ChiGoose

Most of this is actually covered in the Mueller Report. I cannot emphasize enough that people should actually read it if they want to talk about it correctly. It's not that long and you can always just start with the Executive Summaries. "Collusion" is not a term in federal law. The media is really bad at covering law stuff and even worse when it involves politics. Politicians also use incorrect or inflammatory language when it benefits them. That's why Mueller looked at the investigation through the lens of conspiracy law, not collusion. The report also notes that the origin of the Russia investigation was the FBI learning of George Papadopoulos's claim that the Trump Campaign had been told that Russia wanted to assist it by damaging Clinton. As to the idea of the origins being the Carter Page FISA, not only is that debunked by Mueller in the above link, but the report from Trump's DoJ reviewing the origins and appropriateness of the investigations also agrees that Crossfire Hurricane was started because of Papadopoulos in July 2016. It also notes that the first Page FISA was applied for in October 2016, several months after Crossfire Hurricane had already started. As to what some Dems are saying, unfortunately, I do not control the Democratic Party. If I did, Hillary wouldn't have been the nominee in 2016 and Schiff would be losing to Katie Porter right now. Alas, I lack the power to make people say what I want them to say.

Something that has become pretty common is to set a baseline on an issue that is either incorrect or exaggerated because it allows you to make the point you want to make. It's just strawman stuff all the way down. For the Russia investigation, many on the Right assume the narrative of far-Left loonies was the basis of the investigation (think Occupy Democrats, Krassenstein grifters, and even Hillary, etc.) who said things along the lines of Trump taking orders from Putin. That way, when there's a lack of evidence to disprove the extreme position, they can claim victory over the entire issue, ignoring the reality of the situation. What the Mueller Report found is that Russia tried to interfere in the election to Trump's benefit and that the Trump Campaign was open to (or even welcoming of) that support. It also detailed several crimes committed by Russians, members of the Trump Campaign, and by Trump himself. But because it didn't prove the extreme / exaggerated claim that Trump and Putin were working hand-in-hand, the Right declared victory, completely ignoring anything else discovered in the investigation. The idea that Trump and Putin had entered into a conspiracy was always way out there. There wasn't any need for an agreement between the parties: they wanted the same thing and they were going to act to achieve it. Why would they need a formal agreement on it when they were going to do it anyway? If Mueller was telling the truth when he said there wasn't an agreement between Trump and Putin (he was), then why do they think basically everything else in the report is a lie (it isn't)? In the end, you get people stupidly using the Mueller Report to disprove the Mueller Report either through a lack of reading comprehension or a malicious desire to mislead.

Look, obviously the Russia investigation was a hoax. There was no evidence or anything to suggest that Russia was trying to interfere in the election or that the Trump Campaign was open to or welcoming of help from Russia. I mean, sure, Yevgeniy Prigozhin had Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA) start targeting the US in 2014, and yeah, it created a bunch of accounts pretending to be US people and organizations, and Michael Cohen restarted negotiations on Trump Tower Moscow after an earlier attempt never materialized, and the IRA began organizing dozens of political rallies inside the US, and Trump signed a new letter of intent for Trump Tower Moscow with I.C. Expert, a company represented by Felix Sater, and sure, in 2016 the IRA began having its accounts support the Trump Campaign and disparage the Clinton Campaign, and members of the Trump Campaign and family cited, posted, and responded to posts from IRA-controlled accounts such as TEN_GOP, and during the campaign, Michael Cohen spoke to the personal assistant of Russia's press secretary Dmitry Peskov about Trump Tower Moscow, meanwhile the IRA was actually purchasing social media ads opposing Clinton and promoting rallies it organized within the US, around the same time the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) hacked into the computers and email accounts of organizations, employees, and volunteers supporting the Clinton campaign, and then it hacked into the DCCC and DNC, stealing hundreds of thousands of documents, and then the GRU leaked stolen information from the Clinton Campaign to cutouts "DCLeaks", "Guccifer 2.0", and WikiLeaks, at the same time that Trump Campaign staffer George Papadopoulos was informed that the Russian government had dirt on Clinton in terms of thousands of emails, and Trump and campaign officials met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak at a private event, while Paul Manafort (who had a history working with oligarch Oleg Deripaska to install friendly political officials where Deripaska had business interests but was embroiled in litigation after the relationship soured) told Risk Gates to provide Konstantin Kilimnik with updates on the Trump Campaign (including internal polling data) because he believed Kilimnik would share it with Deripaska, and then Roger Stone met with Henry Oknyansky (AKA Henry Greenberg) and Alexei Rasin who claimed to have information on Hillary Clinton, around the same time Michael Cohen accepted an invitation to travel to Russia and meet with Dmitry Peskov (and potentially Putin and/or Medvedev) before backing out of the trip, and then the GRU began targeting state and local computer networks and was able to compromise the Illinois State Board of Elections and gain access to a database of millions of registered Illinois voters, around the time that Emin Agalarov (son of oligarch Aras Agalarov) had Robert Goldstone contact Trump Jr. about incriminating info on Hillary, so Trump Jr. repeatedly told senior campaign staff that he had a lead on negative info about Clinton, after which Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met with Goldstone, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and others at Trump Tower hoping to get dirt on Clinton, and Roger Stone told the Trump Campaign that he knew that WikiLeaks had the Clinton emails before it was public and he told Manafort that he was in contact with someone connected to WikiLeaks, and the GRU sent hacked materials to WikiLeaks which then released them three days before the Democratic Convention, and within hours of Trump's statement asking Russia to find the 30,000 missing Clinton emails, the GRU began targeting Clinton's personal office for the first time, meanwhile a senior campaign advisor for the Trump Campaign diluted a proposed amendment to the GOP platform supporting "lethal" assistance to Ukraine to only "appropriate" assistance, and Donald Trump posted about an IRA-organized political rally in Miami, and Dmitry Simes of the Center for the National Interest (CNI) provided Jared Kushner with information about Bill Clinton, around the time that Manafort met with Kilimnik who personally delivered a message from Vikto Yanukovych about a peace deal that would allow for Russia to control Eastern Ukraine, and Manafort told Gates that his work from the Trump Campaign would be a way to be made whole for his current issues with Deripaska, and then the GRU sent additional hacked materials to WikiLeaks, which then released them, and WikiLeaks began communicating directly with Trump Jr., providing him with info and a password for an anti-Trump website that was about to launch, and then, less than an hour after the publication of the Access Hollywood video, WikiLeaks released the first set of emails that the GRU had stolen from John Podesta, and in the lead-up to the election, the GRU gained access to the network of at least one Florida county government, and in November 2016, Kislyak met with Kushner and Michael Flynn at Trump Tower to discuss US-Russian relations and floated the idea of a secure communication link with the transition team, and Kislyak also set up a meeting between Kushner and Sergey Gorkov, head of the government-owned VEB who had a direct line to Putin, and after Putin met with his oligarchs, Russian oligarch Petr Aven attempted to meet with Kushner to establish a secret channel with the Trump people, and Carter Page (who had previously formed a relationship with Victor Podobnyy, a Russian intelligence officer working covertly in the US) traveled to Moscow telling people that he was still working on behalf of the Trump Campaign (even though he was no longer employed there). While in Moscow, Page met with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich who wished to connect with the Trump transition team, and in December 2016, when the US looked like it would allow a vote on a UN resolution against Israeli settlements, Michael Flynn contacted Kislyak to let him know that Trump opposed the resolution, and also Flynn called Kislyak to discuss sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration, and George Nader arranged a secret meeting in the Seychelles between Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev (head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund), and later on Facebook testified that it had identified 470 IRA controlled Facebook accounts that had collectively made 80,000 posts reaching as many as 126 million people and Twitter testified that it had identified 3,814 IRA controlled Twitter accounts that had been in contact with 1.4 million Twitter users... But aside from that, what evidence is there that warranted looking into Russian efforts to interfere in the election and/or the Trump Campaign's willingness to accept such help?

I’ve said what I continue to say: the reason Biden, Hillary, and Pence were not prosecuted is because their cases differ significantly from Trump’s and would almost certainly lose in court. I’m sorry that reality doesn’t match your narrative but that’s just how it works sometimes. But to bring it back to the topic of the thread, if Trump is right about presidential election immunity, then Biden can’t be prosecuted anyway even if he decides to just start selling our secrets, so long as the Dems don’t vote to impeach him.

I cannot help those who are unwilling to help themselves. Either you cannot read or you are being intentionally ignorant.

The one thing that just about everybody across the political spectrum can rejoice at.

I really would encourage you to read the report where it discusses what evidence they actually have that they can bring to court and why it would ultimately be unsuccessful. That's a pretty good description of Trump's arguments, but most of the cases are actually pretty strong. The documents case in particular is about as slam dunk a case as you can find. Literally anyone else would have already plead out because there's very little hope to be acquitted at trial.

The Dems are so nefarious and controlling that they coordinated a multi-jurisdiction legal attack at Trump by: leading with the worst case, getting the best case stuck with a judge who is in the tank for Trump, waiting for years to move forward so that they would be up against the election, and managing to get each case delayed to a point where Trump likely doesn’t face a jury verdict in a criminal trial before the election. Seems like a bad plan.

Why read primary sources when you can just have dishonest and/or moronic pundits tell you what you want to hear?

On the plus side, if SCOTUS gives Trump the ruling he wants, Biden can just have him assassinated and then bribe Schumer not to impeach. Under Trump’s theory of presidential immunity, there would be nothing anyone could do about it.

Not actually what the report said.

The reason Hillary, Biden, and Pence weren’t charged but Trump was is because that’s what the law and case law called for given the facts of the cases.

What is the average percentage of voters voting uncommitted in previous Dem Michigan primaries?

The article states why sanctuary cities became popular and it pre-dates Trump: "Sanctuary policies became more consequential after 2009, when ICE implemented Secure Communities, a program that linked FBI databases with Department of Homeland Security databases to automatically check the citizenship status of anyone arrested anywhere in the country. By January 2013, ICE had activated such data-sharing technology in all state and local jails in the country, allowing them to track potential noncitizens and request law enforcement agencies to detain them for questioning, or be notified upon their release. Some local law enforcement agencies declined to honor these detainer and notification requests. Jurisdictions that declined to participate, Ascherio said, cited concerns that Secure Communities would penalize immigrant victims or witnesses of crimes and thus undermine community-police relationships." I haven't championed anything. Just trying to put some facts into the discussion that has been severely lacking them.

It is simply that they do not hand people over to ICE if they suspect they are undocumented. The reason municipalities enact sanctuary policy is because undocumented people who are witnesses or victims of crime won’t report the crime if they fear they will be deported for doing so. Sanctuary policy allows them to contact law enforcement without risking their own deportation, increasing the chance that they report crime. That’s likely why municipalities that enact such policies don’t see an increase in crime and often actually see a decrease in crime.

…what do conservatives believe that “sanctuary city” actually means? And if they buy into the ridiculous fallacy of an “open border,” why do they (wrongly) believe that Dems support that?

Project 2025 is an insane idea designed by people who are either completely dishonest or dumb as all hell. There’s no way that anyone who seriously wants to implement it ever thinks their chosen party will ever be out of power again. And that’s probably what the intent is.

The majority of traffic from Elon Musk's X may have been fake during the Super Bowl, report suggests “According to CHEQ, a whopping 75.85 percent of traffic from X to its advertising clients' websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl was fake. "I've never seen anything even remotely close to 50 percent, not to mention 76 percent," CHEQ founder and CEO Guy Tytunovich told Mashable regarding X's fake traffic data. "I'm amazed…I've never, ever, ever, ever seen anything even remotely close." CHEQ's data for this report is based on 144,000 visits to its clients' sites that came from X during Super Bowl weekend, from Friday, Feb. 9 up until the end of Super Bowl Sunday on Feb. 11. The data was collected from across CHEQ's 15,000 total clients. It's a small portion of the relevant data, and it's not scientifically sampled, but it nonetheless suggests a dramatic trend. I am shocked, shocked, that Musk is still having problems with bots…

Not necessarily, but it's a very slippery slope to global chaos and potential war should Ukraine fall. The idea that Russia would just stop with Ukraine and other anti-Western powers would take no lesson from their success is just wish-casting and requires ignoring history and what we're currently seeing. Authoritarian powers are looking to test the commitment of the West to democracy and freedom. It's why China has been pushing the belt and road initiative, and it's why Russia has been interfering in elections in western countries. There's also a populist isolationist movement rising in America that would have us turn away from the world. ~80 years after we built a global ecosystem with us at the top, many in America would rather cede that responsibility to China or whoever else would grab it. Should we abandon Ukraine to Russia, it'll give the green light to whoever wishes to challenge us for global hegemony. Defending Ukraine requires us to risk none of our soldiers and just a fraction of our annual military budget to essentially destroy Russia's ability to make war. If we can't even rise to that, why would China think we'd intervene should it invade Taiwan? Would North Korea really believe that we would defend South Korea? Foreign adversaries are watching for weaknesses in our commitments and we seem happy to show them what they want to see.

Probably Moldova. They already have their little green men there in Transnistria. Also, if Ukraine falls because the West fails to support it, that gives the green light to China, Iran, and even North Korea.

I mean, there was a hope that it would cause friction with the oligarchs but there isn’t a “one weird trick” to end the war.

Who thought taking the super yachts would end the war?

Here’s a good analysis of how the F-16 could change the environment in Ukraine: The air war over Ukraine

Also consider that the country has been under decades of state controlled media propaganda while any dissenters are done away with. Given that environment, is there anybody left who could potentially take over after Putin that would be much different than him?

Ukraine needs air superiority. The US would never attempt the operations Ukraine is trying without it. And we’ve seen why. We are finally letting them use F-16s and giving them training but the delay has really cost them. Trying to maneuver through minefields while under enemy fire isn’t a good way to fight. Blowing up the minefields through the air and suppressing enemy positions with aerial bombardment is how you get the ground troops to advance effectively and safely.