Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Russia tapes may well exist

In Slate reporting on the Senate Intelligence Committee report we read this:
What the report says: Discounting the infamous pee tape allegation made in the Steele Dossier, the committee said it investigated and was unable to corroborate “three general sets of allegations” around “compromising information” Russians were said to have been collecting about Donald Trump. The report goes into some fascinating details about claims surrounding Russian kompromat efforts and about Trump’s previous trips to Russia without providing much in the way of hard evidence. It notes that Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen exchanged texts with a Georgian friend and associate days before the election about efforts to stop “tapes from Russia” after a “person in Moscow was bragging had tapes from Russian trip.”

What we already knew: Cohen’s text exchange with his Georgian friend was actually a footnote from the Mueller report and it didn’t lead anywhere. Also notably, the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that it was “aware of a realistic and well-sourced, but fake, video of someone who looks like Trump portraying him in a situation consistent with the uncorroborated allegations” of a pee tape from the Steele Dossier. If you read Ashley Feinberg’s reporting in Slate last year, though, you would have already been aware of this as well.
Yes, I read that Slate report at the time about the faked "pee tape" - it was quite surprising, the degree of care with which the tape was made; as is the matter of how little attention mainstream media seemed to give it.

In other tweets, I have seen mention of evidence that some hotel worker claiming he overheard conversation about Trump being compromised by a woman he saw during one Moscow trip.

It would not be at all surprising if there was some tape or other taken in Russia with kompromat possibilities.

1 comment:

  1. Oh Lord how long. Find Trump's actual "Russian" mafia connections if you want to have a go at him. Stop with this ridiculous nonsense.

    ReplyDelete