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UPDATE: This chapter should be read in concert with (Chapter A) to really appreciate how many Trump campaign operatives were searching for Clinton’s deleted emails and were convinced that the Russians had them-starting with Trump himself: Russia, if you’re listening…
Just yesterday I wrote about the fact that Rob Goldstone-who sent the initial proposal for the meeting to Donald Jr on June 3, 2016-had emailed Scavino-aka the man who keeps Trump’s twitter feed unpresidential -with Don Jr and Rhona Graff CCed in and proposed a Vote Trump Facebook page in conjunction with a Russian Facebook company.
When the interviewers at Donald Jr’s Senate Intelligence Committee interview presented this to him it was deeply embarrassing to say nothing of incriminating on a number of levels. For one thing it shows that the same cutout who set up the Trump Tower meeting had then, only three weeks later, proposed a venture that is clear collusion.
https://lastmenandovermen.com/2018/08/06/is-trump-defending-his-son-or-throwing-him-under-the-bus/
For another, Donald Jr had testified that after Goldstone allegedly apologized to him after the meeting-as the meeting allegedly didn’t have useful Clinton oppo; note that anything from this gang I say ‘alleged’ unless it can be verified independently-he never heard anything about this from Goldstone again.
Yet under three weeks after the June 10 meeting he was in an email chain where Goldstone made a very concrete proposal for collusion. While Jr was on the email chain-and as is his wont claimed to have no memory of it; he’d also said he had no memory of hearing from Goldstone again and yet we see this email was addressed to Dan Scavino.
Now Natasha Bertrand found this tweet of Scavino-Trump’s social media director who’s in charge of his Twitter feed-surfaced.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the Trump campaign was hoping to get these emails at the Trump Tower meeting.
This from the campaign’s social media director in May 2016, one month before the meeting: https://t.co/kGppIib2Kf— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) August 7, 2018
Scavino tweeted this out on May 11-almost exactly a month before the Trump Tower meeting of June 9. On June 8, Trump had promised a major oppo speech on the Clintons.
Then on June 9, at 4:40, 40 minutes after the Trump Tower meeting was supposed to begin, Trump tweets about Clinton’s emails.
Trump tweets about Clinton’s missing emails: At 4:40 p.m., 40 minutes after the Trump Tower meeting was scheduled to begin, Trump responds to Clinton’s tweet telling him to “delete your account” by asking Clinton about her “missing” emails. “How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up–and where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?” Trump tweets.
Then on June 14, Rob Goldstone sends out what he calls ‘eerily weird news.’
Goldstone sends along ‘eerily weird’ news: Five days after the Trump Tower meeting, there were news reports that Russians were behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee emails.
Goldstone sends a news article on the hacking to Emin Agalarov and Kaveladze, according to the Democratic report, and states: “Top story right now — seems eerily weird based on our Trump meeting last week with the Russian lawyers etc.”
Six days after the meeting Guccifer 2,0 dumps a large trove of emails hacked from the Democrats:
Six days after that meeting, Guccifer 2.0 released the first of the documents stolen by hacking Democratic targets (though note, none of these are known to have come from the DNC, which is the only hack the WaPo reported on the day before; while some have been traced to Podesta’s emails, the others remain unaccounted for).
Eerily weird… You can say that again.
Then we have Trump’s last press conference of the 2016 election on July 27 Russia if you’re listening and asks Russia to find Clinton’s
“I will tell you this: Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
“The president was encouraging a foreign adversary to illegally hack into messages by a former secretary of state that might contain sensitive information, then release them publicly.”
By the way, as I stated above, this was the last press conference he would give-no doubt his staff thought it best not to let him out by himself the rest of the campaign as who knew what trouble he’d get himself into next? He essentially had committed treason in broad daylight-and while some of Trump’s enablers dismissed it-he was just joking and ‘learn from his supporters who take him seriously but not literally-this was taken extremely seriously by the intelligence community including those conducting the FBI investigation into Russia.
They didn’t want to see how he would top that one. Despite the fact it was his last presser, the MSM still continued to act like Clinton was the one lacking in transparency even after she’d given them all the press conferences they could want in September. Did the media acknowledge this? Mostly they just said ‘but why didn’t she given them before?’
Still, reflecting on what Scavino said back on May 11-almost a month before the Trump Tower meeting and 2 and a half months before Russia if you’re listening it got me to thinking. It’s clear that those 30,000 or so emails that Cinton-rightly and legally-deleted from her server were a major preoccupation for the Trump campaign and the GOP more widely.
There are so many examples of Trump operatives attempting to find them. Here is a-far from comprehensive-list.
1. Scavino on May 11, of course.
2. Trump on July 27, of course.
September 2016: GOP Operative Claiming Ties to Michael Flynn Seeks Missing Clinton Emails from Russian Hackers
“Beginning over Labor Day weekend in 2016, an 80-year-old opposition researcher and GOP operative named Peter Smith assembled a team of technology experts, lawyers, and a Russian-speaking investigator to track down hacking groups with access to the 33,000 “missing” Clinton emails, according to The Wall Street Journal. One of those hacking groups was Russian, the Journal reported, and intended to use Smith as an intermediary to transfer the emails stolen from Clinton’s private server to top Trump campaign surrogate Michael Flynn.”
4. Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica also reached out to Wikileaks to find Clinton’s emails in August 2016
“In August 2016, the CEO of the controversial data-mining and analysis firm Cambridge Analytica told his employees in an email that he had recently reached out to Assange to offer help in sorting through and releasing Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, The Daily Beast reported last year. Top Republican donor and Trump campaign backer Rebekah Mercer was copied on the email, too, according to The Wall Street Journal. Assange later confirmed that the CEO, Alexander Nix, had approached WikiLeaks, but said that the organization had rejected his offer to help.”
5. Then-Roger Stone naturally-who had multiple communications with both Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0-that was actually Russian military intelligence-asked Assange to find them in September 2016-at the same time as Smith was trying to speak to Wikileaks on his own track.
“Stone tried to get damaging information about Clinton from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in September 2016, according to The Wall Street Journal. In an email to his friend Randy Credico, a radio host friendly with Assange, Stone wrote: “Please ask Assange for any State or HRC e-mail from August 10 to August 30—particularly on August 20, 2011.” “State” was a reference to Clinton’s time as Secretary of State, when she used a private email server for work-related correspondences. “
6. DM messages from October between both Roger Stone and Donald Jr to Wikileaks later surfaced:
“Both Donald Trump’s son and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone communicated with WikiLeaks in October 2016. As The Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe first disclosed last fall, Donald Trump Jr. wrote to WikiLeaks on October 3, 2016, asking: “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?” The day before, Roger Stone, an informal advisor to Donald Trump, had tweeted, “Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #WikiLeaks.” Ten days later, Stone sent WikiLeaks a private Twitter message asking the organization to “reexamine the strategy of attacking” Stone.
UPDATE: As we see in (Chapter C) Stone apparently got this information-that ‘Clinton was done’ from Randy Credico who had texted Stone those exact words on October 1.
7. Finally, Julian Assange himself on an RT appearance claimed to have Clinton’s emails.
Again this is not an exhaustive list-I’m sure there were many more cases of Trump operatives trying to locate the emails. It’s quite possible that the Trump campaign took the ‘thousands of incriminating emails on Clinton’ George Papadopoulos had been told the Russians had to be the deleted emails.
Still this trope among #TeamCollusion was so strong I’m wondering if there was anything else that led to their certainty that the Russians had located them. In his May 11 tweet, Scavino had linked to the Fake News Trump site Lifezette.
Let’s see what they based this claim Russia had the emails on.
“The Kremlin is considering whether or not to release some 20,000 hacked Clinton emails reportedly in its possession.”
“Russian security services apparently obtained the emails as part of their investigation into the Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar, known as “Guccifer” — now in U.S. custody in relation to the Clinton email scandal.”
“Note that when Guccifer 2.0 released hacked Democrat documents the next month-June, 2016-he claimed to be Romanian-clearly tried to sound as much like Lazar as possible. Again, there’s reason to suspect that when Mifsud told Papadopoulos about the incriminating emails, the Trumpsters assumed Mifusd was referring to emails hacked from Clinton’s server.”
“There’s a debate going on in the Kremlin between the Foreign Ministry and the Intelligence Services about whether they should release the 20,000 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that they have hacked into,” Judge Andrew Napolitano told Megyn Kelly on Monday.
“The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) began monitoring Lazar after a failed attempt in 2011 to hack into RT, a news service funded by the Russian government. While it hasn’t been confirmed publicly by its government that Russia is in possession of the emails, there is ample evidence which suggests the Russians do indeed have Clinton’s emails.”
Lifezette then goes on to feverishly speculate that Russia may have hacked Clinton’s emails 5 different times.
“Indeed, RT’s proximity to the Russian government suggests it’s more likely the agency received the emails, not from Lazar himself, but from Russian authorities monitoring Lazar or Russian hackers themselves. In October 2015, The Associated Press reported that Russian authorities may have hacked Clinton’s server on at least five separate occasions.”
“The existence of these emails is a significant problem for Clinton. Despite the ongoing FBI investigation growing larger and more serious by the day — it was revealed last week that her closest aides from the State Department had all been interviewed, some more than once — Clinton seems no closer to being indicted.”
You hear here the rage from Clinton haters American-and Russia-over. She is no closer to being indicted. But this wasn’t because the FBI was protecting her-quite the opposite. The FBI team investigating her emails-Midyear investigation-knew by early 2016-at the latest that there was no there there-Clinton was not guilty of indictable offense. Yet James Comey Hamlet chose to dither for many months on just how to announce contrary to what he was telling both members of his own team on Midyear and the DOJ-Loretta Lynch, Sally Yates, etc-he’d already decided to make it all about him and do a presser that would admit Clinton did nothing wrong yet dirty her up politically. He would sandbag Lynch with this indefensible idea when it was basically a fait accompli.
The Clinton haters needn’t have worried-the rogue Trump agents over at Trumpland-had them covered. They would ultimately sandbag Comey-like he sandbagged the DOJ on the July presser-into the Comey letter of October 28, 2016-that would prove to be the game winning buzzer beater for Team #TreasonTrump.
But they couldn’t wait and were clearly ready to take matters into their own hands and take Clinton down by any means necessary-including treason.
“But if the State Department is unable (or unwilling) to provide materials to the FBI pertinent to its investigation, then perhaps the Russian government will oblige.”
Now you have Trump supporters actually thanking Russia.
But this was the attitude of the campaign itself and its supporters all along. If you want to understand it at the 30,000 foot view it’s about more than just Trump, it’s the moral and intellectual decay and bankruptcy of the modern-post Nixon Republican party.
https://lastmenandovermen.com/2018/08/02/watergate-2-0-is-about-the-moral-and-intellectual-bankruptcy-of-the-modern-republican-party/
Only a party that has seen this level of moral nihilism and decadence could justify collusion, coordination, or treason just to achieve partisan and ideological goals.
UPDATE: In retrospect this crusade to find Clinton’s deleted emails-with the false myth that the Russians actually had them that was all the rage on the Right at that time-is probably the worst of the many things #TeamTreasonTrump is guilty.
In the Mueller Report itself Mueller defines the hacking-theft-of emails as a crime. Certainly colluding with the Russian government or Russian hackers-affiliated with the government/GRU- is about as serious a crime as it gets. When Mueller said he was ‘unable to establish conspiracy with the Russian government’ this hardly meant there was no evidence of it as he made clear-‘unable to establish’-beyond the 90% threshold of beyond a reasonable doubt-does not mean there is no evidence and we see great evidence for not just collusion and coordination-as we certainly saw with Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi and high ranking members of the Trump campaign-including Trump himself-in the case of the Podesta emails-we learned from Michael Cohen’s testimony there was also coordination regarding the DNC email dumps-but conspiracy with the Russian government-or Russian hackers connected to Russian military intelligence.
Beyond the multiple examples in this chapter we learned from Mueller’s Report that the same day Trump ‘joked’ about Russia if you’re listening he also directed Michael Flynn to get them and that Trump expressed great frustration that they had not gotten Clinton’s deleted emails. Note in addition on this day Russian hackers attempted to hack Clinton’s office in the Hamptons.
And we have to remember that Flynn and his son were close to the late Peter Smith and worked with him to get the emails. Smith’s stated intent in an email to Flynn-and multiple other top campaign staffers; including then campaign director Steve Bannon-was to pay Russian hackers-and work with Wikileaks-to get Clinton’s emails.
We further know that Smith did in fact pay the hackers and there are emails post the Podesta dump in October that suggest Smith paid the hackers behind the Podesta emails-get link for Chapter A Mike.
The question for Mueller is how with this fact pattern did he not feel there was sufficient evidence? Admittedly 90% is a high threshold but this is a pretty large batch of evidence to say the least. If he didn’t have 90% confidence how high was his confidence? It seems clear it’s more than enough not just for probable cause but preponderance of evidence-if not more.