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Comment by jessedhillon | Hacker News Reader

And yet no indictments for anything resembling collusion, i.e. coordination between the Trump campaign and foreign actors.

The fact is that liberals and the media subjected us all to 2+ years of peepants reporting, telling us that all of the shoes would be dropping any day now, chasing a fever dream of a grand conspiracy with Russia. And it was all total horseshit, despite the fact that the NYT, Wapo, MSNBC, CNN et al filled volumes with reporting on the subject. These are the loudest voices in the country, they're supposed to use facts to buoy the public and keep us moored to reality, and instead showed themselves to be the most detached.

If you can't even acknowledge this basic state of affairs, then we're not even talking about the same universes and there's no conversation to be had about the factual accuracy of the media.

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This is inaccurate. Go read the report, or at the very least read the Wikipedia summary.

The conclusion was that a conspiracy between Trumpworld and the Russian government could not be proved because the potential suspects on the US side hid, or destroyed, evidence and lied to investigators.

What were these people covering up -- at considerable risk to themselves for prosecution -- if there was nothing to hide?

Disinformation is dangerous because too many overly credulous people are all to willing to believe in alternative facts even if contradictory primary source materials are available.

The talk page for that wikipedia summary is also entertaining.

If and whether anyone impeded the investigation is beyond the point -- there is nothing in the Mueller report about,

- money laundering through Deutsche Bank

- quid pro quo for a Moscow tower development

- secret mail servers

- Trump as a "Russian agent"

- incriminating piss tapes

And many other topics which don't immediately come to mind but can be easily googled. For two years, these are the stories we were all told were just about to drop.

If for those years, the claim had been "Trump and Russians may have worked together to take out Facebook ads, push bogus articles through troll accounts on Twitter, and phish Clinton aides" nobody would have given a shit. Yet even this set of underwhelming claims probably exceeds all that the Mueller investigation suggests could allege to have taken place at maximum.

You're shifting the goal posts from the question of a campaign conspiracy (coordination) to a broader question of inappropriate connections between Trump and Russia.

Further, the purpose of the Mueller report was not to investigate any of these issues. The Mueller investigation was very narrowly focused on whether the Trump campaign conspired (not 'colluded') with Russian entities during the 2017 campaign.

The additional issues you raise were outside of Mueller's remit. Those questions were supposed to be answered by a separate counterintelligence probe conducted by the DoJ. This separate investigation has vanished without a trace[0] and appears to have been killed or suppressed.

Leaving aside the conflict of interest issues inherent in the Trump DoJ investigating Trump, why would this investigation disappear, given how eager Barr would be to exonerate Trump if the outcome of the investigation would give the DoJ the slightest figleaf of justification to do so?

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/15/what-happ...

This the finest special pleading, and exemplifies exactly what I'm talking about. It's fine for you to insist on this very narrow and technical view of the situation, but that's absolutely not how the case was presented in the media day and night for years, and I have no desire to engage you on these minute points.

I'm not going to argue with you about these specific facts, because the correctness of facts composing your take does not even matter for what I'm saying. You want to argue about the specific gastronomic precedents of a shit sandwich, whereas I'm telling you that the problem is that everyone was told for years that a gourmet hamburger was on its way. It doesn't seem like you have anything to say about this state of things, which is why you keep dragging the conversation down into how many kernels of corn did the sandwich contain, and of which variety.

The Russian conspiracy story did not materialize anything remotely living up to the fantastic sizzle -- a fact made all the more amazing by the staggering abandonment of journalistic principles undertaken en masse by establishment media in promulgating that story. Nobody can be taken seriously who thinks these same people are arbiters of fact.

I'm genuinely impressed with your language and use of culinary analogies. I wish I could learn to write this way

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