‘I believe!’ Maxine Waters defends Russiagate, brings up ‘facts’ debunked by Mueller

California Congresswoman Maxine Waters might have no facts to prove any collusion between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, but that won’t stop her from believing in the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

Waters had wanted to impeach Trump since the beginning, she bragged to CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday, because she had “done some research” and therefore “knew about [Trump’s] alignment with Putin.”

She “knew” that campaign chair Paul Manafort – who actually worked as a lobbyist for Ukraine, not Russia, but who’s counting? – was “sent there by Putin, in essence, to head up the president’s campaign, because I believe, even though I don’t have the facts to prove it, I believe that Putin wanted to lift the sanctions,” she continued.

“I believe that they wanted to elect President Trump, and Trump I believe agreed – I will always believe this, that he agreed that if he got elected that he would lift those sanctions,” Waters went on, sounding more like a cultist than the chair of the House Financial Services Committee.

“He would like to do it, he has not been able to do it,” she added in an effort to explain why Putin would have put in power a president who couldn’t deliver on the one thing he supposedly required.

“There are too many facts” for the whole Russiagate affair to be a fantasy, Waters insisted. “This president will not condemn Putin for hacking into the Democratic National Committee, will not condemn him for hacking into our election system. These are facts!” she exclaimed, citing “17 intelligence agencies.”

It’s not clear which agencies she had in mind, as even at the height of Russiagate hysteria no US intelligence agency went so far as to claim that any Russians had actually fiddled with the vote totals. Meanwhile, the “17 intelligence agencies” mentioned in early Russiagate hyperbole were quietly pared back to three under the supervision of a fourth, and eventually just hand-picked representatives from those three, as more facts emerged about the uncertain nature of their assessments.

But those facts weren’t the ones Waters was interested in. Instead, she jumped to the constitutional responsibility of Congress “to impeach when we see this president – or any president – who is not good for the country, […] who’s aligning himself with a foreign country to interfere in our election. Those are facts!”

The Democrat did manage to describe herself quite accurately – albeit while speaking about independent Congressman Justin Amash – dismissing his remarks about impeachment as the “ranting and raving” of “a frustrated individual.”

“They say these things because they cannot refute the facts,” Waters said, without a shred of irony or self-awareness.

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