Boris Epshteyn

I'd like to think that poker players are fair minded critical thinkers. You don't think that firing Comey, firing Rosenstein, firing Session, and then planting a cover-up artist like Barr, isn't screaming to you that Trump has nothing but air on the river?

I mean, there's actually tons of investigative connections about Trump's ties to Russian money. We don't have the complete connected facts on conspiracy, and Mueller told Barr when he said he wanted a report in 3 weeks that he wasn't going to be able to make a conclusion - meaning, there was still more work to do.

But who knows... we might not get Trump's 5 meetings with Putin and those torn up notes, or the Mueller report. But I'd hope our reason hats are still on that clearly Trump has acted in a way that indicates he has something/many things to hide.

Bolded is not actually accurate. Barr said this:

There are some clarifications of this in the emptywheel piece, just noting that for completeness.

So Barr's denial only covers members of the Trump Campaign, which is not going to include, say, Roger Stone. Emptywheel explains:

Considering Stone seems to be the guy they sent to do their dirty work in this regard, you can see how there's potentially a rather large hole in Barr's statement.

Stone wasn't charged with doing the election crimes with Russia either.

Agreed. But the particular suspicion of collusion with Russia to throw the election did not pan out. As we've discussed earlier, we can expect Trump to oppose any investigation because he has endless sleazy things to hide, even if he hadn't worked with Putin to throw the election.

FYI, Just watched Greenwald on Young Turks. Cenk asked about all the other Trump Russia financial dealings before the election -- wasn't it suspicious and shouldn't Mueller look into that? GG said if Mueller hasn't gone there, Congress should.

He also pointed out major anti-Russian steps during the current administration -- arming Ukranian enemies of Russia, which Obama did not do, pestering Europe to stop buying Russian gas -- economically huge -- and seeking to destroy Russian ally in Venezuela. The Russian Manchurian Candidate angle is still a movie, not reality.

Right, emptywheel's take on that is:

We'll see.

The thing is, you can sketch out some pretty gross scenarios that are not "collusion or coordination". For example: suppose Russia meets with the Trump campaign and are like "FYI, we are going to do the election crimes against Clinton. We're giving some **** to WikiLeaks, they'll probably publish it, that's their jam. Hey, any chance we can talk about ending sanctions if you get elected?". And the campaign is like "OK, thanks, sure we can talk about that" and thereafter coordinates with WikiLeaks around what is getting released when. That is not "coordination with the Russian government" technically, there's no explicit cooperation or quid pro quo, but it's clearly not the sort of thing you want going on. There are many other potential layers here, for example, you would have to prove that the campaign knew they were dealing with agents of the Russian government and not independent hackers.

Right on cue, emptywheel has a piece on Greenwald taking Barr at face value.

Gross scenarios happenings in a US presidential election would truly be a stunning and historic development.

But I'm not sure what you mean by "we'll see" with respect to Stone. There aren't any more indictments coming resulting from Mueller's investigation. That means Stone hasn't been and won't be indicted for any Russian election crimes. If he had acted in a non-insane manner during the investigation he wouldn't have been indicted for anything at all as far as I can tell.

Oh you mean delivering some weapons to secure training facilities under the monitoring of US Soldiers? And then Ukraine stopped all cooperation with Mueller because of the weapons?

Yeah, so tough on Russia. Or more obstruction.

Yeah, that's the Greenwald playbook. After "there's no evidence x happened" fails, next comes either "liberals do it tooooo" or "this is merely the continuation of longstanding US policy".

We know Stone wasn't charged with conspiracy crimes, we don't know why. "Because there wasn't anything that even looked like a conspiracy" is one possible answer, but an unlikely one considering we know that Stone was in contact with both the Russians and WikiLeaks regarding the DNC leak. The reasons this didn't rise to the level of a crime aren't clear.

I'm just pointing out that you and other Russiagate conspiracy enthusiasts have moved the goalposts with impressive alacrity from rampant criminal wrongdoing by the Trump campaign to oh my, an unsavory thing happened in a US presidential election, someone fetch me my smelling salts. The former would be a big deal but forgive me for being unimpressed with the latter.

Maybe because there wasn't compelling evidence he broke the law? Which is generally why folks don't get charged with crimes? Just spitballing here.

Cliffs note for those of you that don't see the irony here.... the witches were 100% accurate six times :-)

Hasn't panned out because the clock expired? I don't understand this narrative still. There's still plenty of smoke.

I've heard GG point to these several times as well. Trump has split loyalties. You're not stopping our oil oligarchs in this country no matter who you are. For everyone of those "proofs" on Trump somehow being tough on Russia, mind you, this is a country who is on a huge offensive like we haven't seen in quite a long time, I can name 3x that amount where Trump has shown more loyalty to Russian positions than U.S. positions. Handing back Russian compounds, changing the Republican platform on Ukraine support, pushing back on Russian sanctions, not making any effort to secure our elections. There's actually a pretty long list here.

I think trump is more like an unwitting asset than a Russian Manchurian candidate.

I'll add..

How is it that Trump is steering a deal to do a Moscow Tower at the same time he’s about to get his party’s nomination. He so wanted that deal that he became compromised both in his business and private behavior (see the Steele dossier). This is classic intelligence “tradecraft”. He meets with Putin five times with no aides and tears up the notes. The look on Kislyak and Lavrov’s faces after a meeting with DT in the WH in Jan 17, was unbelievable.

But the final straw for me was when he announces out this chaos of the wall funding, that he’s pulling out of Syria, on the same day Putin gives his annual address to the Russian people, and he also announces the dropping of sanctions against Oleg Darapaska, the aluminum magnate who was Manafort’s client. And he ends up appeasing Erogan, as a two-fer, to get him to back off on the Koshoggi killing. And when Vlad congratulates him, and raises him one to also pull out of Afghanistan, DT adds that to list of to do's. Mattis then quits in protest.

There's so much he's compromised by, I sometimes have to slap myself to make sure I'm really believing my eyes.

But we really don’t know because Barr said no collusion

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You are right, it does look bad. But none of that is illegal, not when the President does it. And if the President wants to secretly meet with Putin in a highly suspicious manner over and over again, that is his executive privilege, nothing Bobby can do about and what was discussed between these two fine leaders is none of his goddamn buiness. You see, while it was once thought that shame and embarrassment would prevent a President from doing such things, shamelessness is Trump's superpower.

Similar to having your campaign work with Russian nationals who "happen to be friends with Putin" while you are negotiating a massive Moscow real estate deal. And then lying about it and covering it up, over and over and over again.

Yes, shame and a basic sense of deceny would prevent any decent person from doing that, much less someone fit to be President. But show me the law that says its illegal. There isn't one? Haha, **** you then. And you are a fraud and scam artist for bringing it to people's attention and "freaking out" about it.

You might think that a person, especially one who is focused on the abuses of the global elite, might find all of this out in the open corruption to be highly disturbing.

But if you were very smart, like our "leftist libertarians" here, you would find it highly amusing and laugh worthy. You would find it an occaision to mock those who thought there would be "teh election crimes" preventing this. You silly liberals, ever heard of the beautiful Citizens United decision our judges gave us???? Free speech mother****ers! Told you I'm a libertarian, right?

You might even find it an occaision to work with Trump to destroy your common enemy, the dreaded center left! At least Trump is blatant and in your face with his open corruption, a breath of fresh air in a way.

And like Trump, the "left libertarian" is massively insecure, egomaniacal, and has a bottomless need for attention. Yes, when you think about it, an alliance between the two to attack those who failed to give them the praise and recognition they rightfully deserve makes all the sense in the world.

Yeah this is basically just the "I'm not touching you!" thing that annoying kids do. I bet ikes used that move all the time. And I mean as an adult.

Maggie Habermanovich

The idea that Mueller was going to find an irrefutable smoking gun and there would be a Nixonian moment where republicans turned against him was always pure fantasy. That being said, Barr's summary is tantamount to a cover-up of plenty of bad stuff, but Trump and his supporters will cry fake news and "collusion isn't a crime" whenever the facts actually do come to light.

Democrats should take it as a blessing in disguise to ditch the idea of impeachment, keep up with the investigations of his taxes and businesses and focus on the ISSUES in 2020 and win the presidency, senate and keep the house.

It's always a bit hard to determine why the press constantly capes for right wing interests at moments like these. I think there are three plausible explanations:

1. the press is largely educated/elite/rich, entrenched, white, male dominated, especially at the editorial and corporate level, so there might be some natural baked in right wing biases for this kind of pose. You know, the standard idea here that it's patriarchal and they want their tax cuts and the status quo benefits them and so they're going naturally go to bat for the party and ideologues that perpetuate the systemic things (tax schemes, regulations, social mores, etc.) they benefit from
2. if not that, then perhaps editors and journalists, while internalizing that right wing spin is ludicrous, often doubt themselves or are fearful of being hectored by aggressive right wing pundits and Fox News, or are influenced by the success of the right-wing media ecosystem, and effectively -- in the end -- they assume a right-wing bent in their audience and cater to it (e.g., "it makes money" or various explanations that center around economic or professional incentives to be patsies for right wing stoogery even if in their heart of hearts they know they're stanning for nonsense)
3. actually they're just lazy, hapless idiots who don't know any better, and so they are easily duped by right-wing cons, effectively the trope from Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner where they're all just stenographers who churn out the simplest interpretations available to them so they can get home and watch Netflix or whatever

I think it's often a frothy mix of the three factors, really, and not one is dominant but all three combine to give unscrupulous right wingers lots of leverage over the press.

Wrt your last paragraph, I vaguely remember reading about Trump bragging about something to that effect. Obviously he didn’t provide any kind of analysis, but he instinctively knew he could manipulate them.

I think point one is wrong, or at least a much smaller contributing factor than the other two. To the extent that clicks/likes translate to money, money is the dominating factor. I don’t think it’s necessarily a conscious decision by individual journalists or whatever, but the system/ media environment is set up in such a way that it self-selects for these types of god-awful takes that, while horrible, generate interest/clicks, ie revenue, much better than more objective, accurate takes do. Social media platforms like Twitter allow people who produce these takes to stand out, and the gatekeepers to the institutions/media outlets don’t appear to have much interest other than maximizing revenue, so there you go.

for the "no obstruction" crowd:

When Trump asked Comey to "back off" the DOJ investigation, and then fired Comey for failing to do so, how did Trump not "influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law"?

The only answer I can think of is "President's prerogative", which immunizes any President from the application of this statute and therefor moots any investigation into it.

Kushner's meeting with Kislyak, in December 2016 (before Kusher had any US authority) looks like a clear fit here

Trump's pre-inauguration meetings with various Russian oligarchs might be more questionable, depending on how much one considers a centralized economy's oligarchs to be "agents" of that government.

at least, we have circumstantial evidence of the quid-pro-quo: Clinton/DNC "leaks" for pro-Russian foreign policy