[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.

[juliangoldsmith]

Nixon (most likely) wasn't complicit in the break-in, he covered it up after he learned of it.

In any case, the alleged collusion isn't Watergate. The coziness of the investigators with President Trump's political enemies and the amount of false information that the media has reported should be cause to question the purpose of the investigation.

As far as the DNC "hack", the evidence the Russia did it was a hasty, blatant forgery [0]. Julian Assange and Wikileaks have done literally everything short of outright claiming that Seth Rich was their source [1][2].

EDIT: The comment chain has gotten too long for replies, so I'll have to reply here.

@dragonwriter: The Robert Mueller, the special investigator, has ties to James Comey [3]. James Comey has been part of three investigations on the Clintons (the Whitewater scandal, the Marc Rich pardon, and the email server); in two of those, he personally was responsible for dropping the charges, both times with little explanation. I'd consider that to be suspicious at best. The fact that Mueller hasn't recused himself, as a friend of one of the witnesses (Comey) in the investigation, is good reason to question the validity of the investigation.

I'll concede that the point about the media wasn't a good one. A better one would have been that the Russia investigation is based on the Guccifer 2.0 forgery and a fabricated dossier by Fusion GPS. The Fusion GPS dossier was paid for first by Paul Singer, an anti-Trump conservative, and later by Marc Elias, an attorney for the Clinton campaign.

[0]: http://g-2.space

[1]: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/763041804652539904

[2]: https://youtu.be/Kp7FkLBRpKg?t=23s

[3]: http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/17/politics/james-comey-robert-mu...

[chowchowchow]

> Nixon (most likely) wasn't complicit in the break-in, he covered it up after he learned of it.

That's quite a thin distinction and not at all exculpatory of him anyway. So if Donald Trump learned about activities by his campaign manager, son, and son in law after the fact, and attempted to cover them up, would you agree with the Watergate comparison?

The investigation is also not founded on the dossier. That is false. Did you miss how trump Jr, Flynn, etc all retweeted confirmed Russian propaganda accounts? And trump himself echoed many positions that probably came to him in a similar way (he probably didn't specifically know that his sources were Russian peppaganda originally, I'll give you that. He doesn't know much). I think it may turn out that the whole gang is just extremely cynical and stupid, but to pretend Russian efforts never overlapped with the Trump campaign is deep denial and total alternative reality.

[dragonwriter]

> In any case, the alleged collusion isn't Watergate.

This is true to the extent that Watergate did not involve collision with a foreign power engaging in a policy aimed to weaken the U.S. The alleged collision is far, far worse than Watergate.

> The coziness of the investigators with President Trump's political enemies and the number of false information that the media has reported should be cause to question the purpose of the investigation.

That's a bizarre and nonspecific claim. What coziness? Which of the investigators? What false information, and how do false media reports say anything about the purpose of the investigation rather than the sloppiness of the media, in any case?