Saturday, December 2, 2017

Paul Robinson — Collusion

The investigation into suspected collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government has claimed its first three victims: one (Paul Manafort) for completely unconnected money laundering charges, and two (George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn) for lying to investigators about things which were not themselves criminal, and which are therefore crimes which would never have happened had there never been an investigation. To date, the evidence of direct collusion between Trump and the Russians is looking a little thin, to say the least. Now, into this maelstrom steps Guardian reporter Luke Harding with his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russian Helped Donald Trump Win.
Collusion spends over 300 pages insinuating that Trump is a long-standing agent of the Russian secret services, and hinting, without ever providing any firm evidence, that Trump and his team acted on orders from the Kremlin to subvert American democracy. I’ll be honest, and admit that I picked this book up expecting it to be a series of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, and to be utterly unbalanced in its analysis, and in that sense I’m not an unbiased reader. At the same time, I was interested to see if Harding had come up with anything that everybody else had not, and was willing to give him a chance. I needn’t have bothered. For alas, my worst suspicions proved to be true, and then some.…
This collusion narrative is now jumping the shark more than the birther narrative about Barack Obama's birth certificate. In that sense, DJT is just experiencing a dose of his own medicine.

Irrussianality
CollusionPaul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

4 comments:

Matt Franko said...

He's going to sell a lot of these books to the MSNBC and CNN crowd...

Joe said...

Well we know what madow's giving as Christmas gifts. Just her purchases alone will make the boom a best selleer

Salsabob said...

You guys are so funny. Let's see your spin once this thread gets pulled -

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-05/deutsche-bank-is-said-to-have-received-subpoena-on-client-trump

Mueller Subpoenas Trump Deutsche Bank Records

Let's see you all keep your supposed MMT belief-in-accounting values. ;-)

Tom Hickey said...

From the Bloomberg article:

An internal investigation carried out by Deutsche Bank didn’t yield any evidence of connections between the client relationship with Trump and the bank’s so-called Russian mirror trades affair, a person briefed on the matter said. The bank has settled several U.S. investigations into how it helped Russian clients move money out of the country but a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice is still outstanding.