Serious Question

3 Comments

1. 

   Arthur Gilroy on September 9, 2018 at 1:40 pm

   Yes, Booman!!!

   Ever since I read about Papadopoulos’s mini-sentence, I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop.

   Here it is.

   George Papadopoulos, the one-time foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump who became swept up in the special counsel investigation, says members of the Trump campaign team were “fully aware” and in many cases supportive of his efforts to broker a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

   “I actively sought to leverage my contacts with the professor to host this meeting,” Papadopoulos told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos in an exclusive interview on “This Week” Sunday. “The campaign was fully aware what I was doing.”

   —snip—

   Stephanopoulos asked Papadopoulos about his meeting with the FBI in January 2017, at which time the former campaign aide said he was “of course” hopeful that he would get a job in the Trump administration.

   “It was in that context on January 27, 2017 when you met with the FBI and lied to them about your meetings with [Maltese professor] Joseph Mifsud,” Stephanopoulos said. “Why did you lie to them?”

   “I found myself pinned between the Department of Justice and the sitting president and having probing questions that I thought might incriminate the sitting president,” Papadopoulos said.

   “You were trying to protect the president?” Stephanopoulos pressed.

   “Of course,” Papadopoulos responded.

   PHOTO: Former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos exits U.S. District Court after his sentencing hearing, in Washington D.C., Sept. 7, 2018.Yuri Gripas/Reuters
   Former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos exits U.S. District Court after his sentencing hearing, in Washington D.C., Sept. 7, 2018.more +
   Papdopoulos added, “I didn’t understand really the nature of what was going on. Of course I’m remorseful, I’m contrite and I did lie … You know, that was probably in the back of my mind, of what exactly am I doing here talking about Russian hacking or election interference with the candidate that I just worked for.”

   —snip—

   He said that during the campaign he floated the idea of a summit between then-candidate Trump and Putin at a campaign security team meeting on March 31, 2016.

   Among those who seemed to like the concept, he said, was then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, who he says appeared enthusiastic about a Trump-Putin summit, in contrast to what Sessions later told Congress.

   Papadopoulos said Trump was “open to this idea, and he deferred, of course, to then senior Senator Jeff Sessions, who I remember being quite enthusiastic.”

   Stephanopoulos noted that Sessions later gave Congress an apparently different account, saying that he shut down the idea of a Trump-Putin summit at that campaign meeting. “I pushed back,” Sessions told Congress.

   The “attorney general says he pushed back,” Stephanopoulos said to Papadopoulos. “Is he telling the truth?” Papadopoulos said, “All I can say is this is a meeting from about two years ago. My recollection differs from Jeff Sessions.

   He also said that there were mixed reactions to the summit idea among Trump’s advisers at that March 2016 meeting, but that many in the campaign were aware of his efforts, including Corey Lewandowski, the then-campaign manager, Sam Clovis, a senior aide, and Trump himself.

   —snip—

   This is of course simply a result of the slap-on-the-wrist deal he made with the investigation. “He say/they say” with no apparent paper or digital trail the confirm the truth(s) of the matter.

   The PostTruth world in a nutshell, and may the best liars win.

   Sigh…

   AG

2. 

   Tommy D Cosmology on September 9, 2018 at 4:48 pm

   These indictments “talk” as they say:

   1. Emails were hacked. Crimes were committed by Russians and others.
   2. Russian operatives were offering dirt, looking for back channels, and saying they had emails as early as April 2016. Some coffee boy just plead guilty to, and was sentenced for, lying about being told by Russians about emails.

   Forget obstruction, this speaks of conspiracy..

   And this coffee boy is a crappy liar. His CNN performance was telling. Lewandiwski knew.

   Plus!! This is not the only part of the conspiracy! The whole Michael Flynn / sanctions / Pence thread has yet to be pulled!  When those sentences are handed down and start to sink into the public mind…

3. 

   yastreblyansky on September 9, 2018 at 7:18 pm

   The first 50-60 minutes of this film are going to be so great, like a multidimensional rom-com of evil, or maybe Ocean’s Thirty-Seven, as destiny brings all these mooks together.