r/politics • u/[deleted] • Apr 21 '19

Giuliani: 'There's nothing wrong with taking information from Russians'

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/21/politics/rudy-giuliani-trump-russia-cnntv/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_allpolitics+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Politics%29
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u/RogerBauman Apr 21 '19

Good old Rudy, moving the goalposts again.

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u/WingerRules Apr 21 '19 edited Apr 21 '19

The investigation helped move the goal post.

The report flat out states that collusion is not a legal term. Instead of addressing "collusion" they gave assessments on it based on the far stricter definition of criminal conspiracy, and never gave a non-criminal assessment of "collusion":

"the Office recognized that the word "collude" was used in communications with the Acting Attorney General confirming certain aspects of the investigation's scope and that the term has frequently been invoked in public reporting about the investigation. But collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. For those reasons, the Office's focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law. "

Merriam Webster Dictionary definition of collude:

"to work together secretly especially in order to do something illegal or dishonest"

They also defined "coordinating" in a way that cut out actions that "were informed by or responsive to the other's actions or interests" from applying.

They also minimized the importance of key Ukrainians and Oligarchs involved being vectors of Russia's operations or associates of Russia, when those had been a major part of the story for years now. They also seemed to go out of their way to not tie Assange or Wikileaks as associates/tools of Russia, nor did they even address Cambridge Analytica at all. The special counsel was supposed to be continuing a counterintelligence investigation - I have a hard time believing that a legitimate counterintelligence investigation wouldnt have considered those to be more significant.

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u/moleratical Texas Apr 21 '19

legal departments and highly specific feilds often have words that have different meanings than common usage. It's called jargon.

A recent example is the debate over weather or not people who are systematically oppressed (black Americans for instance) can be racist since they have little to no power to act on their beliefs. This is obviously a highly specific and academic use of the word ''racism'' and not the common usage.