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Russian To Judgement?
In the last 24 hours, two new stories on the Trump-Russia relationship have been published by the New York Times and The Washington Post, respectively.
The NYT headline reads F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia and posits that immediately after the President fired FBI director James Comey in May of 2017, the agency opened up an investigation to determine if President Trump was working on behalf in Russian interests:
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.
Buried nine paragraphs in the story comes this reveal:
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.
The Washington Post says Trump has concealed details of his face-to-face encounters with Putin from senior officials in administration and claims that after a one-on-one meet with Putin in Hamburg in 2017, Trump confiscated the interpreter’s notes:
President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.
Predictably, the media and Twitter are spinning both reports as “smoking guns” and proof of collusion. What say you, Ricochet members?
Published in General
Just thought it might be a better use of your time.
Thanks for your concern but not many frozen lakes in these parts.
Nope. Flat out fact.
Snark can be factual but that hardly makes it necessarily a reasonable response.
This whole thread is giving me a sense of unreality. As in ‘gaslighting’ or ‘the big lie’.
Come on, who am I supposed to believe is a Russian agent? Someone who’s given Putin and Co. grief in the energy market, Eastern Europe, sanctions, etc., etc.? And who makes a game of stomping all over the sensibilities of their fellow travelers wherever found?
Or perhaps some cronies of a socialist President, who famously promised a ‘reset’ with Russia, and was going to be ‘more flexible’ in his second term. Managed by a DCIA who had in fact been a card carrying Communist. I’m not saying they were agents, but there’s more prima facie evidence of it than Trump.
Something stinks, but the home addresses are in New York and Washington, not the White House. Roger Kimball today does a good take down on what would be today’s equivalent of the Watergate scandals, if not for the bias of the media and the nattering of their fellow travelers, Never Trumpers included.