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This is believable Hannity Spins Durham Probe Acquittal: ‘I Never Really Cared That Much’ "Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday tried to extract some good news from the acquittal of Igor Danchenko in what was Special Counsel John Durham’s final case, in part by minimizing his own past focus on the Steele dossier researcher.''... I never really cared that much about Igor Danchenko,” Hannity claimed... Hannity, who in May 2020 fretted that “the great American republic will disintegrate before your eyes” if Durham’s team didn’t bring “justice,” brought attention to Danchenko several times, for instance in August 2020 and in November 2021 on Twitter." https://news.yahoo.com/hannity-spins-durham-probe-acquittal-035806320.html

We've already seen what judges think of Cannon's legal prowess. Remember how a panel of the 11th circuit issued a very sharp rebuke to her over whether documents marked classified should be kept from the prosecutors. Raymond Dearie has distinguished himself with a lifetime of service. Judge Cannon is a Joanie-Come-Lately with a brief tenure of disservice. It turns out that there's very strong evidence that Trump's lawyers actually shopped for her by lying that they had to file an appeal in person because the computer system was down. Yet other lawyers filed on the same day via the system and had no problems. The Incredible Mystery of How Trump Got Judge Cannon in the Mar-a-Lago Case https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-incredible-mystery-of-how-donald-trump-got-judge-aileen-cannon-in-the-mar-a-lago-case

The points raised by Trump's lawyers are the kind of losing proposition a lawyer makes to appease a clueless client. They have to know that their grounds for opposing the DOJ are ridiculous.

Well, the odds do strongly favor a Republican majority in the House for the next term. That said, the assertion that the Republican committee is going to dig up incriminating evidence is absurd. John Durham tried his best. He was convinced that there was connivance in the DOJ and tried his best to discover it. He actually criticized the report of the Inspector General which, while harshly critical of the FBI, found no evidence of conspiracy. This is excerpted from Durhams astonishing statement about the IG's conclusion: "Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.” https://www.justice.gov/usao-ct/pr/statement-us-attorney-john-h-durham The thing is, even if Durham had succeeded in gaining convictions of Sussman and Donchencko, instead of failing in both cases, it still wouldn't have established any sort of malice on the part of the DOJ. After 3+ years and investigative carte blanche, he came up with nothing. To expect that a House or Senate committee is going to uncover some dark plot or plots, you'd have to be a believer in black magic or, even more absurdly, believe that the 2020 elections were stolen...oh, wait a minute...

You got me there.

The crucial difference being that members of her party are wise enough to leave her as a backbencher.

I got news for you. The Durham investigation was created to find corruption in the Dept. of Justice The investigation that ended in the failed prosecutions of Sussman and Danchenko didn't start out with those as its goals. It was precisely to find the high level bias and deceit that led the FBI and the justice department to investigate Trump. Barr was quite explicit in his belief in this and Durham issued a statement saying that he didn't agree with the conclusions of the Inspector General of the DOG in the FBI that while errors were made, they weren't motivated by a desire to get Trump. Well, after years of trying to prove that, Durham shifted gears to say that the agents of the FBI were duped, not that they acted out of malice. Durham found nothing and got nothing. He didn't fail for want of trying or want of time. He failed because there was no there there.

Unfortunately, virtually all of the polling I've seen suggests that the Republicans will take the house.

Russian occupiers are increasingly afraid for Kherson: Surovikin allows for "difficult decisions" Sergey Surovikin, the new commander of the Russian army in Ukraine, does not rule out making "difficult decisions" regarding the future arrival of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in occupied Kherson. Quote from Surovikin: "Further actions regarding Kherson will depend on the emerging military-tactical situation; it is not easy, difficult decisions cannot be ruled out." "We will be guided by the need to preserve the lives of the civilian population and our military personnel as much as possible," Surovikin said. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/russian-occupiers-increasingly-afraid-kherson-182147356.html Looks like Surovikin is looking for a humanitarian excuse to bug out of Kherson.

Not just a majority. A "vast majority." And when you couple that with the fact that the Russians do not allow independent inspections of their POW camps whereas the Ukrainians do, it's clear that attempting to generalize the situation into "everyone does it" is essentially a falsehood. Brutality is deeply woven into Russian military culture.

I don't what you mean by any other war unless you mean like any other war waged by Russian forces. As the commission pointed out, the vast majority of violations were committed by the Russians.

No, the Russian military does not encourage being smart tacticians. They don't encourage initiative on the part of their soldiers at all. They prefer keeping them ignorant. We know that because Russian soldiers reported not even being told they were invading Ukraine but rather that they were on an exercise. And of course the massive Russian failures testify to their lack of tactical sense. One of their big problems is the lack of NCOs which forces higher ranking officers to the front.

This is actually a far more important story than Biden's considering telling us business not to build and invest in the Saudis. He should consider ordering these people out of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other murderous regimes.

As far as I'm aware, he ain't called Quid Pro Quo Joe at all except by right wing politicians who want to distract from the nastiest use of Quid Pro Quo that I can recall being used by any President.

I agree with you about mass character. Blanket characterizations of Russians is vicious nonsense although I can see why the Ukrainians might be susceptible to it. Although, if so, apparently they don't take it out on Russian POWs. What the vile behavior of Russian troops shows at best is how poor the command structure is in the Russian military. At worst, how such violence is encouraged.

How about this report from the UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine? UN Commission has found an array of war crimes, violations of human rights and international humanitarian law have been committed in Ukraine The Commission documented attacks where explosive weapons were used indiscriminately in populated areas that were under attack by Russian armed forces. There are also examples of both parties to the armed conflict, although to different degrees, failing to protect civilians or civilian objects against the effects of attacks, by locating military objects and forces within or near densely populated areas. Russian armed forces are responsible for the vast majority of the violations identified, including war crimes. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/10/un-commission-has-found-array-war-crimes-violations-human-rights-and U.N. experts find that war crimes have been committed in Ukraine. Russian soldiers have raped and tortured children in Ukraine, a United Nations-appointed panel of independent legal experts said in a damning statement on Friday that concluded war crimes had been committed in the conflict. A three-person Commission of Inquiry set up in April to investigate the conduct of hostilities in four areas of Ukraine laid out the graphic allegations in an unusually hard-hitting, 11-minute statement to the U.N Human Rights Council in Geneva. “The commission has documented cases in which children have been raped, tortured, and unlawfully confined,” the panel’s chairman, Erik Mose, told the council. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-crimes-united-nations.html Does that tell you anything that the commission found that the vast majority of violations were committed by the Russians? That the committee found evidence for only 2 war crimes committed by the Ukrainians?

Here's something from the latest UNR report that shows just how vile the Russian military is: "While during the reporting period, HRMMU enjoyed unimpeded access to places of internment for prisoners of war in territory controlled by the Government of Ukraine, it was not granted confidential access to any place of internment for prisoners of war in the Russian Federation or territory controlled by Russian armed forces and affiliated armed groups. However, HRMMU found that in the vast majority of documented cases, Ukrainian prisoners of war were subjected to torture or cruel and degrading treatment by the detaining power. HRMMU also documented the death of two Ukrainian servicemen as a result of torture." https://reliefweb.int/report/ukraine/un-human-rights-reports-dire-human-rights-situation-seven-months-after-start-russian-federation-wide-scale-armed-attack-ukraine-enuk

It should also be noted that the only case that Durham won was with evidence developed by the Inspector General of the DOJ. The inspector whose report Durham expressed a lack of faith in.

Please. The judge himself indicated that the case was weak. And the 2 FBI witnesses called by Durham said that they judged Danchenko to be honest. But if you want to talk about bias, how about the fact that Durham followed Barr's leads and said he didn't accept all the conclusions of the report from the Inspector General of the Justice Dept? That kind of unsolicited statement was bad enough coming from Barr but the actual investigator volunteering that as well is even worse.

Well, considering that the 2 FBI witnesses for the prosecution side said that they didn't believe Danchenko was lying, this outcome hardly comes as a surprise. In fact, the defense didn't even call any witnesses to testify on Danchenko's behalf. That was another clue. And the third, was that Jonathan Turley thought that the prosecution had made a strong case. That said, I'm sure we can count on Durham to make all sorts of allegations in his final report.

Trump hires only the "best people". Unfortunately for the best people, they have the worst client.

Your explication of the origins of the swastika.

You would have to work really hard not to see this as a nuclear threat: Mr. Putin said he would use “all available means” to defend Russian territory — which he declared includes four provinces of eastern Ukraine that Russia has attempted to illegally annex. He also argued that the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Japan in 1945 “created a precedent.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/world/europe/russia-putin-nuclear-threat.html

No, it used up 2/3 of its weapons starting about Feb 24, 2022.

There's informed guesses and then there are wildly improbably ones like claiming that Russia has been holding its best stuff in reserve. Is it waiting for its armed forces to completely break down before using those weapons. Such an assertion that the Russians are withholding using their best weapons makes no sense. If they really had better weapons in store, why make nuclear threats?