***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[IATT]

Could you imagine being Bill Clinton right now though.

You lie to cover up an affair and as a result an investigator your AG appointed to investigate on you and a completely different matter (that you were cleared on) makes it his mission to disgrace you and get you impeached. The GOP makes it seems you completely ruined the office of the president, tries to impeach you, and it puts your millions in the hole.

Then Trump comes along and he gets to skate on worst just because his AG said he was paranoid when he was breaking the law.

Bruh, I would be next level livid. It gotta be on sight if he ever sees Barr in public.

 

[Sharpshoeter13]

Trump did grabbed ‘em by the ***** tho so it’s better than a measley bj.

Trump 1, Libcucks 0

 

[whywesteppin]

Trump back to crying about the Mueller report this morning.

 

[aepps20]

Good MORNING LIBBIE SCUMS. Yesterday was a devastating day for you. MOLER'S report said "NO COLLUSION".

 

[Sharpshoeter13]

Trump back to crying about the Mueller report this morning.

“Fabricated and totally untrue”

 

[blastercombo]

Again he uses the term haters. Man I can’t wait till dude is on life support so I can laugh

 

[aepps20]

All the Moler report showed was all of the real cool and legal things happening at the WHITE HOUSE.

 

[Belgium]

Another discrepancy between what Barr has said and what the Mueller report says. Surprising.
If you look at certain aspects of the obstruction investigation, Mueller provides no exculpatory evidence in some cases.
Trump's order to fire Mueller, Trump's second call further pressuring McGahn to carry out that order, Trump's instruction to Lewandowski to pressure Sessions into drastically limiting the scope of the investigation to only "future election interference", Trump's order to McGahn telling him to deny press reports that Trump ordered McGahn to get Mueller fired, Trump's order to McGahn telling him to create a false record (for who?) stating Trump never ordered Mueller fired, ...

None of those incidents were accompanied by any exculpatory evidence and are the most blatant acts of obstruction in the report. The House charged Nixon with obstruction of justice in the articles of impeachment for at least one of the actions Trump took here, namely ordering the Special Counsel fired despite repeatedly being advised by the likes of McGahn, Rosenstein, the DOJ, Bannon, ... that there was no just cause. Knowing he had absolutely no just cause, Trump still ordered Mueller fired just days after learning his personal conduct was under investigation for obstruction of justice.

Something to remember is that Trump refused to answer any questions on obstruction, thus his word means very little in light of the numerous witnesses. WH Counsel McGahn's account for example is corroborated by contemporaneous notes, McGahn's own statements in his interviews with Mueller and his chief of staff Annie Donaldson.

 

[nawghtyhare]

All the Moler report showed was all of the real cool and legal things happening at the WHITE HOUSE.

I’m amazed
how everyday ur still able to
Come up with these posts
Kudos sir

 

[aepps20]

I’m amazed
how everyday ur still able to
Come up with these posts
Kudos sir

Thank you. To be honest, some days it is tough to stay in character but I push through. These Magafell idiots make me sick but comedy is the best remedy.

 

[getback]

Again he uses the term haters. Man I can’t wait till dude is on life support so I can laugh

and capitalizes the H

 

[AEA18]

Too me it looks like Mueller is heavily hinting that Trump should be impeached and once out of office they can put him in jail.

Jail???

I thought treason was punishable by death?

 

[RustyShackleford]

Trump back to crying about the Mueller report this morning.

The Mueller Report is untrue, filled with fabricated statements....The Mueller Report totally clears me.

 

[frenchbreadbuilds]

What’s crazy is that a year ago I didn’t think a report that didn’t directly land Trump in prison could be so damaging. Even if Trump some how pulls off a win he’s not gonna be able to do it from a “your sh*t stink more than mine” faux plausible deniability pedastool. And we haven’t even gotten to debate season. He’s going to have to answer to this report alllll the way until Election Day. I still think Trump can win re-election but it just got that much harder.

 

[-Red-]

A little change of pace. This is an op-ed piece I helped write that came out of a working conference I co-organized last spring on gangs and violence in Chicago. I'm the second author.

https://www.chicagoreporter.com/chi...-violence-intervention-strategies-should-too/

Here's a link to the actual conference report if anyone might be interested:

https://greatcities.uic.edu/wp-cont...acturing_of_Gangs_and_Violence_in_Chicago.pdf

 

[IATT]

 

[boris]

Trump back to crying about the Mueller report this morning.

"Notes" lol.

 

[americangenius]

@gry60

Yeah, people attacked me on here when I said both sides are trash but what are they doing about any of this?

Other countries have riots, overthrow their government, impeach them, throw the corrupt in jail.

What do we get? “Let’s wait he won’t be president forever.”

Exactly, all the reps people went out and voted for absolutely no reason. No one is willing to do anything.
Years of wasted debate, videos, and article posting for absolutely nothing to get done. Mueller just wasted more than a year and millions of dollars to result in a report that says "I'm not sure, you should probably look into this but I'll leave it up to you guys"

Politics in this country are a joke, both parties have been exposed as clowns.

 

[boris]

What’s crazy is that a year ago I didn’t think a report that didn’t directly land Trump in prison could be so damaging. Even if Trump some how pulls off a win he’s not gonna be able to do it from a “your sh*t stink more than mine” faux plausible deniability pedastool. And we haven’t even gotten to debate season. He’s going to have to answer to this report alllll the way until Election Day. I still think Trump can win re-election but it just got that much harder.

From day one, Team Trump has spun and mischaracterized so much of the investigation to control the narrative. I want to believe he'll have to answer for all this bull****, but I'm worried people will just latch on to the propaganda.

 

[harlemtothebronx]

Feels like many already have.

 

[frenchbreadbuilds]

From day one, Team Trump has spun and mischaracterized so much of the investigation to control the narrative. I want to believe he'll have to answer for all this bull****, but I'm worried people will just latch on to the propaganda.

While I agree that many of his core supporters will defend him no matter what I’ve noticed a change in tone of conversation in some of the online political spaces I keep up with. Even with the hardcore supporters. The tone has shifted from “Trump is a true American who cares about American values”
To “we knew what we were getting”. One thing about having a white collar job in a blue collar industry is that I get some insight into white working class Middle class America. There are genuinely people that were able to pull a lever from trump simply because race and social issues dont show up in their lives. It’s something they hear about on tv but never see. It’s ignorance in its purest form. And we can talk about how that means white supremacy is working as intended in another conversation. But with that said, Trump is becoming more and more unpalatable for a lot people. And he has been since the 2018 elections. It is it enough to keep him out of office? I’m not sure. But the plausible deniability shtick in terms of his character is getting harder and harder to maintain.

 

[Belgium]

During Barr's press conference, he used the word collusion a lot in spite of Mueller's report explicitly stating they did not set out to investigate "collusion" because it is not an applicable legal term, instead they looked at conspiracy with the IRA and GRU interference.
Specifically, the report said this:
"Collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. For those reasons, the Office’s focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law."

The report however does contain evidence of blatant collusion, which is again not necessarily a crime. It confirmed a number of things about Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Konstantin Kilimnik and Oleg Deripaska. The following is a clear examination of the evidence regarding the interactions between the above individuals.

In his report, Mueller confirms that Mueller offered private briefings on the progress of the campaign to Oleg Deripaska. Trump's Treasury Dept sanctioned Oleg Deripaska in April 2018 for a variety of "malign activities", while also noting that Deripaska "said he does not separate himself from the Russian state."

Here we see Oleg Deripaska on August 9 2016 conversating with Yevgeny Prigozhin ('Putin's chef'), who was later indicted by Mueller as part of the Internet Research Agency conspiracy.

Here we see Oleg Deripaska on a yacht with the Russian Deputy Prime Minister, also in 2016.

Konstantin Kilimnik served as a liaison for Oleg Deripaska, and has worked with Manafort for many years. Previous court filings, most notably Alex Van Der Zwaan's case, noted that Rick Gates knew and had told others (Van Der Zwaan) that Kilimnik was a former GRU officer. That particular filing also stated that Kilimnik was assessed to have active Russian intelligence ties throughout 2016.
To state the obvious, Oleg Deripaska practically is Russian intelligence given how close he is to the Russian government. And Kilimnik worked for him during the campaign.

Mueller's report goes a step further, stating "Gates suspected that Kilimnik was a ‘spy,’ a view that he shared with Manafort."

And yet despite the knowledge that Kilimnik was a former GRU officer, as well as viewing Kilimnik as a spy, Manafort and Gates engaged in the following conduct:

There were reports of emails between Kilimnik and Manafort in which Manafort says "we can accommodate" if Deripaska requires "private briefings."
Mueller's report now confirms that Manafort did indeed offer Oleg Deripaska private briefings on the progress of the campaign. The report leaves out whether those briefings did indeed occur, but they were certainly offered.

Additionally, the report confirms that the polling data Manafort and Gates gave to Kilimnik was internal Trump campaign polling data from pollster Tony Fabrizio.
The report states that Manafort and Gates shared polling data with Kilimnik for several months. The sharing of polling data continued even after Manafort left the campaign, though Gates did so much less frequent and by that time it was mostly public polling.

The report states in spite of both men's view that Kilimnik was a spy, both Manafort and Gates knew that Kilimnik was going to deliver the polling data to Oleg Deripaska, in addition to pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarchs.

Furthermore, on August 2, 2016, Paul Manafort met in NY at the Grand Havana Club. Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a “backdoor” way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine; both believed the plan would require Trump to win the election to succeed.

The report states they also discussed the status of the Trump Campaign and Manafort’s strategy for winning Democratic votes in Midwestern states at this meeting. By that time, Manafort and Gates had been sharing Tony Fabrizio's internal polling data for months. According to the Special Counsel's court filings in Manafort's case, Kilimnik was given a very detailed walkthrough of the data at this meeting.


Manafort lied about both of those topics to the prosecutors during his cooperation.
While Manafort was busy lying to the prosecutors, his attorney Kevin Downer was briefing the Trump defense on the prosecutors’ questioning.

The report also states the following:
“The evidence supports the inference that the president intended Manafort to believe he could receive a pardon, which would make cooperation with the government as a means of obtaining a lesser sentence unnecessary.”

And indeed, that is what Manafort did. While Trump dangled a pardon for Manafort, he sabotaged his own plea deal by lying repeatedly during his cooperation. In doing so, Manafort increased his sentence and added a bunch of additional charges to his record.

The report states that president Trump made negative remarks about Manafort in private but in public only praised him. When the jury in Manafort’s trial was deliberating, Trump publicly praised Manafort and said amongst other things that he was being treated very unfairly.
After his felony convictions, Trump once more praised Manafort, this time as a “brave man” because he “refused to break, unlike Michael Cohen.”
Manafort was under indictment for obstruction of justice at the time Trump praised him for refusing to cooperate.
Even after Manafort pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice in coordination with Konstantin Kilimnik, Trump kept up the public praise and continued dangling a pardon.

 

[dwalk31]

You're either willfully distorting the definition of "exoneration" or you slept through your introductory lecture on prosecutorial discretion and Blackstone's ratio.

It took nearly forty years for terrorists who committed the infamous Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing to face justice.

After a twenty month investigation, the FBI's Birmingham field office requested permission from J. Edgar Hoover to brief the local U.S. attorney and state prosecutor. Their requests were denied.

(Their investigation included information supplied by active informants in the KKK. As a relevant side note: Gary Thomas Rowe, a longtime informant, admittedly murdered a Black man during a 1963 riot, beat a photographer covering the Freedom Riders, was involved in the murder of Viola Liuzzo, participated in the bombing of Dr. King's room at the Gaston Motel, and was never charged for any of these crimes. Witch hunt?)

By the FBI's own account, "By 1965, we had serious suspects—namely, Robert E. Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash, and Thomas E. Blanton, Jr., all KKK members—but witnesses were reluctant to talk and physical evidence was lacking. Also, at that time, information from our surveillances was not admissible in court. As a result, no federal charges were filed in the ‘60s."

According to your logic, in 1965 the FBI thus exonerated "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss, Bobby Cherry, Herman Cash, and Thomas Blanton, Jr.



I refuse to believe that you're this ignorant when it comes to the law. As such, I’m of the opinion that you're being deliberately obtuse to antagonize other users.

I will remind you - again - that such behavior is considered "trolling" by any meaningful definition.

This is the precipice. You have been fairly warned. Proceed over the edge at your own peril.

You are conflating issues. These cases were before my time, but based on what you wrote was there a report? Was there a claim of no further indictments? Did the investigation find that there was no underlying crime and then say that there was insufficient evidence of obstruction of justice? If you feel that calling that exoneration is an exaggeration, cool. What would you call it? It is certainly closer to exoneration than guilt of any crime. I operate under the presumption of innocence. As I have said numerous times, the erosion of that has historically been devastating.

This is not the first time you have publicly said something to me about the nature of my posts. You did it in the post where you said I was sea-lioning. I did not comment. But I am not going to be bullied. I have been on Niketalk for over a decade. And have helped numerous Niketalkers obtain sneakers, get into venues, etc. If my political leanings cause you to give my posts more scrutiny than you do to other posters then that is your discretion and you can proceed as you must.

But make no mistake, what occurs in this thread by other posters in reference to me is deliberate antagonization that is, in fact, ignored. By me and others. If there is going to be any sort of penalty for such behavior I hope that you do it in a fair, meaningful, and even-handed way. If that cost my membership, then so be it.

 

[big van vader]

Democrats piss me off to no end.

Imagine if this were President Hillary Clinton. Like really imagine it. Republicans know they wouldn't get the House votes and guess what? They wouldn't care.

Until Democrats stop being cowards and playing by some rulebook that was trampled by Republicans long ago, nothing is gonna change.

 

[dacomeup]