Jophiel wrote:
This seems to be the NPR interview in question (it's the only transcript mentioning Ukraine & Clinton from the past couple weeks). It doesn't seem as though Shapiro was mentioning Ukraine as a defense personally but said that "White House allies" were bringing it up. Neither compared any legal ramification from it to Trump's situation.
Again, there's significant differences between the stories but it's ultimately irrelevant anyway because what Clinton (the DNC, actually) did or didn't do has no impact on any breaches committed by the Trump campaign.
Except the relevant fact that this kind of thing isn't unusual in national level campaigns by showing that the Clinton campaign also benefited from information obtained from foreign sources and used it against Trump during the election. I guess my issue with this whole thing is how the word "collusion" has apparently changed meaning over time. At the start of this, collusion meant that the Trump campaign was directly involved in the hacking and leaking of the DNC emails and thus associated with a criminal act, even if just after the fact, along with some sort of assumed quid pro quo agreement in return for that assistance. Now, apparently, "collusion" means having a conversation with anyone remotely associated with, or just claiming association with, a foreign government, but apparently only if that government is Russia, and only if it's the Trump campaign, and regardless of any sort of promises made in return.
If someone calls or emails a member of a campaign claim to have dirt on the opposition, that member takes the meeting. Period. Doesn't matter who the other person is. If the dirt is real, you use it. Again, doesn't matter who the person is who has it, or how they got it. It's certainly not illegal or a violation of any sort of campaign laws to do this. If it was, then a whole lot of people are breaking the law every single election year. This is a case where it appears as though the mere fact of reporting something makes people think the thing being reported is relevant or important. It's not.
At the end of the day, we live in a country that has free speech. That includes political speech. Anyone is free to express their opinion on something, especially in the political arena. If a foreign government wants to spend money promoting a politician, party, or agenda in the US, they have the right to do so. The idea that this is remotely new is bizarre, given that we've had foreign governments and citizens doing this for decades at least. Heck. It's not even strange to have Russian involvement. Have any of you actually read the declassified intelligence report everyone talks about when defending the "Russian meddling" claim, but rarely seem to actually know what's in it? Most of the report isn't about the hacked and leaked DNC emails. It's about how Russia uses propaganda methods to influence US politics, specifically via RT (Russia Times), or, more recently RT USA (and RT UK). What's funny is that RT USA was established, directed specifically at a US audience, back in 2008. What's even more funny is if you read the report, it lists the sorts of positions on various issues that RT advocates. It reads like a checklist of Democratic Party platform items.
If this is "meddling", and it's "bad", and we should be condemning the recipients of that meddling, then why has this been ignored for the last 8 years? Russia has consistently been meddling in ways that benefit the Democrats. Heck. Tie that in with Obama's open mike gaff, where he appeared to be promising Putin something better "in the next term", and you have actual evidence of a direct quid pro quo agreement *and* evidence of Russian help, at least in terms of messaging.
Not enough? Again, the fake dossier on Trump involves not one but *two* foreign governments. Yet, no one batted an eye that the source of the information was foreign. And certainly no one demanded that the Clinton campaign somehow answer for the fact that foreign operatives/governments were working to help her win the election. Not only do I not recall any such demands, I seem to recall Democrat after Democrat taking up this faked info and pushing it as hard as they could. Is anyone on this forum actually going to pretend that had Clinton won the election, there would have been investigations into foreign meddling and "collusion" between Clinton and these foreign parties?
The reality is that a political campaign will accept any help and any information it can to win. No one's going to turn down opposition information because it comes from a foreign source. No one. That's not "collusion". At least not any form of collusion that would be questionable, much less illegal. Again, the only form of collusion that is problematic is if a candidate makes promises to a foreign party in exchange for that help. Which is something we have evidence of Obama doing, but not Trump.
And that's before getting into the incredibly shady stuff surrounding foreign donations to the Clinton foundation. There's strong evidence that Clinton's political influence was up for sale, to anyone, including foreign parties. And once again, we have zero evidence of any such sort of activities on the part of Trump.
Yet Trump is being investigated? And you wonder why it's being viewed as a witch hunt? Can anyone here actually say what crime or violation of campaign rules they think Trump violated? Anyone? I'll point out again, you really need to have at least an idea of what law was broken or may have been broken *before* starting an investigation. Otherwise, it's just an investigation to have an investigation, knowing that the mere existence of such a thing has political weight. IMO, that's all this is.