(08-21-2018 11:27 AM)Machiavelli Wrote: Why does Trump continue to say,
If Russia did it? If he’s not guilty and corrupt. The only other guy who denies Russia did it is Putin.
If Russia did it should be a shock statement to everybody. Not just independents and D’s.
"If Russia did it?" If Russia did what?
That's the thing about this that I question. We have made boogeymen out of "the Russians." But nobody has explained exactly what they did that involves Trump or his campaign.
I get that they tried to interfere with our elections. They try to interfere in every way they can. Have for decades. So do lots of other countries. So do we, to them. Remember Angela Merkel's cell phone? If you ain't interfering, you ain't trying. I wish Trump would quit pretending otherwise. I think he conflates "the Russians are interfering" with "you colluded with the Russians" and thinks he is denying the latter. A much better response would be something like, "Hell yes, the Russians tried, but they didn't succeed and there was no collusion with my campaign. And oh, by the way, when is Mueller going to start addressing what the Russians actually did and how to prevent it or defend against it or mitigate it going forward, instead of chasing ten-year-old unrelated tax issues?"
Here's my question to you, Mach. Why did this never become a problem until Hillary lost an election, at which point anything less than WWIII suddenly became an insufficient response? Why was it not a problem with Hillary's server? Surely you don't believe that "the Russians" either a) didn't try to hack it, or b) didn't succeed if they tried. Or do you?
I believe you've responded in the past something like they didn't hack Hillary's server because we never saw any hacked stuff on Wikileaks. Trust me, if they hacked Hillary's server, you'd never see it on Wikileaks for at least two reasons:
1) That would not have been the appropriate use for the information. A more appropriate use would be, say, if you got the ambassador to Libya's travel schedule and passed it along to sympathetic revels who could kidnap and kill him. I'm not saying that happened, but you can't deny that it certainly could have. And when the left attacks Trump, "could have" or "might have" seem to have become perfectly acceptable standards of evidence. One thing for sure, if that did happen, that's what treason is, not firing a bureaucrat, and arguably it could have risen to the level of a capital offense. The water on that is murky only because the exact nature of our involvement in most of that region remains shockingly unclear.
2) Disclosing information publicly would have disclosed that there was a leak. If you're getting useful intel, you'd rather not blow your cover.