This week in the ongoing Trump Russia/Corruption Timeline we have my new favorite youtuber Steve Shives— whom I intend to make a regular feature — and his quite awesome Facepalm Five which does a far better job of reporting on Trump’s trip to Europe this past week than literally ever other professional media outlet, everywhere.
While the battle over whether to Impeach or not, and trying to get testimony and documents from the Trump administration rages on — we have to take note that those over on the wing-nut right are very openly living in opposite land. Case in point: While Kellyanne Conway is claiming the Mueller Reports is the “definitive final document” on the Russia investigation — even though she wrongly denies that Mueller specifically said that the OLC rules prevented him from Indicting Trump and that he had therefore referred the matter to Congress — on the other hand we have Rep. Mark Meadows yet again went on Hannity to proclaim that “More we learn about the Mueller report — the worse it gets” with Ken Starr chirping in on the side.
Appearing Thursday on the Fox News Channel with Sean Hannity, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) slammed special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on now-debunked collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, stating the “deeper we dive, the more problems we find.”
SEAN HANNITY: I don’t like what Comey did, Congressman. I don’t like the lies that are being exposed in the Mueller report. I don’t like the selective editing. I don’t like a lot of this, but it doesn’t surprise me. Look at his team.
REP. MARK MEADOWS: It doesn’t surprise me. In fact, the best day the Democrats had was just a few days ago when Bob Mueller did his press conference when he was leaving DOJ. That’s the very best day that Democrats have had and will have. I can tell you as we start to look through the Mueller report, multiple omissions.
HANNITY: Exculpatory omissions.
REP. MEADOWS: And even beyond that, you had John Solomon reporting tonight there are other material facts that are just not accurate in the Mueller Report. We’ve been preparing that he may come back. Jim Jordan and I are getting prepared, and I tell you the deeper we dive, the more problems we find.
Meadows and Hannity are following on with John Dowd’s bogus claims that his phone call with Michael Flynn’s attorney was “deceptively edited” by the Mueller report — which since we now have the audio of that phone call is obviously bullshit.
What they’re claiming is are “exculpatory omissions” in the Mueller report includes the argument — yet again — that Hillary Clinton paid for the Steele Dossier which was supposedly full of false Russian disinformation which was used to start an illegal FBI investigation and spying on the Trump campaign.
First of all, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS has testified that his oppo research project on Trump was originally being paid for by the Conservative Washington Free Beacon and only when that contract ended as Trump appeared to be winning the primaries did he reach out to Perkins Coie and ask them if they wanted to continue funding the project. The DNC didn’t know anything about this and neither did the Clinton campaign — who were still in the middle of the primary and didn’t have “control” of the DNC at that point — plus Christopher Steele and his company Orbis didn’t know, or care, who was paying the bills, so the conspiracy theory that this was all a “Set up” spearheaded by Clinton somehow is just plain false.
Instead of reporting their findings to Perkins Coie and the DNC, Steele decided what he found was significant enough to take to the FBI, when their normal investigative process is to keep things under wraps until they come to a conclusion. He grew frustrated with that situation and took his information to the press, and the FBI response was to terminate him as a source for that — but they did use his data to get a FISA warrant on Carter Page who had previously been recruited by Russia intelligence operatives 2013, at least one of whom had been prosecuted and sent to prison, so they had multiple reasons for looking closely at Page, particularly since he made two trips to Russia during 2016.
The press reports generated by Steele actually caused Page to be dropped by the Trump campaign, so in the end the FBI didn’t have their FISA warrant until he wasn’t in the campaign anymore — which was actually Steele’s fault. They were also looking into Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and George Papadopoulos — whom Meadows in the above video claims was “totally innocent”.
Innocent of what? Being told by Prof. Mifsud about the Clinton emails two months before Wikileaks began to release them and not informing the FBI, and then lying to them twice about his contacts with Russians when the FBI came to ask, which is why he went to prison?
And then, we’re to believe the supposed “Deep State” of Comey, McCabe, Strozk and Lisa Page inside the FBI didn’t say a thing to the press about the investigation until months after the election. So that’s the grand plan to cause a coup against Trump? It’s completely non-functional. It’s a pack of lies and distortions of the facts.
This is the Trump defense argument — everybody was biased against him and it was all just a “plot” to take him down that everyone seemed completely incompetent at implementing based on a allegedly “debunked” dossier which I went through in detail last month and found that 73% of it’s allegations have either been fully or partially confirmed by Mueller and press reports.
41 out of the 56 allegations — 73 percent — have been fully or partially confirmed, while 11 remain unconfirmed — 19 percent — and 4 have been totally or at least partially debunked — 7 percent — based on my analysis. If the 11 unconfirmed items can eventually be verified — which is doubtful since most of those items were matters of gossip, opinion, motivation or point of view — then the would the entire dossier would top out at 92 percent accurate. Steele himself has said that his dossier is probably 70 -90 percent correct, so that seems just about right on the money.
Most of what Steele alleged is correct and even where he’s partially wrong, he’s wrong in ways that show that his source was largely legitimate. His allegation that Carter Page had conversations about a sale of 19.5% of Rosneft stock was confirmed by Page himself when he testified to Congress and there actually was a sale of exactly 19.5% of that stock several months later. The only thing wrong was that Page claimed he heard about the sale from a different Rosneft exec than the one Steele noted, and the only fully debunked claim made by Steele according to Mueller was the “trip to Prague by Michael Cohen” in order to arrange a payoff for hackers hired by the Trumpster to find Hillary emails. Except that Cohen did commandeered $50,000 from the campaign for “It services” which has never been fully explained, a few weeks later a Russian hacker was arrested in Prague, and two associates of Michael Flynn, Barbara Ledeen and Peter W. Smith did hire hackers to find copies of Hillary’s emails from her server. And lastly, Trump's bodyguard Keith Schiller testified that Emin Agalarov did offer to provide a pair of hookers to Trump while he was staying at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow. Schiller said he told Emin “No, we don’t do that”, but he also didn’t remain in front of Trump hotel room all night to make sure they didn't come back later and make the offer directly to Trump. So, even where Steele allegations remain unproven, they are amazingly close to what has been confirmed, and there’s no way Steele could have known about the hookers unless somebody else besides Schiller knew about them.
Although Republicans tried to turn the John Dean hearing on the Mueller report this week into a sketch comedy farce, there was still significant testimony by former US Attorneys Joyce White Vance and Barbara McQuade (at 56:00) both stated that they could easily be able to prosecute and convict Trump for obstruction of Justice based on the information provided in the Mueller report.
Washington — Former Detroit U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade told lawmakers that President Donald Trump's conduct as described in special counsel Robert Mueller's report "constitutes multiple crimes of obstruction of justice."
"It's supported by evidence of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and I'm confident that if anyone other than a sitting president committed this conduct that person would be charged with crimes," McQuade said in testimony before Congress Monday.
"Why does that matter? The obstruction described in the report created a risk to our national security. It was designed to prevent investigators from learning all of the facts about an attack on our country by a hostile foreign adversary."
McQuade is one of the over 1000 former prosecutors have made this legal view.
No matter how Trumpsters try to deny the facts, no matter how they make up conspiracy theories about the Steele Dossier and imagine somehow that “George Papadopoulos was totally innocent” even though he totally went to prison — the facts are the Trump is a criminal, and he needs to go to jail.
Unfortunately, there was a helicopter crash in New York City while this testimony was taking place so most cable networks didn’t cover on live TV and has since only mostly covered the disruptive antics of various Republicans such as Jim Jordan who like Kellyanne Conway wrongly claimed that Deanhad no credibility because he “went to Prison” [except that he didn’t go to prison, he was held for 4 months in a safehouse of witnesses while testifying for Leon Jaworsky] and Matt Gaetz who wrongly claimed that Dean had made a “cottage industry out of calling Presidents worse than Nixon.” [Only when they actually are worse than Nixon. He never did a book bashing Reagan, HW Bush or Clinton.]
The best coverage of the Dean hearing, sadly, was on The View where Sonny Hostin pointed out the Dean identified at least 6 specific events which were parallel between the Watergate case and the Mueller report — which he said were “strikingly alike” — and that Special Counsel Mueller had “provided this committee with a roadmap to Impeachment” like the one provided by Leon Jaworski, while Meghan McCain repeated the same lame false talking points as Conway and Gaetz.
But now today Trump has falsely claimed that he “rebuffed” the overtures by Russia to aid his campaign.
During a press gaggle with reporters in the White House, Trump once again railed against the special counsel, whom he claimed was out to get him.
Trump added a new twist to his latest Mueller rant, however, by claiming that the special counsel’s report showed that his campaign was not interested in receiving help from the Russians in 2016.
“It said no collusion and no obstruction and no nothing,” the president said. “And, in fact, it said we actually rebuffed… Russia, that we actually pushed them back, we rebuffed them.”
Exactly when the frack did that happen? The report specifically said he and his campaign did exactly the opposite.
In fact, the Mueller report documents how the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit electorally” from Russia’s efforts to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Most infamously, Trump son Donald Trump Jr. said he would “love” to have Russians help the campaign obtain damaging information on Clinton, and he arranged a meeting with Russian nationals that included Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Meanwhile Mitch McConnell is blocking legislation intended to help protect future elections. These guys are fully of shit, totally and completely.
Here are the daily event details for the week:
June 6th —
June 7th —
June 8th—
June 9th —
June 10th —
- Rosenstein defends Barr’s “reasonable” handling of Meuller’s report. [Yeah, I don’t know what his problem is either, because Barr grossly distorted the facts.]
- Company owned by Kushner has taken in $90 Million from shady undisclosed sources.
- Rep. Peter King isn’t happy that Trump slammed Pelosi while overseas.
- NRA’s corruption scandal widens as it appears they’ve funnelled money to their board of directors.
- Trump again promotes the nutbag conspiracy theory that Tech Companies are “shadow banning” conservatives. [They fucking gave you the White House you dolt!]
- Nadler announces that they’ve reach a deal with the DOJ to gain access to all Mueller’s “most important files” including dozens of FBI 302 forms for all members of Judiciary in exchange for holding off on the Contempt charges against Barr.
- Pompeo offers his solution to Climate Change: “Move to different places.” [Yeah, that’s exactly what people in the Northern Triangle are doing since they can’t grow food anymore due to climate change.]
- Climate Denying WH Official William Happer who says that CO2 is a “Positive Chemical” was the person who blocked the State Dept. Intel office from testifying the “Possibly Catastrophic” effects of climate change. [Sure, it’s a fine chemical if you’re a tree, but not so good if you’re a person.]
- A Helicopter Crashes on top of a NY Skyscraper near Time's Square a diverts the news from John Dean’s testimony to House Judiciary.
- Detroit Police block a plot to create a “Charlottesville 2” during a pride parade.
- Giuliani suggests that Hillary Clinton was “worse than Joe McCarthy” — which is funny since McCarthy’s attorney was Roy Cohn and guess who Trump’s lawyer used to be?
- Trump says that John Dean is “Great, other than being a disbarred loser who went to Prison.” [Yeah, just like Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and soon — Roger Stone, except that Dean never went to prison, he was diverted by U.S. Marshalls to a safe house in Baltimore for four months while testifying for Leon Jaworski in the Halderman and Erlichman trials.] Trump’s lawyers file their appeal to halt access to his financial records. NYTimes reports that Trump told his aides to lie about his negative poll numbers. [But of course, he did] and he say’s he’ll “never resign like Nixon.” [Which Nixon said too, before he resigned.]
- House Republicans produce a sign with all the names that Trump can’t be called during the Dean Hearing: Abuser of Executive Privilege, Abuser of Power, Abuser of Office, Crook, Con Man, Criminal, Draft-Dodger, Demagogue, Misogynist, Racist, Sexual-Predator.
- GOP Judiciary Members spending the Dean hearing talking about anything except the Mueller report. Dean humiliates Jim Jordan by giving him a lesson on House parliamentary rules, then he points out how what’s described in the Mueller report is “strikingly like Watergate.”
- Former U.S. Attorneys Joyce White Vance and Barbara McQuade along with John Malcolm from the Heritage Foundation also testify with Dean. Vance and McQuade both state that they would prosecute and convict Trump for obstruction based on the information outlined in the Mueller report. McQuade: “The facts contained in that report would be sufficient to prove all of the elements necessary to charge multiple counts of obstruction of the evidence,” she explained. “And I would be willing to personally indict the case, and to try the case. I would have confidence that the evidence would be sufficient to obtain a guilty verdict, and to win on appeal.”
- Trump appoints Ken Cuccinelli as acting head of USCIS — which is probably not close to legal.
- Matt Gaetz gets ripped for his ridiculous trivial questioning of John Dean where he accused him of getting rich comparing different Presidents to Nixon and so is Jim Jordan for making a “certified ass of himself.”
- House Oversight is scheduled to vote to hold Barr in contempt on Wednesday (6/12), despite his deal with House Judiciary.
- Reports indicate that Kim Jong Un’s murdered half-brother may have been a CIA informant.
- Court rules that InfoWars has to pay $15,000 to the actual creator of Pepe the Frog.
- Kellyanne Conway claims “Unlike John Dean, I’m not going to jail for obstruction.” [Dean was held in a safe house for witnesses while testifying for Jaworski and never went to jail, but Don McGahn just might go to jail for contempt if he doesn’t honor the subpoena and testify.]
- Bill Maher claims “far left political correctness is a cancer on progressiveness” [No, it’s not] and that Hillary Clinton “obstructed justice” by using a hammer on her phones. [No, she didn’t — that was her IT guy trying to make sure no one stole her digital ID after she’d switched to a new phone.]
- John Durham is reportedly investigating the roles of ‘Foreign Intelligence Services’ in Russia Probe’ [They acted to warn us that Russia was attacking our election and communicating with Trump staff.]
June 11th —
- Justin Amash leaves the Freedom Caucus because of his support for the Impeachment of Trump.
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John Dean says he’s honored to be on Trump’s “enemies list”.
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Pence supports blocking LGBTQ flags from the embassies. [No kiddin?]
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WH calls Deans testimony a “complete and colossal embarrassment” for Dems. Then SHuckabee attacks Biden saying “he allowed Russia to attack our election.” [No, that was the Trump campaign who repeatedly lied to the FBI about it, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell who threatened Dems if they went public about it.]
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Pelosi won’t confirm whether she called for Trump’s imprisonment.
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The View does the best rundown of the Dean Hearing on TV, pointing out that Dean listed 6 specific incidents that occurred during Watergate which are directly paralleled in the Mueller report.
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Jennifer Rubin offers a brutal assessment of Republicans during the Dean hearing.
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Trump gives another crazed South Lawn helicopter press conference and lies repeatedly about the Secret Mexico deal — waving around a nearly blank sheet a paper to prove it exist (WaPo showss that it did have some verbage about Mexico “burden sharing in processing refugees” and having 45 days to use “domestic laws”) to slow immigration — “Sleepy” Joe Biden, “Nasty” Nancy Pelosi, Farmers, Tariffs, China, and says “Democrats committed many crimes” [No, They. Didn’t.] and he wouldn’t have let the CIA use Kim Jong Nam as an informant. [What? Wouldn’t turning away a legitimate intel source be — Treasonous?]
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Mike Mulvaney who’s still somehow running CFPB while also being Chief of Staff has now purged their entire advisor board.
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Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) who wrote Trump’s Tax Bill says that it doesn’t pay for itself. [Yeah, considering the $1.1 Trillion Deficit that would be obvious.]
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GOP worries about Trump’s “bring it on” taunt of Dems to bring Impeachment hearings.
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Pennsylvania swing voters blame Joe Biden for racism and violence that erupted in Charlottesville, because he criticized Trump’s “both sides” BS.
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House Dems frustrated that the Dean hearing was dropped for the Helicopter Crash. “I wish cable was covering it.” [You and me both.]
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Mitch McConnell is taking campaign contributions from lobbyists for voting machine vendors as he blocks election security bills that would subject the companies to new regulations and security requirements.
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Don Jr. is scheduled to be grilled by Senate Intel tomorrow.
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DOJ threatens to use executive privilege — again — to deny census docs to the Oversight Committee.
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A total of 24 Immigrants have died in ICE custody during Trump’s administration.
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House Votes to enforce their subpoenas against the WH in Court by making it easier to call for contempt to get testimony from Don McGahn and documents from Bill Barr.
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Jon Stewart gets a standing ovation after slamming Congress for not providing support for 9/11 First Responders who are suffering from cancer after working on the WTC pile.
June 12th —
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Trump is considering backing the challenger to Justin Amash with help from Mike Pence.
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Even though Trump has already submitted Shanahan for official nomination as Secretary of Defense, he was reportedly considering alternatives during D-Day celebration.
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Kamala Harris says that if she’s elected she would have “no choice to have Trump prosecuted.” [So far that’s Harris and O’Rouke who’ve said they would prosecute.]
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Trump is reported intrigued by the boost he would get by being Impeached.
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Rep. Greg Pence (R-IN) amended his FEC filings on lodging at the Trump International Hotel mere hours after USA Today questioned him on the $7,600 in campaign funds he spent at the hotel after his election (congressmen are supposed to pay for their own housing in D.C.).
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Time reports that the The Trump administration is housing 1,400 migrant children at Ft. Sill Army base in Oklahoma which used to serve as a Japanese internment camp,
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Trump exerts Executive Privilege over all the Census docs wanted by House Oversight.
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McConnell brushes off reports that his wife helped green light Transportation projects intended to help his re-election.
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Nadler says we’ll hear from Meuller “way before summer.” via subpoena.
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On his way into the Senate Intel hearing, Don Jr. says he has “nothing to correct” about hsi previous testimony. Afterward, he says he didn’t change anything because he had “nothing to change” and that he was “not at all” worried about perjury.
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Republicans try to shutdown Oversight hearing on holding Bil Barr and Wilbur Ross in contempt with Mark Meadows claiming that they’ve violated a rule that requires them to wait 3 days after the June 10 deadline.
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Devin Nunes gets crushed Rep. Jim Hines (D-CT) during a Mueller hearing for trying to pass off Manaforts connections to Russia [where he owed an Oligarch $12 Million and kept repeatedly trying to offer him inside information and polling data through a GRU linked contact on the campaign in exchange] as “normal.” “That is not what campaigns do!” Himes said. “Sharing internal polling data with a hostile foreign power is not what campaigns do!”
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Kellyanne Conway accuses MSNBC during an interview of lying about Mueller when they say j he specifically mentioned that his report was intended for Congress to review. “I read the report,” Conway said. “He cites many things in his report, including that there was no collusion, [No, he never said that — he said there was not enough evidence for a conspiracy conviction beyond a reasonable doubt, but plenty of examples of lies and obstruction for which Trump “was not exonerated.”] despite the fact that your network said it many times every single day for many years, respectfully. One thing in the report that is important to note is the job of the special counsel is to refer an indictment or decline a referral on indictment — that is it.” [No, that’s not it — he specifically noted that OLC rules prevented him from indicting, so he didn’t make a recommendation on that because he thought it would be unfair since Trump couldn’t defend himself in court and then said that Congress should take up the issue.]
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Flynn hires a new lawyer Sidney Powell, a Meuller-bashing Fox News guest who traffics in conspiracy theories.
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Adam Schiff threatens to subpoena the FBI for information about their intelligence investigation of Russian election rigging.
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Trump gives a press conference-like thing:
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Don Jr. comes out of his Senate interview and throws shade on MIchael Cohen, although it was Rick Gates who had said he told lots of people about his meeting with Russians. He maintains his innocent and says he never lied in his testimony,.
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House oversight approves contempt charges against Attorney General Bill Bar and Commerce Sec. Wilbur Ross for defying subpoenas on the census citizenship question after a 6 Hour hearing.
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Hope Hicks is scheduled to testify in a closed-door House judiciary session.
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Rep. Duncan Hunter’s wife pleads guilty to campaign finance violations of up to $250,000 including a trip to Europe which included a plane seat for their pet rabbit Eggburt.
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George Conway writes a WaPo Op-Ed calling for Trump’s Impeachment.
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ACLU asks SCOTUS to delay the ruling in the Census Citizenship case in order to consider new evidence involving the late Thomas Hoffler who wrote that the intent of the citizenship question was to provide partisan advantages for the GOP.
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Trump tells George Stephanopoulos that that he would again accept foreign campaign information, and wouldn’t call the FBI.
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“I think I’d take it. If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI — if I thought there was something wrong. But when somebody comes up with oppo research, right, they come up with oppo research, ‘oh let’s call the FBI.’ The FBI doesn’t have enough agents to take care of it. When you go and talk, honestly, to congressman, they all do it, they always have, and that’s the way it is. It’s called oppo research.” [It’s called an in-kind illegal campaign finance violation.]
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When Stephanopolous says Al Gore told the FBI about a stolen briefing book, he says “That’s different.” [No, it’s not — the DNC emails were STOLEN!]
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When Stephanopoulos says FBI Director Wray says you should tell the FBI, he says “The FBI Director is Wrong.” [Bill Barr also testified that people should alert the FBI if they receive information from “foreign intelligence services.”]
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He continues “I’ll tell you what, I’ve seen a lot of things over my life. I don’t think in my whole life I’ve ever called the FBI. In my whole life. You don’t call the FBI. [Yes, you do. ] You throw somebody out of your office, you do whatever you do,” Trump continued. “Oh, give me a break – life doesn’t work that way.” [Yes, it does and so does campaign finance law.]
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He says he’s never contacted the FBI in his life. [He contacted the FBI when he thought some of his personal contacts had mob connections when he was trying to open casinos in New Jersey]