WOW!!! ~ a BIG THANK YOU to Jake Tapper for this concise summary! ~ ~ much more detail in the 2 videos below ~ Sooz

‘How did we get here?’: Watch Jake Tapper ‘connect the dots’ on Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation
Elizabeth Preza / 30 Oct 2017 at 18:11 ET

CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday laid out all of the evidence (so far) that led to the indictments of two former Donald Trump associates and guilty plea from a third.

“How did we get here?” Tapper asked, following a deluge of news reports surrounding special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign. The CNN host went on to “briefly review” what reporters have learned “about Russia, the DNC and Clinton emails and the Trump team.”

“It comes in four stages,” Tapper explained. “There’s the hack, the dangle, the fishing and then the release.”

Tapper noted that in July 2015 and March 2016, Russian hackers breached the DNC and stole a massive number of emails. Likewise, in March 2016, hackers managed to obtain emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

“Here comes the dangle,” Tapper continued. “April 2016, Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos is told that Russia has dirt on Hillary Clinton, thousands of her e-mails, according to his plea agreement. In May 2016, a request to the campaign from Russia to meet with Mr. Rrump is made. That’s also in the plea agreement. June 3, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. gets an email telling him that the crown prosecutor of Russia is going to provide the Trump campaign with official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton.”

Tapper then played a clip of a June 7 speech, where then-candidate Trump promised to “give a major speech” on Clinton and Russia.

“Okay, that’s the dangle,” Tapper said.

“Here comes the fishing—the attempt to get that information,” he continued. “On June 9, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manfort actually have a meeting with the Russians, but they later say nothing is presented to them in terms of incriminating information about Hillary Clinton, and it turns out candidate Trump never gives that speech on Hillary Clinton that he said he would.”

“From mid-June through mid-August, according to the plea agreement, Papadopoulos is trying to set up a meeting between Trump officials and Russian officials. July 7th, Paul Manafort offers private briefings in an email to a Putin friend.”

“On July 22nd, WikiLeaks publishes the first in a series of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee, but we should note they don’t contain anything particularly damaging to Hillary Clinton,” the CNN host said. “They are damaging to the Democratic National Committee.

Tapper said the following week is when Trump asked Russia to find Clinton’s 30,000 missing emails. Also around this time, Republican operative Peter Smith—who claimed to be in contact with top Trump associates prior to his apparent suicide in 2017—was trying to recruit people to help find Clinton’s emails.

“Sometime in the summer we also know that chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that the Trump campaign had hired, they contacted Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and they asked him for access to e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private server,” Tapper said. “Assange says he turned them down.”

As for the “release,” Tapper pointed out that shortly thereafter, Trump associate Roger Stone promised incriminating information on Hillary Clinton. Hours after the famed “Access Hollywood” tape dropped, Wikileaks released the damaging Clinton emails, and continued doing so until election day.

Watch Tapper connect the dots below, via CNN:

Part One —


Part Two —


https://www.rawstory.com/2017/10/how-did-we-get-here-watch-jake-tapper-connect-the-dots-on-muellers-trump-russia-investigation/

For a guy that brags about having all the best people it sure seems Grabem hires a lot of low level, low energy employees.

Jake Tapper is doing some terrific work.

That Mr. Mueller is gonna get the lot of them, methinks.

Looks like Trump is getting backed into a corner. His choices seem be getting narrowed down to firing Mueller (which makes it clear that the investigation is getting too close to home) or he's going to have to start pardoning people right left and center.

Meuller must be cutting close to the bone. The Trump gangsters are now trying to turn things on Hillary:

DOJ will consider new special counsel on Clinton Foundation
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/13/politics/jeff-sessions-special-counsel/index.html

Trump, Republicans try to flip the script on Russia collusion
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/27/politics/donald-trump-republicans-attack-russia-collusion/index.html

Attacks on Hillary Clinton show Team Trump won't go down without a fight
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/29/opinions/trump-clinton-muller-obeidallah-opinion/index.html

Anyone else feel like they need to shower after being immersed in the crap that is the DiC's world? ~ ~ I'm thinking Junior is complicit up to his eyeballs ~ I'd LOVE to see the smirk wiped off his face via an indictment ~ some "live links" to more/corroborating information in the original ~ Sooz

Why Trump Jr’s campaign contacts with WikiLeaks matter
11/14/17 08:00 AM—Updated 11/14/17 08:09 AM
By Steve Benen

[Video from The Rachel Maddow Show, 11/13/17, 9:11 PM ET, "Trump Junior exposed for contacts with Wikileaks during campaign", accessible via the end link.]

Even now, a year after the 2016 presidential election, we’re still learning about previously unreported communications between Trump World and Russia and its compatriots. Take the revelations from late yesterday, for example.


Julia Ioffe’s report in The Atlantic, documenting the exchanges that occurred during WikiLeaks’ dissemination of stolen materials, is well worth your time. Among other things, it makes clear that Donald Trump’s eldest son was communicating – during the campaign – with the same people who were helping carry out the Russian intelligence operation that was mounted during our election to put his father in power.

What’s more, as Rachel added on last night’s show, Trump Jr. has effectively admitted that he helped Russia’s allies distribute their stolen materials.

What’s more, Trump Jr. hadn’t exactly gone rogue while these events unfolded. The Atlantic’s reporting added, “[O]n the same day that Trump Jr. received the first message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior officials with the Trump campaign, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, telling them WikiLeaks had made contact. Kushner then forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks.”

Team Trump has a standard move in circumstances like these, but it’s not available to them in this specific case.

When Paul Manafort found himself in hot water, for example, Trump World pretended to barely know him. When Michael Flynn was in the hot seat, he was dismissed as a peripheral volunteer. The president said he and his team had no idea who Carter Page was. George Papadopoulos was dismissed as a guy who picked up coffee for important people. They even put distance between the campaign and Cambridge Analytica, the data firm Trump World paid millions to last year.

In each of these instances, the efforts have been impossible to take seriously – who’s going to believe the president didn’t know his own campaign chairman? – but with Donald Trump Jr., the tack is obviously a non-starter. Donald Trump and his staff simply aren’t in a position to say the president’s eldest son is an irrelevant figure.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/why-trump-jrs-campaign-contacts-wikileaks-matter

There is no doubt that Junior is thicker than two planks.

Thick as a brick.

A solid commentary ~ the old saying "you can't spin gold from hay" pops into my own mind ~ a few "live links" to more/corroborating info in the original ~ Sooz

TPM EDITOR'S BLOG
Trump’s Tweets May Be His Undoing
By Josh Marshall Published November 14, 2017 6:24 pm

Many Americans have feelings of shock, embarrassment or just serial cringing watching Donald Trump’s presidential tweets. But intelligence professionals have noted for months that it also provides a priceless channel of information for foreign intelligence services trying to understand the President’s state of mind. All countries diplomatic personnel and intelligence analysts devote immense time and resources to understanding the views, motivations, weaknesses and agendas of key foreign leaders. Trump’s often erratic and impulsive tweeting patterns reveals sleeping patterns, moods, what makes Trump angry, what he’s focused on, who he’s hating or cuddling up to at a given moment. In some cases, his tweets actually having geolocations turned on. So they know precisely where he was. But there’s yet another dimension to Trump’s tweeting and generally impulsive nature and it bears on the Russia investigation.

When I first started writing this post last night, this had only been caught by the Journal’s Byron Tau. Julia Ioffe later incorporated it into a revised version of her Don Jr/Wikileaks exclusive in The Atlantic. Others have noted it over the course of the day.

Here’s the gist.

On October 12, 2016, “Wikileaks” (apparently Julian Assange himself) Twitter DM’d Don Jr: “Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications. Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us. There’s many great stories the press are missing and we’re sure some of your follows [sic] will find it. Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4.”

Two days later Don Jr tweeted the link Assange suggested. But only 15 minutes after Assange sent his message, Donald Trump himself tweeted this.


Could this be a coincidence? Theoretically, yes. In practice, it is almost certain that Don Jr told his dad and his dad wrote up this tweet. This came after Don Jr had asked Assange earlier in the month for information on what turned out to be the Podesta emails. Assange was not only in on-going contact with Don Jr but able to get both father and son to do things with his DMs, specifically he got them to broadcast the documents Russian intelligence operatives had stolen and given to Assange.

Bear in minds this was months after it had been widely assumed that Russia was the source of the Wikileaks emails.

This isn’t the only example of this.

On June 3rd 2016, Rob Goldstone first reached out to Don Jr with his now notorious email offering to put together a meeting to give the Trump campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton. That was the email in which he noted explicitly that the offer was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

While Goldstone and Don Jr hashed out the details of the meeting, on June 7th Donald Trump told a crowd that the following week he was going to give a big speech unloading dirt on Hillary Clinton. “I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting. I wonder if the press will want to attend. Who knows?”

Monday was June 13th. The speech ended up never happening. Trump gave a national security focused speech on that day. This was at least in part because the Orlando nightclub massacre had happened the day before and it seemed impolitic to give a slashing partisan speech. But the Trump Tower meeting on the 9th had turned out to be largely a bust. They didn’t get the dirt. Or at least that’s what we’re told.

The most plausible explanation of this chain of events is that the Trump campaign thought they were going to get a load of new dirt on June 9th. But it didn’t happen. Just coincidence? Maybe. But I doubt it.

We now know that there were numerous occasions on which Russians or cut-outs working for Russian intelligence were in communication with Trump campaign staffers. In numerous cases, those staffers were briefing people at the highest level of the campaign about those conversations, people who were side by side with the President for months. Papadopoulos briefed Corey Lewandowski and others. Don Jr immediately looped in Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. Did any of these men ever mention these things to Trump? Of course they did. More seasoned political operatives or foreign policy hands would have had the wisdom not to mention these things directly to the President. Staff knows to protect the principal. But more seasoned hands would have known how dangerous it was to be having these conversations at all. No one with that kind of discretion or judgment was anywhere in sight.

That’s where Trump impetuosity and transparency with his knowledge and emotions comes into play. Seeing Assange prompt a Trump tweet, via Don Jr, is I suspect only the first and clearest of many examples. Who told Trump what? In a lot of cases Trump’s tweets will likely tell us. Trump’s October 12th Wikileaks tweet was totally opaque until we found out about Don Jr’s DMs with Assange a few minutes before. Trump’s tweets are impulsive, immediate, unvarnished. They amount to realtime surveillance of what he was thinking and what he knew at key points of the campaign. They just require the fruits of the ongoing investigations to decipher what they mean.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trumps-tweets-may-be-his-undoing

Special Counsel Mueller Just Closed In On Trump With Sunday Night Request
BY JOELLE GRANDE

Special Counsel Robert Mueller sent the Trump Administration a Sunday night surprise when it made a serious request of the Justice Department. According to ABC News, the Justice Department has been asked to hand over a broad array of documents pertaining to Mueller’s investigation into obstruction of justice in Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey.

Trump abruptly fired Comey in May as the FBI Director was ramping up an investigation into then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

Mueller’s team has requested all emails pertaining to the firing of James Comey as well as the emails related to the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation when it became clear it would be a conflict of interest; Sessions may have had contacts with Russians during the campaign, and would therefore be investigating himself.

This request is Mueller’s first of the department that is actually overseeing his investigation. That means that the Mueller probe is fast honing its sights on high ranking officials progressively closer and closer to Trump himself. These emails he’s seeking were likely exchanged not only between Justice Department officials, but also between Justice and White House officials as well. That’s a real widening of the net.

Attorney General Sessions has been a man of few words when it comes to his thoughts on Mueller’s Russia Investigation.

Trump, however, hasn’t wasted a single opportunity to express everything from frustration to outright contempt for the idea that Russia had anything to do with his election last November.

Mueller issued indictments in the Russia probe for former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and former campaign intern George Papadopoulos at the end of October. Trump responded on Twitter.



If you have to yell it, you’re probably not selling it.

http://verifiedpolitics.com/special-cou ... t-request/

A Split From Trump Indicates That Flynn Is Moving to Cooperate With Mueller

WASHINGTON — Lawyers for Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, notified the president’s legal team in recent days that they could no longer discuss the special counsel’s investigation, according to four people involved in the case — an indication that Mr. Flynn is cooperating with prosecutors or negotiating a deal.

Mr. Flynn’s lawyers had been sharing information with Mr. Trump’s lawyers about the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is examining whether anyone around Mr. Trump was involved in Russian efforts to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

That agreement has been terminated, the four people said. Defense lawyers frequently share information during investigations, but they must stop when doing so would pose a conflict of interest. It is unethical for lawyers to work together when one client is cooperating with prosecutors and another is still under investigation.

The notification alone does not prove that Mr. Flynn is cooperating with Mr. Mueller. Some lawyers withdraw from information-sharing arrangements as soon as they begin negotiating with prosecutors. And such negotiations sometimes fall apart.

More-> http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/politics/ ... ocid=ientp

This makes sense ~ Sooz

Haley Britzky 51 mins ago
Bharara: Cooperation with Mueller is "only sane move" for Flynn

Former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara tweeted on Friday that the only "rational move" for former national security adviser Mike Flynn is to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller. The tweet follows a NY Times report that Flynn's lawyers have cut ties with Trump's, possibly in order to cut a deal with Mueller.

"If you're dead to rights, flipping on others and cooperating with the prosecution is the only sane and rational move. Also, prosecutors accept cooperation only if you can provide 'substantial assistance.' Higher up in the food chain."

https://www.axios.com/bharara-cooperation-with-mueller-is-the-only-sane-move-for-flynn-2512205428.html

A Top Senate Judiciary Member Just Gave Trump The Mueller News He’s Been Dreading

Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told the audience on NBC’s Meet The Press today that President Trump’s own tweets point to a basis for an obstruction of justice case against him.

In a compelling warning to the President that his Twitter addiction has made him his own worst enemy, Feinstein laid out her take on the current status of the Judiciary Committee’s investigation into the same issues that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is handling for the Justice Department:

“The Judiciary Committee has an investigation going as well and it involves obstruction of justice and I think what we’re beginning to see is the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice,” Feinstein said. “I think we see this in the four indictments and pleas that have just taken place, and some of the comments being made. I see it in the hyper-frenetic attitude of the White House, the comments every day, the continual tweets,” she continued. “I see it most importantly in what happened with the firing of Director Comey, and it is my belief that that is directly because he did not agree to lift the cloud of the Russia investigation. That’s obstruction of justice,” she added, referring to former FBI Director James Comey.

Feinstein joins Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in ....

MORE>

What I don't get, if reports are true, is why those surrounding the DiC would be "protecting" him from reality ~ this whole mess is much uglier than it ever needed to be because of all the games being played out ~

A ridiculous but possibly omniscient thought just passed thru my mind ~ just image if what brings down this entire criminal administration are the DiC's tweets! ~

Sooz

While I'm sure that at least part of this mess is due to the fact that people are protecting him from reality (we've seen any number of reports about his staffers who are tasked with telling him about positive press (and nothing negative) I suspect that a large part of it is his ego - he literally doesn't hear anything negative (in one ear and out the other if you prefer) and he really believes that any and all criticism is "fake news" (witness his denying that the voice on the "grab them by the pussy" tapes is his).



Not as ridiculous as you might think. We've already had legal experts chiming in to say that his tweets re Flynn amount to an admission of guilt with respect to obstruction of justice (and the White House said that his tweets were official pronouncements so there's no denying them)

Thanks, shift ~ I recognize there's a difference [a BIG difference] between "glass half full" and "rose-colored glasses" thinking ~

Sooz

From the other day, but still relevant ... and pathetic! ~ ~ emphasis/bolding below is mine ~ Sooz

TPM EDITOR'S BLOG
Panic Spin
By Josh Marshall Published December 1, 2017 5:24 pm

The top responses from the White House today have been, first, “everybody lies in Washington” and now claiming that the Obama White House in fact authorized Mike Flynn’s secret calls with Russian Ambassador Kislyak.


http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/panic-spin

everybody does it is not actually a defense.

it is a confession.

Speaking of claims that "everybody does it" ...

Trump: 'I Feel Badly for General Flynn,' Claims With No Proof 'Hillary Clinton Lied Many Times to the FBI'
by david badash

'It's Very Unfair' Trump Says

Just days after Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI President Donald Trump once again defended his fired, former National Security Advisor, saying he feels bad for him and accused Hillary Clinton, without proof, of also lying to the FBI. There is no publicly recorded substance that Clinton has ever lied to the FBI.

"I feel badly for General Flynn," Trump told reporters Monday morning before heading out to Utah. "Hillary Clinton lied many times to the FBI and nothing happened to her," he claimed. "She lied many times, nothing happened to her. Flynn lied and they ruined his life. It's very unfair."

rump went on to claim, apparently falsely, that Clinton lied on the July 4 weekend last year, when she spoke with the FBI about their investigation into her emails.

Trump appears to be creating the claim Clinton lied in order to make Flynn appear as a victim, something he certainly is not.

Some journalists are suggesting Trump may be getting ready to pardon Flynn.

MORE including vid and live links

If Trump pardons Flynn he'll simply be charged with something else. He's already near-broke with legal bills.

Seems Mike Pence has been kidnapped or something.

Edit: Speaking of devils...

Why the Flynn Guilty Plea Is Bad News for Pence—and Other Senior Trump Officials
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... fficials/#