ChiGoose

I can only speak for myself, but the Steele Dossier was a piece of raw intelligence gathering. It’s basically just collecting all the rumors you can about someone. The next step would be to verify if those rumors were true, but that didn’t happen. Steele was wrong to leak it because the public was just going to latch on to the salacious details without taking a step back and recognizing the report for what it was. As someone who thought (and still thinks) that Trump sucks, I certainly wanted the report to be true and I kept waiting for other outlets to verify the stories but they never could. That’s why the Mueller report dismissed most of the dossier and why the Clinton campaign didn’t use it: nothing in it could be proven to be true. Steele got ahead of himself by leaking it (I believe to John McCain) instead of verifying it first.

In the case of a crime, when charges are filed they are often done so with sworn statements. While people can always lie, there is little penalty for lying on TV while there are hefty penalties for lying to law enforcement. It doesn’t mean people don’t lie to cops, but they are less likely to do so than to lie to a journalist. So in cases such as these, I find it incredibly helpful to ignore the talking heads / media, and just go straight to the filings. That’s what I did here and it’s what I did with the Sussman case. Both times, the outcome was very clear from the start despite the terrible media coverage.

Shoveling people into sides is one of the biggest problems with this country. Sorting into “us vs. them” is terrible and harms all of us. And if what “people were doing” was normal, then we are screwed as a country. Instead of letting the facts drive the conclusion, they were having the conclusion drive the facts. The facts were pretty clear from the jump. Literally from the very beginning I was able to identify what the most likely outcome was by just looking at the official filings. But that apparently makes me a partisan hack. And now the evidence supports my original conclusion. This stuff isn’t hard if you actually want to know the truth. But so many people don’t. It’s not skepticism or critical thinking. It’s just feelings over facts.

Well, if you want to talk media criticism, I’m sure we will find a lot to agree on. But when you quote my post and say “you” a lot while saying things I’ve never said, I’m going to call you out. I try to choose my words carefully and do not appreciate people insinuating that I said things I never said.

When have I ever said that DePape was a Trumper? I said he was a crazy person. I have said from the very start that the most likely explanation is that he was a crazy person who broke into the house to get to Nancy Pelosi. The facts supported that at the time, and the new evidence shows that to be clearly the case.

Yup. Something else that was salacious that people wanted to believe despite the lack of evidence. Feelings over facts

For some reason, we expect people to act in specific or rational ways in all situations, especially intense or dangerous ones. It may, at first, seem like Pelosi should have fought DePape when he came in. Or tried to lock himself in another room. But he’s an elderly man and DePape had already found a way into his house. It’s likely that Pelosi’s goal was to just keep the situation from escalating until the cops arrived. Listening to the 911 call, you can hear Pelosi trying to walk the line between telling the operator to send someone and not angering DePape. The operator even tries to hang up a few times before Pelosi convinces her to stay on. In that situation, simply saying to DePape, “let’s sit down and chat until my wife gets home” while really waiting on the police seems like a smart thing to do.

Here’s a good summary of what was made public with links to the videos and audio recordings: Pelosi Attack Live Updates: Body Camera Footage of Hammer Assault Released Everything is consistent with a crazy guy breaking into the house and an elderly man trying to avoid angering him while trying to get help. The simplest explanation, supported by the facts. While there are some questions that may remain (what’s with the glass of water), they likely have pretty banal expectations (maybe Pelosi was trying to keep the guy calm and poured a couple of glasses of water while waiting for police). Of course, this won’t convince the crazies, but nothing ever will.

I did write them a letter back in 2017. Never got a response though.

I shall join you in not donating any money to the Republican Party

Prosecutor brings a case so weak that his subordinates quit because they don’t want to be a part of it. Then loses the case. Galaxy brained geniuses: it was the jury’s fault.

Yup and that is definitely worth investigating.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/video/paul-pelosi-attack-security-camera-video-shows-break-in-by-david-depape/ Looks like they released the video of DePape breaking into the house from the outside. I’m assuming what really happened is that they were in a secret sexual relationship, got in a fight, and then DePape went outside, and decided to break back in because he realized that Pelosi had his glass of water. Am I doing this right?

I’m sure it’ll be asked at trial and may have already been asked by investigators.

No seriously. Just say what you mean. You still believe that this was a lovers quarrel, don’t you?

What does the drink signify? Is he hiding Damar Hamlin in it?

Oh look. Paul Pelosi opened the door while holding the hammer that DePape was also holding. He didn’t just open the door and walk back to DePape. Who could have thought?

I dunno. After seeing what happened in Bucha and other Russian occupied towns (and imagining what’s happening in currently occupied areas), how can Ukraine accept a peace that leaves Ukrainians in Russian hands? And if they can’t, what’s the point in negotiating when returning to the pre-2014 borders isn’t currently on the table? I imagine they want to see if they can recover the occupied territories or be far along enough in that process that it seems inevitable so that when they come to the table, they have a stronger position to end this on acceptable terms.

I mean, it hasn’t. At all. Sure, there are lefties who made ridiculous claims like Trump was taking orders from Putin or that everything in the Steele Dossier was true. People like to jump at the juicy gossip without actually verifying it first. But the actual crux of the matter, that Russia was interfering in the 2016 election and that the Trump campaign was trying to work with them? That’s 100% proven as true. Multiple times. Denying that is just ignorance.

Hey, if they didn’t want to be investigated for trying to work with Russia, they shouldn’t have spent all that time trying to work with Russia.

The Trump campaign definitely did. That has been proven again and again (and ignored again and again).

So you don’t believe that Russia tried to interfere in 2016? Or do you not believe the Trump campaign welcomed that help?

Of course there were flaws. There are flaws in any investigation and the IG report covered the flaws in the Russia investigation. But what both the IG report and Durham show, the investigation itself was properly predicated and was not a conspiracy aimed at Trump.

Turns out that the obvious thing was obvious. Durham’s investigation shows that Barr was wrong about the origins of the Russia investigation. Barr Pressed Durham to Find Flaws in the Russia Investigation. It Didn’t Go Well. “Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress. Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it. Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued. There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known. The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans to indict a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham’s decision to proceed anyway. (A jury swiftly acquitted the lawyer.)”

Just straight up admitting that they make ***** up because they know people will eat up scandalous lies over boring truths.