Quote:
"Uncovering information as Steele did (and so many other intel services!) of a Russian intelligence operation, and then reporting it to the proper authorities is not the same thing as meeting with Russian intelligence officers so as to collude in secret to support their covert action to undermine and alter the US election," veteran CIA operative Glenn Carle said in an email.
Rick Tyler, a longtime Republican strategist who worked on Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential campaign, said in an interview earlier this year that the Steele dossier and Trump Jr.'s meeting with Veselnitskaya are "apples and oranges."
"Getting opposition research from a qualified professional, even if it's a foreign national, is one thing," Tyler said.
"There are lots of foreign nationals in the US and abroad who work on political campaigns. But it's a very different thing for a government, particularly an enemy, to somehow offer opposition research as a way of saying 'we want to help you win and someone else lose.' That is very serious, and would essentially be allowing a foreign government to help influence an election."
S teele, Tyler said, was not representing a foreign government whose interests he was trying to insert into the election process. Even if Veselnitskaya was not directly connected to the Kremlin, she was presented to Trump Jr. as a "Russian government attorney" who wanted to help the campaign as part of the Russian government's support for Trump's candidacy.
"In my opinion, it's a difference based on the fact that a state is volunteering information in the latter case [of Veselnitskaya]," Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert who is a senior research fellow at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, said in an email.
"The Russians supposedly used for the Steele dossier were just sources, passing on information because they were paid or otherwise induced," Galeotti said. "But this is a case in which (also supposedly: we have nothing more than a publicist's email claim that this was the case) the Russian government itself was intervening for, presumably, its own purposes."
There are plenty of people out there who think JORR and others who believe the Trump talking point are suckers.
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Don Tiny wrote:
Don't be such a fucking chump.