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On May 9, 2017, President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, the man who, up to that point, had been leading the investigation into Russian interference during the 2016 election. Trump, the very next day, welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin’s Ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak into the White House for a meeting that the administration had ostensibly hoped to keep quiet. Thankfully, though, the Russians took photos… and then proceeded to share them on social media. [That’s one of their photos at the top of the page.] Here, with more on that, is an excerpt from something that I’d posted at the time.
…Trump must be trolling us, right? I mean who in their right fucking mind, on the day immediately after he fires the man heading the investigation into whether or not his campaign team colluded with the Russians to steal an election, not only invites into the White House the very Russian Ambassador who’s widely thought to have helped orchestrate the whole thing, but bans the American press, allowing in only Russian news agencies? I mean, this is the very same guy, Sergey Kislyak, that Michael Flynn was fired for having lied about having talked with during the campaign. This is the guy who many think coordinated the whole “we’ll hack the election if you lift the sanctions” deal at the heart of this whole fucking thing. And Trump invites him into the White House on the day after he fires FBI Director Comey in hopes of killing the investigation. It’s absolutely insane. This would be like if Obama, at the height of the Tea Party madness, joined the Black Panther Party, donned a dashiki, released his Kenyan birth certificate, and started to speak exclusively in Bantu… I can’t help but think that Trump is doing everything in his fucking power to get himself thrown out of office, but that, despite his best efforts, the Republicans in Congress, after twenty some years of intellectual rot, can’t appreciate just how absolutely insane all of this is. I mean, could that be possible? Could all of this is just a desperate cry for help? Or is Trump just trying to fuck with us, attempting to suck the very last gasp of life out of the resistance by demonstrating that, whatever he does, no matter how heinous, there will be no consequences? Was this Trump’s end zone dance on the throat of the American democracy?…
Well, as you might recall, shortly after news of this meeting broke, word came out that, during their discussion, Trump had shared highly classified intelligence with the Russian delegation. Here’s another excerpt from something that I posted at the time.
…Not only did Trump invite Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin’s Ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak into the White House the day after firing James Comey, the man responsible for directing the FBI’s investigation into possible collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians to sway the outcome of our last presidential election, but, now, according to the Washington Post, we’re learning that, during that meeting, Trump passed “highly classified information” along to the Lavrov and Kislyak that could jeopardize both our international intelligence relationships and our campaign against ISIS.
….So here’s the question of the day. How can a party that took the White Hosue by railing against the email security of Secretary Clinton, suggesting that her lax server oversight could result in sensitive intelligence falling into the hands of our enemies, possibly withstand the news, which, by the way, has now been corroborated by Reuters, that Trump straight-up passed along classified information to Lavrov and Kislyak, jeopardizing our campaign against ISIS, as well as our relationship with a valued ally. [Is it any wonder why, as the Wall Street Journal reported back in February, that intelligence professionals have been keeping sensitive information from the Trump administration?] And, to make maters even worse, it would appear that Trump didn’t even share the information in the context of a meaningful conversation about ISIS. If the news accounts are to be believed, he just threw this piece of sensitive intelligence data out as an illustration of how awesome our intelligence gathering capabilities are. “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,” he reportedly said to the Russian delegation right before launching into the specifics about the ISIS plot uncovered by a foreign intelligence partner. He essentially gave up the identity of a foreign asset in or to impress the Russians..
And, right after that hit the news, as you might also recall, the administration put White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster in front of reporters to say that the story, as reported, was false. “The President did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known,” he said, adding that the conversation was, “wholly appropriate.”
Well, guess what? It looks now as though it might not have been “wholly appropriate” after all. In the wake of the revelation a few days ago that the Trump administration maintains a private server where notes on the President’s conversations with world leaders are hidden away from members of the intelligence community, people with knowledge of this May 10, 2017 meeting at the White House, have begun to suggest that memos exist which make it clear that Donald Trump not only handed over classified information, but told the Russians that he was OK with their election interference. The following is from today’s Washington Post.
…President Trump told two senior Russian officials in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because the United States did the same in other countries, an assertion that prompted alarmed White House officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people, according to three former officials with knowledge of the matter.
The comments, which have not been previously reported, were part of a now-infamous meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, in which Trump revealed highly classified information that exposed a source of intelligence on the Islamic State. He also said during the meeting that firing FBI Director James B. Comey the previous day had relieved “great pressure” on him.
A memorandum summarizing the meeting was limited to a few officials with the highest security clearances in an attempt to keep the president’s comments from being disclosed publicly, according to the former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters…
For what it’s worth, when Trump brought the Russians into he White House to tell them that he was unconcerned about their election interference, and essentially giving them the go-ahead to keep at it, he already knew the extent of what they’d done. Some five months prior to that meeting, in January, 2017, the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency issued a joint report stating that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” and that he did so in order to help elect Trump. And nothing has happened since to alter that unanimous assessment of our intelligence agencies. [The Mueller report begins with the following. “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” it says.]
It’s also worth nothing that Trump’s apparent comment on May 10, 2017 to Lavrov and Kislyak runs contrary to his public statements on the 2016 election. I guess we’ll have to wait and see the notes from the White House server, but it would sound as though Trump told Lavrov and Kislyak that he knew what they had done, and was fine with in. In public, however, Trump has maintained that he believes Putin when he says that Russia had nothing whatsoever to do with our 2016 election interference. Here’s one of my favorite Trump quotes. It comes from his Helsinki press conference alongside Putin in July, 2018. “My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me, and some others, (and) they said they think it’s Russia,” he told the press. “I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
I could go on, but you get why this is important, right? The day after he fired Mueller, Donald Trump snuck the Russians into the White House, and told them that he’d fired the Director of the FBI, and that he was OK with what they’d done. Then, the recorded comments of the meeting were hidden from view of the our national security agencies. It may not technically be treason, as we weren’t officially “at war” with Russia at the time, but it comes pretty damn close.
Oh, and it’s being reported tonight that the Trump administration, given all of this news, is… you guessed it… reviving the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account. [If you can believe it, they’ve apparently retroactively classified emails shared by Clinton and others so that they can pursue then in court.]