>we've reached "peak fake news" in the USA. Mainstream news networks like Fox have talking heads spouting venomous lies that are demonstrably and trivially proven as such
I think that mainstream news has been doing this for the past 4 years. Here are 3 examples:
1) Trump Russia collusion hoax.
2) Trump saying that neo-nazis and white supremacists are "fine people" hoax.
3) Trump recommending people "inject bleach" hoax.
> Trump saying that neo-nazis and white supremacists are "fine people" hoax.
I have personally watched a press conference where Trump said that live on TV in front of millions of people. I don't understand how you can call this a "hoax" when it came from the mouth of the POTUS himself.
> Trump recommending people "inject bleach" hoax
I have personally watched a press conferences where Trump embarked on an embarrassing, demented, rambling adlib where he has suggested injecting bleach. I watch some of these, and I genuinely have to wonder about both his mental capacity and his mental faculties.
TBH, your comment is demonstrating the problem facing the US just now - you are asserting that easily demonstrable facts are a "hoax", even when they have been broadcast by Trump himself to millions of people.
At time 1:58 Pres. Trump specifically excludes neo-nazis and white nationalists from his 'fine people' description: "And I'm not talking about the neo-nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally."
1) the Meuller report is conclusive: there was collusion.
2) Trump did, in fact, say that. It’s recorded video.
3) Trump did, in fact, suggest that injecting disinfectant might be a treatment for COVID-19.
You're missing the context that the people attending the Unite the Right rally heavily displayed Nazi iconography (swastikas and more obscure neo-Nazi symbols):
If you're okay with marching alongside a swastika, are you really a "very fine person?" As Shaun puts it, "the acceptable number of swastikas at the rally is zero."
Speaker: "One more, one more. I want everyone to repeat after me, pay close attention because this is the first precept of the true alt-right. Remember it. Gas the [slur]s, race war now!"
Crowd: "Gas the [slur]s, race war now!" "Sieg Heil!" "Sieg Heil!" "Who brought the ovens?" "[Laughter]"
Do these people, or anyone who associates with them, seem like "very fine people?"
No one denies that those people were there. Trump condemns them unconditionally.
The issue is the denial of people like this who were also there:
>“Good people can go to Charlottesville,” said Michelle Piercy, a night shift worker at a Wichita, Kan., retirement home, who drove all night with a conservative group that opposed the planned removal of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/us/politics/trump-republi... NY Times Aug 17, 2017
I think that all these people are misguided, but they aren't neo-nazis or white nationalists.
>If you're okay with marching alongside a swastika, are you really a "very fine person?"
Are people marching in the same area as looters or antifa 'very fine people'? Yes, of course they are. No one has control who shows up at these huge public demonstrations.
Trump's comments were clearly regarding the protesters at the original rally (as he mentions the violence), not people who came later. Every protester on the right was a neo-Nazi or complicit in marching with neo-Nazis. The rally explicitly invited white nationalist and neo-Nazi speakers. The stated goals of the rally was to unify the American white nationalist movement.
> No one has control who shows up at these huge public demonstrations.
This demonstration was intended to be a white-supremacist, neo-Nazi demonstration. End of story. If you disagree, I encourage you to watch the Shaun video I linked for more information, or to read the linked Wikipedia and Vox articles.
Trump praised these people. You may argue that he didn't mean to. But the fact is that Trump praised white supremacy, intentionally or unintentionally, and these white supremacists use that praise to justify the continuation of the movement. Even if Trump later condemned them, white supremacists interpret such a move as Trump merely "pretending" to condemn them.
Trump is saying the people who don't want the statue taken down are fine people. He explicitly exludes neo-nazis and white nationalists. I am simply reading his words. No mind reading required.
>But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee.
>and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists — because they should be condemned totally.
And in a previous post I showed you people who went to the rally with the removal of a statue in mind. Don't assume Trump knew everything about the event, and it's make up as it happened. The news will show the extremists because peaceful protesters don't get eye balls so selective coverage isn't proof of anything.
The point is very clear. But let me clarify it: there was an effort by state actors to manipulate and aid a specific party in a way that is fully illegal.
It very likely did. The Muller report showed that it did, at least in all likelihood and given the evidence available. The report just stopped short of taking the next step, calling it proven and going forward with whatever the next step would have been.
It did so because of the very high bar Muller set himself given that the accused was the sitting president, that the DoJ under Barr claimed wrongly that the president is immune (=he were a king), and that he wanted the democratic system to act on the findings in the report.
>Volume I of the report concludes that the investigation did not find sufficient evidence that the campaign "coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities"
The (more recent) Republican Led Senate Intelligence Committee did find significant co-ordination - at best unwitting
To quote The Intercept:
In fact, the Senate report dismisses many of the most outrageous accusations involving Trump and Russia even as it provides overwhelming and damning evidence of Russia’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump win and the Trump campaign’s eagerness to embrace the Russian intervention.
But the Senate report goes much further than election interference and provides the first detailed examination of the broader and complex network of relationships between Trump, his ever-shifting circle of personal and business associates, and a series of Russian oligarchs and other Russian and Ukrainian figures with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
> it provides overwhelming and damning evidence of Russia’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump win and the Trump campaign’s eagerness to embrace the Russian intervention.
Micheal Flynn did not go to prison. Flynn pled guilty when threatened with the prospect of his son being charged and railroaded as well. Once he retained new legal council, he withdrew his guilty plea. The DoJ dropped the prosecution after exculpatory evidence came out that was being withheld by the FBI. Judge Sullivan decided to keep the case going instead of throwing it out- and eventually Trump pardoned Flynn.
Micheal Flynn was being charged for lying to FBI investigators about sanctions, when the transcripts of the calls were finally released by the FBI, it turns out he didn't even bring up sanctions with Kisylak at all. The FBI also withheld the original 302 from the interview with Flynn, and Peter Strzok, who was later fired for bias, had re-written the second 302 that was used to imply that Flynn had lied to investigators.
What's not proven, but suspected, is that the entire call to Kislyak was orchestrated by the Obama admin. Expelling the Russian diplomats/spies when Flynn was already under surveillance prompted the calls between Kislyak and Flynn. Flynn was in a foreign country when this happened, and given his place in the upcoming administration as well as his role under Obama's admin, it was a near guarantee that he would be in contact with Kislyak. He called Kislyak on an unsecured line while in a foreign country. Flynn would have known absolutely that the call was being surveilled, but he didn't believe he was doing anything untoward. What he didn't know was that the FBI would use this as a point to attack him. Comey even jokes about how sending agents to interview a WH staff member alone without legal counsel would never have been acceptable, but that Trump's young and inexperienced administration didn't realize it in time.
But that's all conjecture. What is not conjecture is fact that Flynn did not lie to the FBI, and should not have been charged as such.
> Micheal Flynn was being charged for lying to FBI investigators about sanctions, when the transcripts of the calls were finally released by the FBI, it turns out he didn't even bring up sanctions with Kisylak at all.
This is untrue. Specifically, "lying about sanctions" wasn't what he was charged with. He was charged with lying about asking Kisylak to refrain from escalating the situation, and a large part of his call was about sanctions and the Russian response to them.
Here's the Statement of Offense[1], and the direct quote is:
FLYNN falsely stated he did not ask Russia's ambassador to the United States to refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions the United States has imposed on Russia.
In the transcripts of the call[2] he says:
But I ask Russia to do is to not, if anything, I know you have to have some sort of action, to only make it reciprocal; don't go any further than you have to because I don't want us to get into something that have to escalate to tit-for-tat. Do you follow me?
and later:
I know, I -believe me, I do appreciate it, I very much appreciate it. But I really don't want us to get into a situation where we're going, you know~ where we do this and then you do something bigger, and then you know, everybody's got to go back and forth and everybody's got to be the tough guy here, you know?
and
And please make sure that its uh - the idea is, be -if you~ if you have to do something, do something on a reciprocal basis, meaning you know, on a sort of an even basis. Then that, then that is a good message and we'll understand that message. And, and then, we know that we're not going to escalate this thing, where we~ where because if we put out-ifwe send out 30 guys and you send out 60, you know, or you shut down every Embassy, r mean we have to get this to a -lefs, let's keep this at a level that uh is, is even-keeled, okay?
So it's pretty clear his original statement of offense is correct - he did talk Kisylak and ask him not to escalate, and then lied to the FBI about it.
I think that mainstream news has been doing this for the past 4 years. Here are 3 examples:
1) Trump Russia collusion hoax.
2) Trump saying that neo-nazis and white supremacists are "fine people" hoax.
3) Trump recommending people "inject bleach" hoax.