant population traveling through Mexico.
Trump’s statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. We rate it Half True.
They're his best friends.
If anything, all this media coverage shows is that the US mainstream media is now spectacularly ineffective and irrelevant.
They might have brought down Nixon, but they can't bring down Trump.
Everybody on all sides already has their minds made up, and they only read the news for entertainment, to confirm their biases, and to find talking points.
> An NBC source said that an Access Hollywood producer remembered the conversation on Monday, October 3, and located it in the show's archives.[4][11] The celebrity news website TMZ reports a different chronology: when senior executives at NBC learned about the video, they thought it was too early in the presidential campaign season to release it with maximum effect, and (according to TMZ) those executives publicly said they learned of the video long after they actually learned about it.[12][13]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_Access_Hollywood_...
The Hollywood access tape was covered for weeks, and it's not exactly political. We've all said things in private that would make us look bad if they were recorded and displayed to the world. He apologized for it.
Occasionally (both online and in real life) I feel that whatever I say tends to be interpreted in the binary: "are you with us or against us". This makes it hard to have a thoughtful discussion. Clarifying that I'm loyal to whatever cause the audience supports helps to some degree.
I would hope on a forum such as HN people wouldn't make assumptions ... but I think we all have an assumptive instinct on some level.
Intersectional issues (race/gender/class), some things about China, obviously religion - they're all so loaded it's hard to have a discussion.
Finally, even though I have very nuanced views of Trump, and don't think he's 'all bad' - and my own politics are utterly not on the American spectrum ... I just don't want to be associated with him frankly.
Agreed...
That said, there are people who are happy to have an open discussion without judging everything on the basis of "friend" / "enemy". I wonder if there's a forum, online or offline, where ideas are shared and discussed in good faith.
There was one https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread... <- a very interesting read.
Various satellite forums of slatestarcodex have grown and are around, and only the original Culture War thread is gone. That whole group seems to be politically mixed and at least partially vaccinated against the dangers of framing political disagreements in terms of tribes and dehumanising the outgroup/opponent.
In this case, it seems the original attempt didn't survive the influx of people from outside who were not interested in a civil discussion.
Perhaps a smaller, invitation only, forum might stand a better chance?
We made a choice, in this country, to give away our spectrum to the highest bidder, no questions asked. We used to restrict programs that called themselves "news" to have to present a balanced, reality-grounded perspective, but by the early 90s fear of alternatives like the internet provided the fodder to dismantle that regulation.
It wasn't necessarily bad foresight either. These days, influencers on YouTube regularly get the same viewership that cable news does. Only very recently[1] have we begun to grapple with the social decay and radicalization that results when their engagement-optimization algorithm meets vulnerable folks. Try searching for historical, economic or political content and see how quickly Related Videos draws you down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole.
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-announces-it-...
In my mind, these two acts alone have warranted the last two years of coverage and investigation.
Simply imagine a world where these things were ignored. How untrustworthy would the press seem then?
Also after Comey’s restart of the email investigation many Dems wanted him fired.
>Also after Comey’s restart of the email investigation many Dems wanted him fired.
Irrelevant.
The second (which is also a conviction by way of a guilty plea) and the final indictments made public were for collusion. Or, rather, for lying about collusion, but the collusion itself is part of the factual background of the indictments and a central and necessary one in each case.
If there is a media failure, it's in continuously reporting the Presidents claim that no collusion was indicated and either letting it stand or endorsing it when that is factually incorrect.
There's nothing wrong with the press on this one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
Not buying into the 'red scare' means that in the eyes of some you must be a Trump supporter.
This is a failure of critical thinking and far too many people fall into this trap, thereby perpetuating things like 'RussiaGate' when it no longer makes sense to do so.
The suspicions won't die down amongst those that have been sat in front of their televisions feeding their imaginations with 'RussiaGate'. To them 'it happened but it could not be proven'. Their suspicions are still confirmed.
There is also a failure to take people at their word when it could be prudent to do so in this world of politics and lying. People have motivation for lying and people have motivation for being honest.
The leadership in Russia - Putin, Lavrov and others - have stated why it is that they have not secretly foisted Trump on the American people. But those that don't listen don't want to take them for their word on that.
Fundamentally the Kremlin see other nations as having national interests and, in the case of America, they have no need to care about who sits in the Oval Office as the national interests will be the same. The Pentagon isn't going to go away, the need for oil isn't going to go away, the need for the world to be using the dollar as the world currency isn't going to go away. American capitalism is always going to be what it is. American national interests are a constant as far as Russia is concerned. They cannot expect some external change, they have to be self-reliant and foster their own good relationships with traditional partners.
The Russian leadership have also stated why it is not in their interest to put 'their man' in the Oval Office. It is not due to any standards of conduct it is simpler than that. Thinking two moves ahead, what legitimacy would a puppet President hold, how long would he/she last and how would Russia be treated should the American people find out?
The Kremlin have thought this out. However, explaining to someone that the Russians are not motivated to influence the American elections also falls under the 'instant disclaimer'.
'So you must be a Putin fan?' is the expectation for proffering this explainer. But it is not about that, it is about understanding motivation and the Russian leadership are not motivated to influence American elections in some super-sneaky way.
There is a failure by the press that have pursued RussiaGate to empathise and understand others, whether they be the people that voted for Trump, the Russians, the Democrat machine or even themselves. It is because of this that you are correct, the press will not reform. It is not in their culture and they don't have the mindset to do so.
Diplomacy is a game of liars probing liars. Everyone at the table will tell you exactly what they know you can prove, and no one tells anyone everything they can prove since that would give away valuable information with regards to their own intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities. It's a game in which every comment spoken by a Diplomat, Ambassador, or Head of State is scrutinized and cross-checked against every participating country's models.
Outright deception is one of many tools that is employed, and even if Russia truly didn't have anything to gain from Trump ending up in the White House, they did get a chance to dry-run a potential doctrine against one of their biggest international rivals.
The press was right to be suspicious, and the ethical shortfalls of the President and his administration only amplified the situation in terms of the optics required.
Make no mistake. Intrigue happens. It's why diplomats love the phrase "Trust, but verify."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
That's 496 citations and a warning "This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably".
In other words, there's overwhelming evidence that Russia interfered. Like, not even a question. Suggesting it's a made-up media frenzy is just... alternate universe.
I'm not pointing to the length of the article or the number of citations as direct support - I'm simply showing how overwhelmingly the burden of proof is on the person claiming it's all made up. To suggest that there was no Russian election interference of any sort is on par with moon landing denial. Literally nobody seriously asserts that - not even Trump! (Not anymore, anyway). That bears repeating, if you think Russians didn't interfere with the 2016 presidential election, you have a weaker grasp of reality than Donald Trump. It's frightening post-truth wingnuttery.
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/87841331318880256... https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/96520255620400332...?
I didn’t really address the case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for now. I was told early on that this piece of the story seemed “solid,” but even that assertion has remained un-bolstered since then, still based on an “assessment” by the intelligence services that always had issues, including the use of things like RT’s “anti-American” coverage of fracking as part of its case. The government didn’t even examine the DNC’s server, the kind of detail that used to make reporters nervous.
Words like "wingnuttery" and "moon landing" weaken your case. If you get enough publications to print something, you can make a terrifically long list of citations, but what does that prove? Quality matters, not quantity, and the quality of journalism devoted to this case has been astonishingly low, as Taibbi shows. As he says:
We won’t know how much of any of this to take seriously until the press gets out of bed with the security services and looks at this whole series of events all over again with fresh eyes, as journalists, not political actors.
I can find you 496 citations that the Loch Ness Monster ate Freddie Starr's hamster. If this mattered as a matter of national security, would you prefer to simply ask Freddie Starr if someone is having a laugh?
There are precisely zero citations on that page to any Russian sources. There should be. With the original Russian and English translation. With those sources being official.
Why is this?
When I was at school my history teacher told me that we always had to check sources.
Am I to believe that it is beyond the wit of the journalist to link to words uttered by the Kremlin, posted onto an official Kremlin blog? So we can read the original denials verbatim and in context?
I checked the citations and I am only seeing articles by the media that have been advancing the RussiaGate agenda. Quality is not the same thing as quantity, 496 articles written by Western pundits does not magically make something true.
Not all of the people in those citations are Mother Theresa types. Luke Harding from the Guardian gets a mention in those citations but some Guardian readers know what Luke Harding's game really is. It has something to do with propaganda.
Any story can be made into something it isn't by being economical with the truth. Then we start believing and regurgitating our own falsehoods.
There were a few quips on there about what Putin and Lavrov had to say. Are these cherry picked to support a given narrative? Without links to the source words and the context, who can say?
We need to listen and understand our global neighbours, not live in a world where we only listen to the journalists that Tabibbi is lampooning.
https://m.telegraphindia.com/opinion/some-clues/cid/1669915
When you can only view the world in terms of who to hold responsible and who to Blame, you get hit in two ways. The chances of producing a reaction, defensiveness etc increase and the chances of connecting and producing healthier outcomes decrease.
Blame takes focus away from where attention needs to be. Empathy does the opposite.
Even the most odious of people can be taken at their word about some things. The heroin addict in the village might not be responsible for every burglary in the village even if they are responsible for 95% of them.
In England we have a tradition that people are innocent until proven guilty. RussiaGate and whatever happened in your linked story very much falls under that category.
Guess what? With not even that much effort I can find out that their dog is outside and unattended most of the day. (Means/Opportunity)
I can infer they don't like to leash the dog, due to the frequency the dog can be found roaming the neighborhood. (Motive)
I've seem the neighbors unattended dog defecate in other neighbors yards. (Precedent)
I've even had to walk it home a couple of times as well. (more precedent)
I COULD go through the trouble of setting up a bunch of cameras to catch it red pawed as it were, however, that's kind of a moot point, because I know the neighbor has the means, motive, opportunity, and a history of prior behavior.
This is not only a preponderance of evidence, but in the absence of someone else's dog traipsing through my property, this could even be legally considered beyond a reasonable doubt.
After reading your various replies, I just want to leave you with a word of caution: not everyone is worth trusting, even in the absence of direct proof. Especially if you can collect a preponderance of evidence that suggests that an action isn't outside their expected behavioral envelope.
The biggest problem we face isn't a problem of unreliable sources, but a crisis of ease of manufacture of the blatantly untrue combined with an asymmetrical distribution of the necessary skills/tools to refute.
We're still well equipped to deal with this type of situation, but it requires an elevated level of skepticism until we solve the problem of information provenance.
If there is one thing we have, going for us, however, it is a large store of information recorded from times before misinformation was so trivially distributed and manufactured to work from, and the wherewithal to reason from it. Trust, I think, is going to develop into a completely different beast in the 21st century from what it was in the 20th.
> This is a deep wound for America that I do not think we can blame on Trump himself, however much some of us may loathe him.
> Trump is a Loki who exposed a serious degradation in another part of the system and it has to remedied.
Who are you? What is happening? This is totally deranged. "Trump is a Loki"!?
Trump saying some bad things isn't enough for me. Unless you're also dissatisfied with the character of most presidents, I think your stance is the result of the propaganda machine.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19472718 and marked it off-topic.
In any case, what's wrong with ten year old drag queens? That sounds no worse than any typical beauty pageant and probably a lot more fun.
Too many girls are forced to into "normal" beauty pageants. Maybe you should focus your aggression that way.
That's why I let my child eat his own volume in cotton candy.
So let me clarify, what did OP see that was unfounded?
That sums it up for me. People were desperate to believe their President was a criminal.
Seems we have a bit of a troll/bot/propaganda problem right here on HN.
The internet reflex where people assume that only trolls, bots, or shills can explain something they dislike online, is off topic here. It has also become so self-parodically common that one can only hope it will jump the shark soon.
Sure. Will have a look at the guidelines and appreciate the pointer, as well as the job you have to do.
>The internet reflex where people assume that only trolls, bots, or shills can explain something they dislike online, is off topic here. It has also become so self-parodically common that one can only hope it will jump the shark soon.
But, I don't appreciate the additional editorializing and don't believe your attempt to ridicule me here stands up to your own guidelines. Add to that the fact that you are a moderator, and the standard to which you hold yourself should be even higher.
And, that speaks only to the style you chose here. On the substance, of course we know that my pointing to what I noted as an observable pattern vs merely "something I dislike online" are two entirely different matters. We also know that such things as trolls and shills continue to exist, even if some too readily make the claim that they are present. As for me, you will very rarely find those claims in my history here and, where I have applied it, you might even be surprised at the patterns were you to look more closely. Or not. I could certainly be wrong.
But, as it is, you've restated my position so as to trivialize it, then ridiculed it. In so doing, you've moved it from "hey, please don't do that here, as it's a violation" to "here's my opinion of your comment".
If you want to be part of the discussion to make some additional point about what you think of people who, say, display an "internet reflex" you disdain, then perhaps use a throwaway. But, as it is, I would have difficulty seeing how your comment doesn't "further a flamewar", apart from your position as a moderator precluding members from engaging with you in such.
When it comes to users accusing each other of astroturfing, shilling, spying, and so on, the only conclusion that fits the data is that people are imagining things. In reality, the community is simply divided and users have opposing views. Unfortunately, when my view is sufficiently obnoxious to your side or vice versa, the assumption of good faith evaporates and people reach for more sinister explanations. We can speculate about why, but it's clear that users are projecting those sinister explanations onto fellow users. The more divisive the topic, the more opposed people's views become and the more harshly they express them, leading to more projection, accusation, and division. A vicious loop.
This is especially toxic to HN because HN is a single community where everybody sees the same threads. Here you are more likely to run into views that you strongly dislike than you are on sites where communities partition into like-minded factions. Even when discussions on HN are more thoughtful than these other places, the fact that you're part of one big group—everybody, instead of mostly your own tribe—makes them feel less so.
When people post aggressive remarks to HN, they're not just bonding with their own tribe, they're simultaneously broadcasting to the other side, who take the harshness like a punch. All sides do this, so all sides feel punched. This is painful and one can't help but react internally. I believe that the accusatory reactions are self-protective. If you're a spy or a shill, that explains whatever you say and I needn't give it any credence. Unfortunately, these defensive reactions are also offensive ones, so we get an escalatory cycle. If HN is to avoid being ripped apart, we need a rule against such accusations. Therefore we do have such a rule.
1. There are other contexts on HN where we do find manipulation: usually startups or projects trying to promote themselves, but occasionally also more sophisticated astroturfing that appears to involve larger companies.
2. More on this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403438. For a specific example, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19404162.
p.s. I'm sorry that felt like I was targeting you specifically. My intention was only to say something about a general phenomenon which I've written about many times already: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
I have seen zero reputable people on HN expressing anything that supports this assertion.
>it's telling that rather than discuss the possibility that trump is clean, you just call them trolls and bots.
Discuss with whom? The "people" who just downvote anything perceived to be anti-Trump or anti-Russia? That's the point. This isn't the first time that pattern has emerged on HN. Obviously, an online community with HN's makeup is a prized target.
Or are you one of those who doesn't believe there have been any bots or trolls or other propaganda aimed at Americans? U.S. intelligence just made it up? Facebook and Twitter just made it up? It's all the Deep State is it? That, and liberal bias in social media?
Trump colluded out in the open and continues to do so. A foreign adversary plotted to help him and a byzantine maze of people around him and his campaign have been indicted, pled guilty, lied about contacts with Russia, etc. But, it's all a coincidence and has nothing to do with Trump, the ignorant beneficiary?
Meanwhile, Trump also oddly and consistently checks off the Russian dictator's bucket list, denigrating his own country (intel community, McCain, etc.) whenever it speaks ill of that dictator. In order to have people overlook all of this, he invents a conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Republicans and Democrats within the government is plotting against him. And, that neatly explains everything that is not pro-Trump.
Talk about lazy propaganda.
It'a absurd. But, in order to defend him as "clean", absurdity and inane conspiracy theories are required, right down to the complete denial of reality.
He's clean. There's literally no evidence he's not. Muellers report is done and after the Intel agencies working for nearly 3 years - they got nothing.
It's probably hard for you to see, but you're literally doing the thing you're frantically and emphatically complaining is happening on the right.
There are people out there with differing views. Red states have internet too.
And not like it justifies the Russians, but MediaMatters bots Reddit for the DNC.
I don't think HackerNews is a big enough target for anyone tbh.
>There are people out there with differing views
Strawmen.
>And not like it justifies the Russians, but MediaMatters bots Reddit for the DNC
Citation? What's your point, anyway? This is just what-aboutism that has nothing to do with the question at-hand. Obviously.
>I don't think HackerNews is a big enough target for anyone tbh
The HN community is sizeable and traffic from articles posted on HN routinely knocks sites offline. Additionally, some of the sharpest technical minds online hang out here. Of course it's a rich target.
Your comment is all deflection and strawmen. Not much unlike the standard propaganda of the day.
You're the one who speculated there are bots here. Just because there are comments without replies and downvotes. Unless you're psychic or you know Putin you don't have any proof of that, so it's wild speculation. My point was those are more than likely real people with differing views. That's way more likely than some bot being farmed on a random topic on HN.
“There will be people protesting: the Mueller report doesn’t prove anything! What about the 37 indictments? The convictions? The Trump tower revelations? The lies! The meeting with Don, Jr.? The financial matters! There’s an ongoing grand jury investigation, and possible sealed indictments, and the House will still investigate, and…
Stop. Just stop. Any journalist who goes there is making it worse.”
This is actually factually wrong. It is persuasive but wrong because while Mueller isn’t pursuing more prosecutions, he has referred people on for more prosecutions and investigations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/us/politics/mueller-repor...
Also no one is actually saying that the mueller report doesn’t prove anything, because no one has read it yet. And that position is a rhetorical flourish that makes no sense given that all of the indictments, prosecutorial referrals etc were done by Mueller.
The next few sentences aren’t true either;
“The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star. That’s a hell of a long way from what this business was supposedly about at the beginning, and shame on any reporter who tries to pretend this isn’t so.“
First of all, he plead guilty to charges by the SDNY. AFAICT, The WSJ broke the story, Common Cause then filed a lawsuit followed by Stormy Daniels, and then the FBI raid happened. So this claim is actually inaccurate.
He has a point to make and he is willing to throw facts into the blender to make it. He is also a part of what’s wrong with the media and seems to be unable to recognize that.
Edit: given the downvoting here are some citations;
WSJ breaking the story - https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-lawyer-arranged-130-000-p...
Common Cause’s lawsuit - https://www.npr.org/2018/05/03/608291878/watchdog-questions-...
SDNY and Cohen - https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5453401-SDNY-Cohen-s...
What is happening to HN?
Genuinely confused - is it not worse than Watergate? At least Watergate was done by Americans.
The Mueller investigation confirmed the source of the hacks and the propanda effort in nauseating detail that was denied and dismissed during the campaign.
If the names were changed, Hacker News people would be outraged. They would be mad at the FISA court, mad at the FBI, mad at the media.
Look in the mirror and decide, do you have consistent principles or do they own apply in certain situations.
I mean I think the FBI has a lot to answer for, here and on plenty of other issues, but...
I don't know how to tell you this, because you won't believe it, but if you're sincere and not a troll then you have a very unhealthy media diet. Your take here is very disconnected from reality.
I'm sure you disagree. Alas.
I know this is an issue on which views are both polarized and fixed. But that's why the guidelines say that comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You know why impeachment is out? Because Republicans control the Senate, and because there are plenty of conservative Democrats too, so impeachment doesn't stand a chance.
If anti-Trump politicians controlled Congress, Trump would have been booted out long ago.
The only reason Trump is still in office is because plenty of Congressmen still support Trump, and many of them don't care what the evidence says.
He's nominated the judges they want. He's given gigantic tax cuts to the wealthy. He's pushing hard against immigration and pissing off liberals. That's clearly more than enough to get the support of most conservatives. If he had to cheat or lie or get Russian help to get in to office, that doesn't matter to his supporters because all they care about is that their agenda gets pushed.
His supporters also know if they admit he's committed impeachable offenses, they'll be politically stained along with him, and it'll be a gift to the anti-Trump camp. So they'll never admit it.
* failure to disclose tax returns
* failure to divest of his business interests
* blatant nepotism ( including issuing his son-in-law a security clearance against the advice of professional sta ff )
* Owning a private club (Mar-a-lago) to which he sells memberships and visits at taxpayer expense where his customers have exclusive access to the President and his cabinet.
Add in his business interests in Russia and what looks an awful lot like a quid pro quo trade of favorable treatment for policy changes desired by the Russian leadership...
And you're gonna declare it's all just fine because there is no smoking gun evidence of campaign pay to play?
I really hope you all are more attentive to your own businesses; this is basically the political equivalent of your CFO suddenly developing a sports car and supermodel habit; maybe everything is fine, but you should probably get an outside audit.
The religious voters will come out in droves to vote for him based on guilt alone for society having dragged his now irrefutably innocent name through the muck all these years. The poor man!
The content of the article is pure propaganda that deliberately conflates news and opinion and conflates sources and information with reporting on sources and information.
Again, pure propaganda. Shame on Taibbi.
Now, which is it? If the press is essentially reporting what prominent people--presumed to have inside information--are saying, then is it the press whose reputation has been destroyed?
I'll be the first to say that their breathless reporting and the 24-hour news cycle are exhausting, as is their click-baity ratings chase. But, with regard to reporting the substance, what else are they supposed to do when many believe POTUS is breaking laws in plain sight, and so-called experts are corroborating that crimes are being committed?