The report said that there was insufficient evidence to establish conspiracy (as defined in their legal terms) between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The report DID NOT say the same about obstruction of justice by Trump. They didsay that if they were confident that they had evidence that exonerated him, they would have said so. BUT THEY DID NOT. They were bound by rules against indicting him or (according to Mueller) even saying that the evidence suggested that Trump obstructed justice.
For anyone who has zero deductive ability, this means that the evidence that was reported by the investigation on obstruction, was substantial and may very well have been indictable except for the stance that a sitting POTUS cannot be indicted for anything.
I prefer the term “Russian Obligate President” since it best describes the overwhelming circumstantial evidence.
You may not like the messenger but the evidence is the evidence no matter who’s discussing it. So back to the Mueller Report itself:
Inside the Mueller report, a sophisticated Russian interference campaign
PBS NewsHour
Published on Jun 3, 2019
The 448-page Mueller report contains copious detail about how Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, both by using social media to influence American voters with misinformation and by hacking into the Clinton campaign’s computers. Russian operatives also connected with WikiLeaks to release the stolen material. Lisa Desjardins and William Brangham share some of the key findings.
The report said that there was insufficient evidence to establish conspiracy (as defined in their legal terms) between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The report DID NOT say the same about obstruction of justice by Trump.
So, either, they were successful at obstructing the investigation, or they are not guilty and had no reason to try to obstruct it but they did try. Hmm, which one makes more sense?
PS: CC, I caught the tail end of that PBS News Hour piece. Thanks for the link.
Obstruction of the process of investigating possibility of criminality is a crime, precisely because it can be effective in covering up the evidence that would successfully expose the crime.
In the Mueller report, there was not a finding of “no collusion”. There was not even a finding of “no conspiracy”. The report ONLY said that they did not have ENOUGH evidence to establish conspiracy. At the same time, the report published massive evidence of obstruction.
What was all that obstruction about? Was it successful in covering up evidence of conspiracy? I don’t know. You don’t know.
As far as Dems being “limp” re: doing something effective about Trump having obstructed justice, I guess you could say that. But it is because, Trump, currently, IS ABOVE THE LAW. An impeachment cannot currently result in his removal from office because 67 votes in the Senate are not even close to being available (and they may never be for Trump).
The Dem House, should, however, imo, immediately begin using the power of inherent authority to inflict major daily fines on each person who defies a subpoena to testify before them.
In Clinton’s view, the election outcome was not the result of social, political and economic developments within society. Rather, it was determined by two conspiracies. The first—FBI Director James Comey’s intervention into the election campaign—has a degree of credibility. The second—Vladimir Putin’s alleged effort to subvert the election—is a fabrication. But neither of these components of Clinton’s theory can explain why 63 million people voted for her opponent.
Despite ubiquitous and pervasive propaganda, to the contrary, from the outset, Russians did subvert the 2016 election. They didn’t need to change 63 million votes in order to do so. A couple of 1ooK or so voters worth of well targeted propaganda was sufficient.
Why do you think businesses have advertising campaigns? It is not their stance that everyone will be reached or influenced by their advertising. It is rather that they are sure that a portion of customers will be influenced to buy their product or retreat from their main competitors product. Iow, it works.
I read something somewhere and just assumed I’d see it again, but haven’t yet. It was about the timing of the hacking of the DNC. Not long after Russia got into the servers, Bannon changed his tactics and started going hard after Michigan and maybe Pennsylvania and Ohio. Clinton wasn’t going there and wasn’t spending much money there. It’s of course possible that they just figured that out based on their own recon, but it’s also possible they saw her playbook. If anyone sees that, please post it.
This story is only about the facebook targeted campaign influencing, iow, it does not include all of their other substantial and systematic influence efforts.
Trump tower and miss universe in Russia is your smoking gun
Not sure what you mean by that, but it's more about Trump saying he has "no business in Russia" while he is negotiating a deal for building a building in Russia. After you tell me that's no big deal, tell me why he lied.
WASHINGTON — In the years after Republicans swept state and congressional elections in 2010, legislatures in 25 states — all but a handful of them dominated by the party — enacted laws that made it harder to register and vote, from imposing ID requirements and curbing voter registration drives to rolling back early voting periods. …
well, and you know how it goes, one thing leads to another.
you know there’s a bunch more. Besides come on be real, Trump is all slick ad stock, no substance there. The Apprentice, and the Birther Hate Campaign, made his political career, no reading or thinking necessary. A Hollywood guy for a Hollywood nation, ad run all the way.
ISSIE LAPOWSKY - 10.26.17
WHAT DID CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA REALLY DO FOR TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN?
. . . Cambridge Analytica was paid $5.9 million by the Trump campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings, $5 million of which went toward buying television ads, with the remainder going to pay Oczkowski and his team. But that wasn’t the only work Cambridge did for the campaign. Parscale says Cambridge’s head of digital, Molly Schweikert, managed an advertising budget of roughly $12 million on behalf of Parscale’s firm, Giles-Parscale. It’s a sizable, but still small slice of the $94 million Giles-Parscale was paid in total to purchase the campaign’s ads.
The Cambridge staff helped the campaign identify which voters in the RNC’s data file were most likely to be persuadable, meaning they were undecided but looked likely to swing toward Trump. They also created lists of voters who were most likely to become donors. In August 2016, a Trump aide told me Cambridge was critical to helping the campaign raise $80 million in the prior month, after a primary race that had been largely self-funded by Trump. This was the only period during which Oczkowski’s staff relied on Cambridge’s data, because the RNC was just beginning to share its data with the Trump team.
Cambridge went on to conduct hundreds of thousands of voter surveys for the Trump campaign to better understand the likely Trump voter and sent a full-time staffer to the New York headquarters, who could relay these findings to senior staff, including Parscale. . . .
Player it’s easy to dismiss - but once you start looking at all the evidence it get more difficult.
Targeted Ads Don’t Just Make You More Likely to Buy — They Can Change How You Think About Yourself
Rebecca Walker Reczek
Christopher Summers
Robert Smith
APRIL 04, 2016
… But, for a time, Fabrizio was at the helm of Trump’s polling operation, and it was his job to share polling information with Trump’s campaign manager. The contested swing states that Trump narrowly—and surprisingly—won, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, were also places where both the Trump campaign and Russia’s Internet Research Agency focussed their efforts. Herein lies at least one answer to the question of why Russia would want the Trump campaign’s polling data: it potentially offered demographic targets for Russia’s bots and propaganda.
In her analysis of five million paid, issue-based Facebook ads—which covered such hot-button issues as gun rights, abortion, gay rights, immigration, terrorism, and race—during a six-week period of the 2016 Presidential campaign, the University of Wisconsin professor Young Mie Kim discovered that “the most highly targeted states—especially Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—generally overlap with the battleground states with razor thin margins.”
These were ads placed by two hundred and twenty-eight groups, many of which were later linked to the Internet Research Agency. Kim also found that these efforts were calibrated to appeal to certain demographics. Low-income white voters, for example, were targeted with ads focussing on immigration and race.
An even more comprehensive analysis, by Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project, which was released last month, shows just how pervasive Russia’s inflammatory targeting was. “On Facebook, the five most shared and the five most liked posts focused on divisive issues, with pro-gun ownership content, anti-immigration content pitting immigrants against veterans, content decrying police violence against African Americans, and content that was anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, anti-Obama, and pro-Trump,” the researchers wrote.
The posts developed by the Internet Research Agency “tended to mimic conservative views against gun control and for increased regulation of immigrants. In some cases, terms such as ‘parasites’ were used to reference immigrants and others expressed some tolerance of extremist views.” These posts increased almost seven-fold between 2015—before Manafort joined Trump’s team—and 2016, when he, and the pollsters he hired, were guiding the campaign. …
