Jophiel wrote:
No, "working with"= "flipped". Not just plea. If I'm in the Mafia and I get arrested and I just plea guilty, that doesn't mean that I flipped.
Ok. But you're still playing word games though because every single plea includes "cooperating with the investigation", which more or less automatically meets your stated criteria for "working with", which also meets your criteria for "flipping on Trump".
Which leave us back to you assuming that each and every single one of these people has "flipped on Trump", with the assumed meaning that they must have some information proving Trump (or someone close to Trump in the campaign) being involved in "colluding with the Russians". Which is exactly the part that I don't see, and which I label as "wishful thinking" on your part.
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Each of those people are/were actively cooperating with Mueller.
Yeah. Um... That's what kinda happens as part of a plea agreement. It's an incredibly broad statement Joph. It does not mean "has valuable information critical to the furtherance of the investigation". It simply means that they're not pleading the 5th, or otherwise lawyering up. Again, my issue is with your continued assumption that if someone enters a plea and "agrees to cooperate with the investigation" that it must mean that they have evidence linking Trump to Russian collusion.
I think that's a very flawed assumption. And if the history of these sorts of investigations is any indicator, is likely 100% wrong.
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Not just "Whelp, you got me, I'm guilty whatever; give me my sentence so Trump can pardon me". This honestly isn't a difficult concept.
No. It's not. And most of us get the concept that there's a huge range of "cooperating with the prosecution" that does not have to include having evidence key to proving the guilt of a specific target the prosecution would like to go after. There's a huge cart before the horse aspect to this. You want there to be evidence out there, somewhere, that links Trump to some form of "Russian collusion", so you interpret every single plea as more evidence that there must be such evidence because, hey, why else would they give them a deal if they didn't have anything on Trump, right?
An alternative explanation is that the whole thing is about political damage, and the point is exactly to get people like you to make that assumption, and in the end we'll find little or no actual charges file, and none at all directly related to "Russian collusion". I'll again point to the Plame investigation. Surely you recall all of the people who were brought in for questioning, then brought in again, and all of the media interpretation of how "that looks bad for the Bush administration because they surely would not be doing that if they didn't think it would lead to something". Remember how it all lead to
absolutely nothing at all?
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I honestly suspect the only reason why you're pretending otherwise is embarrassment at your ignorance when you said...
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Given your repeated posts about how people are going to flip on Trump "like any day now. Ok, any day... NOW. Hmmm... Ok, maybe this time?"
...since I know you had no idea how many people were cooperating with the investigation. But who knows, maybe you really are this confused about how things work. That would explain a lot.
Because I don't equate "cooperating with the investigation" as "flipping on Trump". I thought I'd already made that abundantly clear with my previous posts. My entire point is that I think you are getting well ahead of your skis by making that assumption. Yet you keep doing it, over and over. And you use that assumption to believe that the investigation must be making progress or something. My prediction is that there is no progress, certainly not in the direction of detecting, much less proving, collusion with the Russians. It's all smoke, and no fire.
It may certainly be progress towards finding yet another victim to rake over the coals, and threaten with some unrelated charges so they can get a plea from them, and then maybe move on to the next person with the next unrelated thing. But in the end, none of it will have anything to do with Russian collusion. Because none of it has so far. They literally have two people who did nothing other than make the mistake of lying about whether they merely had a conversation with a Russian (but no wrongdoing in the nature of the conversations themselves), and two people who were engaged in business dealings years before joining the campaign which skirted the letter of the law (tax filing status essentially). Um... Also with no evidence or even claim of them having "colluded with the Russians to rig the election".
So your assumption that any of this will lead back to said collusion is based on ... what? Nothing, right? Wishful thinking? Yeah. I think that's about it.