Rep. Nadler escalates Russia witch hunt after it fails
House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler has subpoenaed the Justice Department for a full, unredacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, as well as its underlying evidence.
“My Committee needs and is entitled to the full version of the report and the underlying evidence consistent with past practice,” Nadler said in a statement released Friday. “Even the redacted version of the report outlines serious instances of wrongdoing by President Trump and some of his closest associates.”
Nadler’s subpoena demands the material by May 1.
Mueller’s report cleared President Trump of any collusion or conspiracy with Russia to swing the 2016 election, and found no legal basis to charge the president with obstruction of justice, but stopped short of“exonerating” him.
Rather, Mueller left it up to Congress to decide whether or not to “apply obstruction laws,” a decision that Nadler has embraced.
“It now falls to Congress to determine the full scope of that alleged misconduct and to decide what steps we must take going forward,” his statement continued. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, the New York Democrat said that impeachment proceedings are “one possibility.”
“We will proceed with our enquiries,” he said, adding that Mueller’s report “was probably written with the intent of providing Congress with a road map.”
Mueller’s roughly 400 page report is littered with more than 800 redactions, from a name here and there to entire pages of text. Theses redactions were made for four reasons: to protect “investigative techniques,” to avoid releasing classified grand jury information, to avoid compromising ongoing investigations, and to avoid infringing on the privacy of “peripheral third parties.”
It is unclear whether a completely unredacted report can be released, and whether such a report could possibly implicate Trump in anything illegal. Trump himself has claimed complete vindication, and Republicans have dragged Democrats for attempting to keep the ‘Russiagate’ investigation alive.
“Democrats want to keep searching for imaginary evidence that supports their claims, but it is simply not there,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “It’s time to move on.”
Even with the ‘Russian collusion’ narrative buried by the Mueller report, some mainstream journalists have come out to claim their anti-Trump coverage was backed up by the report. Were they reading a different report?
The Mueller report, CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz said on Thursday, “really corroborated a lot of the good journalism that was done” during the last two years.
“One of my main conclusions from the #MuellerReport so far is that the vast majority of *reporting* on Trump and Russia was extremely accurate,” GQ magazine’s Julia Ioffe chimed in.
Prokupecz is not entirely wrong. Both CNN and Mueller’s team shared an obsession with chronicling every last inconsequential encounter between anyone connected to candidate Trump and anyone remotely connected to Russia, no matter how peripheral. From handshakes at the Republican National Convention to missed calls and unanswered emails, Mueller’s report is completely absent of bombshells, but heavy on humdrum contacts.
When it came to examining these tidbits, however, they were often completely wrong.
Both Mueller and the media focused heavily on the infamous Trump Tower meeting, during which Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met with a Russian delegation to discuss US/Russian relations, and potentially damaging information to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The meeting was, as Kushner told Manafort, a “waste of time,” and no information was provided.
Not to CNN, who reported the “collusion bombshell” that President Trump knew about the meeting in advance, accompanying the headline with the lede: “holy crap.” Of course, the source for the article was none other than former Trump lawyer and convicted perjurer Michael Cohen, but that didn’t stop CNN from suggesting that Cohen’s word could “be the biggest step to date in proving real collusion,” and finishing with the poetic and barf-inducing: “Where have you gone Robert Mueller? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”
Well, Mueller was investigating, and found “no documentary evidence” that Trump knew about the meeting or its “Russian connection.” Sorry CNN.
And it wasn’t just Trump tower. CNN claimed that Trump Jr. was given “advanced access” to the WikiLeaks archive of leaked Democratic Party emails in 2016. Mueller’s report proved this to be false, and even at the time CNN issued a retraction. A year later, three CNN employees resigned over a false story about an alleged investigation into “a Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.”
CNN was far from the only outlet to cry collusion where Mueller found none. Buzzfeed famously broke the scoop earlier this year that Trump had directly instructed Cohen to lie to Congress about shelved plans to build a Trump Tower property in Moscow. Buzzfeed’s lie was so egregious that Mueller himself spoke out and denied it, three months before the report landed.
As the media peddled conspiracy after conspiracy about Trump and Russia, Mueller’s team combed through federal statutes, looking for a way to make something stick. They ultimately failed to “establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
CNN had circled the wagons ever since Attorney General William Barr released a summary of the report’s main findings late last month, with host Jake Tapper claiming “I don’t know anybody that got anything wrong” in the network’s two years of puffing from the collusion crack pipe.
“We never stated that there was conspiracy/collusion,” Tapper tweeted at the time. “Yes some others did.”
CNN certainly dropped enough “collusion bombshells,” and regularly featured guests who swore up and down that collusion had taken place. Tapper himself seemed happy to send his Twitter followers to articles claiming the same, including one from the Washington Post entitled “bungled collusion is still collusion.”
Now, several weeks and a full report later, the business end of that crack pipe is still hot to the touch. After a panel discussion attacking Attorney General Barr for his “excessive” pronouncement that there was “no collusion,”CNN’s chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin drew his own conclusion, tweeting that Trump’s frustration with the investigation against him was somehow “evidence of guilt.”’
Newsweek columnist Seth Abramson wrote over 450 tweets in a desperate attempt to frame the redacted Mueller Report as a net negative for President Donald J. Trump, even though it exonerates the president by proving there was no collusion with Russia or obstruction of justice.
In a Twitter thread that saw new followup tweets published every few minutes for over 24 hours, Abramson desperately attempted to reframe the Mueller Report as bad news for President Trump.
Abramson started his thread with an optimistic tone on April 17, the day before the Mueller Report was released to the public in its redacted form. The thread started with an article written by Abramson for the far-left Newsweek, which seems to have been created for the purpose of minimizing the importance of the Mueller Report.
(MUELLER REPORT LIVE THREAD) This thread chronicles—in real time—the release of the Mueller Report, with news and a… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) April 17, 2019
Yesterday morning, Abramson began live tweeting Attorney General Bill Barr’s press conference in which he discussed the Mueller Report.
Already, Abramson seemed to enter a sort of panic, condemning Barr as a spokesman for President Trump.
Abramson also, again, attempted to minimize the impact of the Mueller Report in the minds of his Twitter followers by stating that “we won’t even get a *certain* answer on whether there was a criminal conspiracy” orchestrated by President Trump.
After the Mueller Report was released to the public, Abramson immediately began finding flaws, and honing in on the small parts of the report that, using second hand hearsay, painted President Trump in a negative light.
He also moved the goalpost. Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not find sufficient evidence to prove President Trump broke the law, which Abramson says must surely mean there wassomeevidence, even though as a lawyer, Abramson surely must know this is not how the law works. If there is insufficient evidence to prove a crime, then the suspect must be assumed innocent.
This was only tweet 115 of over 450. Abramson’s mental state would seem to deteriorate as the day went on, and he continued tweeting every few minutes in desperate attempts to find damaging parts of the Mueller report, and excuse its total exoneration of President Trump.
By tweet 273, Abramson said it was time to consider impeaching the president.
By tweet 315, Abramson held the position that impeaching President Trump should not depend on any criminality. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” does not count for presidents, according to the far left journalist, and Twitter obsessed man.
By tweet 360, Abramson was back to denigrating the Attorney General, and claiming that he is a partisan actor working for President Trump.
Hilariously, Abramson also attempted to get his followers to retweet the original tweet from the thread, so new readers may sit and read the hundreds of ramblings.
Ironically, when this journalist attempted to do exactly this, Twitter became so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content that it was unable to load more than 200 or so tweets before freezing.
Around 400 tweets in, Abramson began to respond to criticism to his mad Twitter rant. At this point he would go on for three more hours, finishing at roughly 1 a.m.
Unless he decides to tweet more today, which seems entirely possible considering the insane number of tweets published.
Abramson wrote “I don’t *care” when it comes to how observers may respond to his massive Twitter storm, “because when American national security is at stake, you don’t *worry* about embarrassment.”
By tweet 433, Abramson had more or less turned against Mueller, seeming to suggest that he should have pressed the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., to testify against other targets of Mueller’s investigation.
Finally ending his mad Twitter tirade, Abramson made a claim completely contrary to the findings of the Mueller report: He believes that collusion did, in fact, occur.
This would seem shocking coming from a man who just live tweeted his experience reading the report cover to cover, except for the fact that he seems to have drifted further and further from reality as he wrote the 451 tweets.
This type of anti-fact behavior would seem to be the ultimate expression of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Abramson now believes that Barr is a bad actor, as is Mueller. He believes that just because Mueller could not find evidence, does not mean evidence does not exist. Even though Mueller could not find evidence to justify an indictment for obstruction of justice, that does not mean President Trump did not obstruct justice.
At this point, those like Abramson are living in their own reality, created entirely to protect them from the fact that they were completely and totally wrong.
It is, essentially, baseless justification to continue hating a duly elected president.
Freshman Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib recently told supporters they need to do more than protest on social media, and cited others who are going as far as hunger strikes to convince Republicans to back down.
While speaking to supporters at a fundraiser earlier this week, Tlaib said it is the responsibility of Americans to “shut down” Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and convince Republicans to forego any type of border security.
“It’s going to take movements outside the halls of Congress, rooms outside the White House,” said Tlaib, “I want you all to shut them down. We can shut them down. Don’t wait for this Congress to act, shut them down.”
Realizing how strange this must sound to those listening, she went on to expand on her command.
“I know what they’re going to say to me, ‘What do you mean, Rashida?’ Well I’ll tell you,” she said. “There are some people that are using hunger strikes, all these other things.”
She also told her supporters she was planning on “going to the border” and encouraged them to do the same, though she did not explain what this will do to impact policy decisions made in Washington, D.C.
Tlaib, who shares a blood relation with her ex husband, is apparently only interested in the human rights of illegal aliens, and not homosexuals from around the world.
Last week, she refused to condemn the horrifying policy in the Muslim theocracy of Brunei, which will now punish homosexual acts by stoning homosexuals to death in a public setting.
Neither Tlaib, or her fellow Muslim congresswoman Rep. Ilhan Omar, would condemn the barbaric, brutal, and morally reprehensible homophobic policy.
Over 90 illegal immigrants were caught entering The United States near Sunland Park, New Mexico Wednesday night and an American patriot livestreamed the entire encounter.
Facebook user Conservative Anthony filmed as he chased down a large group of mostly men who ran across the border into America.
This comes just one day after a group of 300 illegals was turned over to Border Patrol by a group of New Mexico patriots known as “United Constitutional Patriots” patrolling the exact same area.
The group has reportedly been apprehending 1,000 border crossers each day over the last 65 days.
The massive surge of illegal immigrants crossing the border is part of a United Nations operation meant to destabilize America by opening up large migration routes from the third-world into the country.
The UN has already been caught assisting migrant caravans heading toward America.
Liberal billionaire George Soros is also largely involved in the globalist plot to flood The United States with illegal immigrants as exposed in the video below:
Infowars reporter Greg Reese exposed the UN’s plan for replacement migration in the following report:
Eagle-eyed Russiagaters landed on potential new evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia on Thursday: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wasn’t blinking enough during his boss’s press conference on the Mueller report.
Twitter lit up during Attorney General William Barr’s press conference in advance of the release of a partly-redacted version of the report, with many speculating that Rosenstein’s facial movements — or lack thereof — were providing clues about the contents of the full report.
Some found Rosenstein’s face and insufficient number of blinks “disturbing.”
“Blink twice if you are ok Rod Rosenstein,” wrote former State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, whose calls were echoed by a former Hillary Clinton aide urging him to “please blink twice if Barr is mischaracterizing the report.”
Rosenstein “does not look like man at peace,” NBC reporter Ken Dilanian chimed in, perhaps hoping to do his bit to keep the conspiracy alive.
The Mueller report’s finally dropped and instead of being relieved to discover, once and for all, that the president didn’t collude with a foreign power to steal an election, Democrats and media pundits are absolutely devastated.
This is America in the era of Russiagate.
The partly-redacted, nearly 400-page report, delivered to Congress on Thursday afternoon, offered no new evidence or indication that Donald Trump or his 2016 campaign were in cahoots with Moscow to prevent Hillary Clinton from ascending to what Democrats believed was her rightful presidential throne.
Of course, their high expectations for the report had already come crashing down when Mueller wrapped up his investigation mid-March and Attorney General Bob Barr sent a four-page letter summarizing its anti-climactic findings to Congress. No evidence of collusion, it said.
The opposition party and the media’s most ardent Russiagate pushers had been moving the goalposts on “collusion” for months. In the earliest days of the two-year investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was given savior status; he would be the one, they said, who would deliver them from the evil of the Trump presidency. “Wait for the Mueller report!”they had screamed, as the weeks and months dragged on with “bombshell” after “bombshell” evaporating into thin air.
“Wait for the Mueller report!” quickly morphed into “Barr must be lying — wait for the full Mueller report!”
But Barr hammered the final nail into the Russiagate coffin on Thursday as he emphatically reiterated during a pre-release press conference that evidence to support theories of collusion did not exist and that all Americans should be “grateful” to hear that news. They were not grateful, though. In fact, they were acutely distressed by the news that Trump had been telling the truth about “no collusion” all along.
On the question of whether Trump had obstructed the investigation, Mueller’s report offered Russiagaters slightly more hope, in that it did not make a final determination and suggested that congress has the authority to take action in that regard.
But Barr enraged reporters by arguing it was necessary to take “context” into consideration when assessing potential obstruction. He said Trump faced an “unprecedented situation,”“relentless” media speculation and held a “sincere belief”that the investigation was “undermining his presidency.”
He also noted that Trump “took no act” that deprived Mueller of documents necessary to conduct the investigation and said he believed there had been no “corrupt intent” to hamper it. Not only that, but Barr also told shell-shocked reporters that Trump had not exerted executive privilege over parts of the report (as he legally could have done), “in the interests of transparency.”
Russiagaters masked their disappointment by trying, in endless formations, to spin the situation into a vindication of their theories; ‘Barr is lying for Trump!’ ‘Maybe Mueller was in on it?’ ‘He didn’t investigate the right things!’ ‘It wasn’t about collusion, it was about obstruction!’ – and the most pathetic of all attempts: ‘It doesn’t matter anyway, we know in our hearts collusion is real!’
The fact that the report was partly redacted (“standard for prosecutors handling sensitive information,” as the New York Times put it), triggered yet another meltdown from Democrats and Russiagate media stalwarts in advance of its publication. Casual observers of this seemingly never-ending saga might have been led to believe the report would be redacted beyond all comprehension. Indeed, it appears as though that’s what Russiagate truthers would have preferred. The more redactions, the bigger the scope for new conspiracy theories to emerge. Sadly for them, Barr also said an almost completely unredacted version would soon be made available to a bipartisan group in congress.
In a sign of just how desperate they had become, Democrats also spiralled into a total frenzy on Wednesday upon hearing that the aforementioned press conference would be held before the report was handed over to Congress. They genuinely seemed to believe that Barr might stand in front of the entire news media and lie about the contents of a document he was about to post publicly online a couple of hours later.
Why did it matter that he held a press conference summarizing its findings before the release? It didn’t matter, of course, but it was something to cling to. Remember, the Democrats and the media spent two years convincing Americans that Trump and members of his family were going to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House in handcuffs – so, at this point, they’ll latch on to anything.
On the eve of the long-awaited Mueller report about an already discredited conspiracy theory, the conspiracy theory's top proponent dubs the Mueller report the "Barr Report" & tries to make an issue out of Barr holding a news conference a few hours before the report is released: pic.twitter.com/JyAOeLSbhZ
Focus will now shift to Mueller’s expected testimony before Congress, which is due to happen no later than May 23 – and some are still holding out hope that the investigator will pull through at the last minute and say or do something to rehabilitate the entire narrative.
Journalist Aaron Mate, who has painstakingly covered the Russiagate drama, noted on Twitter that Mueller at times used “suggestive wording” in his report while simultaneously acknowledging that no evidence of collusion actually exists. This is likely what Democrats will be watching for during his testimony; any shred of doubt or uncertainty from Mueller on even the tiniest of details.
At the end of the day, however, the fact will remain that Mueller overturned every Russiagate rock and did not charge or arrest even one American for conspiring or colluding with Moscow, despite issuing more than 2,800 subpoenas, 500-plus search warrants and interviewing about 500 witnesses in excruciating detail.
But Russiagate was really always about Democrats and their inability to accept two basic truths: Hillary Clinton lost the election because she ran a terrible campaign – and because of the abject failure of the US political system to deliver basic changes that Americans want and need. Trump offered them hope, however false, of something new – and he won. There is no bigger mystery.
But the cries of “collusion!” will continue for months, if not years, and the media will meticulously pick apart the pages of the Mueller report for weeks, hoping to land on something that can credibly carry the conspiracy forward – and as they do so, they will be handing Trump a great gift going into the 2020 election.
Years from now, when Trump is hosting some post-presidency reality TV show or living out the rest of his days at Mar-a-Lago (rather than in a prison cell), Rachel Maddowwill probably still be ruminating over the finer details of the investigation and inviting the most discredited analysts onto her nutty show to help figure out how it all went wrong. Luke Harding is likely gearing up to write a sequel to his “COLLUSION” best-seller as we speak. Maybe he can call the next one“COVERUP” and profit off Russiagate for another two years.
The elaborate and demented conspiracies of Russiagate could fill a library, but the strangest thing of all about this saga might just be how much they fiercely wanted it to be true.
On page 23 of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report into Russia collusion during the 2016 election, it is revealed that the Russian company responsible for attempting to collude with the Trump campaign also supported Bernie Sander’s campaign for President.
In the report, it quotes a message seeming to come from the Russian-based Internet Research Company (IRA):
“Main idea: Use opportunity to criticize Hillary [Clinton] and the rest (except Sanders and Trump – we support them.”
The IRA is the company responsible for the “Russian internet trolls” that produced and promoted content meant to sway the results of the election. And in their communications, they make it clear that it isn’t just President Trump they support, but also Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
This means that many of the supporters for Sanders’ massive campaign that nearly defeated Hillary Clinton could simply be trolls, according the fake news narrative of the last 2.5 years.
It is unlikely that many media outlets will spend much time discussing this, as the narrative appears to have already been made that it is Trump that Russians wanted elected.
But as the report makes clear, President Trump and his campaign never colluded with the Russians, and any support coming from the IRA, or any other Russian interest was not in coordination with the Trump campaign.
The redacted reportfrom Special Counsel Robert Mueller was released this morning, and it reveals the country ran dozens of social media pages purporting to be American citizens, including several supporting Black Lives Matter.
It appears the at least one of the goals of the Russia Federation’s meddling in the United States was to simply tear apart any type of social cohesion in the United States. In addition to cyber efforts aimed at supporting then-candidate Donald J. Trump in 2015 and 2016, the Russians also backed Sen. Bernie Sanders, and strangely enough, Black Lives Matter.
Russia’s Internet Research Agency, or IRA, ran several Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook pages and groups aimed at pushing Black Lives Matter messaging. Some of these were called “Black Matters”, “Blacktivist”, “Don’t Shoot US”, “Black Fist” and a self-titled grass roots group called “Black Matters US”.
While these groups were created by the IRA, they recruited American citizens to assist in creating content and running the operations. While portions of the Mueller report have been redacted to protect the privacy of American citizens, it appears the IRA attempted to contact prominent members of Black Lives Matter within the United States to gain their support on social media. This appears to have been unsuccessful.
However, at one point, the IRA-created “Black Fist” entity hired a “self defense instructor” in New York to offer classes sponsored by the social media presence. The purported goal of these classes was to “teach African-Americans to protect themselves when contacted by law enforcement.”
In addition to the various Black Lives Matter presences on social media, and those supporting President Trump and Sanders, the IRA sponsored several social media outlets claiming to be part of America’s LGBTQ and Muslim communities. These included “LGBT United” and “United Muslims of America”.
This information seems to suggest one of Russia’s primary goals in its meddling in the United States was to play all sides to destroy the already decaying social cohesion within the country.
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