Senate Intelligence Committee: Trump’s 2016 Campaign Had Repeated Contact with Russian Intelligence

The Senate Intelligence Committee - a committee chaired by a Republican - has dropped several bombshells as it has released it report on the Trump 2016 campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, including a finding that a number of witnesses (including Trump family members) likely lied when they gave testimony.  Now, the committee's report lays out that the Trump 2016 campaign had repeated contact with Russian intelligence officials, adding credence to what many of us have long believed, namely that the Trump campaign colluded with a hostile foreign power to work for the election of Trump who has consistently acted as if he is taking orders from Vladimir Putin.  Under most standards from the past such behavior smacks of treason and underscores the reality that Senate Republicans sided with Trump and Putin when they refused to vote to impeach Trump.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at these disturbing findings of the Senate Intelligence report.  Here are article highlights:  

An exhaustive investigation led by members of President Trump’s own political party portrays his 2016 campaign as posing counterintelligence risks through its myriad contacts with Russia, eager to exploit assistance from the Kremlin and seemingly determined to conceal the full extent of its conduct from a multiyear Senate probe.

The long-awaited report from the Senate Intelligence Committee contains dozens of new findings that appear to show more direct links between Trump associates and Russian intelligence, and it pierces the president’s long-standing attempts to dismiss the Kremlin’s intervention on his behalf as a hoax.

Like the Mueller report before it, the nearly 1,000-page Senate document does not contain evidence of direct collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. But the Senate report carries particular weight because it is the first major investigation of Russian interference in 2016 to be conducted by a Republican-controlled committee and endorsed by both Republicans and Democrats.

The report’s language is often stark, describing Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s receptivity to Russian outreach as a “grave counterintelligence threat” that made the campaign susceptible to “malign Russian influence.”

At one point, the document concludes that members of Trump’s transition team probably fell prey to Russian manipulation that they were too callow to recognize. Kremlin operatives “were capable of exploiting the transition team’s shortcomings,” the report says. “Based on the available information, it is possible — and even likely — that they did so.”

Trump will have difficulty taking exculpatory advantage of a report that is replete with damning details about his conduct and that of his associates.

The Senate probe is the first to flatly declare that a longtime partner of Manafort was, in fact, a Russian intelligence officer. The report also for the first time cites evidence that that alleged operative, Konstantin Kilimnik, may have been directly involved in the Russian plot to break into a Democratic Party computer network and provide plundered files to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

The committee determined that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally directed the hack-and-leak campaign.

[T]he report concludes that one of Trump’s core claims of innocence cannot be credited. In written testimony to the team of federal prosecutors led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump insisted that he could not recall ever discussing the WikiLeaks dumps with political adviser Roger Stone or any other associate. . . . . the Senate report said, “the committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.”

The document describes Trump and associates of his campaign as often incapable of candor. It offers new proof that former national security adviser Michael Flynn lied about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, raises troubling questions about Manafort’s decision to squander a plea agreement with prosecutors by lying to Mueller’s team, and accuses Blackwater founder Erik Prince of “deceptive” accounts of his meetings with a Russian oligarch in the Seychelles weeks before Trump was sworn into office.

The two sides [Russia and the Trump campaign] shared the same objective — the defeat of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton — and basked in one another’s admiration.

The document would read more like a harrowing historical account were it not for mounting evidence that many of the same forces of disruption are lining up for the 2020 election. The top U.S. counterintelligence official recently warned that Russia is again waging a far-reaching interference campaign and favors Trump in the upcoming election.

Trump continues to amplify many of Russia’s divisive messages. Attorney General William P. Barr has intervened in criminal cases against Trump allies Stone and Flynn. And Trump supporters on Capitol Hill, including Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), have reportedly accepted material from Russian-tied sources to discredit former vice president Joe Biden, Trump’s opponent in November.

Five Democratic senators ­— including Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), the party’s 2020 vice-presidential nominee — asserted that the report “unambiguously shows that members of the Trump Campaign cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected.” Referring specifically to their findings on Manafort, the Democrats wrote, “This is what collusion looks like.”