Director Clapper reiterated what everybody, including the fake media already knows- there is "no evidence" of collusion w/ Russia and Trump.— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2017
So the tweets up above are what Trump has been using to convince the public that he is in the clear and there is no evidence of wrongdoing on his part.When James Clapper himself, and virtually everyone else with knowledge of the witch hunt, says there is no collusion, when does it end?— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017
However that is highly inaccurate as Vox points out in their article yesterday.
First off here is what James Clapper actually said to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee:
In our intelligence community assessment, we made the point that we could not make that call. The intelligence community has neither the authority, the expertise or the resources to make that judgment. The only thing we said was we saw no evidence of influencing voter tallies at any of the 50 states. But we were not in a position to judge whether — what actual outcome on the election.
You will notice that this is specifically talking about the Russians affecting the voter tallies directly, NOT whether they influenced the outcome through their use of propaganda, and says nothing about collusion.
So yesterday Clapper goes on MSNBC and gets a little more specific.
Here is the transcript of his remarks:
Well, it might be useful, first, to explain the unique position that the FBI occupies in that it straddles both intelligence, as a part of the intelligence community and law enforcement.
My practice during the six and a half years that I was at DNI was always to defer to the director of the FBI, be it Director Bob Mueller or Director Jim Comey on whether, when, and what to tell me about a counterintelligence investigation when the possibility was there that this could devolve into some sort of a criminal investigation.
So I left it to the judgment of the FBI and that was certainly the practice I followed here. But that was consistent with what I did during the whole six and a half years.
So it's not surprising or out of — or abnormal that I would not have known about the investigation, or, even more importantly, the content of that investigation.
So I don't know if there was collusion or not. I don't know if there is evidence of collusion or not, nor should I have in this particular context.
Clapper goes on to say, quite definitively, that though there was no evidence of collusion that found it's way into that Intelligence Community Assessment which was released confirming that the Russians meddled in our election, that it does not mean there wasn't any evidence.
So essentially Clapper kneecapped Trump's argument that Clapper's words had vindicated him that all of this is nothing but a witch hunt.
Source http://ift.tt/2pIErFP
