Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

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

We still have time to mess this up!

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Donald Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

The words do not have to be perfect.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

The willow is too close to the house.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2016 / Collusion Lite (Open Thread)

Collusion Lite (Open Thread)

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The latest line is that if there was collusion, it was over before the election anyway:

Next up: “Collusion is awesome and everyone does it.” A version of this brazen lie was debuted earlier this year by Giuliani in defense of Dim Son, when Giuliani said that any campaign would have taken a meeting with Russians claiming to have dirt on a political opponent. Does anyone doubt this tactic will eventually be rolled out in defense of Trump himself?

Giuliani hinted at it today when he said on the same program, “if Roger Stone gave anybody a heads up about Wikileaks leaks, that’s not a crime. It would be like giving him a heads up that the Times is going to print something.”

Okay then. Y’all go with that.

Reader Interactions

94Comments

  2. 2.

    dmsilev

    Who among us hasn’t committed a bit of light collusion? I mean, it’s just like jaywalking, right?

  3. 3.

    Tom Levenson

    If anyone needs a lawyer and was wondering whether Giuliani would be right for the job…

    …

    …

    Yeah. That bad.

  4. 4.

    Pogonip

    I just tried frog legs for the first time. (I was underwhelmed.). What are those little black threads in the legs?

  6. 6.

    Suzanne

    Does anyone doubt this tactic will eventually be rolled out in defense of Trump himself?

    No doubt at all.
    The question should really be how can we shame his defenders.

  8. 8.

    sukabi

    Ghouliani would look great in orange for 10 – 15 years in the graybar hotel, he needs that long of a timeout just for his STUPID LIES.

  12. 12.

    oldster

    Look, that stuff we did with the Russians in order to steal the election?

    That happened *before* the election!

  13. 13.

    Schlemazel

    posted this in the dying moments of an earlier thread. got no response but still find the idea intriguing
    The story goes that there were several sealed indictments against Agnew and he was offered a deal, “resign and we will quash these”. He did.

    What if Dump’s agita the last couple of days is he and Pence have been offered the same deal? It is a limited time offer because the GOP would be pleased with a Ryan administration. TICK TOCK might be it exactly. Dump does not care about the GOP but they sure as hell care about not having a President Pelosi. So the GOP is hounding him in private because they know he may say no & they still have to defend him

  15. 15.

    PaulWartenberg

    IT *WAS* THE ELECTION!

    And the conspiracy – EFF THE WORD COLLUSION, We are talking CONSPIRACY here – with the Russians has been ONGOING.

    The “oh it’s all in the past let it go” defense needs to die a quick death.

    They’ll be at the “blame the victim” excuse soon: It’s all Hillary’s fault because *she’s* so unlikable the American voters had no choice but to vote for a candidate who was gleefully selling the nation out to Putin.

  16. 16.

    Schlemazel

    @Pogonip:
    young & broke I found a place that canned frogs for HS biology classes. They paid $1 each if they were the right size. Being broke I saved a few for dinner. The meat was sweet and very mild. Have not had them in years now.

    I don’t recall black threads though so no clue

  19. 19.

    Ken

    @Tom Levenson: Remind me – Does Trump have actual lawyers who might be trying to figure out a defense? And if so, do you think they come down with screaming migraines every time someone says “Giuliani’s on TV again”?

    Also remind me, is Giuliani being paid for his efforts on behalf of Trump, or is it just a service he provides for free?

  20. 20.

    Jay

    @oldster:

    Had to have happened *before* the election, otherwise the election could not have been stolen.

    I’d be hitting Rudy hard on racism,

    “So you believe in “broken windows” policing and prosecutions in Minority Neighborhoods, where the most minor civil infractions like littering or jaywalking are punished severely,

    But when White Nationalists, Russians and Rapists steal an election you call it a “process crime” deserving of no punishment!

    Rudy, Rudy Racist hypocrite.”

  21. 21.

    Ruckus

    @Pogonip:
    Now this is going to sound strange but I had frogs legs once. On board ship in the navy. They were great.
    There is a back story. The Chief in charge of the galley (that’s a rate in the navy – E7) was just about to hit his 30 yrs in and retire. He had his crew produce some amazing meals. Of course he retired about 2 months after I arrived and a few months later we literally almost had a mutiny over a dinner meal. But he could turn the provided food into actual meals, not just pig slop. But he could also use outside suppliers if he stayed in budget, hence the frogs legs.

  22. 22.

    sukabi

    @Ken: guiliani is deeply involved in conspiring with the Russians, he was a conduit from wikileaks to the press and from the ny fbi to the press on the clinton email hack. He’s wanting this to go away to save his own ass.

  24. 24.

    patrick II

    @Schlemazel:

    I think Trump has committed too many crimes for that to be a realistic scenario. Mueller could quash federal indictments, but New York can’t wait to get at him.

  25. 25.

    West of the Rockies

    Remember when Rudolph actually was a semi-respectable figure? How quickly they decay. Sunrise…. Sunset….

  26. 26.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Another Scott:

    Every time good people use the word “collusion” rather than “conspiracy” it strengthens Donnie’s framing of his crimes an angel’s wings fall off, its halo disappears, and its harp is repossessed.

  27. 27.

    sukabi

    @West of the Rockies: his respectability veneer was microscopicly thin, the difference now is that he’s gotten used to operating “above the law” and this time he’s been caught. He can’t stand the scrutiny.

  28. 28.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Mueller couldn’t have a better ally than Ghouliani. He’s reinforcing Mueller’s case.

  29. 29.

    Ruckus

    rudy’s ugly mug is almost as ugly as individual 1’s. Maybe it’s what’s inside that causes them to look like that.
    I really hate just seeing their mugs and knowing that these assholes are supposed to be our leaders. And yet they are so horribly stupid that neither or both could lead a parade out of a wet paper bag.

  31. 31.

    Corner Stone

    @Ruckus:

    I really hate just seeing their mugs and knowing that these assholes are supposed to be our leaders.

    I have never seen a picture of Trump where I didn’t feel visceral hatred for him. There’s nothing but phony and stupid there.

  32. 32.

    Hob

    @Another Scott: Maybe I’m just not reading the right articles, but I really haven’t been seeing that much use of the word “collusion” in reporting on Trump. I’ve seen 1000 times more of it from Trump himself and his mouthpieces— and also in pieces like the one you linked, or pieces like this one that are aiming for a similarly contrarian angle on how everyone else is supposedly focusing on the wrong thing.

    ETA: Also this.

  33. 33.

    Ruckus

    @Schlemazel:
    If they want him to leave why is it that they have to defend him? Not enough of them want him to leave? Not enough of them are not just grifting along in office? Not enough of them are smart enough to read the writing on the walls, and every other surface?

  34. 34.

    Peale

    I’m a busy guy with a full time job, so sometimes weeks go by and I can’t find the time to rob a liquor store. In fact, if you’d just count the days I’m not robbing liquor stores, you’d find that I’m pretty much a law abiding citizen. People are just negative in this witch hunt against me and judge me using as evidence only the bad things they want to see about me.

  36. 36.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Ruckus: Perhaps what Schlemazel means is that the GrOPers are afraid to dump Shitler b/c afraid of his base. So they’re hoping he’ll just *resign already* and spare them the moment of moral clarity (such as it is with these moral imbeciles). They want him out, but without their own fingerprints on the weapon.

    That makes sense to me. But I have some difficulty believing that Mueller would go along with it; or maybe I just hope he won’t.

  37. 37.

    Ruckus

    @Corner Stone:
    The real shame is that he’s looked like that for decades. Because he’s been the same person all his life. Stupid, racist, lying piece of shit.

  38. 38.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Geoboy: No, to the politically unaware (like me in 1995) he seemed quite respectable. It took a while (like, during Dubya’s admin) to realize he was a shitheel and asshole. [Leaving out his descent since then into treason.]

  39. 39.

    Schlemazel

    @Ruckus:
    The GOP wants him to leave but they will not say so publicly – they fear the monster they have created. He is such a narcissist that he is not going to go quietly, he still thinks he can get away with it.
    So the GOP wants him gone but can’t say so publicly and needs to be prepared to continue rearranging deckchairs

  41. 41.

    Emerald

    @Corner Stone: Which is exactly why he has to be indicted. He committed multiple felonies to defraud the American people but because the fraud succeeded he can’t be prosecuted.

    Which means that he IS above the law.

    Bullshit.

  42. 42.

    Another Scott

    @Hob: “site:balloon-juice.com trump collusion” gives me 1380 hits.

    “site:balloon-juice.com trump conspiracy” gives me 3080 hits.

    So, it’s not overwhelming here, but it’s still a lot. FWIW.

    AFAIK, Mueller’s team has been using 18 US Code § 371 – the conspiracy code – thus far. It seems like a stretch to try to apply 18 U.S.C. § 201 – “Bribery of public officials and witnesses” – to Donnie since he wasn’t a public official at the time, and we know from McDonnell’s case that proving a quid-pro-quo is really, really tough. Especially when 371 obviously works well.

    IANAL. YMMV.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  43. 43.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Ken:

    Also remind me, is Giuliani being paid for his efforts on behalf of Trump, or is it just a service he provides for free?

    “Free” is overcharging considerably for Ghouliani’s “skills” as an attorney.

  44. 44.

    Schlemazel

    @Chetan Murthy:
    I could see Mueller believing that this is the easiest solution for the nation. It saves us the ugly bitter battle of impeachment as well as leaving unanswered “can a sitting POTUS be indicted?”

  46. 46.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Corner Stone:

    Rudy has always been a racist, lying, camera hogging piece of shit.

    QFT. I’m just saying that for the politically unaware (and I was unaware, while still voting straight-ticket Dem), he could come off as “an effective mayor, telling hard truths, cleaning up the streets”. Yes, that was illusion and bullshit. But like I said: “for the politically unaware”.

  50. 50.

    Ruckus

    @Chetan Murthy:
    Oh I get your point.
    But these are still people in congress, they also took an oath which they are ignoring completely. The reality is that individual 1 probably will never resign. It’s just not in his nature/personality/width of intelligence. He thinks he was elected King, and he’s pissed to find out that there are limits that were placed upon the job, and that he ain’t shit. Because before this no one seemed to have bothered to point this out. At least not in a way that he could understand.

    So it’s kick him out or he stays till noon, Jan 20, 2021, or until he drops. And the rest of the full of shit party isn’t going to take a stand, because they won. It’s a rather hollow victory isn’t it?

  51. 51.

    Emerald

    @Chetan Murthy: According to Rachel Maddow’s podcast “Bagman” that’s exactly what happened with Agnew. He was poised to become the President of the United States, and the prosecutors could not let that happen, so they let him plead “no contest” if he resigned and he got his get out of jail free card.

    Made them sick to do it, but there it was.

    Makes me sick too. I want Shitler and his whole criminal family in JAIL.

  52. 52.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Schlemazel:

    I could see Mueller believing that this is the easiest solution for the nation.

    Three thoughts:
    (1) I would hope that he wouldn’t make such a political decision. That he’d stick to the law.

    (2) For the sake of law and order, I sure hope not. Shitler didn’t create all this corruption: he merely exposed it to the light of day. The corruption needs to be hosed-out and put down.

    (3) I don’t know if he realizes just how much anger there is out there, against these thieves and traitors. I think, precisely for the sake of the nation, we need a resolution to this crisis that actually punishes bad actors. Anything else tells many, many Americans that there will never, ever, ever be justice.

    Let me be concrete: “You expect me, ME, to pay my taxes to support traitorous scum in Tennessee? Fuck that. Fuck that. I want Federal expenditures in California to equal Federal taxes from California”. Tax Fairness, dammit. And you can imagine further steps, that all end up destroying the compact between the states, bit-by-bit. If we’re going to stay together as a nation, we need to know that the laws mean something.

  53. 53.

    Schlemazel

    @rikyrah:
    I assume he will not go willingly. But, if you were Bitch McConnell and you could easily see the jig is up wouldn’t you try to convince him? When you did how do you expect he would react? His tweets the last two days have reached new levels of insanity.

    I think it was the day he spent in his jammies & refused to even pretend to be POTUS when it was offered to him

  55. 55.

    Jay

    @Schlemazel:

    Nope. It leaves all the rot in place, same old Russians, same old GRoPer ratfuckers, and some new or old GRoPer for them to all get behind.

    Meuller’s methodically ripping out the rot and making it public.

  56. 56.

    Ruckus

    @Villago Delenda Est:
    rudy’s skills aren’t free. He may not be getting paid but anyone he’s assisting is having bills stack up beyond belief.
    rudy is the anti lawyer. The guy you call when you need help digging the hole deeper.

  58. 58.

    Schlemazel

    @Chetan Murthy:
    Mueller is a man of honor & duty to America. I can easily believe he would see this as a path of least damage.

    Me personally I would love to have the whole crime syndicate homed at Gitmo so they never see America again. But I am not a man of honor and duty

  59. 59.

    germy

    This will be Michael Cohen’s prison experience:

    For now, at Cohen’s request, the judge is recommending that he go to the minimum-security prison in Otisville, N.Y., a town of 1,000 (not counting prisoners) in the Hudson Valley. It’s a two-hour train ride from Penn Station. No doubt Cohen would rather be in midtown — the prison has been described as a “grim, gray, spirit-draining place” — but as prisons go, it’s almost impossible to do better. Forbes named it one of the ten “cushiest” prisons in the U.S. It has no fences; most of the doors aren’t locked; and it’s safe to say Cohen won’t get shanked in the prison yard. “If you look sideways at another inmate, they’re going to kick you out of there,” said Alan Ellis, a defense attorney who wrote a guidebook to federal prisons. “The biggest problem there is boredom.”

    The prison has a large Jewish population, including many Hasidim, and it’s the only federal prison with a full-time rabbi, Ellis said. As of 2008, the much larger medium-security prison next door served extensive Seder meals every spring, with kosher chicken, potatoes, and handmade matzo. And the commissary menu is extensive: with nine kinds of nuts, four kinds of sausage, tuna, mackerel, and a range of cooking supplies. Ray Liotta’s crew in GoodFellas should have been so lucky. “Even if you’re not an observant Jew,” Ellis said — and Cohen has called himself agnostic — “it’s still a pretty good place to be.”

    http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/michael-cohen-might-not-actually-go-to-prison.html

  65. 65.

    rikyrah

    @Schlemazel:

    Dolt45 understands one thing….
    Him being “President” is the ONLY reason why he is not under indictment right now.

    He will NOT give that up.
    He will tear this country asunder before that happens.

  68. 68.

    Schlemazel

    @rikyrah:
    If I were a betting man that would be where my money is also. But that does not mean he is not being leaned on right now, that he actually understands he is deep in the shit and he will act out because of that

  70. 70.

    Chetan Murthy

    @sukabi:

    what you saw was the media’s ‘vision’ of him they and he wanted you to see.

    Agreed. Like said: “politically unaware”. Dem, but politically unaware.

  71. 71.

    Suzanne

    @Chetan Murthy:

    I think, precisely for the sake of the nation, we need a resolution to this crisis that actually punishes bad actors. Anything else tells many, many Americans that there will never, ever, ever be justice.

    I also think we need a way to establish that this never happens again. Expressly make the president indict-able. Kill the electoral college. Disenfranchise anyone who voted for Trump (hey, they do it to felons—they should do it to accessories to the crime, too). I am open to suggestions. But we cannot allow Trumpy people to amass cultural power, either.

  72. 72.

    Humdog

    When I think of frog legs, I think of Arkansas nightmares. When I was a kid, my family went on a visit to distant family in Arkansas. We visited an uncle who lived on a swampy area and he offered to let us join his hunt that evening. Dozens of cousins went out into the night with boards and went to the waters edge to bash frogs and they’d put them in a bag attached to their waists. I didn’t help, was mosquito food instead.
    Then we went to another uncle in wiener Arkansas. He’d just had a heart attack so my dad offered my help to mow his lawn for him. The lawn was full of frogs but uncle said just keep mowing! He made fun of me for not liking the frog bits that stuck to my shoes.
    Arkansas frog nightmares!

  73. 73.

    Hob

    @Another Scott: I don’t really see the point of your Google exercise, given that—at least in the first four pages of “collusion” results I looked at—roughly half of them were just quoting bullshit from the Trump camp, and the other half were using the word in the general sense of cooperating or conspiring rather than trying to make any kind of specific legal point. I mean, most of the time when people talk about someone conspiring to do such-and-such, they’re not trying to cite a specific conspiracy statute either. And either way, the phrasing people use in blog posts and comments has diddly-squat to do with whether Trump’s “framing” is “strengthened”, IMO; Trump is going to continue talking about “collusion” even if literally everyone on the Internet says “conspiracy”, his whole thing is to pick a word and stick to it no matter what.

  74. 74.

    Ruckus

    @Chetan Murthy:
    EXACTLY.
    We are supposed to be a nation. A nation of laws for everyone, not only those without the ability to hire a lawyer to protect us from ourselves. I took an oath once to defend that. Spent 4 yrs of my life for that, many others have spent a lot more, including their lives. And that isn’t the important part but this is, so has every elected national office holder.
    We have to follow through with this because we are at a cross road here. Do we get better or does this experiment fail completely? Nixon was allowed to resign and was pardoned and he never should have been. It should not be considered an embarrassment to us to treat a criminal as one just because he sits in our house. We’ve done far, far worse to people that did nothing on the scale of the Greasy Old Poop party or it’s leaders. And a lot of that was at the hands of that party. If for no other reason they deserve the same treatment for themselves as they give to people who have done far less.

  76. 76.

    Ruckus

    @Schlemazel:
    Read my comment at 74.
    I fully believe that if we don’t clear cut the rot we will continue to see it for ever. And there is never a good time for this as it causes issues that rebound for years. But the rot is persuasive in the GOP (and I’d bet there is some on the liberal side, but it is in no way as deep and consistent) and if we don’t clear it out at some time it will never die or at least go away to a controllable level.

  78. 78.

    cynthia ackerman

    @Ruckus:

    I met Trump a few times in the late ’70’s.

    He struck me then as a particularly nasty iteration of a d-list Manhattan entitled jerk.

    It’s odd seeing that same coke-head now, showing signs of dementia while piloting the Resolute Desk.

  81. 81.

    jl

    @Ruckus: Followed comment thread from your 76. I agree with you. But it depends on big wins in upcoming elections by Dems, or at least by non-GOPers. Mueller is the law, and regardless of how narrowly or widely he interprets his job, there is only so much the law itself can do.

    A lot of the cleaning must be done by big election wins, and elected official who can take innovative and effective action that makes the lives or ordinary people better, and removes the corruption, most of it from a very corrupt political financing system and resulting crony capitalism, The damage done by many of our political leadership, almost exclusively from the current degraded GOP, is so great and so deep, cannot be fixed with merely legal remedies.

  82. 82.

    Platonailedit

    @rikyrah: Yup. The totus thug’s ego and self-preservation instinct will never allow it. It’s moot anyway since the notion that current corrupt cowardly corpse called gop will make such an offer is a laughable fantasy.

  83. 83.

    Ruckus

    @jl:
    Indicting and getting admissions of guilt or convictions has to be done.
    Sure we have to elect better people in the first place, but this is where we are now, it’s where we’ve been headed for at least 40 yrs or more. The rot runs a lot deeper than just the russian interference. There had to be something there in the first place and there was, their names are Regan, Bush, Newt, McConnell, Goldwater, Buckley, Nixon, racism………
    This is not a new thing, this is an ongoing mess of people being bought to bend and break the laws to get more money for those already way too wealthy and to conspire to keep many from ever being treated with respect and equality. And it didn’t start after WWII, it has been ongoing since the first day this was a country. We’ve tried to at least mitigate some of it over the years but it is a failure of epic proportions. The base ideas are fine, it’s the implementation that keeps getting screwed up. Just one point, how tall can you stack the IRS regulations on double spaced pages? I believe it’s well over 4 feet tall now. Most of those are how rich people can avoid paying taxes.

  85. 85.

    Gex

    GIULIANI, today: Trump paid Stormy Daniels because he “was very concerned about how this was going to affect his marriage”

    GIULIANI, 5/3/18: “Imagine if that came out of October 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Clinton…Cohen made it go away. He did his job”

    Judd Legum

    A large percentage of their defenses can be rebutted by their own words.

  86. 86.

    Mnemosyne

    @germy:

    Meh. It’s probably way easier to keep Cohen alive there than at a super-max type of place, no matter how much I would love to see him someplace like that.

  87. 87.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Mnemosyne: If Mikey Cohen manages to get Shitler indicted, we should throw him an effin’ parade. And I say this knowing he’s been in bed with the Mob since he cut his teeth.

  88. 88.

    Schlemazel

    @Ruckus:
    I am not saying you are wrong but I am saying the Mueller sees things differently & his opinion would be the one that matters

  89. 89.

    Redshift

    @Suzanne: Just this morning, Trump was tweeting trying to imply that the fact that the Russia investigation started “long before” he was elected was somehow suspicious. Don’t think that one is going to work on anyone but the 27%.

  91. 91.

    Jay

    @Schlemazel:

    Meuller’s all but named Individual 1 and tied him to crimes in public court documents and criminal indictments.

    I don’t think Meuller see’s things differently.

  92. 92.

    Ruckus

    @Schlemazel:
    Agreed.
    But looking at how the investigation has gone so far, IOW the bits we can see, I see Mueller following the law, at least as I understand it, very closely. He’s charged with investigating Russian interference and any other federal crimes he finds and has evidence for along the way and charging individuals for their crimes. He seems to be doing that. So far I have no reason to believe that he will stop because of someone’s position. Yes he may respect the DOJ saying that a sitting president can’t (or is it shouldn’t be) indicted. That means of course that individual 1 serves out his term or stops breathing on his own before then. But while I think, considering the scope and scale of this crime family, that he’s going pretty damn fast, it may take the next 2 yrs to get to the tippy top. Individual 1 could be indicted by 1:00 pm on Jan 20, 2021 if that happens, and arrested within minutes.

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