In Depth Look why Papadopuolos story starting Trump investigation is terrible

We are told that the investigation into trump/Russia collusion started with a look into Trump team associate George Papadopoulos. I have long argued that this is an absurd reason to start an investigation that led to the wiretapping of people associated with trumps team, the unmasking of individuals, and eventually led to the special counselor Mueller and the seeming never ending investigation we see today.

I have been looking in to the Papadopoulos matter, and have found that there are many coincidences and strange happenings going on that I feel are not being covered at all by the MSM.

THE STORY

The story was first broken by the NYT (I believe) in which it sought to clarify that it wasn’t the controversial dossier that started the FBI looking in to trumps team but was actually the actions of trump team member George Papadopoulos (hereafter referred to as GP).

Here is a link to the NYT story.

www.nytimes.com...

I will give a quick rundown, but I encourage all to read the article to make sure I am representing it correctly.

GP gets named to Trumps team and ends up meeting a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud. At first Mifsud had no interest in GP, but when he found out he was working with Trump, he took an interest and ends up introducing him to a Russian woman named Olga Polonskya with hopes of setting up a meeting between Trump and Putin. Mifsud incorrectly describes the woman as Putin’s niece. Mifsud also sets up a meeting with GP and a man named Ivan Timofeev, who is described as a direct link to Russia’s Foreign ministry.

GP then discusses this with the Trump campaign, but Sessions tells him they are not interested.

GP kept pushing to meet with Russians for the purpose of improving Russian relations he claimed, and some Trump team people seemed to be warm to the idea, though no one ever traveled to Russia.

Now on to the meat.

In late April of 2016, Mifsud tells GP that he has learned that Russia has emails that make Hillary look bad. GP then gets drunk in May and tells Australian diplomat Alexander Downer about his connections to Russia and the fact they have emails that make Hillary look bad.

THE PROBLEMS

Now let’s go over some of the problems with using this story as the reason to launch the seemingly never-ending Russia investigation, and look in to some of the characters in this story.

1. HACKED EMAILS

At just the initial level, this story makes no sense as a reason to start this investigation.

The veracity of the story hinges on the fact that GP discussed Russia having Hillary emails, and then months later it being found out that the DNC was hacked. In other words, the Russians knew about the DNC hack before Hillary’s camp did, therefore proving that the Russian that told GP about the emails must have known Russia hacked the DNC.

The problem with this is that in fact many, many people including media personalities, politicians and others were discussing months before Russians told GP about emails that Hillary’s personal server, the one in her house that resulted in the FBI investigation of her, may have been hacked by foreign intel sources such as Russia, China, etc., and may have dirt on her.

Note the language the NYT piece uses.

In late April, at a London hotel, Mr. Mifsud told Mr. Papadopoulos that he had just learned from high-level Russian officials in Moscow that the Russians had “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” according to court documents. Although Russian hackers had been mining data from the Democratic National Committee’s computers for months, that information was not yet public. Even the committee itself did not know.

It just says emails that are dirt on Hillary. It doesn’t say from the DNC server, or from John Podesta’s emails. The Russian is making a claim that everyone had been worrying about for months; that Russia hacked Hillary’s server and had dirt her.

If you were a Russian trying to convince someone you had goods on Hillary, this is exactly what you would say seeing as how the entire world knew Hillary was careless with her server and may have been hacked.

So, the claim that this somehow shows that GP and the Russian had knowledge of the DNC hack well before it was ever discovered is just not true.

Given this, from the get go, we have this entire Russia investigation starting because a minor member of Trumps team got drunk, and told an Australian diplomat a Russian told him they had emails on Hillary, which was a claim that was being publicly worried about for months.

That is absurd.

(continued below)

2. SESSIONS SAYS NO

Another part of the story that makes the being the beginning of the investigation odd is that even the NYT story admits that Trumps team, in the person of Sessions, told GP they were not interested in meeting Putin. Now yes, the NYT article goes on to say others in Trump’s team seemed to encourage GP reaching out to Russians, but that is hardly a big deal.

In fact, as the NYT again admits, there is no proof GP ever mentioned these emails Russia had to anyone inside the Trump campaign.

So, think of the precedent this sets. If any member of any campaign gets drunk and says something stupid, or even does something stupid, the entire campaign can be put under investigation that may last years, wiretaps may be put on, conversations unmasked, even if there is not only no proof the campaign was involved, but they are actively telling the drunk guy they aren’t interested in what he is pushing.

3. A REAL DOWNER

Now let’s look in to a few of the characters of importance.

Alexander Downer is crucial to the entire story, because he is the Australian diplomat that told the FBI that GP had discussed these emails that were dirt on Hillary.

Now first, its important to note that Downer did not speak up until months later when Wikileaks had released the DNC emails. This would seem to suggest that Downer did not find GP’s story credible or worrisome enough to say anything when he first heard it.

Now who exactly is the important player, the man whose claims got the entire investigation into Trump/Russia collusion started?

Would it surprise you to know that he is actually a friend of the Clintons, and was instrumental in helping acquire a $25 million for the Clinton foundation?

The Australian diplomat whose tip in 2016 prompted the Russia-Trump investigation previously arranged one of the largest foreign donations to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s charitable efforts, documents show.

Former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer’s role in securing $25 million in aid from his country to help the Clinton Foundation fight AIDS is chronicled in decade-old government memos archived on the Australian foreign ministry’s website.

Downer and former President Clinton jointly signed a Memorandum of Understanding in February 2006 that spread out the grant money over four years for a project to provide screening and drug treatment to AIDS patients in Asia

thehill.com...

And to make matters worse, there seems to be an investigation about corruption involving the giving of that $25 million to the Clinton Foundation.

An Australian investigative journalist who is a retired police detective said Tuesday he has been asked to provide the FBI with details about multiple allegations of mishandling millions of dollars contributed to the Clinton Foundation by the Aussie government.

“I have been asked to provide the FBI with further and better particulars about allegations regarding improper donations to the CF funded by Australian taxpayers,” Michael Smith told LifeZette.

At the center of Smith’s complaints are former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, and multiple Australian government officials, including senior diplomat Alexander Downer, that government’s high commissioner to the United Kingdom.

www.lifezette.com...

How convenient that the person who is the lynchpin in starting the investigation into Trump and his team is involved in a possibly questionable donation of $25 million to the Clinton Foundation.

So now we have two big starts to the Trump team investigation, this GP story which has a Clinton friend as the lynchpin, and the dossier which was funded by Hillary Clinton. Isn’t it odd that all of the evidence used for this starts with Hillary or her friends?

We are now being told by Nunes who headed the House intel committee’s investigation into Trump/Russia collusion and found no such thing occurred, that in fact there were no official intel from the Australian government that came to the US.

Nunes explained the “Five Eyes” agreement between the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand, five countries that share intelligence.

“We are not supposed to spy on each other’s citizens, and it’s worked well,” Nunes said. “And it continues to work well. And we know it’s working well because there was no intelligence that passed through the Five Eyes channels to our government. And that’s why we had to see that original communication.”

m.washingtontimes.com...

If this is true, it means that the Australian intel service didn’t even give the US intel this info; it was all given by one Clinton friend.

Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot, and some diplomat somewhere that had business ties to Trump said that some DNC member had mentioned hacks by a country like China on Trump. Based merely off of the word of that diplomat, Trump then uses his FBI to investigate his opponents for years on end, issuing wiretaps, unmasking people, leaking to the media to make them look bad, etc. This would be an outrage.

Yet this is exactly what we see happening here.

(continued below)

4. ENTER THE MIFSUD

Another central character in this story is Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese Professor that took GP under his wing and started facilitating all of these meetings with Russians.

I have read some articles about him recently that made me want to write this thread.

At initial appearance, it seems Mifsud is a Russian sympathizing professor who has connections to the Kremlin. This would make his relationship with GP and his attempts to connect him with Russians seem more nefarious.

However, there is more than meets the eye.

It turns out that Mifsud’s connections to Russia are rather vague and not as apparent as the NYT article would appear to suggest. However, his ties to the Italian Intel community (and by proxy the CIA) are actually much more obvious yet seem to not be reported on nearly as much.

“In a rush, American and European journalists started digging into Joseph Mifsud. The reporting was excellent to begin with. As The Washington Post had an unfair month-long head start, they were the first to focus on Mifsud’s ties to Italy, ‘Mifsud helped to establish in Rome [Link Campus]with a senior Italian politician who had been implicated in a series of scandals. The university later withdrew its participation.’ But they failed to elaborate on the scandals or the fact they involved Italian intelligence services. Mifsud was certainly more than a humble academic.”

“The Guardian then picked it up, ‘Link Campus had a reputation for being closely connected to some elements within the Italian intelligence services.’ It was an understatement. Link Campus is intelligence central. It attracted foreign intelligence organizations. The CIA worked there.”

www.zerohedge.com...

Now I know people will say Zerohedge is a bad source (I disagree) but notice that all of the sources are linked that are being discussed.

So, for example, lets see what the Guardian had to say about Link Campus (where Mifsud collaborated) and their connections to the Italian intel community.

Mifsud’s professional activities are not limited to the UK. In Rome, he is an official at Link Campus University, which is headed by a former Italian interior minister named Vincenzo Scotti.

One Rome-based professor claimed Link Campus had a reputation for being closely connected to some elements within the Italian intelligence services.

“Mifsud is a person who collaborates with us,” said one person who was reached at Link Campus.

www.theguardian.com...

(if some of these links dont worked they are archived on the zerohedge article, clink on the links and go from there)

I encourage everyone who reads the Zerohedge article to go to the linked articles and fact check for yourself.

Although connections to the Italian intel community may not seem like that big of a deal, it’s the next part that is more troubling.

On of Mifsud’s great friends and coworker is a person by the name of Gianna Pittella. Now keep in mind, the loose connections between Mifsud and Russia were all that were needed to raise eyebrows, so surely his connection to Pittella which are much tighter would seem to also warrant investigation.

(continued below)

5. DEEPER INTO THE PITTELLA

So who is Pittella? From the Zerohedge article.

“I found Mifsud’s link to Gianni Pittella and the Democratic National Committee on the 3rd November and tweeted it to a BBC journalist. Jon wrote ‘Gianni Pittella and his ‘caro amico’ Joseph Mifsud‘ on his blog a few days later. Journalists were interested in our loose alliance because we were churning out large amounts of linkages and stories that hadn’t been covered. But, the interest in Mifsud’s ties to European intelligence figures began to drop off rapidly.”

Here is the article showing the strong connections between Pittella and Mifsud.

Yet there is one Brussels politican who knows Mifsud very well. And no-one in EU circles seems to have woken up and noticed yet.

Gianni Pittella

The leader of the S&D Group in the European Parliament, and hence one of the most important and senior MEPs.

Pittella’s page on Wikipedia lists that he is a lecturer at the London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD), Mifsud’s outfit that was affiliated to the University of East Anglia and then the Univeristy of Stirling. Pittella’s role at LAD is also mentioned on his page on the S&D Group site and Pittella’s own site. There are two videos on Youtube where Pittella speaks about his role at LAD:

Pittella and Mifsud are both in the Diplomat Magazine piece about LAD. Pittella is listed as a “Visiting Professor” on the now deleted Stirling Uni page about LAD. Here is Pitella on a conference panel with Mifsud, and mentioned together with him at EMUNI. And here they are at a seminar at Link Campus Univerity too.

Pittella talks about Mifsud thus: “Joseph è un mio caro amico, non posso crederlo coinvolto nel Russiagate” (“Joseph is my dear friend, I can not believe he is involved in Russiagate“) – in an Italian news story here. This is more than people who happen to meet at events.

It is not only academic – Pittella has brought Mifsud campaigning with him – see this pic from a PD rally with him with Mifsud. There are tweets (one, two) with him and Mifsud.

jonworth.eu...

So, a strong MP in Brussels, a colleague of Mifsud’s at the LAD (school they worked at which I will get to in a minute), and apparently a close friend of Mifsud’s. Strange that nebulous ties to Russians from Mifsud would warrant such scrutiny, but his close connections to a strong leader in EU parliament would be largely ignored.

And there is one more thing you should know about Mifsud’s close friend and colleague Pittella; he attended the DNC and campaigned for Hillary Clinton.

Gianni Pittella, a longtime Italian member of the European Parliament, hit the campaign trail this week. Sitting at the back of the Gran Caffe L’Aquila, he warned a group of local businesspeople and supporters of the evils of fascism.

Except Pittella wasn’t touring Italy. He was sitting in Philadelphia, trying to convince American voters to oppose an American candidate: Donald Trump.

“I have taken the unprecedented step of endorsing and campaigning for Hillary Clinton because the risk of Donald Trump is too high,” Pittella told TIME. “I believe it is in the interest of the European Union and Italy to have Hillary Clinton in office. A Trump victory could be a disaster for the relationship between the U.S.A. and Italy.”

time.com...

What another strange coincidence!

Now let’s go back to the Zerohedge article. Notice what he says about the LAD, the university where Mifsud and Pittella work.

“Luke Harding of The Guardian wrote a profile on Simona Mangiante in January. She was connected to Gianni Pittella, George Papadopoulos, and Joseph Mifsud. He had wanted to examine the claim in Jon Worth’s blogs and my research that Pittella was a fulcrum, ‘She was introduced to Mifsud in about 2012 by Gianni Pittella, a well-known Italian MEP who in 2014 became president of the Socialists and Progressive Democrats group. “I always saw Mifsud with Pittella” claimed Mangiante, she also said the London Centre for International Law Practice Mifsud’s was a “facade. “I never met any Russians there … But the center certainly wasn’t what it pretended to be” Harding tries to make LCILP sound like a Russian front, ‘she acknowledged to the Guardian that she might have inadvertently been sucked into a Russian intelligence plot.'”

Chris continued: “The problem is there is nothing Russian about LCILP or the London Academy of Diplomacy; both organizations have ties to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Pittella’s links to the Democratic National Committee were well known to ‘Mifsud scholars’ in Europe, so why was Harding omitting a rather pertinent part of the story and pushing it toward Russia?”

So, the media is pushing the LAD as some Russian connected University, when it reality they have ties to UK government.
Mifsud has much stronger proven ties to Pittella than any Russians, and Pittella campaigned for Hillary.

Perhaps GP was being led along all the while by people who wanted Hillary to win and were looking to gather info on what Trumps team was doing and hope to smear them as connected to Russians.

Let’s review. The two most key figures in the GP story are Alexander Downer, the Australian diplomat that told the FBI about the drunken conversation where GP said Russians had emails, and Joseph Mifsud, the professor that set up meeting between Russians and GP.

Both of them in turns out (Mifsud through his friend Pittella) have ties to Hillary Clinton.

Isn’t it weird how all of the evidence in all of these stories has a connection to Hillary?

(continued below)

CONCLUSION

The GP story should have never been used to start this investigation into trump/Russia collusion. It doesn’t remotely show or even suggest that Trump or anyone on his team, even GP offered to work with Russians to hack the DNC emails.

The stories two key characters both have connections to Hillary, like almost all of the other stories that are being pushed (the dossier paid for by Hillary, the Don Jr. meeting with a Russian lawyer who just happened to be meeting with Fusion GPS during the same time period).

If this story really was the reason for the start of the investigation, it is an incredible abuse of power and shows the FBI was looking for any excuse to investigate Trump and his team.

This taken in conjunction with all the other biases and double standards we see toward the intel communities handling of Trump and Hillary shows that this investigation is biased and appears to be nothing more than a witch hunt.

FINISH

The fact that we have hundreds of texts between the 2nd in command on the Trump case (Strzok) and the attorney that is assigned to keep them honest (Page) that insinuate all manner of things, including an "insurance policy". The fact that the top 2 positions in the FBI have been fired, with 1 being referred for criminal charges ("Andy", whose office the insurance policy was discussed in). The fact that the investigation itself is issued through secret orders given verbally.

I have no faith in the federal criminal justice system. Zero. None. The Hillary investigations, to me, are null. Not because I want to see her investigated ad nauseum...but because of the issues related to her cases being fixed by a provably crooked FBI and DOJ.

Alexander fricken Downer, that total piece of absolute shyte!!!!

As an Aussie Im familiar with this smug piece of political garbage, hes never done any good for anybody and needs to be retired asap.
Im actually surprised hes still floating around and in anyway relevant.

Theres only so many times you can hit a dead horse before it falls apart and becomes mush, right now the horse isnt being hit so much as its being stirred

S&F excellent post.


There is no doubt that Hillary's private server was compromised.

As soon as she set foot in a foreign country and had her blackberry turned on, all the foreign intel agencies knew the IP address of that server.


EDIT: I am sure you know who will be along shortly to claim there is no proof that her server was hacked, despite the fact that Blackberry's are so easily hackable that FBI agents were not allowed to take FBI issued Blackberry's to certain foreign countries.

They were only allowed to take old phones that had no email, and they contained no information that would be of use to foreign intel.

great research and well thought out but i fear your post will not be appreciated because you left out one thing: Trump is evil and must be destroyed by any and all means(including fascist acts, law breaking, and what ever else is needed)!!!!!!!

"It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance" - Thomas Sowell

Thanks again, i appreciate the work you did here

a reply to: Grambler

If they can do something like this to Trump imagine how many innocent people are sitting in jail. for real innocent ..

I cant believe they raided a sitting POTUS lawyer. They are covering up something YUGE...

Ya know, you're probably a lot closer to the truth than most with that take. DJT directly 'colluding'? His ego suggests that he wouldn't let anyone but himself take the credit for his win -- whatever previous misdeeds aside. Maybe he runs with some innuendo and character assassination on the campaign trail but having and using state-sponsored 'dirt' to win the election seems a lot less likely underneath the surface, not what has been 'exposed' on the surface.

Having said that I don't believe DJT's ego would allow him to conspire and 'collude' directly because it would diminish the accomplishment, I do believe he let a small, stage-1 cancer metastasize into a full-blown terminal illness because of his ego: his attacks (right, wrong, or indifferent) on the media kept his eyes off the ball and, IMO, there were shortcuts (aka lies, etc that will be prosecutable crimes) taken in handling the whole matter and an extremely strong economy were pissed away.

He gets taken down by an '18 Congress that was essentially elected to do so, or Mueller ties up someone way too close to him and resigns the presidency. If he only would've put down the twitter...he could've been a two-term prez. SMH. MAGA

a reply to: Grambler

Great investigation! It looked like you just proved the Russian collusion aspect of this administration. That's why Jared has been sidelined.

The trump FBI investigation started long before Papadopolous. Thump had been dealing with Russian mobsters for many years and to think they wouldn't love to have someone in the WH is extremely naive. Do you really think the 3 letters don't know every detail of trumps financial and personal interaction with the Russians.

themoscowproject.org...

www.nydailynews.com...

www.rollingstone.com...

www.wnyc.org...


This rabbit hole goes much deeper than a silly political election. Much deeper, believe me!

a reply to: Grambler

Where to begin.

It just says emails that are dirt on Hillary. It doesn’t say from the DNC server, or from John Podesta’s emails. The Russian is making a claim that everyone had been worrying about for months; that Russia hacked Hillary’s server and had dirt her.

If you were a Russian trying to convince someone you had goods on Hillary, this is exactly what you would say seeing as how the entire world knew Hillary was careless with her server and may have been hacked.

The way Assange hinted at the DNC release in the June 12 interview was that it (the release of DNC emails) would be damaging to Clinton ("harm Hillary Clinton's chances to win the presidency").

When Misfud and Papadopoulos were having their meetings, the Russians were actively collecting emails not from the Clinton email server (which had by then been down for what 2 years?) but from the DNC server. And it was only a few weeks or less between the May conversation between Papadopoulos and Downer and when it was revealed that that the DNC network had been compromised.

You want to believe that it's more plausible that it was a reference to emails from the Clinton email server (which had been taken offline what? 2 years prior?) but a) unlike the DNC hack, there's no actual evidence that the Russians hacked the Clinton email server and b) the known hack was actually taking place while these other events were happening.

(I'll break the responses down across a few posts)

And there we have the first claim of "there is no proof her server was hacked" which they prefer over "there is no proof her server wasn't hacked".


A Secretary of State using a commercial off the shelf Blackberry for official government business in places like Russia, China, Israel, etc. is a foreign intel agencies wet dream come true.

originally posted by: RickinVa
And there we have the first claim of "there is no proof her server was hacked" which they prefer over "there is no proof her server wasn't hacked".


A Secretary of State using a commercial off the shelf Blackberry in places like Russia, China, Israel, etc. is a foreign intel agencies wet dream come true.

As mentioned earlier, her use of the Blackberry devices in foriegn countries that are not friendly to the US makes it a virtual impossibility that her private (and at the time... not even password protected) server wasn't hacked by foreign intelligence services.

a reply to: Grambler

If this is true, it means that the Australian intel service didn’t even give the US intel this info; it was all given by one Clinton friend.

Other than an attempt to muddy the waters, the "connection" between Downer and the Clintons is irrelevant. The inescapable fact is that the information that he provided was accurate.

He didn't fabricate a story about a conversation that didn't happen about meetings that George Papadopoulos didn't actually have.

I also don't think that this Nunes "official intelligence" thing matters much at all. The information wasn't obtained through the Australian's intelligence gathering apparatus.

First off, your Washington Times source mischaracterizes the NYT piece. Nowhere does it say, "it was the Australian intelligence service that first triggered the FBI investigation."

In fact, as the author then emphasizes, the article states:

"Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts"

In other words, there seems to be an effort by Nunes to impugn the information because Downer didn't relay it to whatever Australia's counterpart to the CIA is to have it then passed to the CIA via normal intelligence sharing channels. I don't know that there's anything unusual about that at all.

And again, the information was accurate.

a reply to: theantediluvian

It does not matter rather or not Hillarys server was hacked.

The point is every suspected that it most likely was.

The reason the GP story seems to be very important is that it is being billed as proof that GP and thie russian knew BEFORE even the DNC did that they were hacked.

But there is no proof of that whatsoever. Again, everyone assumed that "enemies" and perhaps even allies had hacked Hillarys server.

So it would not be a surpirse at all to see a Russian that was trying to peddle to GP how impoartant they were to say "yeah we got dirt on Hillary through emails" He never says hacked, he never mentions the DNC server or Podestas emails.

So this is proof of nothing.

Imagine that back in the day I met with a member of the Colorado Rockies baseball team. I crypticlly tell them that I have evidence of steriod use by a Sna Franciso Giants player. This would be no shcok, as everyone had assumed Barry Bonds was doing steriods.

But then a month later it turns out that San Frncisco Giant Benjie Molina is caught doing steriods.

Is that somehow proof that I must have been giving Benjie Molina steroids?

Of course not.

Similarly, in this situation, it is no big surprise a Russian that was trying to sell GP a bill of goods would claim that they had emails about Hillary.

It does not matter if the "known" (which is garbage there is still no publicly available proof that Russia hacked the DNC) hack was going on during this time period; there is no proof that GP or this russian knew this hack was occurring.

The only proof given is that the referenced emails before the hack was public knowledge, but as I have shown, there is a perfectly good explanation for that russian to mention emails from hillary seeing as how the entire world was talking about Hillarys server possibly being hacked.

a reply to: theantediluvian

And just to expound on this point about emails.

Chuck Schumer warned before any of the evidence came out that the Intel community would find 6 ways from sundaty to get back at Trump if he criticized them.

Since then, we have seen Comey leak, strzok and pages texts, and many other things.

Does this mean that there should be an entire investigation into Schumer and the Democrats, because clearly he must have KNown about Strzok and Pages texts and all opf the things the FBI was doing against trump, because he announced that before it became public knowledge?

Or could it be that Schumer was just saying what many people believed.

The same is the case with a russian saying about hillary emails that everyone assumed were probably hacked.

a reply to: theantediluvian
How do you know the info he provided was accurate?

What exactly did Downer tell the FBI? How do you know he didnt exaggerate or add in details? How do you knopw how drunk Papadopoulos was? Does he even remember what he himself said?

And it doesnt matter what we now know (or claim to know) about what Downer said. The fact is the FBI did not know when they started the investigation; all they knew was the word of one Clinton friend that a minor member of the trump team got drunk and said a Russian told him they have emails that are dirt on hillary.

Had their been official five eye intel from the Australian government given to the FBI, then that would seem a better reason to investigate.

Again, there are plenty of people making plenty of accusations about all sorts of politicians, especially the Clintons.

Should the FBI launch an investigation that ends up taking years, has wiretaps, etc., on the clintons because a diplomat that had business ties to trump claims that some lower person around her did something illegal?

Of course the threshold for that should be much higher.

But for the FBI, the word of a Clinton friend was more than enough to start this investigation.

a reply to: theantediluvian

And again, the information was accurate.

Yes it was.

A drunk in a bar was bragging about Russians having incriminating Clinton emails. That much was accurate. I suppose we can all be thankful he wasn't drunk enough to claim that aliens had taken over Clinton's brain, or she would be in a laboratory having exploratory brain surgery right now to remove them.

This is what has bothered me about the whole Trump-Russia claim from the start. Far too many assumptions and far too many conspiracy theories (which is a large statement since I am posting this on the largest internet conspiracy theory forum). And without an exception, all of the conspiracy theories boil down to one of a handful of major assumptions: Trump is too dumb to tie his shoes, Trump is a manipulative genius out to make money, or Trump is an evil Russian plant (maybe has had plastic surgery to appear American?). If one simply makes the assumption that Donald Trump is a successful business person, all the theories fall apart.

I think Grambler has done an amazing job of laying out the sequence of events.

TheRedneck