Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

In my day, never was longer.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

This really is a full service blog.

Books are my comfort food!

“But what about the lurkers?”

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

We will not go back.

No one could have predicted…

… gradually, and then suddenly.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2016 / Russiagate Open Thread: BUT **THEIR** EMAILS…

Russiagate Open Thread: BUT **THEIR** EMAILS…

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Look, I’m as dismissive of the DISTRACTION! theories as any other cynic, but it’s been a really bad week for Donald Trump, by Donald Trump’s standards. The optics — the only measure he understands — have ranged from ‘just terrible’ to ‘super-duper sucky, even by this loser’s degraded standards’; formerly dependable kissups like Chris ‘Mad Bitcher’ Cillizza and Erick ‘Voice of the GOP Gated Community’ Erickson have gone so far as to express doubts on Twitter.

And it’s been even worse for the only other humans Donald Trump seems to sometimes care about, his daughter-wife Ivanka and her partner Jared (who Trump undoubtably considers the son he would’ve had, if not for the base treachery & failure of the human broodmare who birthed DJTJr and Whats-His-Name). Since Robert Mueller III is not a man to be hustled into premature disclosures by breaking news reports, we aren’t liable to know for some time just how bad the latest multiple reports on Javanka’s slack email security will be judged, but a less connected couple would certainly have been asked to turn over their passports and warned about the consequences of destroying evidence…

… The accounts would have been more secure if they relied on commercial email providers. It is unclear what they did. “If you’re using a commercial email service provider, you’re really reducing the risk,” according to Lewis, because the major tech companies that run platforms like Gmail and Outlook typically have robust security teams. “If you’re doing your own email, it gets to be a lot easier [to hack],” he added.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said last week that White House staff had been told to stick to its government email accounts. “All White House personnel have been instructed to use official email to conduct all government-related work,” Sanders said. “They are further instructed that if they receive work-related communication on personal accounts, they should be forwarded to official email accounts.”

[Now, if only the Kushners were ‘WH personnel’, which they keep telling us they’re not…]

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), and ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) sent a letter to White House counsel last week requesting more information about the use of private email addresses by White House staff….


And we know — us mere citizen voters found out just this week! — that the Trump kids aren’t smart enough or careful enough not to discuss their criminal activities in emails. Per the New Yorker/ProPublica/WNYC:

In the spring of 2012, Donald Trump’s two eldest children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., found themselves in a precarious legal position. For two years, prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had been building a criminal case against them for misleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development that was failing to sell. Despite the best efforts of the siblings’ defense team, the case had not gone away. An indictment seemed like a real possibility. The evidence included e-mails from the Trumps making clear that they were aware they were using inflated figures about how well the condos were selling to lure buyers.

In one e-mail, according to four people who have seen it, the Trumps discussed how to coördinate false information they had given to prospective buyers. In another, according to a person who read the e-mails, they worried that a reporter might be on to them. In yet another, Donald, Jr., spoke reassuringly to a broker who was concerned about the false statements, saying that nobody would ever find out, because only people on the e-mail chain or in the Trump Organization knew about the deception, according to a person who saw the e-mail. There was “no doubt” that the Trump children “approved, knew of, agreed to, and intentionally inflated the numbers to make more sales,” one person who saw the e-mails told us. “They knew it was wrong.”…

The Trump spawn got away with that one, allegedly because the old man’s lawyer made a big donation to the Manhattan District Attorney. (Although if you or I had produced a Donald Trump Junior, our faith in the eugenic ‘racehorse theory’ would’ve been seriously challenged.)

But that was in the good old days, when the Trumps were just another clan of NYC real-estate scroungers; now they’re national figures, and held (we can but hope) to a rather higher standard of behavior, as befits a bunch of Lucky Sperm Club grifters individuals with the (unearned / undeserved) power to blow up the global economy, and possibly the globe…

Reader Interactions

91Comments

  1. 1.

    Trentrunner

    Process question:

    What will Mueller’s culminating presentation be?

    Will it be The Mueller Report a la The Starr Report?

    Will it be recommendations for indictments?

    What?

  2. 2.

    Mnemosyne

    I don’t see any reason why the Russians would bother to break into the Kushners’ emails since they had the whole chain already anyway.

    I’m kind of fascinated by the news that Kelly’s cell phone has been compromised for months. Seems like somebody at the Kremlin wants Kelly gone.

  5. 5.

    BBA

    Due to this and the revelations about the Miramax guy, I’ve decided to run against Cy Vance. Sure I’m a long shot – I’m starting just a month before the election, I have no money and no name recognition, and I’m only slightly more qualified than the average person on the street. But I live in Manhattan and I’ve passed the bar exam and that’s enough to be DA, and I figure I couldn’t screw the pooch nearly as much as Vance has.

  8. 8.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Trentrunner: Right now he is empowered to bring indictments. It is unclear whether he is empowered to produce just a classified report that closes out the counterintelligence investigation or such a report and an unclassified version to be delivered to Congress like the Starr Report. I’ve seen reporting that says the former, not the latter and other reporting that says both. And the reporting, regardless, is all based on the memorandum issued by Deputy AG Rosenstein establishing Mueller’s office.

  10. 10.

    Anne Laurie

    @rikyrah: I would like to believe Seth Abramson, but he consistently gets too far ahead of the known facts for me to fully trust his reasoning…

  13. 13.

    Starfish

    @Anne Laurie: agreed. I don’t know why people keep quoting Seth as if he has any credibility.

    I thought Javanka had two separate private email servers. Which one is this about?

  14. 14.

    mai naem mobile

    Seriously? Fucking seriously? You have to be fucking kidding me. This stupid asshole and his stupid little girl voice wife and her fucking moron dad were doing the exact same fucking thing as HRC and making a big deal about it? Mother fuckers. Where the fuck is Darrel Issa and Trey Gowdy and that other fucking southern as swipe investigating this? Fucking hypocritical assholes should be hung and tied up by their balls. Fucking scumbag shitheads. I am sooo fucking pissed off by this shit. Its not even fucking funny anymore.

  15. 15.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Starfish: They closed their’s down, or at least moved their emails off of it, and moved them to the Trump Organization’s server. In addition to the clearance concerns that Brad Moss raised in the tweet in the post, this is also a Federal records law violation.

  16. 16.

    mai naem mobile

    Let me fucking bring this up again . HRCS server was at the same place as her husband a former POTUS lived. Yes, I know it’s a cyber world but jeezus that should count for something .

  20. 20.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    Shit. You know the truly amazing thing? We’re, what, only eight months into this. Maybe nine? I think it’s eight. It feels like it’s been eight years, for fuck’s sake. I want Mueller to do a thorough job here, but, Lorn in heaven, we need him to hurry the fuck up and tell us what happened. We can’t go on this way much longer. If we were some dinky little country, Zambia or Uruguay or something, it wouldn’t be such a huge deal, but we aren’t. We’re the biggest economy and military in the history of the fucking world. We can’t just ride this out and hope we can weather it. The president of Angola can’t drop a nuclear bomb on North Korea and set off a war that ends all life on Earth. This shitheel can. We need to get this asshole out of there, and boy, I mean like yesterday.

  21. 21.

    Mnemosyne

    @mai naem mobile:

    This stupid asshole and his stupid little girl voice wife and her fucking moron dad were doing the exact same fucking thing as HRC and making a big deal about it?

    Of course they were. Just like Newt Gingrich was fucking his mistress and then going out onto the floor of the House to denounce Bill Clinton as an adulterer. It’s what these hypocritical assholes do, and no one in the media ever calls them on it.

  25. 25.

    John

    @Adam L Silverman: What was it Flynn said at the convention? “If I’d done just HALF of the things she’s done, I’d be in JAIL right now!!” What happens if you’ve done twice as much?

  26. 26.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Cheryl Rofer: Personal phones should be locked in the external lockers prior to entering the clean areas of the workspace. Or left locked in personal vehicles. Government issued phones that are unclassified should also be locked in the external lockers prior to entering the clean areas of the workspace. No unclassified or personal communication devices should be in any classified areas, meetings, briefings, working groups, etc.

  27. 27.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    As somebody has said, maybe Josh Marshall, the real problem here is a political one. I’d love to see some people get indicted and convicted, but the more pressing thing is to get these people out of office as fast as we can. That’s really the hitch here, I think. Mueller’s job is a legal one, and what we have here is foremost a political cancer. I don’t know the best way to reconcile the two, but then, I’m not a lawyer, so maybe there is some way. But at this point, my biggest fear is the harm this clot of creeps is doing to the country and the world. They have to go, and as fast as we can run them out of there. Shit, they should have been gone months ago. Double shit, they never should have taken office, but we can’t wait much longer here. I fear the whole political system is breaking here. We just don’t have any mechanisms to deal with a monster like this running the country. The people who wrote the Constitution never fathomed that such a creature would even find its way into the presidency.

  28. 28.

    mai naem mobile

    @Adam L Silverman: she probably put her catholic schoolgirl outfit on for her daddy. I think the whole family is crazy,weird and disgusting. I find it strange that you never hear abut Ivanka’s mom being around the grandkids. That’s not normal. And Marla Maples taking Tiffany all the way to the other side of the country so that Dolt can’t get his hands on Tiffany is icky too. He’s so obviously a lech. I wish Joan Rivers was alive. I think she might have said something regardless of her NDA.

  31. 31.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Marshall is wrong. I like him. I like what he’s written about the President and all of this circling around him, but on this point he is wrong. This is not a political problem. And while it is partially going to be handled as such and partially as a criminal one, it is really neither of those. It is an ongoing low intensity war being carried out through a variety of asymmetric and largely non-violent means. We are at war. We were and have been repeatedly attacked. Whatever we have been doing to combat these attacks is clearly insufficient. It was insufficient under President Obama and it is woefully insufficient under the current President. The sooner everyone gets their heads around this fact – that we are at war, that it is a very different type of war that we have ever experienced, and that we need to fully mobilize across all lines of national power to mount a defense the better off we will all be.

  33. 33.

    Peale

    @mai naem mobile: because perhaps it really wasn’t a big deal? And all those shithead whiner faux tech bros who were complaining that if they had done what Hillary had done at their jobs, they’d be fired…were lying about the hard ass bosses and company policies they had to deal with? And all the conservative tears about “our precious bodily fluids and national secrets” that she treated omehow disrespectfully and so carelessly that she might as well have been caught peeing on the tomb of the unknown soldier…those guys were perhaps being a bit phony in their concern?

  34. 34.

    patrick II

    Open thread topic.

    There were some comments written several months ago here about the high cost of the epinephrene injector epi-pen’s high cost. There are now several generic competitors on the market, but their costs are generally high. I visited my allergist this week and he suggested Auvi-Qa new generic that, if your insurance covers it, is free. It is a new company (since February) and it is not in pharmacies but delivered to your home. The doctor’s office sent in the request, an Auvi-Q rep called me to confirm address and when I would be home to recieve it. It will be delivered Tuesday.
    If your insurance doesn’t cover it and you have insurance through work, fill out a form on the site and it will still be free. (Seems like a marketing thing). If you have no insurance at all it’s $350. It seems they don’t want to deal with individual bill collecting. Anyhow, if like me, you sometimes need an epinephrene injector there is now a much cheaper option for many.
    So, anyhow, perhaps someone who reads this site will save a few $.

  36. 36.

    Raoul

    @RepCummings: Within 24–48 hours after #Gowdy & I sent #Kushner & #Ivanka preservation letters–they transferred their emails to #Trump Org.

    This certainly looks bad.

  38. 38.

    Raoul

    @Adam L Silverman: Unfortunately, the klown kar GOP is completely unwilling, since anything Russian will damage their (damaged) potus.
    The Dems are scrambling to not let the admin smash-n-grab everything of Obama’s legacy.
    And the press doesn’t yet see or understand enough of this to get how this war sells papers/affixes eyes to web pages.

  39. 39.

    randal sexton

    Ping the number at the beast!
    start->cmd.exe
    at the prompt –
    ping -n 666 ijkpph01.ijkfamily.com
    ping -n 666 ijkpph02.ijkfamily.com

  40. 40.

    Corner Stone

    Man. I never thought re-binge watching Vampire Diaries on Netflix would have been so instructive for our current political situation.

  41. 41.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Corner Stone: I like President Obama. I think he did a lot of good while dealing with a bad hand. But he wasn’t perfect. He had far too much faith in the better angels of his political opponents nature. And in trying to prevent further entangling the US in messes that are hard to define and hard to get out of he was often to conservative in his responses. When Russia gobbled up Crimea I was the temporarily assigned control Cultural Advisor at US Army Europe. I was a strong believer in not getting into a military conflict with Russia, a nuclear weapon power, over Crimea. I was wrong. We should have bloodied Putin’s nose. While I only know the publicly reported details, my understanding is that the President, for whatever reason, chose very conservative and cautious responses to the Russian cyberwar against us. It is what it is. It can’t be redone. But it set the conditions that have allowed things to get worse. And they will get worse if we don’t get our tuchas’s in gear.

  44. 44.

    GregB

    That was a deep dig into the Breitbart abbattoir by Buzzfeed.

    The Mercer family is getting some of the gutter splashed on them. It also gave a look into all kinds of filthy corners of the fascist-sphere.

    Bannon is a fucking degenerate in the model of Goebbels.

  45. 45.

    Corner Stone

    @Adam L Silverman: I agree, mostly. In the same vein, I have been struggling with how much, exactly, I can enjoy the work of R&B legend R Kelly now that we know what he has done.
    I mean, I basically lived my entire gettin’ it on to the edict of “I don’t see nothin’ wrong…with a little bump n grind”. But was that really efficacious? I think history is going to judge us all quite harshly.

  47. 47.

    Adam L Silverman

    @GregB: Everyone needs to read the article. It is a big deal. It shows just how far in bed all of these folks are with the NAZIs and the KKK folk and their fellow travelers. Some of Milo’s passwords are referenced. The passwords are sly plays on bad things happening to Jews. Such as kristall for kristallnacht. Absolute degenerate filth. The lot of them.

    You can read through this thread for outtakes:

  48. 48.

    GregB

    The other thing about Bannon is his writing, at least his emails come across like a seventh grade school child.

    Between the Buzzfeed story and others, it seems like the dumps against Chesse-Wiz Ceaucescu are accelerating,

  53. 53.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Adam L Silverman:

    The passwords are sly plays on bad things happening to Jews. Such as kristall for kristallnacht

    Look again–the person said the password “started with kristall”. His other password is just something bad that happened to Jews and then another bad thing that happened to jews. They’re not sly plays.

    @BBA: he has a black husband too, which I’m 68% sure is a paid arrangement so he can rebuff accusations of racism with “I married a black person, what did you ever do?”

  54. 54.

    Corner Stone

    @Adam L Silverman:

    While I only know the publicly reported details, my understanding is that the President, for whatever reason, chose very conservative and cautious responses to the Russian cyberwar against us. It is what it is. It can’t be redone. But it set the conditions that have allowed things to get worse.

    I hate to tee off the haters, but this is one thing I am never going to let go of.

  58. 58.

    Turgidson

    @Raoul:

    The media has two problems (besides just being fucking shitty in general). First, they are still busy denying that their atrocious election coverage has anything to do with Hair Furor’s victory and everything that it has spawned. Second, while in private, access-humpers like Maggie Haberman might lament what the ZOMG EMAILS reporting hath wrought on the country and the world, Hair Furor’s administration is such an epic shitshow that they now have so many potentially huge stories to cover and unravel that they can barely keep track of them all. If HRC had won, they’d be stuck with BENGHAAAZI and EMAILS for another few years along with lending credibility to whatever stupidity the Clinton fever swamps dredge up. Their jobs are way more interesting with Dolt 45’s merry band of demented crooks in charge.

  60. 60.

    GregB

    I think Obama under estimated how brutally eviscerated Hillary had become via coordinated multi pronged attacks.

    He thought she’d win and then she could give Putin shit herself.

    He underestimated how thoroughly corrupt the GOP had become too.

  62. 62.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Corner Stone: Hindsight is 20/20.

    As someone who has spent a lot of time as a senior advisor to a variety of senior military leaders, I can honestly say that good senior leaders make decisions based on as full a consideration as possible of the information they have; what they often think is the least worst of the possible choices; and recognize that every decision made in regard to a give problem or set of problems essentially remakes the reality around them; which produces new problems. Often, what at the time seemed to have been the right decision turns out to have not been after time has passed. We honestly don’t know what the President had in terms of information, what the options his team prepared for him to choose from, or why he chose to respond in a way that now seems to have been less than effective.

  63. 63.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Major Major Major Major: I do not blame you. To be honest, even with the Mercer’s providing security for him, I think it is likely he’ll come to an ugly end. He’s going to go to the wrong place and mouth off to the wrong person one too many times and the response will be very, very ugly and unpleasant.

  65. 65.

    Corner Stone

    @Adam L Silverman: I have not commanded men and women into a life or death arena. But my livelihood has put me in multiple situations over 20+ years where working for the least bad outcome was not an option. It’s easy to risk money and manpower when no one is going to die if you fuck up. I get that.
    Obama knew in 2015. 20fucking15 that we were getting fucked right up the fucking ass. Pull the trigger, hoss.

  66. 66.

    Turgidson

    @GregB:

    I mean, I think Obama had long since been disabused of any notion that the GOP would put the national interest above their desire to destroy his presidency – and we saw this in the form of the No Fucks Left to Give Obama we had for the last couple years. But, I don’t think he saw it coming that they were so fucking evil and devoted to power above anything else that they would accept fucking Russia’s help to win an election, especially in light of their nominee being a dangerously incompetent sex offender.

    But, there truly is no bottom with most of these soulless ghouls, particularly McConnell and the Granny Starver. They are just reprehensible.

  68. 68.

    GregB

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Milo is playing with fire by cozying up to the fascist right. He’ll end up like Ernst Rohm one of these days if the comments section from another wingnut who offered him good cheer on his wedding is an indicator.

  69. 69.

    Mnemosyne

    @Turgidson:

    I don’t think he saw it coming that they were so fucking evil and devoted to power above anything else that they would accept fucking Russia’s help to win an election, especially in light of their nominee being a dangerously incompetent sex offender.

    This. I think Obama was unable to comprehend that the same Republicans who claimed to revere Ronald Reagan would literally commit treason in order to win an election by working directly with Russia. I think it’s hard for any of us who grew up during the Cold War to believe it, and yet they did it. Because racism and white supremacy were more important to them than their own country.

  70. 70.

    Peale

    @Major Major Major Major: yep. He certainly tests the limit of my belief for humane and fair treatment of even the worst of the right wing gay men. Look, there are going to be looney right wing gay men and lesbians, and more sedate log cabin republicans, and just obnoxious blowhards of all stripes. May their numbers be tiny. But when, say, Andrew Sullivan is being an ass, treat him like an ass and don’t add the homophobic slurs. Or Glenn Greenwald. Or Camille Paglia. But I find Milo so obnoxious and irredeemable that I’m not going to remind people that hoping for his suicide because we don’t have gas chambers isn’t really a healthy sentiment to stir up.

  71. 71.

    Shalimar

    @Adam L Silverman: Did anyone ever confirm that Milo has a marriage certificate filed? I still believe it was a publicity stunt until I hear from someone I trust that they have seen it.

    Edit: should go to M4’s comment at 53. Too tired to correct.

  74. 74.

    cokane

    at least it’ll be a fascinating chapter in history books, America downed by a 3rd tier grifter family

  78. 78.

    joel hanes

    @Mnemosyne:

    St. Ronald himself committed treason at least twice: getting the Iranian “students” to hold the US embassy hostages until the election was over, and then trading arms for unConstitional funding for a covert rump military not funded by Congress.

  79. 79.

    barb 2

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Keep repeating this. We are at war.

    I was wondering why there was such an effort to rehabilitate Putin’s reputation — mostly by Conservative talking heads and politicians. That was perhaps a couple of years ago. Great admiration for Putin — now I understand the why. War Propaganda and buying off (or blackmailing) enablers in the US.

    Weaponizing political data to swing an election — why are more people angry? Pissed?

    The Russian leadership — they are not our friends and never will be. It is not in their interest to be “friends”. They want to dominate — and with puppet Trump — just a few months and look at all the damage he has done. There are a lot of traitors.

  80. 80.

    seaboogie

    @Anne Laurie: Yeah, but I am kind of rooting for “pee” tapes. Won’t make a difference to his base, but I am kind of hoping for that degree of shame to befall him before the Russia collusion indictments.

    If this doesn’t end in nuclear war for the purpose of distraction, it will be a miracle.

  81. 81.

    patrick II

    @Mnemosyne:
    I don’t know what loving Reagan has to do with not being able to think of someone being treasonous. He made an agreement with Iran to hold the hostages until he was president so he could make a big show of setting them free just as he became president.

  82. 82.

    Jinchi

    @Mnemosyne:

    I don’t see any reason why the Russians would bother to break into the Kushners’ emails since they had the whole chain already anyway.

    Remember the original Kushner scandal was his attempt to get Kislyak to set up a secure line of communications on a Russia-intelligence hosted back-channel.

    He isn’t worried about Russians breaking into his emails. He’s worried about American intelligence breaking into his emails. Never forget, these guys are literally Russian agents.

  83. 83.

    SFAW

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Some of Milo’s passwords are referenced. The passwords are sly plays on bad things happening to Jews. Such as kristall for kristallnacht. Absolute degenerate filth. The lot of them.

    You seem to be focused (after a fashion) on The Jews. Why is that?

    Kidding, of course.

    I used to read the Boston Glob. One of their op-ed persons is a guy named Jeff Jacoby. He’s a major-league asshole conservative, prone to getting his “facts” from NewsMax and similar “press” outlets. But one of his non-asshole-conservative things was defending Israel. In fact, that was the ONLY thing he did that was not asshole-conservative scrawlings. But he’s a Trumper — or seemed to be, the last time I could stomach him. (“Stomach him” == reading one or two sentences, because that’s all I can take of that asshole)

    One wonders — given all the Nazis and neo-Nazis that have attached themselves to Shitgibbon, and to whom Shitgibbon has attached himself — whether Jacoby will have an epiphany (as opposed to Epiphany), and realize what an evil, corrupt, degenerate motherfucker his Dear Leader is, and actually speak out.

    But one does not wonder too long, because Jacoby is, after all, an asshole conservative. And Bill Clinton Barack Obama Hitlery Clinton was worse

  86. 86.

    Chris

    Look, I’m as dismissive of the DISTRACTION! theories as any other cynic, but it’s been a really bad week for Donald Trump, by Donald Trump’s standards.

    Reading this makes me realize that I really have no idea how to assess these things anymore. I’m sure this week’s done a lot to make it clear that the Trump administration is a raging dumpster fire, but let’s be honest, most people have known that since before he was inaugurated. On the other hand, nothing that’s happened has made his Republican base turn on him or is likely to make his Republican base turn on him.

  87. 87.

    Tenar Arha

    @Chris: On the scale of slightly good news, the dumpster fire is having an effect. According to a few political stats based writers & a few middle of the country bloggers, they are getting a lot more people self-identifying as Independents rather than Republicans. That’s what started happening post-Katrina for Bush. And currently ilt’s that person in your family who has enough sense to finally see the Nazi-KKK-patriarchy at the center of the party and then say “but I’m really an Independent!”

  89. 89.

    lethargytartare

    @Mnemosyne:

    I think Obama was unable to comprehend that the same Republicans who claimed to revere Ronald Reagan would literally commit treason in order to win an election by working directly with Russia. I think it’s hard for any of us who grew up during the Cold War to believe it, and yet they did it. Because racism and white supremacy were more important to them than their own country.

    I also think he was correctly wary of how the US media would report on the issue.

    “ZOMG!!!! Obama uses CIA to help Hillary campaign!!!111!!!!!1!” or “ZOMG!!!! Obama instructs FBI to investigate Trump family!!!!111!1!11111” wouldn’t have made things better, IMO.

  90. 90.

    The Lodger

    @Tenar Arha: But it doesn’t change who they are or what they want, and it doesn’t make them any more likely to vote for Democrats. It just means they’re fed up with a particular faction of Team R. When someone new comes along or rebrands themselves, they’ll just fall back into line.

  91. 91.

    SFAW

    @lethargytartare:

    “ZOMG!!!! Obama uses CIA to help Hillary campaign!!!111!!!!!1!” or “ZOMG!!!! Obama instructs FBI to investigate Trump family!!!!111!1!11111” wouldn’t have made things better, IMO.

    But given the attention span of most of the electorate, the negative effects probably would have been transitory.

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