Joe Conason - CNN: Officials Have Evidence That Trump Associates 'Coordinated With Russians'
Joe Conason
CNN: Officials Have Evidence That Trump Associates ‘Coordinated With Russians’
March 23, 2017 1:27 am
On Wednesday, CNN reported what many of us who closely follow the Russian hacking scandal have expected for months: The FBI has evidence of contacts between unnamed “associates of Donald Trump” and “suspected Russian operatives” during last year’s presidential election — and possibly coordinated with Russians to attack the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party.
Coming two days after FBI director James Comey confirmed that his agency has been investigating the Trump campaign’s connections with Russian interference in the election since July 2016, the CNN report is stunning but not surprising. It also follows an Associated Press report on Tuesday that Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chair, had secretly devised a plan as early as 2005 to “greatly aid” the Putin regime by influencing the U .S. government and media. (Evidence that he pursued precisely such a campaign can be found in this 2008 Nation article by Mark Ames and Ari Berman, detailing efforts by Manafort and his partner Rick Davis to promote pro-Russian positions and policies with Arizona Senator and 2008 presidential candidate John McCain.)
The White House defense against these corrosive revelations would be comical if the dangers of this situation were not so grave. On Tuesday, press secretary Sean Spicer tried to suggest that Manafort, who ran Trump’s campaign for five months, had “played a very limited role for a very limited time.” Such an absurd defense is a sign of a fearful attempt to conceal the truth. As Carl Bernstein observed on CNN, the Trump administration is actively engaged in a cover-up.
That cover-up is failing, as evidenced by the resignation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and the humiliating recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The alarms have been sounding ever since Americans learned that two top government officials had been caught lying about their contacts with a foreign power. Now we know that there is much more, and probably much worse.
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http://www.nationalmemo.com/trump-associates-coordinated-russians
