President Trump’s latest explanation for the June 2016 campaign meeting with Russians at Trump Tower: It was to obtain dirt on his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and that’s “totally legal and done all the time in politics.” The Russia Meeting at Trump Tower Was to Discuss Adoption. Then It Wasn’t. How Accounts Have Shifted. The meeting and the administration’s response are a focus of the inquiry by the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. That inquiry is no doubt complicated by the constantly shifting explanations from nearly everyone involved. Here’s a breakdown. President Trump’s latest explanation for the June 2016 campaign meeting with Russians at Trump Tower: It was to obtain dirt on his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and that’s “totally legal and done all the time in politics.” How the Trump team’s story of the meeting changed over time: First, it was to discuss adoption.July 8, 2017 When first asked about the meeting, Donald Trump Jr. issued a statement saying the meeting was primarily about the adoption of Russian children. Then, to see someone who ‘might have information helpful to the campaign.’July 9, 2017 After The Times informed Donald Trump Jr. that it was preparing an article that would say the meeting also involved a discussion of potentially compromising material on Mrs. Clinton, he issued another statement flicking at that possibility. Later, to obtain information about an opponent.July 17, 2017 Mr. Trump defended the meeting in a tweet, saying “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That's politics!” Now, explicitly to ‘get information on an opponent which is totally legal and done all the time in politics.’ August 5, 2018 In a tweet, Mr. Trump solidified that the primary purpose of the meeting was to obtain political dirt on Mrs. Clinton. How the story of Mr. Trump’s involvement in the response changed over time: First, the team said Mr. Trump was not involved.July 12, 2017 Then, it said he weighed in but did not dictate the statement.Aug. 1, 2017 Then, he dictated it.Jan. 29, 2018 Still, the president maintains he did not know about the meeting.Aug. 5, 2018 Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer at the center of the meeting, initially said she attended in a private capacity. Later, she acknowledged she was an informant for a top Kremlin official.
Yes, the Durham investigation with Sussman has been in the headlines for months. However it was only after The Hill picked up the story late Monday morning about the filing did this particular story get much attention. Are you telling me that Newsmax, Fox and Oan covered the legal filing over the weekend?
The Clintons are totally corrupt. They rigged the democrat primary, they rigged the email server investigation, they tried to rig the general election. Of course, as always, they never go after Obama who was a Hillary enabler. It was his intelligence agencies who spied on Trump and there is no way in helll he did not know it was going on. The biggest shithead of all is Bernie Sanders who was screaming it was rigged. He found that it was actually rigged then as soon as it was it was time to endorse Hillary he did so without hesitation. I suppose Bernie was just surprised he was actually right because his track record is awful.
As I understand it, Sussman had access to DNS records for security analysis reasons. He was providing services to the EOP. When Russian phones popped up on the DNS Sussman kicked it over to the CIA. Duh. Now Durham is saying there are 2 degrees of separation between Sussman and Hillary Clinton, some tech exec named Joffe, so Sussman should have reported her as a client. Maybe, maybe not. Sussman claims he was working on his own merits through the EOP directly. That is a bit too cloudy to sort of parse out from this far out but Sussman is only charged for failure to disclose and even that evidence is an unrecorded first person statement with zero witnesses or recording or records - and I wouldn’t be surprised if Sussman skates on the charge either. It’s weak. Kind of dicey of Durham, especially because these records are a clearinghouse that go between 2014 and 2017. It’s a stretch to say the least.
One perspective... Fox News is mangling Special Counsel John Durham's latest Trump-Russia filing https://theweek.com/donald-trump/10...unsel-john-durhams-latest-trump-russia-filing On Friday night, Special Counsel John Durham filed a pretrial motion on possible conflicts of interest by the lawyer representing Michael Sussmans, a cybersecurity lawyer Durham has charged with allegedly lying to the FBI. But he also "slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump," Charlie Savage writes in Monday's New York Times. Trump and allied media organizations say Durham's filing, as Fox News' Brooke Singman put it in a widely cited early report, shows that lawyers for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign "paid a technology company to 'infiltrate' servers belonging to Trump Tower, and later the White House, in order to establish an 'inference' and 'narrative' to bring to government agencies linking Donald Trump to Russia." Those claims were repeated Monday on Fox News' daytime news and prime time opinions shows. "But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news," the conclusions "based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation," Savage writes. Gabriel Malor, a lawyer who writes for several conservative media outlets, lays out a few specific points on Durham's filing, including that it never uses the word "infiltrate" or accuses the Clinton campaign of ordering Sussmans or anyone else to pass the tech company's analysis of DNS data to the FBI or CIA. Savage summarizes the competing narratives from Durham and the cybersecurity experts who compiled the contested DNS data, adding that the right-wing mischaracterizations "involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims." Lawyer Marcy Wheeler, who writes at Emptywheel, has a lot more detail about Durham's filings and Kash Patel's involved role in this story. And Wheeler, a critic of Durham's Trump-Russia meta-investigation, has a theory about why he dropped this information into an unrelated motion just days after the statute of limitations appears to have expired. "As I keep noting, Durham is obviously trying to pull his fevered conspiracy theories into an actual charged conspiracy, one tying together the DNC, Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele, and Hillary herself," she writes. "If he succeeds, these flimsy charges (against both Sussmann and [Igor] Danchenko) become stronger, but if he doesn't, he's going to have a harder time proving motive and materiality at trial."
So what was The Times' excuse? The revelations, according to national security and legal policy correspondent Charlie Savage, "tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time." So because readers might need to think about what they're consuming from a news outlet rather than just uncritically accepting what an outlet tells them at face value, according to Savage, means "raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims." https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spenc...nt-cover-this-weeks-durham-bombshell-n2603300