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F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia

  

Category:  Op/Ed

Via:  johnrussell  •  5 years ago  •  21 comments

F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia
The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, took over the inquiry into Mr. Trump when he was appointed, days after F.B.I. officials opened it. That inquiry is part of Mr. Mueller’sbroader examination of how Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired with them.

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T




F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia


ADAM GOLDMAN, MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT AND NICHOLAS FANDOS JANUARY 11, 2019

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Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.

The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.

The investigation the F.B.I. opened into Mr. Trump also had a criminal aspect, which has long been publicly known : whether his firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice.

Agents and senior F.B.I. officials had grown suspicious of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign but held off on opening an investigation into him, the people said, in part because they were uncertain how to proceed with an inquiry of such sensitivity and magnitude. But the president’s activities before and after Mr. Comey’s firing in May 2017, particularly two instances in which Mr. Trump tied the Comey dismissal to the Russia investigation, helped prompt the counterintelligence aspect of the inquiry, the people said.

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, took over the inquiry into Mr. Trump when he was appointed, days after F.B.I. officials opened it. That inquiry is part of Mr. Mueller’s broader examination of how Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired with them. It is unclear whether Mr. Mueller is still pursuing the counterintelligence matter, and some former law enforcement officials outside the investigation have questioned whether agents overstepped in opening it.

The criminal and counterintelligence elements were coupled together into one investigation, former law enforcement officials said in interviews in recent weeks, because if Mr. Trump had ousted the head of the F.B.I. to impede or even end the Russia investigation, that was both a possible crime and a national security concern. The F.B.I.’s counterintelligence division handles national security matters.

If the president had fired Mr. Comey to stop the Russia investigation, the action would have been a national security issue because it naturally would have hurt the bureau’s effort to learn how Moscow interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Americans were involved, according to James A. Baker, who served as F.B.I. general counsel until late 2017. He privately testified in October before House investigators who were examining the F.B.I.’s handling of the full Russia inquiry.

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“Not only would it be an issue of obstructing an investigation, but the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security,” Mr. Baker said in his testimony, portions of which were read to The New York Times. Mr. Baker did not explicitly acknowledge the existence of the investigation of Mr. Trump to congressional investigators.

No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials. An F.B.I. spokeswoman and a spokesman for the special counsel’s office both declined to comment.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, a lawyer for the president, sought to play down the significance of the investigation. “The fact that it goes back a year and a half and nothing came of it that showed a breach of national security means they found nothing,” Mr. Giuliani said on Friday, though he acknowledged that he had no insight into the inquiry.

The cloud of the Russia investigation has hung over Mr. Trump since even before he took office, though he has long vigorously denied any illicit connection to Moscow. The obstruction inquiry, revealed by The Washington Post a few weeks after Mr. Mueller was appointed, represented a direct threat that he was unable to simply brush off as an overzealous examination of a handful of advisers. But few details have been made public about the counterintelligence aspect of the investigation.

The decision to investigate Mr. Trump himself was an aggressive move by F.B.I. officials who were confronting the chaotic aftermath of the firing of Mr. Comey and enduring the president’s verbal assaults on the Russia investigation as a “witch hunt.”

A vigorous debate has taken shape among some former law enforcement officials outside the case over whether F.B.I. investigators overreacted in opening the counterintelligence inquiry during a tumultuous period at the Justice Department. Other former officials noted that those critics were not privy to all of the evidence and argued that sitting on it would have been an abdication of duty.

The F.B.I. conducts two types of inquiries , criminal and counterintelligence investigations. Unlike criminal investigations, which are typically aimed at solving a crime and can result in arrests and convictions, counterintelligence inquiries are generally fact-finding missions to understand what a foreign power is doing and to stop any anti-American activity, like thefts of United States government secrets or covert efforts to influence policy. In most cases, the investigations are carried out quietly, sometimes for years. Often, they result in no arrests.

Mr. Trump had caught the attention of F.B.I. counterintelligence agents when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin . And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.

Other factors fueled the F.B.I.’s concerns, according to the people familiar with the inquiry. Christopher Steele, a former British spy who worked as an F.B.I. informant, had compiled memos in mid-2016 containing unsubstantiated claims that Russian officials tried to obtain influence over Mr. Trump by preparing to blackmail and bribe him.

In the months before the 2016 election, the F.B.I. was also already investigating four of Mr. Trump’s associates over their ties to Russia. The constellation of events disquieted F.B.I. officials who were simultaneously watching as Russia’s campaign unfolded to undermine the presidential election by exploiting existing divisions among Americans.

“In the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself, you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious in order to weaken our ability, America’s ability and the West’s ability to spread our democratic ideals,” Lisa Page, a former bureau lawyer, told House investigators in private testimony reviewed by The Times.

“That’s the goal, to make us less of a moral authority to spread democratic values,” she added. Parts of her testimony were first reported by The Epoch Times .

And when a newly inaugurated Mr. Trump sought a loyalty pledge from Mr. Comey and later asked that he end an investigation into the president’s national security adviser, the requests set off discussions among F.B.I. officials about opening an inquiry into whether Mr. Trump had tried to obstruct that case.

But law enforcement officials put off the decision to open the investigation until they had learned more, according to people familiar with their thinking. As for a counterintelligence inquiry, they concluded that they would need strong evidence to take the sensitive step of investigating the president, and they were also concerned that the existence of such an inquiry could be leaked to the news media, undermining the entire investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election.

After Mr. Comey was fired on May 9, 2017, two more of Mr. Trump’s actions prompted them to quickly abandon those reservations.

The first was a letter Mr. Trump wanted to send to Mr. Comey about his firing, but never did, in which he mentioned the Russia investigation. In the letter , Mr. Trump thanked Mr. Comey for previously telling him he was not a subject of the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation.

Even after the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, wrote a more restrained draft of the letter and told Mr. Trump that he did not have to mention the Russia investigation — Mr. Comey’s poor handling of the Clinton email investigation would suffice as a fireable offense, he explained — Mr. Trump directed Mr. Rosenstein to mention the Russia investigation anyway.

He disregarded the president’s order, irritating Mr. Trump. The president ultimately added a reference to the Russia investigation to the note he had delivered, thanking Mr. Comey for telling him three times that he was not under investigation.

The second event that troubled investigators was an NBC News interview two days after Mr. Comey’s firing in which Mr. Trump appeared to say he had dismissed Mr. Comey because of the Russia inquiry.

“I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it,” he said. “And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.”

Mr. Trump’s aides have said that a fuller examination of his comments demonstrates that he did not fire Mr. Comey to end the Russia inquiry. “I might even lengthen out the investigation, but I have to do the right thing for the American people,” Mr. Trump added. “He’s the wrong man for that position.”

As F.B.I. officials debated whether to open the investigation, some of them pushed to move quickly before Mr. Trump appointed a director who might slow down or even end their investigation into Russia’s interference. Many involved in the case viewed Russia as the chief threat to American democratic values.

“With respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life,” Ms. Page told investigators for a joint House Judiciary and Oversight Committee investigation into Moscow’s election interference.

F.B.I. officials viewed their decision to move quickly as validated when a comment the president made to visiting Russian officials in the Oval Office shortly after he fired Mr. Comey was revealed days later .

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to a document summarizing the meeting. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”


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JohnRussell
Professor Principal
1  seeder  JohnRussell    5 years ago

There’s a decent chance, when all the dust has settled from the doomed presidency of Donald Trump and the historians are picking over the ashes, that tonight’s  Lawfare piece by Benjamin Wittes will be seen as an important document that emerged at a crucial turning point. Certainly, the  New York Times article on which it is based will be a key reference point.

I find this frustrating.

It’s frustrating because Wittes’s piece is essentially a giant  mea culpa–  on behalf of himself and on behalf of the media in general. It’s at once a recognition and an apology for having gone about the analysis of the Russia investigation the wrong way from the beginning.  Its basic insight is that the Russia investigation has never really been bifurcated into collusion and obstruction of justice components, but has all along been primarily a counterintelligence investigation with criminal components.  To go just a bit deeper, Wittes seems to be realizing for the first time that Trump’s efforts to obstruct the investigation may be little more than an element of the underlying problem, which is that Trump has been working on the behalf of Russian interests all along.  For this reason, his obstruction is just as much about protecting Russia as it is about protecting himself.  Or, in other words, the Obstruction Was the Collusion .

To be sure, there  is some genuine news in the  New York Times   piece . We learn about specific events at specific points in time. We learn how investigatory decisions were made and what prompted them. But the central revelation, as shocking as it may be, really should not come as a surprise. The American intelligence community suspects that Donald Trump is compromised by the Russians.

In reality, they began to suspect this at the same time that everyone else began openly asking the question, which was as far back as September 2015. As I’ve discussed repeatedly, in the context of the Moscow Trump Tower aspect of this investigation, people really began to wonder about Trump’s motives for defending Vladimir Putin in the late summer of 2015, at the precise point in time that Michael Cohen and Felix Sater were feverishly (and secretly) trying to make a deal to build the tallest skyscraper in Europe in the Russian capital. It was also in that period that the right-wing  Washington Free Beacon contracted with Fusion GPS to investigate Trump’s foreign business ventures. That’s the investigation that eventually produced the Steele Dossier.

It was in September 2015 that Trump began comparing Putin favorably with Barack Obama and signaled his approval of Russia’s intervention in Syria. By December he was defending the assassination of Russian journalists on the premise that the charges were unproven and, in any case, nothing worse that what America does on a regular basis.

We now know that on October 28, 2015 Trump signed a letter of intent to build his Moscow Tower, which was the exact type of secret business interest that people suspected might explain his solicitous behavior.  Of course, opening a counterintelligence investigation on a presidential candidate is not something law enforcement is going to do lightly, and no formal investigation was launched. But some people in Trump’s orbit were already under investigation and others would be investigated in 2016 prior to the election.

As far back as 2013, Carter Page had been notified that Russians were trying to recruit him and yet he was undeterred from bragging about his close ties to the Kremlin (see my May 27, 2018 piece On Stefan Halper and Carter Page ). He had been the subject of a FISA warrant in 2014, and yet he somehow wound up being one of a small handful of named foreign policy advisers to the Trump campaign.

I’ve written constantly about the intelligence community’s suspicions about Michael Flynn. Probably the most comprehensive of these was the Why the Intelligence Community Was Focused on Michael Flynn piece I wrote on March 20, 2017. When Barack Obama sat down with Donald Trump just before the transfer of power, he offered two main pieces of advice: focus on North Korea’s nuclear program and do not hire Michael Flynn to be your national security advisor. Naturally, Trump ignored the advice about Flynn and decided to become best pals with Kim Jong-un. The important point on Flynn as far as the intelligence community was concerned was encapsulated by a senior Obama official who said in 2016 that “It’s not usually to America’s benefit when our intelligence officers—current or former—seek refuge in Moscow.” That’s how the fired former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s decision to appear on Russian television to criticize American foreign policy and to dine with Vladimir Putin was perceived here at home by intelligence officials.

By the end of July 2016, there was enough concern about Russian influence within the Trump campaign that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation codenamed Crossfire Hurricane on not only Page and Flynn, but also on campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his former business partner, Roger Stone. The Crossfire Hurricane reference was likely less a reference to the Rolling Stones song Jumpin’ Jack Flash than a nod to the perilous step of investigating a major party’s political campaign in the middle of an election. If so, it was prescient, because both the FBI director and his deputy subsequently lost their jobs, along with others associated with the investigation.

It’s important to make a distinction between policy differences and a genuine threat to national security. Reasonable people could argue that, unfortunate consequences aside, the best option for Syria would be to leave it to Russian domination or that the annexation of Crimea wasn’t something that should warrant harsh anti-Russian sanctions. If Trump ran on those unorthodox positions and won election, he would be entitled to expect the government to get behind him and support his program.  But if Trump was actually compromised in some way and was pushing policies on behalf of Russia, that would be something entirely different. It’s going to be vitally important to remember and to emphasize that the suspicions about Trump were not based only on the strangeness of his pro-Russia positions. They were buttressed by many other sources, including information coming from friendly foreign intelligence services and the aforementioned preexisting concerns about several of his associates.

Any candidate offering a more isolationist foreign policy and more friendly relations with Russia would encounter resistance from the American foreign policy establishment, but it took a great deal more than that to motivate the FBI to take the extraordinary steps they have taken to investigate first the Trump campaign and then the Trump administration.  More than anything else, it was the Russians’ deliberate interference in our presidential politics that motivated them. And that really gets to the heart of what the new reporting has revealed.

Had the Russians had no preference who won but limited themselves to sowing divisions and distrust of our democratic systems, the FBI would have gone about their investigation largely unimpeded and without controversy. But not only did the Trump campaign benefit from Russian interference, they also did all they could to deny that it had occurred at all.  Trump would not accept the conclusions of the intelligence community and conflated any investigation of what the Russians did with an effort to discredit his victory.  Unfortunately, until now, the media have largely accepted this false distinction in how they’ve reported on the investigation.

Yet, when Trump made himself an enemy of the investigation into Russia, he turned himself into a national security threat. At first, the intelligence community went along with the idea that Trump wasn’t a target of their investigation on the theory that their investigation was about Russia, not in any necessary way about the president. If Americans, including the president, were found to have conspired with or assisted the Russians, even unwittingly, then they could become subjects or targets, but the focus was on protecting America from any future interference in our elections by learning everything the Russians had done in 2016.

The first big problem arose when Trump decided to delegitimize, obstruct and threaten the investigation because that might make it impossible to learn in full what the Russians had done and how they had done it. Obviously, one concern was to learn Trump’s motivations for acting in this way, but in another sense it didn’t matter. The investigation had to be protected regardless of how or why it was being threatened.

The first big eruption came over Michael Flynn. Of all of Trump’s associates, he was most suspected of being compromised by the Russians, and now he was the National Security Adviser. Suspicions about him were ramped up to the highest level when his calls with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak were intercepted during the transition and it was clear that he was assuring the Russians that their punishment for interfering in the election would be lifted soon after Trump took office. That he decided to lie about this gave them the ammunition they needed to force his prompt resignation, removing the most dire counterintelligence threat imaginable.

But they still had investigating to do, and that Trump decided to bring FBI director James Comey to the White House and ask him  not to investigate Flynn was obviously a major problem.

By the time we get to the actual firing of Comey and the official launch of a counterintelligence investigation of the president himself, the FBI had been operating with a high level of suspicion for a very long time.

The firing of Comey was interpreted as an effort to kill the Russia investigation for a simple reason. President Trump explained his decision in those terms. He did it in a memo he wrote that was spiked by his own White House counsel, Don McGahn. He did it in the Oval Office with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister. And he eventually did it on national television in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt.  It wasn’t just an effort to obstruct an investigation of himself. It was an effort to prevent the FBI from investigating Russia.

It has been fairly easy for people to contemplate that Trump might be trying to cover his own tracks, but there has been a widespread mental block when it comes to envisioning the American president as working to cover Russia’s tracks. The FBI overcame that hurdle after the firing of Comey. Ever since, the investigation has operated on the assumption that Trump and Russia are coconspirators both before and after the fact.

It’s not hard to see why. Trump has encouraged Brexit , talked about dismantling NATO (including new member, Macedonia ), actively sought to weaken the European Union, said that Crimeans are happier under Russian occupation, moved to turn Syria over to Russian domination, followed Russian advice to stop military exercises with South Korea, sought to re-include Russia in the G8, slow-walked congressionally mandated sanctions of Russia, complained about reprisals that he  has approved, and repeatedly accepted Putin’s denials that Russia intervened in the election.  He’s also had repeated private meetings with Putin without witnesses present.

While Trump has acquiesced in some tough measures against Russia, the overall picture is indistinguishable from what a Manchurian president would do if they wanted to press Russia’s interests as far as possible while still retaining enough deniability to maintain their hold on power.  That is certainly how the intelligence community sees things, which is why this is more than some dispute with the Deep State or the military-industrial complex.

There are people, many on the left, who think that the Russia investigation is a criminalization of policy differences waged by hawks who have some kind of Cold War hangover about Russia.  That is certainly going to form the basis for much of Trump’s defense. But the most important thing to remember is that the president hasn’t been making these policy decisions freely, honestly or as a matter of principle. Nothing makes that clearer than the revelation that he was pursuing a Trump Tower in Moscow throughout late 2015 and early 2016. That shows that his motives were warped, but it also opened him up to exposure from his Russian counterparts who could have exploded his campaign at any time by revealing the details of their negotiations. Some people may still be wondering if there is a video in Russia’s possession of Trump having prostitutes urinate on the bed where the Obamas once slept in Moscow, but they had all the leverage they needed on Trump from the tower deal.  He has been totally compromised from  at least  the day he signed a letter of intent to build that tower.  This is now beyond dispute.

What is supposed to be shocking in the new reporting is that the intelligence community was concerned enough about the president’s loyalties to open an investigation on him, but to anyone who has been really paying attention over the last two-plus years, this was already a given.

It’s just a larger version of the move against Michael Flynn. But it was immeasurably easier to get rid of a compromised National Security Advisor than it is to get rid of a compromised president.

This counterintelligence investigation existed before it became formalized and it never went away. Robert Mueller inherited it and he has run it down with relentless dedication.  In the process, he has also exposed other criminal activities including campaign finance violations involving bank and wire fraud, Russian collusion by the National Rifle Association, foreign lobbying violations, criminal behavior involving Trump’s lawyer, campaign finance chair and deputy chair, and probably tax and money laundering violations by the Trump organization.

I’ve been arguing for a long time that people are underestimating how strong the case for impeachment will be and that even the Senate Republicans will not be able to shrug it off. With this new reporting  from the  New York Times , you’re beginning to get a sense of what I’ve been talking about.

It’s gratifying to see things starting to come to fruition, but it’s still frustrating to see people acting surprised after all the effort I’ve put in to make the case that this is an inquiry that began as an investigation into Russia but has long sought to prove, and will prove, that the president is acting as an agent of a foreign power.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
2  seeder  JohnRussell    5 years ago

What this shows us is that collusion has been the emphasis of the investigation into Trump/Russia, and still is.

Trump will say, and has said through Giuliani last night, that nothing came of this FBI investigation thus the president is innocent. But in the NYT story it states that the FBI counter intelligence investigation into Trump was turned over to Mueller SIX DAYS after it began.  The Mueller investigation continues. And in fact this NYT story makes it worse for Trump. Trump's supporters have said all along that Russia was a phony story, now we see that it is a top level ongoing investigation.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
2.1  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  JohnRussell @2    5 years ago
It has been fairly easy for people to contemplate that Trump might be trying to cover his own tracks, but there has been a widespread mental block when it comes to envisioning the American president as working to cover Russia’s tracks. The FBI overcame that hurdle after the firing of Comey. Ever since, the investigation has operated on the assumption that Trump and Russia are coconspirators both before and after the fact.

It’s not hard to see why. Trump has encouraged Brexit, talked about dismantling NATO (including new member, Macedonia), actively sought to weaken the European Union, said that Crimeans are happier under Russian occupation, moved to turn Syria over to Russian domination, followed Russian advice to stop military exercises with South Korea, sought to re-include Russia in the G8, slow-walked congressionally mandated sanctions of Russia, complained about reprisals that he has approved, and repeatedly accepted Putin’s denials that Russia intervened in the election.  He’s also had repeated private meetings with Putin without witnesses present.

While Trump has acquiesced in some tough measures against Russia, the overall picture is indistinguishable from what a Manchurian president would do if they wanted to press Russia’s interests as far as possible while still retaining enough deniability to maintain their hold on power.  That is certainly how the intelligence community sees things, which is why this is more than some dispute with the Deep State or the military-industrial complex.

 
 
 
Dismayed Patriot
Professor Quiet
3  Dismayed Patriot    5 years ago

The evidence is truly damning, but Trumps loyalists will reject it as "fake news" because they are already balls deep invested in his Presidency, they simply can't pull out now even if they wanted to. They're half way through receiving a blow job from a street hooker when they notice the Adams apple, but they just close their eye's and try not to think about it while they finish. Then later they'll get all angry and bitter claiming they were deceived...

 
 
 
Jasper2529
Professor Quiet
4  Jasper2529    5 years ago
No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.
 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
4.1  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Jasper2529 @4    5 years ago

Mueller hasnt made his discoveries known yet, so of course they are not "public".

 
 
 
PJ
Masters Quiet
5  PJ    5 years ago

Anyone with half a brain knew this well before now.  All the situations cited in the article that the public was privy to raised alarm of true patriots.  Those who were blinded by white power and the promise of shangri la chose to dismiss and ignore the very glaring actions of then candidate, now president, his administration and republican leadership by easily accepting the attempts they took to bury the evidence.

life-quotes-inspirational-successful-wisdom-450w-1077861230.jpg

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
5.1  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  PJ @5    5 years ago
Anyone with half a brain knew this well before now. 

I agree, I have assumed all along that US law enforcement was investigating Donald Trump personally for his behavior toward Russia. He certainly deserved it.

 
 
 
PJ
Masters Quiet
5.1.1  PJ  replied to  JohnRussell @5.1    5 years ago

Another important question and story here is WHY republican's enabled the cover up.  They were privy to information about the questionable actions of this President and yet they stood in front of the cameras and lied to the American people.  They actively obstructed justice and used their power to attack those who were conducting investigations on behalf of the country and the American people.

The republican leadership was derelict in their responsibilities and imo they colluded with the President to bury and hide his actions against America and the American people.

They were supposed to protect the country and the American people and they did the opposite for greed and money and white glory.

They should be stripped of their seats and lose their benefits including retirement.  They are traitors.

 
 
 
Dismayed Patriot
Professor Quiet
5.2  Dismayed Patriot  replied to  PJ @5    5 years ago
Anyone with half a brain knew this well before now.

Well now, that's not entirely true, I think there are many Trump sycophants with only half a brain who aren't able to wrap what brain they have left around the fact that Trump did in fact have a surreptitious relationship with Putin and the Russian government. There really is no doubt that Trump was used as an asset of an enemy foreign government, the only thing that's in debate is how much Trump actually knew. He's so fucking stupid it's entirely possible he was simply used like a glory hole prostitute and claims he couldn't tell who's dick it was he was sucking... even though it was small and white with a hammer and sickle tattooed on it... "How could I have known, no copulation, it wasn't me, that's tarter sauce on my lapel, hashtag making America great again one Russian gas station bathroom at a time...".

 
 
 
igknorantzrulz
PhD Quiet
5.2.2  igknorantzrulz  replied to    5 years ago
here is absolutely no credible evidence to prove any of that

you replyking

proof enuff, know ?

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
6  Sean Treacy    5 years ago

This  looks more like an FBI scandal than a Trump scandal. 

Per the Times, the basis for the investigation included the Steele Dossier, unsubstantiated rumors from Putin's cronies paid for by the Clinton campaign.   

If the FBI and Mueller spend years  trying to destroy an elected President based on unsubstantiated allegations from Clinton oppo research, and don't find evidence that Trump conspired with Russia, there's going to be hell to pay.  The FBI, if it wants to survive as a credible institution, better be hoping that Mueller is sitting on a ton of evidence that hasn't been made public demonstrating Trump working with Russia. 

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
6.1  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Sean Treacy @6    5 years ago

If Trump had never heard of Russia he would still be completely incompetent to be president of the United States. It is painful watching an intelligent person try and defend this piece of shit.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
7  seeder  JohnRussell    5 years ago

A Former CIA operations officer accused Donald Trump of being a “traitor” who “betrayed” America after the New York Times revealed that the FBI launched a secret probe into whether the president was working for the Kremlin.

In a series of tweets on Saturday, Evan McMullin, who ran as an independent candidate in the 2016 presidential election, pointed out the gravity of the report and asserted that Trump has "betrayed us."

“That the FBI had cause to investigate a sitting American president for possible collaboration with a foreign power against the nation should shock and awaken us to the gravity of our situation. Still, beyond the perception of many, Trump has betrayed us,” McMullin wrote on Twitter, alongside a link to the New York Times article.

He added: “I’ve always been fascinated by traitors. They consider themselves highly intelligent, yet fail to understand how likely they are to be caught. When they are, they become men without a home, having betrayed their countrymen and been used by an enemy. So it will be with this one.”

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
7.1  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  JohnRussell @7    5 years ago
Trump Dodges Question on Whether He Has Worked for Russia
By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump avoided giving a direct answer when asked if he currently is or has ever worked for Russia after a published report said federal law enforcement officials were so concerned about his behavior after he fired James Comey from the FBI that they began investigating whether Trump had been working for the U.S. adversary against American interests.

Trump said it was the "most insulting" question he'd ever been asked.

The New York Times report Friday cited unnamed former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.

Trump responded to the report Saturday during a telephone interview broadcast on Fox News Channel after host Jeanine Pirro, who is also a personal friend of the president, asked whether he is currently or has ever worked for Russia.

"I think it's the most insulting thing I've ever been asked," Trump said. "I think it's the most insulting article I've ever had written, and if you read the article you'll see that they found absolutely nothing."

Trump never answered Pirro's question directly, but went on to say that no president has taken a harder stance against Russia than he has.
 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
7.1.1  Vic Eldred  replied to  JohnRussell @7.1    5 years ago

Jeanine Pirro asked that question to allow Trump to go on record over another unnamed sources fable by the New York Times, which deals with how top level FBI officials supposedly "felt".
The President responded that the question was insulting and it was. It's kind of like me asking Darlene Superville if she is actually an Obama operative posing as a journalist.

 
 

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