that's a good one:confused:

why is that in quotes in that sentence?

Barr could be prosecuting Rudy soon.
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Since you support a serial womanizer, admitted molester, accused rapist and philanderer, does Mr Dangles have an issue with your morals?
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Trump implied that the whistleblower committed treason.
This from the man who asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival.

His attacks on whistleblowers will likely increase the very thing that the whistleblower legislation was created to eliminate, leaking.

The ironic part is the man complaining about Fake news and leaking created his image thru an alias (John Baron) leaking fake info and puffery.
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In other Trump family news this weekend: Jared is giving Ivanka, Eric & Don Jr tips on visiting daddy in prison. No way Tiffany visits and Barron never knew him as dad.
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time for your medication Peto

Cabernet works fine, Trump ought to try it instead of Adderall

Something to sleep on

Three life lessons learned from Nancy Pelosi -

Choose your battles wisely -

Timing is everything -

Give the right person enough rope and they'll hang themself
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You have no compunction in letting yourself twist and torture language to suit your arguments. But you give no quarter to Trump's often careless or sloppy diction. You insist that he means exactly what his words, if used precisely, are supposed to mean. So, if he says he doesn't care, it must show that he has no concern whatsoever.

Umm, no. Trumpspeak in this case means that he understands that they do, just as we do (and everybody else does). And that their interference was not especially effective. But that doesn't mean he has absolutely no concerns about it. He did take some steps to limit outside interference.

You have done it enough to know but you still have a pulse. Trump has you dancing still despite tightening your noose. Good luck in your quest to expose. Timing is everything as you learned. I hope you apply this new science.
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Special counsel Robert Mueller's report made it clear that the Trump campaign was aware of Russian meddling in the election, encouraged it and hoped to benefit from it.Mueller was prohibited by DOJ rules from indicting Trump.
He gathered evidence for Trump’s eventual indictments.
Trump’s obstruction was successful in preventing him from obtaining evidence from Ukraine.

Trump pursued the Trump Tower Moscow project throughout the election. He lied about it, saying he had no deals, no business in Russia.
Do you honestly think that he still isn’t trying to make a deal still?
Many people say he is

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Peto continues to impress...:musc:

Many people say Trump is guilty of fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, insurance fraud, obstruction of justice, conspiracy against the United States, and sexual assault. He has attacked our allies and praised our enemies. Seven of his aides have been convicted of felonies. He has praised Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Roy Moore. Trump is a criminal president.
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Did Putin manipulateTrump into doing what he did on Ukraine?

Putin certainly benefited when Trump withheld $391 million in military aid to Ukraine. Did the KGB manipulate Trump into believing Ukraine, not Russia, hacked Democratic emails?
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Trump has 2020
Pete has nightmares
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If Trump is such a lock, why is he extorting a foreign power to dig up dirt on his primary 2020 opponent? If he is such a lock, why is he looking back at Clinton emails in desperation? If he is such a lock why does he attempt to use fear to bolster support, the latest TV spot stating the dems are going to take basically everything away from you; I’m surprised he didn’t add your next born child. He isn’t confident and that’s why he is ok with putting our national security at risk and why he is ok using our tax dollars to open up old investigations and using fear sadly isn’t new for him it’s just his usual MO. You don’t threaten a whistle blower or other concerned individuals, even going so far as to wish the penalty could be they way spies in the old days were dealt with, unless you yourself are concerned about the truth coming out.
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I'm pretty sure trump is a KGB agent, it's where he and putin met...they were classmates

Not quite, but you’re not that far off.

Trump’s first visit to Moscow was in 1987. The visit was arranged by KGB’s top arm, General Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov. In the mid eighties, the General realized the world was changing. Russia would be left far behind, if they couldn’t gather intelligence.
In January 1984, Kryuchkov discussed the problem at a review in Moscow, and then again, six months later, at a conference. The demand was crystal clear, the KGB needed to improve their agent recruitment. Once upon a time, Moscow recruited Western individuals who sympathized with Russian ideology. In the mid-eighties, such individuals were hard to find, if not nonexistent. During these conferences, Kryuchkov suggested using money and flattery to lure recruits.
Hmmm……can you think of any prominent Western figures who’d be lured by money and flattery?

Trump had been a target with the KGB for a long time. According to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies had been secretly observing Donald Trump and his newlywed Ivana. At the time, Ivana Zelnickova was a 28 year old model from Czechoslovakia, a communist country.
According to the declassified files, the Czech spies would read the letters Ivana sent back home.
The fact that the KGB was interested in recruiting Donald Trump to be a spy is fact. Whether or not Trump replied favorably to their offers of cash and flattery is questionable, but once upon a time, Donald Trump was almost certainly recruited by the KGB.
To become a full KGB agent, a foreigner had to agree to two things. (An “agent” in a Russian or British context was a secret intelligence source.) One was “conspiratorial collaboration.” The other was willingness to take KGB instruction. — Politico

The bottom line is that Trump had been a recruitment target of the KGB for decades.
The recruitment process started when Trump was introduced to Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin in 1986.
Dubinin’s daughter said: “Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it he likes it. My father’s visit worked on him [Trump] like honey to a bee.”
Six months later, Trump is at an Este Lauder luncheon, and just happens to find himself sitting next to Yuri Durbinin. It just seemed too weird that this ambassador, the one who wound up sending Trump to Moscow for the first time, was magically everywhere that Trump was.

Dubinin’s other daughter, Irina, said that her late father — he died in 2013 — was on a mission as ambassador. This was, she said, to make contact with America’s business elite. For sure, Gorbachev’s Politburo was interested in understanding capitalism. But Dubinin’s invitation to Trump to visit Moscow looks like a classic cultivation exercise, which would have had the KGB’s full support and approval. — Politico
According to The Art of the Deal, Trump toured “a half dozen potential sites for a hotel, including several near Red Square.” “I was impressed with the ambition of Soviet officials to make a deal,” he writes.
It seems that Russia kept flaunting the greatest pieces of real estate in front of Trump’s face. Thirty years ago, Trump was so close to making a deal, that still hasn’t occurred. Perhaps Russia was using these properties as bait, to lure Trump along.

Trump’s first visit to Moscow was relatively unproductive. Trump was shown all these beautiful and lucrative real estate properties. He stayed in a hotel room that Lenin stayed in, most likely it was bugged. And then he went home. But Trump did endure one significant change, when he came back from his first Russian trip. As soon as he got back to America, Trump began tossing around the idea of running for president.
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:rotf2::rotf2::rotf2::rotf2::rotf2::rotf2:

probably what happened was that trump was abducted when he visited russia and the russians replaced him with an imposter who is now doing the bidding of the russians or perhaps an alien race...run with that :spin:

Not quite that complicated, they just waited till Trump went bankrupt and bailed him out.

President Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from allegations of collusion by asserting that he has no business interests in Russia. That’s not for lack of trying: Trump’s efforts to establish a hotel in Moscow go back at least to 1987, when, according to his book The Art of the Deal, he discussed the possibility with the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin. But the questions regarding the Trump campaign’s collusion with the Russian government go beyond whether Trump has business dealings with Russia. It is just as important, if not more, to understand the many ways that Russia has business with Donald Trump.

That Kremlin-linked entities invested significantly in Trump’s properties over the years is not inherently nefarious. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, wealthy Russians have invested heavily in real estate in the West, while Americans were in turn encouraged to invest in Russia. However, in the context of a president under several investigations for his connections to the Kremlin, Russia’s outsize role in Trump’s reemergence from financial tribulations that nearly destroyed his real estate empire merit additional attention. What emerges is the story of a man indebted to Russia through the oligarchs that President Vladimir Putin helped create and now controls.

Upon taking office, Trump superficially distanced himself from the Trump Organization, ceding day-to-day control to his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. However, he still owns and profits from the company, which gives him an ongoing stake in maintaining the relationships that make his company profitable, and leaked internal emails suggest he retains more control over the Trump Organization’s operations than he publicly acknowledges. Moreover, the relationships and transactions described below occurred long before his political career, at a time when both internal and external sources have described him as exerting almost unilateral control over the organization.

Individually and collectively, these relationships form the underpinning of the Russia scandal. The Kremlin has a long history of using compromising information, or kompromat, to exert leverage over businesspeople and politicians, both in Russia and abroad. As a result, the question of whether Trump is financially compromised goes beyond the simple question of whether he or his company is directly in debt to Russian banks—something the president denies but has yet to demonstrate by releasing his tax returns. The president’s myriad financial entanglements with individuals from Russia and the former Soviet Union may provide Russia with such kompromat, especially given the substantial evidence that Trump and the Trump Organization have engaged in questionably legal practices, many of which are outlined below. (The Trump Organization has repeatedly denied, both in specific cases and in general, that it has acted illegally or unethically in its business practices.)

This does not intend to suggest that all of Trump’s clients and partners from Russia and the former Soviet Union are individually connected to the Kremlin, nor that each deal is individually corrupt or connected to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Instead, the goal is to highlight how dependent Trump’s company has been on Russian money, a fact he has repeatedly denied, and to explicate how those connections appear to have laid the foundation for what occurred in 2016. As such, this explainer explores the totality of those business dealings, ranging from projects whose financing comes from sources directly linked to the Kremlin to potentially corrupt dealings in Azerbaijan and Georgia to the allegations that some of Trump’s Russian and Soviet buyers and business partners have used his properties as vehicles for money laundering, all of which could have generated the type of compromising material the Russian government is known to exploit.
Trump almost certainly wouldn’t have survived the period without the financial support of his father, Fred Trump, who not only loaned his son millions of dollars to keep his struggling businesses afloat but also helped orchestrate massive, likely illegal tax fraud schemes to hide those transactions from authorities. Unfortunately for Trump, that safety net disappeared in the late 1990s, first when Trump and his siblings officially took over the family company in 1997 and later when his father died in 1999. But Trump’s financial struggles continued: his flagship companies declared bankruptcy in both 2004 and 2009, with Trump resigning from his position as head of the board of Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009.

Compounding Trump’s financial problems was the Wall Street stigma his business failures attracted. The Guardian has reported that, in the 1990s, “Wall Street banks, which had previously extended him credit, turned off the tap.” According to The New York Times, bankers went so far as to coin the phrase “the Donald risk” to describe the widespread aversion to lending to Trump. In 2013, one banker told The Atlantic, “If a major institution in New York—whether it was a Chase or a Goldman or a law firm or something—wanted to have a building built . . . I can give you almost 100 percent assurance that Donald would not be on the list.”
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THE RUSSIAN-FUELED COMEBACK

So how, then, did 15 Trump-branded projects break ground between 1998 and 2012?

Given that Trump has defied decades of political tradition by assiduously refusing to release his tax returns, it’s difficult to truly get to the bottom of his finances. But the public record is more than enough to demonstrate that the answer, in part, lies with Russia.

With the collapse of the Russian economy in 1998, Russian oligarchs who had made their fortunes buying up formerly state-held assets now sought to stash their money in international real estate. The Trump Organization offered an appealing haven for several reasons, ranging from its ostentatious gold-plated aesthetic to its reputation for lax reporting standards. As a result, several Trump-branded projects from 1998 onward received significant financing from sources with ties to Russia, most notably the Bayrock Group, a real estate company headquartered in Trump Tower and founded by the Kazakhstan-born former Soviet official Tevfik Arif, and Deutsche Bank, one of the few major financial institutions to still lend to Trump and which paid $630 million in penalties in 2017 for involvement in a $10 billion Russian money laundering scheme.

Russia also provided many of the buyers for Trump-branded real estate. According to a Bloomberg investigation into Trump World Tower, which broke ground in 1998, “a third of units sold on floors 76 through 83 by 2004 involved people or limited liability companies connected to Russia and neighboring states.” Reuters, meanwhile, has reported that “at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses have bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida.”

And the Trump Organization reportedly welcomed the clientele. For example, a 2013 article in The Nation about the influx of Russian money in Miami real estate noted that Elena Baronoff, a Russian American socialite once described on the cover of a Russian magazine as “the Russian Hand of Donald Trump,” operated a real estate company out of the lobby of the city’s Trump International Beach Resort that catered to Eastern European buyers. The New Republic has also extensively documented how the Trump Organization actively sought Russian buyers, so much so that the area around Trump Sunny Isles in Florida became known as “Little Moscow.” Though these transactions are not inherently suspect, they demonstrate that the Trump Organization was sufficiently aware of its reliance on Russian money to actively cultivate relationships with Russian clients.

Some of the individual deals have attracted attention, most notably the Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev’s 2008 purchase of one of Trump’s mansions in Palm Beach. He paid a reported $95 million for it—$53 million more than Trump paid for it four years earlier. The transaction has received scrutiny from investigators, particularly because, though Trump justified the price increase by claiming he had “gutted the house” and spent $25 million on renovations, there were few apparent alterations. Such rapid and unexplained increases in price are frequently cited as red flags for money laundering through real estate. According to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the transaction is one of several special counsel Robert Mueller and his team are investigating for “potential money laundering or other illicit financial dealings between the president, his associates, and Russia.” Rybolovlev drew additional attention for his behavior during the final months of the 2016 election, during which his private plane was spotted on separate days in Las Vegas and Charlotte within hours of Trump’s arrival in each city. A spokesman for Rybolovlev dismissed the incidents as a coincidence, and Trump has denied meeting Rybolovlev; a White House official described questions about their relationship as a conspiracy theory. In November 2018, Rybolovlev was arrested in Monaco on apparently unrelated charges of corruption, to which he pleaded not guilty.

Trump SoHo, which broke ground in 2007, typifies how the Trump Organization benefited from financing coming out of Russia and the former Soviet Union. Much of the project’s financing came from the Bayrock Group. Several reported funders of the project, including Arif, Tamir Sapir, and Alexander Mashkevich, hail from the former Soviet Union and have reported ties to the current Kremlin. Some have also faced allegations of corrupt and criminal behavior, ranging from money laundering to smuggling to involvement in a prostitution ring. For example, in 2009, Sapir pleaded guilty to illegally importing animal parts. Mashkevich has been repeatedly accused of bribery and money laundering on projects in Kazakhstan, and settled a case in 1996 without admitting guilt. The same can be said for some of the property’s clientele. For example, Viktor Khrapunov, who formerly served as mayor of Almaty, Kazakhstan, went on trial in July 2018 for allegedly purchasing condominiums in the building using money stolen from state coffers and laundered through a network of offshore shell companies while serving as the country’s energy minister. As of this writing, the case is ongoing, and Khrapunov has denied any wrongdoing.
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It was his responsibility to determine, and so state, if there was sufficient evidence to do so. Otherwise there was no reason for his investigation. It was not meant to be evidence gathering for Congress. Congress doesn't need his investigation for that. It does its own gathering and it can impeach for any reason it chooses if it has the votes to do so.

Just keep supporting Putin’s Puppet

Successful obstruction leads to insufficient evidence.

Mueller’s report suggests his obstruction of justice investigation was heavily informed by an opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opinion that says a sitting president cannot be indicted – a conclusion Mueller’s team accepted.

“And apart from OLC’s constitutional view, we recognized that a federal criminal accusation against a sitting President would place burdens on the President’s capacity to govern and potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct,” Mueller’s team wrote.

That decision, though, seemed to leave investigators in a strange spot. Mueller’s team wrote that they “determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes.” They seemed to shy from producing even an internal document that alleged the president had done something wrong – deciding, essentially, that they wouldn’t decide.

“Although a prosecutor’s internal report would not represent a formal public accusation akin to an indictment, the possibility of the report’s public disclosure and the absence of a neutral adjudicatory forum to review its findings counseled against determining ‘that the person’s conduct constitutes a federal offense.’ ”
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About me? I don't subscribe to your opinion that Trump sold out our national security. It certainly hasn't been proven so. Actually, it appears to me that he has, and is further trying, to bolster national security with his border policies, strengthening our military, placing more financial responsibility on the EU for its own protection instead of merely draining our resources, attempting to create more equitable trade policies which also entail more protection of our intellectual properties from Chinese forms of theft, trying harder than past presidents to prohibit NK's drive to become a nuclear threat as well as ergo Iran's, assisting Eastern Europe's protection, and unleashing our own economic potential with tax and deregulation policies.

Ultimately, for me, it's not about Clinton or Trump. It's about who is most willing to protect our national sovereignty. Who is least likely to continue the destruction of our constitutional system. Who is most likely to preserve our uniquely American values, our American notion of individual liberty, our notion of unalienable rights, and who is most likely not to lead us into what I consider irrational notions of what and who we are as human beings.

All that requires paying attention to more than the personalities of the President. All of that requires that the body politic, our citizens, are clearly aware of those basic, fundamental issues, rather than being distracted by surface likes or dislikes, current fads and fancies, fetishistic devotion to individual and group differences promoting each of them to an icon of unalienable behavior which must be granted the legal permission to require the rest of us to serve them as they wish.

It requires that, at core, we all have a principle that unites us. Not a person, not a savior . . . a principle. The who that is ultimately responsible is not Clinton or Trump. The who is us. We may be divided into various factions, but the clusters of factions that merge into the two main adversaries are those who desire the sovereign, bottom up, constitutional system on which we were founded, and those who want a global union based on top down Progressive, socialist, communist views that we are best served by a basically all-powerful governing bureaucracy.

Frankly, this politically biased debating on what a horrible person Trump is, or, for that matter who Clinton or any other flawed human acting as a politician is, devolves into sickening hate rants. They are tiresome, boring, destructive, and off the mark. They don't discuss the proverbial heart of the matter.

Frankly, I don't want to participate in irrational character assassinations. It is stupid, non-productive, nauseating.

I would rather discuss things that matter. If you want to have a civilized discussion on the nature of government and which type you prefer and why, I'm in.

And when I vote, I will do so on the basis of what is the most likely choice available that most possibly will maintain what we have left of the Constitutional American Republic.

Regardless of whose pussies the candidate has touched.

Good luck with the chosen one
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Trump's daughter works at the WH
Her husband works at the WH
Rudy's son works at the WH
Barr's son in law works at the WH
Barr's daughter works at Treasury
Trumps sons do foreign business
His daughter is getting Chinese patents and Saudi grants
But sure let's talk about Biden
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The central fact is this: the President corruptly abused his office to coerce a foreign government to interfere in the 2020 election. His White House then tried to cover this up and got caught. That's the story.

The fact is there is more evidence connecting Jim Jordan to the Ohio State sex scandal than there is evidence connecting Joe Biden to any Ukraine scandal.
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I don't watch TV, but I saw this guy on a Fox youtube video covering the various questions re the whistleblower stuff, including, for example, the notion of Trump withholding Ukraine aid before the phone call. It's almost 17 minutes, so not too long. And a VERY interesting analysis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUCaOOfYA08