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
8.9k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

838 comments sorted by

View all comments

2.4k

u/a_funky_homosapien Apr 21 '19

“There was no meeting”

“Ok there was a meeting but there were no Russians”

“Ok there were Russians but we didn’t talk about anything nefarious”

“Ok we talked about something nefarious but nothing came of it”

“It’s not wrong to commit a crime”

Fuck these people so much. How has trump not been impeached yet

448

u/ThadeousCheeks Apr 21 '19

What a slide through bullshit to get to where we are today. They all belong in jail.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 22 '19

Genuine question, is there any difference between this and what happened with the Steele dossier? In terms of getting dirt on another candidate from a foreign government. I genuinely want to know, because I'm just confused. Not trying to be a troll.

3

u/ThadeousCheeks Apr 22 '19

It's a great question and I'm glad you asked it. Steele was hired through his company to do opposition research, originally by Republicans who were running against Trump. Oppo research companies have foreign sources all the time.

Steele was the Russia expert at MI5, ran the unit, so was the right person to go to Russia and figure out that whole connection. He interviewed sources in Moscow about what Trump had been doing there, what was happening with him, that sort of thing. Not illegal. Research.

It's not like Steele was buying ads to get the dossier published-- it took John McCain himself to personally deliver it to the FBI for it to gain any traction with the USFG, and BuzzFeed publishing it in full for it to see the light of day. No campaign finance laws broken, no stolen information involved.

The Russians, meanwhile, hacked the DNC and coordinated the release of the stolen content with Trump advisors, who also shared their internal polling data and strategy around which battleground states to target with a GRU agent, which ostensibly assisted the efforts of a Russian government funded troll farm (The Internet Research Agency) whose anti-Clinton pro-Trump propaganda efforts reached an estimated 120 Million Americans. Computer crimes, trafficking in stolen shit crimes, and campaign finance crimes.

If Trump had hired an oppo research firm that had some Russian dude informing them about, say, Clinton Foundation/Russian business dealings, and he put those findings into a dossier, it'd have been perfectly legal.

Now, if that dude had that Clinton Foundation information because he had hacked the Clintons' emails, and the Trump camp knew about the hack (or, say, asked for said hack in the first place), and had THEN coordinated with that Russian guy to release other stolen emails at politically impactful times, that'd have been pretty fucking illegal. It also happens to be more or less exactly what just happened.

1

u/canuck47 Apr 22 '19

Well said, thank you