Since then, President Trump has fired former FBI Director James Comey and admitted to NBC’s Lester Holt that it was “because of Russia,” and has called the investigations a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Attorney General Bill Barr declared Trump to be released in all matters related to Russian interference in the 2016 elections and the subsequent cover-up, and all but one Republican in the House of Representatives voted in his impeachment trial to oust him funding of prosecutors he the assistance of the Ukrainian government in the elections in 2020.
We know that Trump abused his power in the Ukraine case: That is a matter of public record, which he himself is releasing. We also have the voluminous report by Robert Mueller, which proved that the Trump campaign welcomed, if not directly colluded with, Russian government interference in the 2016 elections and that the president later obstructed the investigation.
All of these probes have been attacked by Republicans as unjust partisan attacks on Trump. This week, the First Committee of the House of Representatives, chaired by sen. Richard Burr, RN.C., released the definitive volume of his research and it is impossible to make that charge. The report was signed by all members of the committee. Indeed, this is the only time during Trump’s first term that Senate Republicans, with the exception of Mitt Romney of Utah, have done their duty to protect our democracy.
In essence, the report shows that the Trump campaign was creeping up with Russians, far more than is usually realized, and the evidence strongly shows that any official or law enforcement official who did not investigate these bizarre circumstances would have been deciphered in their duty to have.
The Mueller report explicitly stated that as a law enforcement research team, Mueller’s team was not concerned with the non-legal concept of ‘collusion’ and were instead bound by the definition of the criminal code of ‘collusion’, which ‘ t they were unable to prove, for a large part, of a lack of cooperation by those involved in the probe. The House committee had no such restrictions and investigated collusion – and found it.
Commission Republicans, led by scenario Marco Rubio of Florida, cherry-picked certain conclusions to deny that, but the details they provide in this 1,000-page report prove that they are lying or delusional.
The report finds that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort acted in principle as a Russian agent. The chairman of the campaign. This is the man Trump publicly glared at two years ago, who slapped him on the back for refusing to cooperate with the special adviser:
The New York Times describes the Manafort-Russia relationship that Trump was so happy about. Manafort declined to comment on:
[T]he report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people connected to the Kremlin – including a longtime employee of the one-time chairman of Trump campaign Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, who identifies the report as a “Russian intelligence officer. “
In 2016, “on several occasions,” Trump’s campaign president “secretly tried to share internal campaign information” with Kilimnik, who the investigation found was likely linked to Russia’s main interference operation at the GRU, the successor organization to the KGB. There is also information that “increases the possibility of Manafort’s potential connection to the hack-and-leak operations,” which would be big news if true.
The report calls Donald Trump’s campaign president a ‘grave counter-intelligence threat.’ How that does not fit everyone’s definition of collusion is hard to understand.
Kilimnik was also found to have “almost certainly helped a settlement of the first public messages that Ukraine’s interfered in the US election”, which, incidentally, I’m sure, Trump in his famous phone call with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, an act of betrayal for which he was impeached. Yet Trump and his henchmen go on to say that the president was absolutely unaware of any of this.
It is also made clear in the report that Trump’s top dirty trickster, Roger Stone, targeted some of the WikiLeaks dumps and that Trump almost certainly knew about it, according to numerous witnesses. That two people close to Trump, Manafort and Stone, seem to have been intimately involved in the most scandalous of the Russian interference actions, the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the timed leaks of those emails on behalf of Donald Trump. Unless we are to believe that the man who claims to have “aced” a memory test right around the same time forget that he repeatedly spoke to Stone about the WikiLeaks operations, this means that the president read against Mueller in his written responses.
Just when Mueller found that the White House was obstructing its investigation, the commission found that it was also obstructing its investigation:
As this experience illustrates, White House intervention has significantly hindered and prolonged the Committee’s investigative efforts. Most importantly, some witnesses were directed by the White House not to disclose any potentially biased information …
And a lot of people left. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the commission made criminal references to Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Erik Prince and Sam Clovis in federal prosecutors in 2019, for misleading Congress. There is no word on what might come of those references.
The report looks at the possibility of Compromise and details some juicy testimony about trips to Moscow, an affair with a beauty queen and evenings at fetish clubs, among others. They could not produce evidence of extortion, but kept it in the report for the purpose of showing that even misinformation could be used to gain influence.
The image that emerges is of a presidential campaign, and an administration, so completely out of its depth, that it “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating remarkable vulnerabilities to counter-intelligence.” In other words, Trump and his cronies were ready dupes and the Russian government took full advantage of that. In fact, it still is.
This is not a particularly shocking revelation, but it follows nicely this week with another national security story, the comment of former DHS national security official Miles Taylor, who wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post headline “At Homeland Security, I first saw how dangerous Trump is for America. “He offers a shocking assessment of the president as an ignorant, unforgettable, obsessive, self-centered fool who cannot be trusted with a second term.
Taylor says that if Trump wins the election, it will be “shock and fear” and there will be no oversight at all.
If you are wondering what that might mean, Vladimir Putin was killed last month in a change to Russia’s constitution that would allow him to remain in power until 2036. He and Trump have often had conversations on the phone lately. We can only guess what they are talking about.
