The Evidence Is Damning: What Team Trump Knew and When
We already know that the Trump campaign was aware of — and intended to profit from — Moscow’s interference in the election.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/12/04/the-evidence-is-damning-what-team-trump-knew-and-when-flynn-guilty/
The circumstantial evidence suggesting that the Trump campaign collaborated with the Kremlin to get now-President Donald Trump elected continues to mount. But even if it turns out that there was no direct “collusion” to shape the 2016 election, what we have learned so far — including most recently from retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s guilty plea this past week — is incredibly troubling. The evidence is now irrefutable that Trump, his associates, and Republican leadership more broadly conspired to give Moscow a pass despite (or perhaps because of) Russia’s attack on our democracy.
While much remains unknown about the full extent and nature of the relationship between Team Trump and Russia’s 2016 election activities, we actually know a great deal already. We know that Kremlin intermediaries reached out to Trump foreign-policy advisor George Papadopoulos and then to Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., in the spring of 2016 offering “dirt” on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (including, in Papadopoulos’s case, an offer of “thousands of emails”). We know that several other senior Trump campaign officials were aware of these approaches, failed to report them to the FBI, and encouraged the outreach. We also know that, in the summer of 2016, then candidate Trump called on Russia to “find” Clinton’s missing emails, and that several campaign surrogates (including Roger Stone and the Trump campaign’s data firm Cambridge Analytica) and at least one prominent Republican operative (Peter W. Smith) reached out to WikiLeaks (which was laundering information for Moscow) and to Russian hackers to get additional dirt on Clinton.