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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2794 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 28, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Somehow I doubt they'd be saying the same thing about Russiagate, a conspiracy theory based on zero credible evidence. But putting that to one side, this makes discussion pointless:

Even the Durham report admits that there was credible evidence for Russiagate (namely that Donald Trump asked* Russia to hack and leak Hilary Clinton's e-mails, that Russia did in fact hack and leak John Podesta's e-mails, and that there was circumstantial evidence that the Trump campaign worked with the GRU and Wikileaks to maximise the political impact of the leaks). The core claim of the Durham report is that there was insufficient evidence that Donald Trump committed a crime** to justify the amount of resources devoted to the investigation.

* I am aware that Trump's supporters on this site say he was obviously joking. The GRU didn't take it as a joke, so I don't.

** Signal-boosting true-but-illegaly-obtained information is of course 1st-amendment protected. This just means that it isn't a crime, not that we can't take it into account when assessing the patriotism, integrity, professionalism, or lack of all of the above, of Donald Trump.

core claim of the Durham report

There was a lot of other stuff in the Durham report! https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-durham-report-released-special-counsel-fbi-trump-russia-investigation/

The special counsel's examination also revealed senior FBI personnel "displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor toward the information they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons and entities."

"Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation," the special counsel found.

Strzok, Durham wrote, "at a minimum had pronounced hostile feelings toward Trump," and the investigation was opened "without ever having spoken to the person who provided the information" claiming there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

"The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign," the report states.

Come on, Russiagate is completely and totally dead. That they then put a 'oh we don't find the FBI to have a political bias' on at the end doesn't revive Russiagate, it's just face-saving.

there was circumstantial evidence that the Trump campaign worked with the GRU and Wikileaks to maximise the political impact of the leaks)

Not really.

The core claim of the Durham report is that there was insufficient evidence that Donald Trump committed a crime

Or really any of the people that they started investigating. It's very good that they eventually found some actually bad stuff like tax/bank fraud by people, but that had nothing to do with what they set out to do and what they allowed the public to believe about Trump for years on end. One would hope that they'd do a better job of finding tax/bank fraud without going on a massive fishing expedition on basically zero predication for partisan political purposes.

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