Conservatives start suggesting that colluding with Russia isn’t so bad

Democratic team?

Muller is a Republican.

Rosenstein is a Republican.

All the Judges that approved the subpoena's were Republicans.

 

There are approximately 18 lawyers working on the case.

The last I saw 9-10 were confirmed democrats, with some like Quarles having made campaign contributions to both parties.

Also a majority of the lawyers are young.

 

In 2021 if Oprah is president, will Trump fans commit now to this apparent rule I’ve never heard of, where no Republican voter or donor in law enforcement will be able to work on any case related to anyone in Oprah’s democratic administration?

I means that’s the rule you guys think should be the norm. Commit to it or shut up.

 

mark levin and sean hannity... you can't much more representative of today's trump republicans... now supporting putin over mueller.

 

I hear that they all are seriously angry ... Angry Democrats!

People are saying ...

 

Maybe Mueller, Rosenstein et al are really RHINOs.

 

Obligatory cute baby rhino picture...

 

"I did not vote for Trump, but..."

... will morph here in the D&D to ...

"I'm no fan of Putin, but..."

 

Guessing its all of fox news that has followed trump into this place...

 

Can you imagine if one of Comrade Putin's political rivals did this to his motherland? We'd be finding tremendous frozen bloated bodies all over siberia. But that wouldn't happen in Glorious motherland as all parties including, the Liberal Democratic Party, The communist party and the united Russia party all Love Putin. We can now add the GOP party.

 

In fairness, not all conservatives... this The Weekly Standard Editorial merits reading in full so I spoilered it instead of cutting excerpts.

Editorial: Republicans and Trump Tower

Spoiler: Weekly Standard Editorial

"This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics—and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!” So tweeted President Donald Trump on August 5. He was referring to members of his immediate family and his campaign team having met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016.

The president’s former attorney Michael Cohen is (according to media reports) willing to testify to special counsel Robert Mueller that Trump knew about the meeting before it happened. Cohen’s an unreliable witness, but such testimony would directly contradict Trump’s claim that he knew nothing about the meeting.

A quick recap. Rob Goldstone, the publicist who initially connected Veselnitskaya and the Trump campaign, had written in a message to Donald Trump Jr. that “the Crown prosecutor of Russia . . . offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” Don Jr. agreed to a meeting and replied: “if it’s what you say I love it.”


As late as July 2017, Don Jr. maintained that the meeting was about Russian adoptions. But with the revelation of the email exchange with Goldstone, in which the candidate’s son accepted the meeting on the basis of receiving “information that would incriminate Hillary,” it became clear that Don Jr.’s original story was meant to mislead. It may be true, as the president insists, that “zero happened from the meeting.” But the more relevant fact is that the eldest son of the Republican nominee sought information from a foreign adversary for the purposes of affecting the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort attended the meeting and so did the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner (he says he left early).

Trump doesn’t deny any of this. At a July 2017 press conference, he sought to minimize the significance of the meeting by admitting the attempt to collude: “It’s called opposition research or even research into your opponent. I’ve had many people . . . call up—‘Oh, gee, we have information on this factor or this person or, frankly, Hillary.’ . . . Politics is not the nicest business in the world, but it’s very standard where they have information and you take the information. . . . In the case of Don, he listened. I guess they talked about—as I see it, they talked about adoption and some things.”

But the meeting was never meant to be about “adoption policy”; it was always about defeating Hillary Clinton.

Don Jr. now says that he was the victim of a bait and switch, and indeed it’s not difficult to imagine him as a dupe. We tend to doubt that Don Jr., Manafort, or Kushner committed any crime by holding the meeting. But there is no excusing the shamefulness of the thing. Political campaigns are often approached by people claiming to possess dirt on opponents, but Veselnitskaya’s presentation of herself as a tool of the Russian government puts this affair in a whole new class of loathsomeness.


It’s clear that even these amoral operators understood the meeting was inappropriate. How else to explain the cascade of lies they told to cover it up? These include saying that:

There were no contacts between the campaign and foreign governments.
There were no contacts with Russians.
There were contacts with Russians but they weren’t improper.
The Trump Tower meeting was about policy matters.
The Trump Tower meeting was about routine “opposition research.”
The Russians never produced the material they’d promised.
There’s nothing improper about accepting opposition research from a foreign adversary.
Each defense lasted until facts emerged to render it inoperative.

Among the more dispiriting aspects of this sordid affair is the untroubled, nothing-to-see-here-folks attitude of Trump surrogates, Republican officeholders, and most of the conservative media. Once upon a time, conservatives were keenly aware of the importance of norms. They are the reason a society does not need to spell out laws to govern all possible behaviors. It is precisely the normative pursuit of virtue that has allowed America to be a land of freedom and liberty. Rick Santorum used to make this point on the campaign trail all the time. Bill Bennett wrote an entire series of books about it.

Republicans ought to be castigating the president over the Trump Tower meeting, not covering for him. Even if they support him more broadly. And what would it cost them? Nothing. They could say, “While the meeting does not appear to have been illegal, it was unethical and has no place in American politics. Trump and his campaign were wrong to do it and should be ashamed of it.” You can say that and still support the president, still want to vote for him in 2020, still want The Wall.

The problem, as always, is that Trumpism doesn’t allow for honest appraisals or piecemeal support. If you’re in for a penny, you must be in for a pound. Defending norms was one of the bedrocks of conservative thought right up until the winter of 2016, at which point Republicans suddenly became contemptuous of the very idea of norms.


We suspect Republicans will come to regret their new “anything goes” rationalization. Will it be okay for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign to seek copies of Donald Trump’s still-secret tax returns from hackers working for North Korea? Or for Bernie Sanders operatives to meet with Iranian regime cutouts for dirt on Trump cabinet officials?

It wasn’t long ago that Republicans were concerned about foreign meddling in U.S. elections. In 1996, when evidence surfaced that China was funneling money to the Democratic party, including the Clinton-Gore campaign—remember the fundraiser at the Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights attended by Al Gore?—GOP leaders demanded an investigation. In 2015, when credible evidence emerged that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had used her position to enrich the Clinton Foundation, Republicans called it another indication that she lacked the character to be president.

But the fact that Trump and his closest advisers were keen to get their hands on opposition research generated by America’s greatest foreign adversary is no big deal for Republicans. How far we’ve come in just two years.

https://www.weeklystandard.com/the-editors/editorial-republicans-react-to-trump-tower-tweets

 

I’m not saying Hitler was right.... but