Breaking News! Trump campaign staffers talking to the Ruskies

[PopeyesPappy]

CNN is reporting that law enforcement and intelligence officials are saying that members of the Trump campaign staff were in regular communications with the Russians during the campaign.

Not a surprise as some of us knew about this way back when because a Trump server was reported as having regular email traffic with Russia. The campaign denied it. The server went offline for a couple of days then was turned back on with a new IP and resumed passing the same kind of traffic.

[Baruch]

This is old behavior.  George W was the bag man sent by his father and Ronald Reagan, to help Iran manipulate the election of 1980.

[Cavebear]

This is old behavior.  George W was the bag man sent by his father and Ronald Reagan, to help Iran manipulate the election of 1980.

And should have been impeached for that.  This nonsense has GOT to stop and if we have to kick a President or 2 out of office to drive the point home, so be it!

[Jason78]

McCarthy.  70 years too early.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

This is old hat and one of the reasons that Flynn gets to be the fall guy for the entire administration, not that he doesn't deserve whatever he gets, but it's part of the cover up and why repubicans in congress are going to play with kid gloves and not really investigate. They may have a big show with Flynn to make it appear that they're getting to the bottom of it all.
A great read (in my opinion) is from Bill Moyers and company..
http://billmoyers.com/story/americas-sake-need-answers-russia-now/
What did Trump know and when did he know it? Or as lampooned during the Nixon years, What did he know and when did he forget it?
Republicans spent untold tax dollars to investigate Clinton and Bengazi to uncover basically nothing and to give the public a very misleading view of Clinton as Secretary of State, but now we have a president and entire administration covering up possible actual treason and as  one congressman said, (I can't recall the name)"It'll just take care of itself." and if you have ANY ability whatever to read between the lines it means "We'll always put party before country."
What I'm hoping for (if this drags on for two years ) we'll have the midterm massacre and republicans will be leaving Washington in a mass exodus with the first order of business being impeachment.
And by the way suddenly plenty of career Russian diplomats are disappearing into thin air over leaks that have brought all of this into the light.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a weekly meeting with ministers of the government at the Novo Ogaryovo state residence Oct. 29, 2014 in Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a weekly meeting with ministers of the government at the Novo Ogaryovo state residence Oct. 29, 2014, in Moscow.
(Note: I hardly had finished writing the following piece when Michael Flynn resigned, requiring a small revision. With this new development, the plot thickens, and getting to the truth about Russia and the Trump White House becomes even more important. And it raises the famous questions that so bedeviled Richard Nixon: What did Donald Trump know and when did he know it? mw)

These first weeks of the Trump White House have felt like one of those tennis ball machines run amok, volley after volley shooting at us in such rapid fire that often the only reaction is to grimace and duck. Outrage after outrage, imperial pronouncement after pronouncement, lie after lie; it’s just one damned, fast and furious, flawed thing after another.

All of this is confusing and distracting and of course, that’s precisely what they want. As the old saying goes, if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. It easily distracts us from the real issues, diverting our eyes from those important things that have to be closely examined and resolved if we’re to continue trying, at least, to behave like a free nation.

Outrage after outrage, imperial pronouncement after pronouncement, lie after lie; it’s just one damned, fast and furious, flawed thing after another.
One of those burning issues is Russia, which largely seemed to go off the scope in the days immediately before and after Trump’s mini-inauguration, even though around the election and in the weeks after we heard a great deal about Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the release of emails aimed at defeating Hillary Clinton â€" allegations that were backed by the US intelligence community. With the FBI, those spy agencies also have been investigating intercepted communications from Russian intelligence. And then there’s that infamous “dossier,” compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, filled with thus far unverified allegations about President Trump’s business dealings with Russia as well as certain salacious tales of his purported extracurricular activities there.

But with the resignation of Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, in the wake of news reports about his December phone calls with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and word that US intelligence has confirmed some of the information in the Steele dossier, interest in Russia has rekindled, and a good thing, too.

On Thursday night, The Washington Post released the story that Flynn “privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials, current and former U.S. officials said.”

This was followed by Monday night’s breaking news from the Post: “The acting attorney general informed the Trump White House late last month that she believed Michael Flynn had misled senior administration officials about the nature of his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and warned that the national security adviser was potentially vulnerable to Russian blackmail, current and former U.S. officials said.” Within hours, Flynn was out.

What’s more, at week’s end, as the Flynn story was beginning to unfold,  CNN reported that investigators have now corroborated some of the less personal information in the Steele dossier, conversations among Russian officials: “The corroboration,” the network reported, “has given US intelligence and law enforcement ‘greater confidence’ in the credibility of some aspects of the dossier… Some of the individuals involved in the intercepted communications were known to the US intelligence community as ‘heavily involved’ in collecting information damaging to Hillary Clinton and helpful to Donald Trump, two of the officials tell CNN.”

And it raises the famous questions that so bedeviled Richard Nixon: What did Donald Trump know and when did he know it?
These latest developments came on the heels of Trump’s astonishing remarks to Bill O’Reilly, in an interview pre-taped for Super Bowl Sunday, when Trump said he respected Putin and O’Reilly noted that the Russian leader is a killer: “There are a lot of killers,” Trump replied, sounding more like a two-bit Al Capone than the leader of the free world. “We have a lot of killers. You think our country is so innocent?”

This is way beyond troubling, so it merits noting some of the other news about Russia that has transpired in the last few weeks, news that might have flown under your radar while Trump’s fusillade of executive orders and tantrums was bombarding your every waking moment.

All of it is serious business, specifically when it comes to figuring out just why Trump is so deeply enamored of Vladimir Putin and how much Russia interfered with our election, and more broadly for what it says about Trump and his chief strategist Stephen Bannon’s vision, God help us, of a world divided and dominated by white nationalists.

For one, and speaking of killers, there’s the matter of the missing Russian intelligence men, all of whom may be connected to the Trump affair. Amy Knight, former Woodrow Wilson Fellow and author of Orders From Above: The Putin Regime and Political Murder, writes in The New York Review of Books, “… Since the US election, there has been an unprecedented, and perhaps still continuing shakeup of top officials in Putin’s main security agency, the FSB, and that a top former intelligence official in Putin’s entourage died recently in suspicious circumstances.”

She’s worth quoting at length:

“It appears that the Kremlin has been conducting an intensive hunt for moles within its security apparatus who might have leaked information about Russian efforts to influence the US presidential election. In mid-December 2016, following public assertions by leading US intelligence officials that Russia had intervened in the election, two high-level FSB officers, Sergei Mikhailov, deputy chief of the FSB’s Center for Information Security, which oversees cyberintelligence, and his subordinate, Dmitry Dokuchayev, were arrested. (Russian authorities reportedly took Mikhailov away from a meeting of the FSB top brass after placing a black bag on his head.) The two men â€" along with Ruslan Stoyanov, who headed the Kaspersky Lab, a private company that assists the FSB in internet security â€" were charged with state treason. Russian independent media reported that the men had been responsible for leaks to Western sources, including US intelligence, about Russian cyber attacks against the US and also about Russian covert efforts to blackmail Donald Trump…

“Also, the authoritative independent Russian business daily Kommersant reported two weeks ago that Andrei Gerasimov, chief of the FSB’s cyberintelligence department, and Mikhailov’s boss, would be fired, although Gerasimov’s dismissal has yet to be officially confirmed. According to Russian security expert Andrei Soldatov, the upheaval in the FSB amounts to a purge of the entire Russian state security team dealing with cyberintelligence and cybersecurity.”

Then there’s a former KGB and FSB general, Oleg Erovinkin, found dead in the back of his car in Moscow on Dec. 26, officially from a heart attack, but as Agatha Christie would say, foul play is suspected. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports:

“Erovinkin was a key aide to Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister. He has been described as a key liaison between Sechin and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now head of the state-owned oil company Rosneft, Sechin is repeatedly named in the so-called Trump dossier… [Christopher] Steele wrote in the dossier, which was dated July 19, 2016, that much of the information it contained was provided by a source close to Sechin. That source was Erovinkin, according to Russia expert Christo Grozev of Risk Management Lab, a think-tank based in Bulgaria.”

Well crap..I only meant to quote part of this, but instead you get the full Monte..

[Baruch]

Yes, the Obama Atty Generals were so much better than the ones Shrub had ;-(  Why do you worry about politics?  Septic tank.  Are you one of the turds?  Some turds are floaters, some are sinkers ... but I don't care which is which!!

[widdershins]

I'm just waiting for the day when I read the news and see the headline, "Trump cabinet didn't fuck up!"  When that day comes I'm going to be forgiveness for all my sins because that's the day Jesus is coming back.

[Unbeliever]

And should have been impeached for that. 

Should've been charged, convicted and imprisoned for that! When these high mucky-mucks get away with murder (or other high crimes) it just encourages them to keep on murdering.

[Unbeliever]

McCarthy.  70 years too early.

yeah, there's never a House Un-American Activities Committee around when you need one...

[Baruch]

Should've been charged, convicted and imprisoned for that! When these high mucky-mucks get away with murder (or other high crimes) it just encourages them to keep on murdering.

Members of administrations talk to foreign governments all the time ... see Hillary Clinton taking 1 million dollar bribe from Qatar last year?

[trdsf]

Watergate: "What does the president know, and when did he know it?"

Iran-Contra: "What does the president know, and does he know that he knows it?"

Today: "What the fuck, man?  No, seriously, just what the fuck?"

At least Nixon and his men kept their crimes against representative democracy a domestic action.  Asshole outsourced it overseas, as usual.

[fencerider]

CNN is reporting that law enforcement and intelligence officials are saying that members of the Trump campaign staff were in regular communications with the Russians during the campaign.

Don't forget that Jeff Session the new attorney general was a big player in the DonRump campaign. Maybe he was one of the people talking to El Rusko. Now he would be the one in charge of the investigatipn.

[Cavebear]

I don't want any American President to be impeached for stupidity or improper collusion with other nations, but Trump may and rightly if things are as they seem to be.

[Baruch]

I don't want any American President to be impeached for stupidity or improper collusion with other nations, but Trump may and rightly if things are as they seem to be.

"improper collusion" .. there is no improper collusion if it is profitable.  All politics is collusion.  This is why Antifa is the real opposition.

[Cavebear]

"improper collusion" .. there is no improper collusion if it is profitable.  All politics is collusion.  This is why Antifa is the real opposition.

You really think that anti-fascism is a bad thing?