Smoke Gives Way to Fire in the Trump-Russia Saga
By early last summer, Russia and its intelligence services, the GRU and the FSB, were hip-deep in hacking the Democratic National Committee, and by mid-July the first leaked DNC emails had started to surface on WikiLeaks. That same month, the FBI quietly opened a counterintelligence investigation into the Russian hacking and the possibility of collusion between Moscow and Donald Trump's campaign.
And now we know that smack dab in the middle of all that, on June 6th, three people at the very heart of Trump's team secretly met in Trump Tower with a well-connected Russian operative who promised to deliver damaging information to them about Hillary Clinton's campaign. According to The New York Times, whose reporters broke the story in two stunning pieces on Saturday and Sunday, the three Trump minions were Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
Until this weekend, there'd been lots of smoke, but little actual fire with regard to the Trump-Russia story. Now, the Trump administration is ablaze. The revelations, The Times reports, "represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help."
Of course, it is neither shocking nor surprising that three of Trump's most intimate advisers would take the bait the Russians were dangling. After all, throughout 2016 and up until Trump's inauguration in January, a veritable who's who of the Trump machine held a dizzying array of tête-à-têtes with Russian officials and intermediaries, mostly neglecting or refusing to disclose those contacts until media reports forced them to admit them. That list includes, just for starters, former National Security Adviser General Michael T. Flynn's unreported conversations with the Russian ambassador in Washington, now Attorney General Jeff Sessions' September sit-down with that same ambassador and Kushner's hush-hush request that the Russians set up a covert, back-channel communications system between Trump's transition team and the Kremlin – again, through Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/smoke-gives-way-to-fire-in-the-trump-russia-saga-w491539?utm_source=rsnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=071017_15
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