So ... shoot first ask questions later? Your 'facts' would strictly speaking seem to be more opinion, queries, rumour and hearsay, with as far as I can see no actual evidentiary basis.
You're aware, I assume, that this is an investigation in its earliest stages, are you not? And that much of the investigating and unearthing is going on behind closed doors? That unless you are, say, a mamber of the US National Security apparatus, you almost certainly wouldn't be privy at this point to more than "opinion, queries, rumour and hearsay"? That's how these things work.
But where's there's smoke there may be a fire, right?
To quote Wes from Footloose: "Usually works like that."
And yes, the senate investigations will presumably unearth actual treasonous facts as they go along...
They might turn out to be the case; it might not. But while some may want to declare "there's nothing to see; let's all move along" at this point, such weighty matters certainly deserve to be looked into. I mean, we had multiple investigations into the Benghazi non-scandal; multiple investigations into the IRS non-scandal; multiple investigations into the "Climategate' non-scandal; multiple investigations into the Planned Parenthood non-scandal. Hell, we had multiple investigations into Bill Clinton having an affair with a staff member. So certainly an invitation into the functions of the highest levels of the US government extended to a major, non-friendly foreign power with a vested interest in destroying the West should get more than just a cursory ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Ya' know?
Now, perhaps you're right, and this will wind up being just a huge time-wasting nothingburger slathered in Russian dressing. Maybe Flynn's offer to testify if granted immunity means nothing, and his secretly working for Russia and Turkey while being at the top of the US's security apparatus was entirely innocent; maybe Manafort's extraordinarily deep financial ties with Russians and Russia's government effected not one bit his job as Trump's campaign manager; maybe the widespread Russian disinformation campaign directed against Clinton had absolutely no effect whatsoever on voters' election-day decisionmaking; maybe the dozens of highly-placed professionals with profound knowledge of Russia and cybersecurity and politics are simply delusional, and nothing is going on.
But why shouldn't we at least have a look?
How was it again that the Russians influenced the election? Via their media corporations and/or cyber hacking operations? Direct manipulation of electronic voting systems wasn't it? At least at one point.
To repeat: you're aware that this is an investigation in its earliest stages, are you not? This isn't about voting machines; it's about some Americans working directly in cahoots with a foreign government to subvert democracy. And since this isn't a one-hour TV episode of
Murder She Wrote or
Matlock, it's going to take more than a few weeks to get to the bottom.
Anyhow, hopefully once Trump has been impeached and hung for treason we can all get back to business as usual!
Well, no. If Trump's guilty of being nothing more than the petty, vindictive, impetuous, greedy, arrogant, dimwitted, bigoted blowhard we all know him to be, he should be neither impeached nor hung. But if he and/or his campaign did indeed collude with that aforementioned foreign power to ensure he was elected, I'm among those who think that sort of thing should be dealt with, and harshly.
Anyway, some responses here and in other threads make me wonder why it is that some think battles can't be fought on multiple fronts simultaneously. Just because we want to know whether Russia is electing America's leaders doesn't mean we don't also care about and can't do anything about spreading corporatism, or the evergreen Republican wet dream of denying healthcare to tens of millions, or the stunning weakness of the Democratic party, or the Trump regime's severe anti-science stance on just about everything, or any of the other thousand things that need addressed. But he's been in office just 10 weeks.
10 weeks. We still have almost 200 weeks (or, god help us, 400 weeks) left to fight about the rest.
At any rate, for those saying the Russian thing is overblown and meant to distract, what course of action would you suggest? Our options seem to be: a) pretend that the increasing amounts of smoke we're seeing aren't proof of anything, and just go happily about our merry way; b) do as some here suggest and just consider high-level Russian meddling in our electoral process one of those things we'll have to deal with from now on, and turn our attention to all the other areas that need fixing; or c) look at that high-level Russian meddling in our electoral process as detrimental to the future function of our nation, see how deep and how high it reaches, and do something about it, while also realizing that we can multitask, meaning that we can also pay close attention to all the other areas that need fixing.
I'm going with 'C'. But what say you?