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Although I agree with many of the points here, unfortunately the piece itself has made the same mistake as the media it criticises: it's jumping to conclusions

Although I agree with many of the points here, unfortunately the piece itself has made the same mistake as the media it criticises: it's jumping to conclusions a little prematurely. Why read so much into the lack of indictments when Mueller's team have agreed to the standard that they cannot indict a sitting president? [1] Let's just wait and see -- I'm fed of speculation at this point. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/muellers-team-told-trumps-lawyers-the-special-counsel-cannot-indict-a-sitting-president/2018/05/16/cf4d5700-5961-11e8-858f-12becb4d6067_story.html?utm_term=.69151ddb2c5b https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/muellers-team-told-t...

s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
Because to have collusion you need to have multiple parties colluding. They haven't indicted anymore Russians or any other members of the Trump campaign, and no existing indictment has been due to collusion. So even though the President can't be indicted, the indication that no other indictments means that collusion is not a part of the report. There may be other offenses that Trump have committed, but that is even MORE speculation.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  You can tie the loose ends together. No matter what the final report has the Stone indictment is incredibly damning with regard to his communication with Wikileaks in addition to the Trump tower meeting.
- jasonlotito 8y ago
  Not to mention that you can't be indicted for colluding, even if you give evidence and admit to collusion.
- int_19h 8y ago
  You can't indict anybody for collusion, since it's not a crime. What is a crime is, for example, conspiracy to hack DNC computers - for which several people, mostly Russians, were already indicted. Another example would be conspiracy to "impair, obstruct, or defeat the lawful function of any department of government", which is what the Internet Research Agency was indicted for.
  - cm2187 8y ago
    "Mostly"? Are there any US national?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- IOT_Apprentice 8y ago
  Collusion, like "Crooked Hillary" are terms Trump used courtesy of Cambridge Analytica to control the narrative. The investigation was to look for coordination and links between Russia and the Trump campaign, along with obstruction of justice as well as "any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation."
  - s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
    Collusion is a euphemism, my point was noone was indicted for coordinating with the campaign, and noone was indicted in the campaign other than for tax fraud and processing crimes. If you can point out who exactly you think coordinated with Trump that'd be great.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > noone was indicted in the campaign other than for tax fraud and processing crimes. Pappadopolous was convicted for lying about his attempts, approved by higher ups in the campaign, to coordinate with Russia. Stone was indicted for lying about his role in coordinating between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks about the DNC document release in which, from other indictments, WikiLeaks was acting as either an agent or dupe of Russian intelligence.
      - s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
        Those are processing crimes. And Stone denies the accusation.
        dragonwriter 8y ago
        > Those are processing crimes. Irrelevant, the actual facts charged in the indictment involve collusion. “Collusion” isn't a legal charge, it's a fact pattern, and it's part of the fact pattern in both the Stone and Pappadopolous indictments. The claim that there are no indictments involving collusion is false. > And Stone denies the accusation. Which is irrelevant to any claims about the content of indictments of findings of the Mueller probe. It would be relevant if the claim was “no convictions involving collusion” or “no confessions involving collusion”, though Pappadopolous would still disprove both of those claims.
- NotAnEconomist 8y ago
  > the indication that no other indictments means that collusion is not a part of the report. This is incorrect. "Collusion" isn't a specific crime, but rather, a euphemism for a family of crimes. We've seen Trump associates charged with and convicted of those crimes, relating to improper communications, obstructing an investigation into foreign influence, lying to the government during an investigation, etc. We've seen the Russians charged with the related crimes, such as hacking the DNC. We've seen Mueller trace out the connection between GRU and the campaign convicts, via Wikileaks. We've seen multiple Trump associates who lied under oath about their or Trump's financial dealings with Russia. Or in the case of Stone, about many many things. We've seen additional evidence that Trump is the center of a vast criminal syndicate with ties to Russia, given the multiple branching investigations across jurisdictions, the related campaign finance crimes, and the testimony of his decade-long "fixer". This is what is looks like when a criminal organization is prosecuted -- and the reason that Trump has not been charged with conspiracy relating to the criminal acts he ordered, acts for which others face jail terms, is policy against indicting a sitting president. There's no speculation involved, and considerable evidence of their criminality. What's fanciful is you ignoring all of the facts to say things like: "Well, it doesn't matter if associates of his are going down for related crimes, and that he's the connecting feature between their criminal acts -- that he hasn't been charged with something made up means that nothing happened!" (All of that aside, the media is a travesty and their coverage of this has been click-bait driven fantasy.)
- SEJeff 8y ago
  Yet there could be sealed indictments that have yet to be unsealed. In fact, every single one of Mueller's indictments were originally sealed. Who's to say there aren't others that he's handed off to various federal prosecutors like at SDNY or EVDA? Assuming that Mueller has entirely cleared the president (or anyone around him) at this point is about as pointless as proving he's about to be arrested in the Oval Office. Let it play out and see what happens. Regardless, I suspect Congress will inevitably get the truth out and eventually it will come out to the public. Like most things in a democracy, they're often slow and sometimes messy. This is a feature, not a bug!
  - CookieMon 8y ago
    FWIW NBC reported no sealed indictments, they're citing "a senior U.S. law enforcement official". https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/special-counsel-mueller-has-no-sealed-indictments-as-russia-probe-ends-nbc-news.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/special-counsel-mueller-has-...
  - Fjolsvith 8y ago
    As of November, there were three dozen sealed indictments in the federal D.C. circuit. [1] My theory on this is that the FBI has been investigating crimes not committed by the current administration, but which would, if prosecuted during the Mueller investigation, raise a cry of obstruction and interference, due to the people they target. The FBI has been letting the Mueller special counsel wind down before going after the real criminals. 1. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/dozens-sealed-criminal-indictments-dc-docket-mueller/story?id=59249030 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/dozens-sealed-criminal-indic...
  - Fjolsvith 8y ago
    > as pointless as proving he's about to be arrested in the Oval Office. A sitting president cannot be arrested by his administration, by law.
    - SEJeff 8y ago
      A sitting president can not be indicted by the DoJ, per DoJ policy. There is no law whatsoever, but only a memo that makes a policy from the DoJ's OLC (Office Of Legal Opinion). If you think this is a law, you are mistaken.
- franey 8y ago
  Saying that no indictment has been because of collusion isn't true, since Manafort was indicted in part for lying to investigators about his contacts with Kilimnik. Surely you'd agree that Trump's campaign chair giving US polling data to a Russian cut-out counts as colluding. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/paul-manafort-trump-polling-data-russia-allegation-1.4970502 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/paul-manafort-trump-polling-da...
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > and no existing indictment has been due to collusion. The Pappadopolous indictment and conviction-by-guilty-plea was for (lying about) Trump-campaign initiated attempted collusion, in which Pappadopolous acted with the knowledge and approval of higher officials in the Trump campaign. The Stone indictment is for (lying about) collusion with WikiLeaks on the release of information that, per other indictments, was being released as part of a Russian propaganda operation. So, no, it's entirely false to say “no existing indictment has been due to collusion”. > There may be other offenses that Trump have committed, but that is even MORE speculation. That's not really speculation, either; it's not as if the identity of the unindicted coconspirator Individual 1 in the Cohen indictment out of SDNY is a mystery.
  - Fjolsvith 8y ago
    > The Pappadopolous indictment and conviction-by-guilty-plea was for (lying about) Trump-campaign initiated attempted collusion, in which Pappadopolous acted with the knowledge and approval of higher officials in the Trump campaign. The two week prison sentence Pappadopolous received gave little weight to his complicity, and seemed to me to be more a slap on the wrist for his not cooperating with the FBI.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    Pappadopolous was the victim of a con. He went to a couple of campaign staff meetings, so he was "on the campaign staff". Then some DS tool whispered something inconsequential in his ear. He got in trouble when he re-whispered that silly rumor in the ear of some other DS tool. That's all that happened. If he had a decent lawyer or any stones at all, he would never have plead guilty nor been convicted of anything.
gpsx 8y ago
I think the real problem in the US media is political bias. I think essentially the article is accusing the left leaning media of letting that bias color their views. Of course the article is equally guilty of that same thing. And I assume it does not see its own bias. And sadly, the fact that the media is like this is largely a reflection of the population in general. And, as others point out, the media is probably like this because they are just chasing profit.
- wavepruner 8y ago
  Confirmation bias explains a lot of what is going on with media. It's human nature to be biased. This doesn't have to be a big problem if we accept that we are all biased. Biases are rooted in the computational limitations of the human mind. We have limited memory and communication bandwidth. Our brains use compression algorithms to record, store, and retrieve data.
- davvolun 8y ago
  > I think the real problem in the US media is political bias. Absolutely not. As someone else notes to your comment, everyone is biased. I'm "biased" that people not dying is a good thing -- some would argue the universe would be better off without humanity. Bias is inevitable, and not the problem; the problem, as you state, is "letting that bias color their views." Or, rather, not so much "color" your views, but letting your personal bias override any other interpretation. I personally believe Trump has done some very illegal things and it's just a question of finding a smoking gun. That doesn't mean he has done anything illegal regarding situation X (I don't know, let's say promoting Mar-A-Lago after he started running for office), and that's something I need to keep in mind when I read articles about him.
TomMckenny 8y ago
It's a little worse than jumping in prematurely. The article is trying to persuade us the press discredits itself when it correctly reports 37 indictments, several convictions, Russian meetings with Don jr. and a mind-boggling array of lies. It criticizes an accurately researched nyt list of Trump associates connected with Russians implying it has been refuted by the Mueller report which the author has not even seen. Consider what the author is suggesting: these things should not be reported. It intentionally blurs opinion pieces with factual reporting, and even then heavily paraphrases. It attributes words of others to papers that did not publish them. It implies someone's votive candles somehow reflects on the press. All hinged on the the fact that there are no recommended indictments (beyond the dozens already being pursued). Additional indictments that would have to be for the theoretically unindictable offense of collusion. It's not attempting to examine press malfeasance, it's attempting to discredit establish facts by vaguely lumping these unrelated things together. Mixed along with what is not explicitly stated in the unread Mueller report. And to do so preemptively to fix opinion about a report before it's even available publicly. This article is neither reporting nor analysis, although it pretends to be. It is indistinguishable from countless others that appear in Turkey, Venezuela, Hungary and other nations in a similar state. The names are different and the language is English and that's all. It is another attempt to de-legitimize the press using exactly the same techniques in every other nascent autocracy: blur one persons words with another, blur opinion pieces with reporting and wildly paraphrase them. Blend irrelevant errors over unconnected annoying fact. Do all this preemptively.

s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago

Because to have collusion you need to have multiple parties colluding. They haven't indicted anymore Russians or any other members of the Trump campaign, and no existing indictment has been due to collusion. So even though the President can't be indicted, the indication that no other indictments means that collusion is not a part of the report. There may be other offenses that Trump have committed, but that is even MORE speculation.

akhilcacharya 8y ago
You can tie the loose ends together. No matter what the final report has the Stone indictment is incredibly damning with regard to his communication with Wikileaks in addition to the Trump tower meeting.
jasonlotito 8y ago
Not to mention that you can't be indicted for colluding, even if you give evidence and admit to collusion.
int_19h 8y ago
You can't indict anybody for collusion, since it's not a crime. What is a crime is, for example, conspiracy to hack DNC computers - for which several people, mostly Russians, were already indicted. Another example would be conspiracy to "impair, obstruct, or defeat the lawful function of any department of government", which is what the Internet Research Agency was indicted for.
- cm2187 8y ago
  "Mostly"? Are there any US national?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
IOT_Apprentice 8y ago
Collusion, like "Crooked Hillary" are terms Trump used courtesy of Cambridge Analytica to control the narrative. The investigation was to look for coordination and links between Russia and the Trump campaign, along with obstruction of justice as well as "any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation."
- s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
  Collusion is a euphemism, my point was noone was indicted for coordinating with the campaign, and noone was indicted in the campaign other than for tax fraud and processing crimes. If you can point out who exactly you think coordinated with Trump that'd be great.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > noone was indicted in the campaign other than for tax fraud and processing crimes. Pappadopolous was convicted for lying about his attempts, approved by higher ups in the campaign, to coordinate with Russia. Stone was indicted for lying about his role in coordinating between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks about the DNC document release in which, from other indictments, WikiLeaks was acting as either an agent or dupe of Russian intelligence.
    - s_y_n_t_a_x 8y ago
      Those are processing crimes. And Stone denies the accusation.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > Those are processing crimes. Irrelevant, the actual facts charged in the indictment involve collusion. “Collusion” isn't a legal charge, it's a fact pattern, and it's part of the fact pattern in both the Stone and Pappadopolous indictments. The claim that there are no indictments involving collusion is false. > And Stone denies the accusation. Which is irrelevant to any claims about the content of indictments of findings of the Mueller probe. It would be relevant if the claim was “no convictions involving collusion” or “no confessions involving collusion”, though Pappadopolous would still disprove both of those claims.
NotAnEconomist 8y ago
> the indication that no other indictments means that collusion is not a part of the report. This is incorrect. "Collusion" isn't a specific crime, but rather, a euphemism for a family of crimes. We've seen Trump associates charged with and convicted of those crimes, relating to improper communications, obstructing an investigation into foreign influence, lying to the government during an investigation, etc. We've seen the Russians charged with the related crimes, such as hacking the DNC. We've seen Mueller trace out the connection between GRU and the campaign convicts, via Wikileaks. We've seen multiple Trump associates who lied under oath about their or Trump's financial dealings with Russia. Or in the case of Stone, about many many things. We've seen additional evidence that Trump is the center of a vast criminal syndicate with ties to Russia, given the multiple branching investigations across jurisdictions, the related campaign finance crimes, and the testimony of his decade-long "fixer". This is what is looks like when a criminal organization is prosecuted -- and the reason that Trump has not been charged with conspiracy relating to the criminal acts he ordered, acts for which others face jail terms, is policy against indicting a sitting president. There's no speculation involved, and considerable evidence of their criminality. What's fanciful is you ignoring all of the facts to say things like: "Well, it doesn't matter if associates of his are going down for related crimes, and that he's the connecting feature between their criminal acts -- that he hasn't been charged with something made up means that nothing happened!" (All of that aside, the media is a travesty and their coverage of this has been click-bait driven fantasy.)
SEJeff 8y ago
Yet there could be sealed indictments that have yet to be unsealed. In fact, every single one of Mueller's indictments were originally sealed. Who's to say there aren't others that he's handed off to various federal prosecutors like at SDNY or EVDA? Assuming that Mueller has entirely cleared the president (or anyone around him) at this point is about as pointless as proving he's about to be arrested in the Oval Office. Let it play out and see what happens. Regardless, I suspect Congress will inevitably get the truth out and eventually it will come out to the public. Like most things in a democracy, they're often slow and sometimes messy. This is a feature, not a bug!
- CookieMon 8y ago
  FWIW NBC reported no sealed indictments, they're citing "a senior U.S. law enforcement official". https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/special-counsel-mueller-has-no-sealed-indictments-as-russia-probe-ends-nbc-news.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/special-counsel-mueller-has-...
- Fjolsvith 8y ago
  As of November, there were three dozen sealed indictments in the federal D.C. circuit. [1] My theory on this is that the FBI has been investigating crimes not committed by the current administration, but which would, if prosecuted during the Mueller investigation, raise a cry of obstruction and interference, due to the people they target. The FBI has been letting the Mueller special counsel wind down before going after the real criminals. 1. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/dozens-sealed-criminal-indictments-dc-docket-mueller/story?id=59249030 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/dozens-sealed-criminal-indic...
- Fjolsvith 8y ago
  > as pointless as proving he's about to be arrested in the Oval Office. A sitting president cannot be arrested by his administration, by law.
  - SEJeff 8y ago
    A sitting president can not be indicted by the DoJ, per DoJ policy. There is no law whatsoever, but only a memo that makes a policy from the DoJ's OLC (Office Of Legal Opinion). If you think this is a law, you are mistaken.
franey 8y ago
Saying that no indictment has been because of collusion isn't true, since Manafort was indicted in part for lying to investigators about his contacts with Kilimnik. Surely you'd agree that Trump's campaign chair giving US polling data to a Russian cut-out counts as colluding. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/paul-manafort-trump-polling-data-russia-allegation-1.4970502 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/paul-manafort-trump-polling-da...
dragonwriter 8y ago
> and no existing indictment has been due to collusion. The Pappadopolous indictment and conviction-by-guilty-plea was for (lying about) Trump-campaign initiated attempted collusion, in which Pappadopolous acted with the knowledge and approval of higher officials in the Trump campaign. The Stone indictment is for (lying about) collusion with WikiLeaks on the release of information that, per other indictments, was being released as part of a Russian propaganda operation. So, no, it's entirely false to say “no existing indictment has been due to collusion”. > There may be other offenses that Trump have committed, but that is even MORE speculation. That's not really speculation, either; it's not as if the identity of the unindicted coconspirator Individual 1 in the Cohen indictment out of SDNY is a mystery.
- Fjolsvith 8y ago
  > The Pappadopolous indictment and conviction-by-guilty-plea was for (lying about) Trump-campaign initiated attempted collusion, in which Pappadopolous acted with the knowledge and approval of higher officials in the Trump campaign. The two week prison sentence Pappadopolous received gave little weight to his complicity, and seemed to me to be more a slap on the wrist for his not cooperating with the FBI.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  Pappadopolous was the victim of a con. He went to a couple of campaign staff meetings, so he was "on the campaign staff". Then some DS tool whispered something inconsequential in his ear. He got in trouble when he re-whispered that silly rumor in the ear of some other DS tool. That's all that happened. If he had a decent lawyer or any stones at all, he would never have plead guilty nor been convicted of anything.

gpsx 8y ago

I think the real problem in the US media is political bias. I think essentially the article is accusing the left leaning media of letting that bias color their views. Of course the article is equally guilty of that same thing. And I assume it does not see its own bias. And sadly, the fact that the media is like this is largely a reflection of the population in general. And, as others point out, the media is probably like this because they are just chasing profit.

wavepruner 8y ago
Confirmation bias explains a lot of what is going on with media. It's human nature to be biased. This doesn't have to be a big problem if we accept that we are all biased. Biases are rooted in the computational limitations of the human mind. We have limited memory and communication bandwidth. Our brains use compression algorithms to record, store, and retrieve data.
davvolun 8y ago
> I think the real problem in the US media is political bias. Absolutely not. As someone else notes to your comment, everyone is biased. I'm "biased" that people not dying is a good thing -- some would argue the universe would be better off without humanity. Bias is inevitable, and not the problem; the problem, as you state, is "letting that bias color their views." Or, rather, not so much "color" your views, but letting your personal bias override any other interpretation. I personally believe Trump has done some very illegal things and it's just a question of finding a smoking gun. That doesn't mean he has done anything illegal regarding situation X (I don't know, let's say promoting Mar-A-Lago after he started running for office), and that's something I need to keep in mind when I read articles about him.

TomMckenny 8y ago

It's a little worse than jumping in prematurely. The article is trying to persuade us the press discredits itself when it correctly reports 37 indictments, several convictions, Russian meetings with Don jr. and a mind-boggling array of lies. It criticizes an accurately researched nyt list of Trump associates connected with Russians implying it has been refuted by the Mueller report which the author has not even seen. Consider what the author is suggesting: these things should not be reported. It intentionally blurs opinion pieces with factual reporting, and even then heavily paraphrases. It attributes words of others to papers that did not publish them. It implies someone's votive candles somehow reflects on the press. All hinged on the the fact that there are no recommended indictments (beyond the dozens already being pursued). Additional indictments that would have to be for the theoretically unindictable offense of collusion. It's not attempting to examine press malfeasance, it's attempting to discredit establish facts by vaguely lumping these unrelated things together. Mixed along with what is not explicitly stated in the unread Mueller report. And to do so preemptively to fix opinion about a report before it's even available publicly. This article is neither reporting nor analysis, although it pretends to be. It is indistinguishable from countless others that appear in Turkey, Venezuela, Hungary and other nations in a similar state. The names are different and the language is English and that's all. It is another attempt to de-legitimize the press using exactly the same techniques in every other nascent autocracy: blur one persons words with another, blur opinion pieces with reporting and wildly paraphrase them. Blend irrelevant errors over unconnected annoying fact. Do all this preemptively.