When this Op-Ed appears on CNN....Houston we've got a problemFlorda_mike said:corncob pipe said:Exactly !!tommie said:Canada2017 said:tommie said:fadskier said:The issue I see is that this involves two presidents and a former Secretary of State...Trump, Obama, and Hillary are all guilty in all of this. They play political football with a red, white, and blue ball. Our standards fell during the Obama administration and we haven't gotten back up.Beardown1919 said:
With this news I've tried to take a stance of, "okay, and if it had been Hillary how would I have reacted?" Trying to weigh out my own bias. Until Trump, I'd have considered myself a republican but the party has left me and largely my generation.
With that preface. From what I've read to day I see two basic premises.
1. There was insufficient evidence to say that the president or his campaign conspired (collusion isn't actually a legal thing) with Russia.
2. There was clear evidence of obstruction of justice and lies and misleading or incomplete information by people being investigated (including deletions of e-mails) created a significant hindrance in the investigation.
IMHO - if number two was done well it easily could prevent sufficient evidence. I don't know if it did or not, but I don't know what an innocent man/campaign would work so hard and clearly to prevent the truth from being found.
Mueller's report was clearly contradictory to what Barr summarized regarding obstruction, and it seems clear his intent for congress to decide.
Had this been any other modern president that alone would have been incredibly damning. I don't understand why our standards have completely fallen.
There should be nothing partisan about protecting our democracy
Protecting our democracy has been partisan since the days of George Washington.
It has not been. We've disagreed since GW but we've never stood bye and quietly accept a foreign attacker
why didn't Obama tell Trump about the Russians ?
Because obama is what Tommie called, "a foreign attacker"
That's why
Given Obama's record on Russia, one operating theory is that his people needed a smokescreen to obscure just how wrong they were. They've blamed Trump. They've even blamed Mitch McConnell, in some twisted attempt to deflect blame to another branch of government. Joe Biden once claimed McConnell refused to sign a letter condemning the Russians during the 2016 election. But McConnell's office counters that the White House asked him to sign a letter urging state electors to accept federal help in securing local elections -- and he did. You can read it here.
I guess if I had failed to stop Russia from marching into Crimea, making a mess in Syria, and hacking our democracy I'd be looking to blame someone else, too.
But the Mueller report makes it clear that the Russian interference failure was Obama's alone. He was the commander-in-chief when all of this happened. In 2010, he and Eric Holder, his Attorney General, declined to prosecute Julian Assange, who then went on to help Russia hack the Democratic National Committee's emails in 2016. He arguably chose to prioritize his relationship with Putin vis--vis Iran over pushing back against Russian election interference that had been going on for at least two years.
If you consider Russian election interference a crisis for our democracy, then you cannot read the Mueller report, adding it to the available public evidence, and conclude anything other than Barack Obama spectacularly failed America. Subsequent investigations of this matter should explore how and why Obama's White House failed, and whether they invented the collusion narrative to cover up those failures.
