[chowchowchow]

> If something being suspicious is cause to believe it,

That's not what I said at all, I was talking about the reality of the suspicious acts, not the reality of their implications. But the immediate refocus to the Clintons, when nobody was talking about them, is plenty illuminating about where this will go if we keep discussing.

[juliangoldsmith]

I don't think discussing President Trump's main political opponent during the election is too large of a jump.

Are the Clintons off-limits, or do you just not want to consider the possibility that they might be up to no good?

[chowchowchow]

> Are the Clintons off-limits

Umm, no. Not off limits. But also not relevant, for the same reason I didn't bring up George W. Bush and his administration. Your pivoting of this discussion into one of my personal opinions about the Clintons is super revealing.

I truly don't know what it has to do with anything, but it appears you're trying to catch me personally in some kind of contradiction? Even if I were holding contradictory views about these matters (I don't think I am), what relevance does that have to the factuality of there being enough suspicion around the 2016 election and actors within Trump's campagin to warrant an investigation?

[juliangoldsmith]

An impartial investigation isn't unreasonable. Having an investigation conducted by someone (Robert Mueller) with ties to the Clintons (via James Comey) is.

Keep in mind that almost the entirety of the media and the political establishment in the United States opposes President Trump. If they had anything substantive on him, don't you think it would have come out after an investigation that's been going on for a year?

[chowchowchow]

> don't you think it would have come out after an investigation that's been going on for a year

I don't know. I'm not a federal investigator, I don't really know how long these things take or what "should" have leaked by now if there was something serious enough afoot for you to consider it substantive.

It took like 2 years or something for impeachment to begin after the watergate break in was first reported as a spying effort and Nixon was still fully denying it a year later.

[juliangoldsmith]

That's how long it took for impeachment to begin. The actual break-in was reported on NBC by Robert Endicott on June 19th, 1972, two days after the crime was committed.

Up to this point, the news media hasn't seen any actual evidence of a collusion. To quote Adam Entous, who writes on national security for the Washington Post, "Our reporting has not taken us to a place where I would be able to say with any confidence that the result of it is going to be the president being guilty of being in cahoots with the Russians. There's no evidence of that that I've seen so far." [0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIm9zNItYq8

[chowchowchow]

wait wait, you are totally crossing wires.

In the watergate analogy "collusion" would be Nixon's direct complicity in the Watergate break in. Nixon was denying all involvement one year after the crime was reported. The crime was the break in then, and now it's Russian election meddling via social media and probably hacking the DNC (I'm sure you disagree with this).

So we're in the period after the crime was revealed, before the link to the sitting President was found, if we are just comparing the two timelines.