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Worth reading the full extract of James Clapper's newly release House testimony. Here are the relevant bits, with my comments to follow:
Continued from above:
So Clapper's statement tracks with the findings of the Mueller report, which went one further and rubbished the very concept of "collusion" as not even being a legal term of art. However...
You've got a bit of the testimony redacted here, pertaining to anecdotal evidence about Trump campaign officials meeting with Russians (the context of this exchange makes clear they weren't private citizens but emissaries of the Russian government).
Clapper notes that his counterintelligence Spidey sense tingled owing to the frequency of those meetings, although -- and here is a significant admission -- he was in the dark as to what, exactly, was discussed at those meetings.
Moreover, Clapper all but accuses Michael Flynn and the Trump campaign of acting as a shadow government in its dealings with Kislyak re: sanctions -- something I don't think those crowing about both this testimony and DoJ's motion to dismiss today care to acknowledge.
And note, too, his debunking of another conspiracy theory of the Trumpkin Right -- that the Steele dossier is to blame for U.S. intelligence's conclusions about Russia's interference operation.
This is a common theme, I'm finding, with those who spend most of their day lambasting the press for fucking everything up but then rely on cursory or superficial press write-ups of complicated events or documents: it's all about the gotcha, not the substance.
Here is the full transcript of Clapper's testimony. Read it for yourself: https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/jc7.pdf
