Tag: Vladimir Putin

While the Mueller report answered plenty of legal questions, behind its redactions it raised new ones. What could they mean for Pres. Trump? We asked Joyce Vance and Jill Wine-Banks. » Subscribe to MSNBC: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc MSNBC delivers breaking news and…

Officials in Moscow are dismissing the details laid out about Russian election interference in Mueller's report, but what are they possibly learning from it? Fmr. Russia Amb. Michael McFaul joins to discuss. » Subscribe to MSNBC: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc MSNBC delivers breaking…

Mueller went out of his way to not bring conspiracy charges while simultaneously describing the conspiracy Edit: PASTING my previous comments here again, because I want people who have not read the report themselves to do so and to come away with what seems like the only real explanation for Mueller's decision: Mueller chose not to bring conspiracy charges against Trump or his family because he did not want to single-handed torpedo the presidency and destroy the Republican Party. Yet Mueller basically said he can't PROVE an agreement with agents who were related TO THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT which is why no one was charged with criminal conspiracy. Yet Mueller in the next breath says "the report did not ESTABLISH that Trump himself wanted the change." Regarding Kusher and Don Jr, the report itself states the Kushner and Don Jr were not indicted because Mueller claimed "they could have claimed ignorance, so that would make it difficult to prove intent." Mueller says he "did not identify evidence" that Kushner or Sessions—who had contact with Simes—passed info to the Kremlin. So we can't therefore know that Dimitri Simes is part of the "russian government" THAT is what Mueller is saying in the report. Sure seems like Mueller, once again, is giving Kushner (and Simes) such unbelievable benefit of the doubt, because you can't PROVE that Simes was a direct agent of the Kremlin, so he's not technically part of the conspiracy. I mean, seriously, Mueller? What we're being told from the report: Don Jr. speaks of Clinton dirt to: (1) Manafort (2) Kushner (3) Ivanka (4) Hope Hicks (5) Eric Trump (6) Donald J. Trump—his dad, the man who's going to leave him billions, and the GOP president candidate So all three Trump kids knew the campaign was getting Clinton dirt; Trump's campaign manager knew; his communications director knew; his son-in-law knew; his lawyer says Trump knew... yet the report concludes there's insufficient evidence that Trump himself was told. Mind you, all this despite the fact that, on the day Don Jr. told everyone, his father went out and made a public statement saying he'd {checks notes} shortly be giving a "very interesting" speech on Clinton dirt.

The House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Rep. Adam Schiff, holds a hearing on "Putin's Playbook: The Kremlins Use of Oligarchs, Money and Intelligence in 2016 and Beyond." Set to testify will be former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, former…

We should have learned from the time that we believed we were on the verge of the first female president – the derivative T-shirts, the chilling champagne – only to find that our hopes had been dashed by a racist misogynist demagogue. Yet here we are again, a mass of deflated blue balloons, as the Monday morning headlines confirming our worst fears. Robert Mueller has issued his report. Sometimes, I was: as the investigation dragged on and on, with no indictments of the Trump family and no interviews with the president himself, it was hard to hold on to hope that the release of the report would be Trump’s Watergate. But had he uncovered that the president was treasonous it seemed unlikely that he’d go through all of the evidence before alerting the nation. Two years was a very long time to maintain a heartfelt belief in the possibilities of the Mueller report. Optimism flagged. We all saw his conduct in his Finland press conference with Vladimir Putin, and we all know as well that he’s worked to obfuscate the details of their other meetings. But even if the Mueller report had turned out to indicate impeachable culpability on the part of the president, the complex problems at the heart of our current political crises would remain. Regardless of the role of Russia in the last election, Trump’s success is symptom of a racist and corrupt nation.

The single most important fact in American political life is the degree that so many Americans believe, with a deep sentiment of dread and foreboding, that the Trump presidency has become a national nightmare that profoundly impacts American civic life in dangerous and disturbing ways. When President Trump recently spent more than two hours giving a bizarre and sometimes incoherent speech that was a rambling litany of angry insults and a tirade describing himself as a horribly aggrieved victim, he appeared to be a man in the middle of a nightmare. Would an innocent man declare total political war against special counsel Robert Mueller, who his former White House counsel Ty Cobb wisely says is a national hero running an honest investigation? The president’s nightmare is spending the next two years trapped in a spider’s web of federal, state and congressional investigations with potentially catastrophic consequences, while he cannot spend a penny of appropriated money or enact a dime of tax cuts without permission from a powerful Democratic Speaker and resurgent Democratic House. Huge masses of Democratic and independent voters are enduring the nightmare — which they will act to end with a spectacular turnout in November 2020 — of a president at war against their hopes and dreams for their lives and our country. Many of America’s finest and most principled conservatives are enduring the nightmare of a conservatism they have long championed with honor being shredded and corrupted by a president who is a conservative in name only, and his allies who demonize national heroes from Mueller to John McCain and attack the FBI for investigating the Russian dictator subverting our democracy and seeking to impose on America the president of his choice. What would Ronald Reagan think of Trump’s extravagant praise of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un? A solid majority of voters fervently want the Trump presidency to end. The answer to the big lie is the big truth. Here is how Democrats frame the election and win big in 2020, most similar to the message from Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), whom I will support if he seeks the presidency.

Telling MSNBC that it's 'possible' Trump has been compromised by Russia, Andrew McCabe says Trump's behaving like the head of a criminal enterprise. Fmr. CIA Director John Brennan reacts. » Subscribe to MSNBC: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc MSNBC delivers breaking news and in-depth…

Donald Trump returned to the attack against Andrew McCabe on Monday, in response to an interview in which the former deputy FBI director discussed his new book and made claims damaging to the president. 'I believe Putin': Trump dismissed US advice on North Korea threat, says McCabe Read more In the interview, broadcast by CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday night, McCabe addressed, among other matters: How the deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein was told by Trump to write a memo justifying the firing of FBI director James Comey in May 2017 How, following the firing of Comey, McCabe ordered investigations of whether it was done to impede the investigation of Russian election interference and whether Trump was acting on behalf of the Russian government How he believes that is why he himself was fired Discussions about whether Trump could be removed from office under the 25th amendment Discussions about whether Rosenstein should wear a wire to record the president How Trump ignored US intelligence advice on North Korea’s nuclear capability and said: “I don’t care. So it was really something that he kinda threw out in a very frenzied chaotic conversation.” The deputy attorney general also offered to wear a wire to record conversations with Trump, McCabe said. “The deputy attorney general [DAG] never authorized any recording that Mr McCabe references,” the statement said. The president may have been engaged in obstruction of justice in the firing of Jim Comey Andrew McCabe He told CBS: “Rod was concerned by his interactions with the president, who seemed to be very focused on firing the director and saying things like, ‘Make sure you put Russia in your memo.’ That concerned Rod in the same way that it concerned me and the FBI investigators on the Russia case. “If Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein listed the Russia investigation in his memo to the White House, it could look like he was obstructing the Russia probe by suggesting Comey’s firing. And the president responded, ‘I understand that, I am asking you to put Russia in the memo anyway.’” Publicly, shortly after Comey’s firing, Trump told NBC he had done it because of “this Russia thing”. The president, then, fired the director. “In the firing of the director, the president specifically asked Rod Rosenstein to write the memo justifying the firing and told Rod to include Russia in the memo. On CBS, McCabe was asked how he could remember conversations with Trump well enough to put them in a book.

An exasperated Modi told this writer: Tell me if a Congress leader has visited a farm in the past 10 years. Were there no farming calamities then? The Congress lured farmers away from the BJP by promising to waive their loans if they came to power. While the sop may bring some relief to 100 million small farmers, the overriding feeling is that it was too little too late. It also ignored the 140 million agricultural labourers. When it came to agriculture, the Modi government made the same mistake many previous governments did. While the Modi government did make an effort in this direction, it fell far short. Whether the cash promised is sufficient to push them to vote for the BJP is doubtful. The sop would provide relief of a maximum of Rs 12,500 a year. As with farmers, even with jobs, perception matters and the government can ignore it only at its own peril.

It wasn’t the first time the president has dismissed the findings of the U.S. intelligence apparatus — last year he sided with Vladimir Putin in refusing to accept that Russia meddled in the 2016 election — and Republicans are finally starting to grow frustrated with the president’s fidelity to Fox News and foreign autocrats over the FBI and CIA. “There’s an awful lot — there’s so much tradition, and history and complexity to some of these foreign policy issues, you have to rely on people who have been working these issues for decades,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said on Fox News Sunday. These people have the real knowledge and you have to listen to them.” Johnson also criticized the president’s plan to pull U.S. troops out of Syria, a move based on his false belief that ISIS has been defeated, which National Intelligence Director Dan Coats contradicted last week. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) talks to Chris about ISIS and the situation in the Middle East pic.twitter.com/I21GkGn1g4 — FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) February 3, 2019 Over on CNN, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) elaborated on why the president’s politicization of intelligence is so troubling. “These are professional people,” he said. “The president’s briefed every day on it. Most of the time they’re pretty much on point.” “It’s troubling to all of us but I think there’s got to be real good communication between the President and the Director of the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence … Most of the time, they’re pretty much on point,” @SenShelby says of Trump criticizing his intel chiefs pic.twitter.com/OFR5dk3u5P — State of the Union (@CNNSotu) February 3, 2019 “It’s troubling to all of us,” said Shelby, “but I think there’s got to be real good communications between the president and the director of the CIA and the director of national intelligence.” But fostering “good communication” between the president and his intelligence chiefs has so far been close to impossible. On Saturday, Time published a terrifying look inside the president’s intelligence briefings, with several officials describing “futile attempts to keep [Trump’s] attention by using visual aids, confining some briefing points to two or three sentences, and repeating his name and title as frequently as possible.” The report notes that the president is prone to have outbursts if material presented in the briefings contradicts his delusions, and that intelligence officials are often warned not to present Trump with findings that contradict views he has expressed in public. The Time report features several other glimpses of Trump’s incompetence and, as one official described it, “willful ignorance” regarding intelligence that dates back to when he first took office. Trump routinely cites his relationship with Kim Jong-un as one of the chief accomplishments of his first two years in office, downplaying the idea that North Korea’s nuclear program is still operational.