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Showing posts with label Trump and Russia Investigation. Show all posts

Sunday, February 11, 2018

Trump and Russia investigation

House Democrats to 'clean up' Trump-Russia memo in bid for release

Democrats are prepared to black out parts of memo Trump blocked, which tries to counter GOP allegations of surveillance excesses

Associated Press

Sun 11 Feb 2018 20.14 GMT

‘The president doesn’t want the public to see the underlying facts,’ Adam Schiff said on CBS’s Face the Nation. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

A White House aide said Sunday he was confident it would be released once Democrats “clean it up”.
That possible nudge toward progress came as both sides traded recriminations over the matter.
Representative Adam Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Trump was putting his personal interest above the country’s in blocking a memo that “completely undermines his claim of vindication” in special counsel Robert Mueller’s continuing investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s relationship with Russian interests and Russia’s meddling in the election. “The president doesn’t want the public to see the underlying facts,” Schiff said on CBS’s Face the Nation.
The White House legislative director, Marc Short, countered that Democrats padded their memo with sensitive information, knowing Trump would stop its release, in an effort to make him look obstructionist.
“We’re not afraid of transparency,” Short said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I think you’re going to see us release the memo.”

Trump overrode strong justice department objections when he declassified a Republican memo alleging an abuse of surveillance powers in the FBI’s Russia investigation earlier this month. The FBI expressed “grave concerns” about the memo’s accuracy and the justice department said in advance that its release, without proper review, would be “extraordinarily reckless”.

But Trump has blocked the Democratic document, which tries to counter the Republican allegations of surveillance excesses. The president has the authority to keep such information under wraps, and has exercised it only against the Democrats.
“Their goal here is to put the FBI on trial, to put Bob Mueller’s investigation on trial, and the president is only too happy to accommodate,” Schiff said.
Representative Devin Nunes, chairman of the intelligence panel, said if Democrats were intent on making important information public, they should get to work. “Their memo is sitting at the House Intelligence Committee down at the bottom of the Capitol waiting to be redacted,” the California Republican told Fox News. “If they really wanted to get it out, they’d be down there all day yesterday redacting it, getting it back over to the White House so that the public can know what’s in it.”
Schiff said Democrats showed the memo to the justice department and the FBI and asked for their feedback before bringing it to the intelligence panel, and did not hear complaints about inaccuracy. But he said Democrats will “sit down with the FBI and go through any concerns that they have” about the disclosure of classified intelligence. “We will redact it to make sure that we’re very protective of sources and methods,” Schiff said.
In their memo, Republicans challenged how the FBI and justice department used information from former British spy Christopher Steele in obtaining a secret warrant to monitor Carter Page, who advised the Trump campaign on foreign policy. The memo alleges the FBI and justice department didn’t tell the court enough about Steele’s anti-Trump bias or that his work was partly paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Republicans argued that the reliance on Steele’s material politicized the government’s surveillance powers.
Democrats said that memo “cherry-picked” details. They noted federal law enforcement officials had informed the court about the political origins of Steele’s work, some of his information was corroborated by the FBI and other evidence was used to get the warrant. The Democratic memo is thought to elaborate on those points.
Short, though, said Democrats also introduced political theater into the episode.
“We believe that Congressman Schiff potentially put in there methods and sources that he knew would need to be redacted,” he said. “And if we redacted it, then there would be an outcry that said the White House is trying to edit it. So we said take it back, work with the FBI, clean it up, and we’ll release it.” Asked if Democrats drafted a memo they knew would be blocked, Schiff said “of course not”.

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Friday, December 15, 2017

Trump and Russia Investigation

Trump May Decry the Russia Investigation, But the Trail of Evidence Is Long

By David Ignatius

December 15, 2017

WASHINGTON -- President Trump's recent denunciations of the Russia investigation recall the famous legal advice: "If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell."
Trump shouted out his defense earlier this month: "What has been shown is no collusion, no collusion!" he told reporters over the whir of his helicopter on the White House lawn. Since then, Trump's supporters have been waging a bitter counterattack against special counsel Robert Mueller, alleging bias and demanding: "Investigate the investigators."
But what do the facts show? There is a growing, mostly undisputed body of evidence describing contacts between Trump associates and Russia-linked operatives. Trump partisans have claimed that Mueller's investigation is biased because some members of his staff supported his rival Hillary Clinton. But Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein disagreed Wednesday, arguing that Mueller "is running his office appropriately."
As Republicans seek to discredit the investigation, it's useful to remember just what we've learned so far about how the Trump campaign sought harmful information about Clinton from sources that, according to U.S. intelligence, were linked to Moscow. This isn't a fuzzy narrative where the truth is obscured; in the Trump team's obsessive pursuit of damaging Clinton emails and other negative information, the facts are hiding in plain sight.
From the start of the campaign, Trump spoke of his affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Trump's aides followed his lead. In March, a young adviser named George Papadopoulos met a London professor who introduced him to a Russian woman described as "Putin's niece." This began months of efforts by Papadopoulos to broker Trump-Russia contacts, described in the plea agreement that Mueller announced in October.
Russian operatives by March 2016 had already hacked the computers of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Through cutouts, the Russians over the next eight months allegedly spooled out damaging information about Clinton to the media, sometimes egged on by Trump and his associates.
Papadopoulos got the first hint the Russians might share Clinton emails in a late April meeting with the professor, who told him "the Russians had emails of Clinton ... thousands of emails," according to the plea agreement.
Dishing dirt on Clinton was the pitch of a June 3 email to Donald Trump Jr. from the publicist for Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov's pop-singer son. He said Russian authorities "offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary."
Don Jr. eagerly met Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya on June 9 at Trump Tower. When she claimed that an anti-Putin U.S. businessman had looted money from Russia, Don Jr. pressed her: "He asked if I had any financial documents from which it would follow that the funds stolen from Russia were then involved in financing the Clinton's Foundation," she told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month.
Trump's hunt for Clinton emails continued in June, when Jared Kushner hired Cambridge Analytica to do campaign research. The firm learned that WikiLeaks planned to publish a stash of the Clinton material, and Cambridge's CEO asked Julian Assange "if he might share that information with us," according to The Wall Street Journal. Trump promised "very, very interesting" revelations about Clinton in June, the same month an alleged Russian cutout dubbed "Guccifer 2.0" began leaking DNC documents.
WikiLeaks dumped nearly 20,000 Clinton documents on July 22. Three days later, Trump tweeted: "The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC e-mails ... because Putin likes me." Two days after that, at a July 27 press conference, Trump said: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."
Roger Stone, a Trump friend and sometime adviser, kept beating the WikiLeaks drum through August 2016, saying he was communicating with Assange and that more damaging Clinton leaks were coming. WikiLeaks contacted Don Jr., too, in five messages that continued until Election Day.
"I love WikiLeaks," said Trump at a rally Oct. 10. And no wonder. This was the campaign's secret weapon.
U.S. intelligence agencies said on Jan. 6, 2017, they had "high confidence" that Russian intelligence had used WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 "to release U.S. victim data obtained in cyber operations." CIA Director Mike Pompeo has since described WikiLeaks as a "hostile intelligence service."
The next time Trump demands a probe of Mueller's investigation or the FBI's handling of Clinton emails, remember that he isn't arguing the facts or the law about collusion with Russia. He's pounding the table.
(c) 2017, Washington Post Writers Group

davidignatius@washpost.com

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Thursday, December 14, 2017

Trump and Russia Investigation

By Josh Delk - 12/12/17 03:03 PM EST

Poll: Majority believes Trump obstructed Russia investigation

A majority of Americans believe that President Trump has tried to obstruct the investigation into Russian interference in last year's presidential election, a new poll found.
According to the Quinnipiac University poll, 57 percent of voters agree that Trump has tried to "derail or obstruct the investigation into the Russian interference in the 2016 election," while 38 percent disagree.
Forty-eight percent of respondents believe that Trump did not personally collude with the Russian government to win the election over Democrat Hillary Clinton. However, 52 percent say they believe his campaign colluded with the Russian government.
The poll comes just weeks after Trump's former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI after the Trump's inauguration regarding his communications with Russian officials during the White House transition.
Trump said after the plea that he fired Flynn for lying to Vice President Pence about his assurances to then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that he would roll back Obama-era sanctions on Russia for its meddling, raising questions as to whether Trump knew of the lies when he fired him in February.
Flynn was charged by special counsel Robert Mueller, who was appointed to investigate possible collusion after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey.

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Sunday, February 11, 2018

House Democrats to 'clean up' Trump-Russia memo in bid for release

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Friday, December 15, 2017

Trump May Decry the Russia Investigation, But the Trail of Evidence Is Long

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Thursday, December 14, 2017

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