5

There really are no coincidences in law enforcement. Those were the blunt, striking words of Catherine Vance, former U.S. Attorney for the northern district of Alabama on Rachel Maddow’s show-Nicole Wallace was subbing for her-on July 31, 2018.

Very striking words because when you consider the explanations and the attempt of Trump’s defenders to construct a counter-narrative it always comes down to insisting that while a lot of it certainly looks bad, it’s all just a big coinci-dink. You have all those meetings between senior Trump campaign aides and the Russians-doesn’t prove anything, it’s just they happened to meet with very high number of Russians during the campaign. It’s certainly not normal for a campaign to meet with so many Russians-or foreign nationals from other countries during a campaign-Obama’s Russian Ambassador points out they didn’t meet with the Russians once during the 2008 campaign-but it’s just a coinci-dink.

Apparently it’s just an unusual idiosyncrasy of the Trump campaign-they met with lots and lots of Russians-Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone,  Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Jared Kushner, Rex Tillerson… 

All just a big coincidink that doesn’t prove anything. Other than-as the cases of alleged ‘coffee boys’ like Carter Page and Papadopoulos-the best way to advance far in the Trump campaign was to have suspicious Russia ties.

Russia if you’re listening was a coincidink.

It was also, the Deplorables scold us,  a joke. You have to learn how to take Trump seriously but not literally, don’t you know-as if that’s actually possible.

It was one of the more outlandish statements in a campaign replete with them: In a news conference in July 2016, Donald J. Trump made a direct appeal to Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails and make them public.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said, referring to emails Mrs. Clinton had deleted from the private account she had used when she was secretary of state. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

“As it turns out, that same day, the Russians — whether they had tuned in or not — made their first effort to break into the servers used by Mrs. Clinton’s personal office, according to a sweeping 29-page indictment unsealed Friday by the special counsel’s office that charged 12 Russians with election hacking.”

Just another coincidence. Just like Podesta’s time in the barrel was a coincidence. Speaking of Roger Stone remember when he insisted he never spoke to ‘anyone identifiably Russian’ during the campaign? That didn’t age well either. 

Then there’s the fact that in late July-early August 2016 Stone had admitted that Russia was very possibly behind the hacks and had done it to help Trump but suddenly on August 4 he totally changed his tune and categorically denied it was Russia. After Mueller’s recent indictment we now know that Stone was directed by the Trump campaign to find out what else Wikileaks had on Clinton after the DNC leaks successfully forced Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to step down.

UPDATE: Of course, as usual no matter how bad it is with Trump it turns out to be even worse than you think. Michael Cohen told Mueller and testified to Congress in March 2019 that in fact Roger Stone gave Trump prior knowledge of the original DNC emails dumped on July 22-on around July 18 or 19-Chapter A for more.

After insisting in a very categorical manner he now claims to have forgotten. That’s only slightly more plausible than when Stone claimed he didn’t mean to threaten Randy Credico when he told him ‘Prepare to die, cocksucker!’ he was actually expressing sympathy to his sick cocker spaniel .

When you look at the history of Russiagate, it’s clear the MSM took a very long time to take it seriously. Sure, they covered and investigated it-after the election when that woman was safely defeated, and even more after the intel report came out documenting Russia’s interference, intended to hurt Clinton and help Trump, even more after Comey-finally eight months later-acknowledged the existence of the Russia investigation-that was looking not just at Russia’s interference but the possibility that members of the Trump campaign colluded-actually coordinated-with this interference.

But the going assumption seemed to be that the chance that Trump committed the underlying crime itself-Russian collusion-was unlikely. This is why despite the derisive way the MSM reacted to folks like Louise Mensch, she had a following in early 2017-from the standpoint of folks in the #Resistance-folks like me-at least she took Russia collusion itself seriously.

The media consensus seemed to be that Trump was guilty of something. No one seriously argued-not even his most loyal supporters-that he was guilty of nothing-ie, he was innocent. No, the one thing no one denied was that Trump might be anything but no one would call him innocent. 

A common theory was that Trump wasn’t guilty of collusion but that he likely was guilty of financial or business corruption, perhaps with shady Russian interests.

FN: Of course, simply being accused of having shady foreign interests would be enough to take down Hillary-these allegations were made about the Clinton Foundation but never substantiated yet the MSM took them seriously-particularly Baquet’s NYT.

Indeed, regarding the huge sequel of Russia if you’re listening-Ukraine if you’re listening-the fake scandal Trump was trying to contrive was about allegedly shady foreign dealings involving Biden’s son.

Essentially Trump was trying to get the spinoff to Emailgate around totally false allegations that Biden called for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect his son. And the worry is the MSM will help him just as they did on Emailgate.

Indeed, Greg Sargent called out a tendency of the Beltway yesterday regarding their false equivalence.

It’s typical for much of the MSM-Baquet’s Times as always as usual a particularly flagrant offender-to play this game: for GOP operatives to simply make an accusation-wether in any way predicated or with a factual basis or not-is enough to declare it will thrust the target into scandal. This MSM practice rewards making up false charges-if just the allegation itself thrusts the target into controversy and scandal. 

End of FN

But collusion? What was that exactly? Most MSM pundits just found it farfetched. It was never clear what these skeptics would consider evidence. Some argued it’s not a crime or construed it in the most narrow literalist terms

Footnote: Make this a footnote: they did the same thing in defining treason-that it can only mean aid and comfort to an enemy during wartime-but hadn’t Russia attacked us in some way? True not on the battlefield but on the cyber level which made it even tougher to defend against? Indeed, this is why many in the intelligence community refer to what the Russians did as a cyber Pearl Harbor or 9/11. True, the cyber version, thank God, doesn’t include the loss of life and property but attacking our democratic process is nevertheless an attack on something that Americans hold especially precious. There are attacks on life and property but this was an attack on a cherished American ideal-our democratic process, our democratic system of government.

UPDATE: I guess what collusion skeptics wanted was an absolute smoking gun-a phone call between Trump and Putin; that no doubt didn’t exist as it was done through cutouts.

The MSM was willing to give Trump every plausible benefit of the doubt-that despite the machinations of his campaign manager and other campaign operatives he somehow knew nothing about it.

And even after the Mueller Report documented many clear cases of collusion to this day when Trump declares there was no collusion found no one in the Beltway contradicts him.

But Ukraine if you’re listening has what Russia if you’re listening never did-a smoking gun phone call between Trump-now with the power of the Presidency-and another head of state planning to collude to help defeat his political rival.

End of UPDATE

But, in any case, in the early going, conventional wisdom (CW) seemed to be that Trump might well have been guilty of financial malfeasance-quite possibly with dodgy Russian oligarchs-but collusion seemed far fetched. It seems to me that the notion that Trump did collude also had some disquieting implications for the MSM as its narrative for Clinton’s defeat was that she was a terrible candidate who didn’t go to Michigan but collusion seriously problematizes this thesis. The media was concerned about Clinton ‘escaping responsibility.’

Note that no previous ‘defeated’ Presidential candidates had to ‘assume responsibility’ for their loss, certainly not Romney who lost by a much more decisive margin than Clinton’s ‘loss.’

Actually a good point is that the fact of Russian interference already problematizes this thesis-wether there was collusion or not-but the media wasn’t putting two and two together just yet.

Footnote: After all even if the Trump campaign didn’t collude, conspire, or coordinate-hard to square with Roger Stone’s own communications both with Corsi and ‘senior Trump campaign officials’-they still benefitted from the Russian interference. The real debate has been on the level of wether  basketball team A coordinated with the refs efforts to throw the game on their behalf or wether they were just the lucky beneficiary of these efforts.

Find the post that made that good point Mike

The media finally began to consider that maybe it’s at least possible Trump could be guilty of collusion in stages. First there was the Comey firing. The reaction of many pundits was that now Trump was guilty of something much easier to prove than a hazy thing like collusion with Russian interference. It seemed much more plausible to argue that Trump was guilty of obstructing justice  in firing Comey than Russia collusion. Of course the question begs: if he wasn’t guilty of collusion why fire Comey? If he were innocent of collusion that was a big mistake on his part as it led to the appointment of Mueller’s special counsel.

And what we’ve seen with Trump is the bar keeps getting lowered-you might think obstruction is easier to prove but now his GOP co-conspirators have taken to arguing that things like obstruction and perjury are ‘mere process crimes’-uh, this is why they impeached Bill Clinton!-that you can prove Trump guilty of anything but unless it’s him and Putin on the phone agreeing in the most literal terms to rig the American election it’s not a big deal.

FN: As noted above in Ukraine if you’re listening we do indeed have such a phone call.

A number of MSM journalists at this point argued that while Trump likely wasn’t guilty of collusion-at least it couldn’t be proven-he was likely guilty of something-again likely financial corruption with Russian oligarchs-and it was information about this financial corruption with the Russian oligarchs that he wanted to obstruct. It was not until July, 2017 with the news of the Trump Tower Russia meeting in June, 2016 with Donald Jr, Kushner, and Manafort that many in the media seemed for the first time to consider collusion as a real live possibility. This was also the first time you started hearing Trump defenders on Fox, the GOP House, etc, add to the argument that there was no collusion,  that but anyway, collusion isn’t a crime. 

In any case, post the revelation of the Trump Tower meeting of June, 2016 for the first time many Russian collusion skeptics begun to become a little more open to the possibility. Prior to that, it wasn’t just the ‘both sides do it’ journalists but even a solid liberal, Democrat like Josh Marshall who’d resisted that collusion was a real live possibility prior to the Times breaking the news about the Trump Tower Russia meeting.

Josh explained why it had taken him so long: he just didn’t want to believe even Trump was this cynical-it was only after the Trump Tower meeting that he begun to seriously entertain the possibility of Russia collusion.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/21/17030420/trump-russia-mueller-guilty

But even when he came to be more critical of Russia skeptics he still retained his own measure of skepticism:

First to the agreement. I’m also skeptical that we’re ever going to find this kind of formal and explicit agreement between Trump and Putin (what Hounshell calls the “silver bullet”) to conspire together at the very highest levels. My skepticism springs from a few sources. One is my simple skepticism of all bad behavior – both my bane and salvation as a reporter. The other is that I’m just skeptical of things for which I have yet to see clear evidence.

He puts it well-I agree it’s something of a bane-it makes me think of the neurotically obsessive compulsive tv detective Monk’s favorite line-it’s a blessing and a curse.

Perhaps it’s a necessary blessing/curse of mainstream reporters-it’s certainly arguable that we need them to be this way. Ezra Klein-speaking as a journalist-discusses the fact that in covering Trump most journalists presume that politicians are risk adverse and that this is quite clearly a problematic assumption in covering ‘President Trump.’

And one can’t help but feel there’s some projection here-while it’s probably true that mainstream, conventional politicians tend to be risk adverse there are no more risk adverse individuals in a more risk adverse industry than mainstream, conventional journalists. Again, perhaps that’s right and beneficial in many ways, though it is certainly taken too far in some cases-the case of Trump for starters…

And as we noted in (Chapter A) there is another kind of journalism besides what Jay Rosen calls the view from nowhere-what some call advocacy journalism. 

Indeed, if it’s not possible to be both an advocate and a journalist, certainly I could never be a journalist-not that I claim at this point to be one-for that you need sources!

But looking at what Josh says, while it might be a virtue to generally be skeptical of bad behavior can you really be skeptical of it in Trump’s case? Don’t we have more evidence than could ever be needed that with him and his GOP co-conspirators at least, you should as a matter of course, assume the worst? Seth Abramson has explained the legal meaning of prima facie evidence: with the existence of such evidence the shoe moves to the other foot from someone being innocent until proven guilty to the reverse. For instance, based on what Trump said about a Muslim ban during the election, he should be presumed to be guilty-of desiring to and doing everything in his awesome executive power to install a Muslim ban until and unless he can somehow disprove this-which is appropriately a very high bar indeed.

The more innocent explanations that his legal team have since conjured up-it’s not a Muslim ban it’s a travel ban to keep us safe. that most of the countries on the list have large Muslim populations is just a coincidence-should be viewed with prejudice. 

This holds for most anything Trump-or his GOP co-conspirators-says or does, he’s long squandered any benefit of the doubt. When should you believe Trump-or the GOP co-conspirators? When he/they say something actually unhelpful to their interests. Abramson has explained that one way you can get bad guys to testify against other guys and have it be believable is precisely this principle-if they say something unhelpful to themselves, it’s much more likely to be the truth.

Regarding the need for a sliver bullet of smoking gun, this is a very helpful demand-for the criminal conspirators themselves as often there is no such thing as Angus King recently put very well in an interview on MSNBC regarding evidence MBS was behind the assassination of Khashoggi:

By the way, this demand by MSM journalists for overwhelming direct evidence-so long as the subject isn’t Hillary Clinton-as we saw above is pointedly not shared by intel agents and criminal investigators. If reporters like Marshall are skeptical of conspiracies, criminal investigators are skeptical not of conspiracies but of coincidences-as they take a lot of planning as Malcom Nance puts it so aptly.

By the way, this tendency of many people-of most MSM journalists by trade and many regular people who are only casual consumers of the news-to be skeptical of stories of great wrongdoing is very helpful for those who: engage in great wrongdoing as is another congenital trait of most MSM journalists and many regular folks-laziness and a reluctance to see their previous priors questioned.

As an example regarding my discussing the theory that the Reagan campaign colluded with Iran in 1980 to delay the release of the hostages, many will dismiss it simply because it so totally flies in the face of their previous preconceptions of Reagan and who he is-the notion that ‘the Gipper’ could do any such thing is obviously absurd, no reason to listen to any evidence. On the other hand, more people will find it easier to believe Nixon sabotaged LBJ”s 1968 peace talks with Vietnam-as he’s already held in low estimation by most Americans.

Meanwhile it wasn’t until James Clapper’s book that it became acceptable to suggest that Russian interference  actually impacted the result.

Finally,  in the Summer of 2018 you started getting Trump loyalists saying that if collusion helped Trump defeat That Woman, then maybe it was worth it.

It was an interesting evolution from no collusion to collusion is not a crime to yeah collusion! 

UPDATE: We now know that at Trump’s Oval Office victory dance with the Russians the day after he fired Comey he told them: he was cool with them interfering on his behalf. 

No wonder his staff worked so hard to make sure Americans would never know what he said in that treasonous victory dance.

End of UPDATE

And these old white male GOPers say it all: this is what it means to be a Republican in Trump’s America: a purely negative partisanship, It’s how many Republicans found the race between Roy Moore and Doug Jones a tough one: sure, Roy Moore was a pedophile, many times over, but, Doug Jones was something even worse: eek, a Democrat!

And this seems to be how Brett Kavanaugh was finally ‘plowed through’ just by the skin of his teeth. After Dr. Christine Ford’s testimony, even many Republicans were pessimistic-Mitch McConnell did admit in his Fox interview that this was the moment he did wonder if they were going to win. Then Kavanaugh went on this wild eyed, emotional breakdown of a rant. To me-and many-it looked pathetic and whiny. But it clearly struck a chord in the GOP.

What he reminded them was this: He may be a serial sexual assaulter, he’s certainly a serial perjurer, who may well have been chosen specifically to protect Trump from Russia. But darn it all he hates the Democrats as much as they do. Case closed.

He had them at ‘resentment at the election of President Trump and revenge on behalf of the Clintons.’

So Catherine Vance-like most investigators doesn’t believe in coincidences and Nance points out they take a lot of planning. Ok, the fact that their names rhyme-that’s probably a coincidence…

After all, if you presume a smart criminal then there will be no silver bullet so blindingly clear and obvious that even Captain Obvious himself couldn’t miss it. Are most criminals stupid?-that’s, perhaps, a comforting thought. I don’t know what the empirical evidence says about that. 

But suffice it to say, all criminals no matter how ‘smart’ or ‘stupid’ they very well may be attempt to cover up their crimes: this is the trouble with Trump’s talk of ‘process crimes’-if there is no underlying criminal action why cover it up? And in all crimes there is a conspiracy to cover it up-wether this is done well or poorly depends on the intelligence-and good luck-of the criminals involved.

Now speaking personally, I have neither any background in law enforcement or intelligence-though I admit I’m fascinated by intelligence. But it seems to me that perhaps my mind works more in line with them rather than reporters because I have been convinced that there was something weird going on with the Russians, Wikileaks,  and the Trump campaign ever since the DNC leaks forced out Debbie Wasserman-Schultz on the very first day of the convention. My thought was-not Nance’s that coincidences take a lot of planning, or Vance’s that there are no coincidences but rather: ok, I get it that coincidences happen but this was just a little too convenient. 

Just like Russia if you’re listening  happening within a day of the Russians hacking the Democrats was too convenient and Roger Stone’s prediction that soon it will be Podesta’s time in the barrel was too convenient as it really was, and it was way too convenient that the Comey letter came out at the most optimal time for the many anti Clinton agents at the FBI in terms of proving fatally damaging to her campaign-just 11 days before the election.

And it was way too convenient  for Wikileaks to begin dumping the Podesta emails just a few hours after HollyWood Access.

So my instinctive reaction was: coincidences may happen but you have to be highly skeptical of those this convenient. 

And it turns out that I was on the right track as we’ve since learned that US intel was thinking the same thing-the timing of the Wikileaks dump was way too convenient for it to be a ‘coincidence.’

But I think that’s a central tension between those skeptical that there was collusion and those who strongly suspect it happened: both are skeptics but each are different types of skeptics: the collusion skeptics are skeptical of conspiracies, but those who think it likely did happen are skeptical of coincidences.

https://evilsax.pressbooks.com/wp/wp-admin/post.php?post=2223&action=edit

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October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

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