It's not just the number of Trump-Russia contacts. It's the timing.
A court filing published Friday revealed yet another point of contact between people involved with President Trump’s company or presidential campaign and a Russian national interested in offering Trump some help. That revelation was relatively minor, a contact between Trump’s longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen and a Russian athlete named Dmitry Klokov interested in helping push a Trump development in Moscow. But it further expanded our understanding of the frequency of those contacts.
There are two facets of the Russia-Trumpworld points of contact that are interesting. The first is the volume: More than a dozen people who worked with Trump’s campaign or who were close to him personally had meetings, emails or calls with Russians over the year-long span from the end of 2015 to the end of 2016. But the timing is also interesting. The bulk of those contacts happened in the spring and summer of 2016, a period when it looked increasingly like Trump would be the Republican nominee for president.
Below is a chart of where and when people in Trump’s orbit were in contact with Russians, largely adapted from The Washington Post’s presentation of Trump-Russia contacts. Circles are scaled to the number of meetings or the number of individuals or both.
Michael Caputo. Campaign communications staff. Caputo was involved in one of the odder points of contact during the campaign. A Russian national named Henry Greenberg reached out to Caputo’s business partner offering to exchange cash for dirt on Trump’s presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton. Caputo passed the information on to Trump adviser Roger Stone, who met with Greenberg. (It’s not clear that Caputo had direct contact with Greenberg.)
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