President Trump’s first month in office has not been the honeymoon it was supposed to be. While carrying on with the work of filling his executive positions and presenting his agenda to Congress, he has been under a lot of public scrutinies following recent scandals.
Did Russia Interfere with the elections?
The Trump administration has been under fire recently over ties with Russia, claims that have been denied in the past by his administration. However, information from many sources differs with these claims. Tuesday night this week had the New York Times release a report concerning President Trump, his campaign team, and other “Trump Associates.” It claims they had “repeated contact with Senior Russian intelligence officials.” These calls occurred before the November 8th election and were intercepted by U.S. officials who were monitoring Russian intelligence. These officials then shared the information that the calls had been made to the Times, leading to the release of the report.
Despite warnings on the report clearly indicating that there was no information on whether the calls involved the discussion of interference in the election, there is still room for suspicion. The murky circumstances under which a campaign team would have constant contact with a foreign power that has shown hostility towards the United States is reason enough to arouse doubt.
After the Democratic National Committee’s hack in June 2016, most people turned to Russia as the prime suspect. This was because of Russia’s rich past in influencing Western elections for its favor. Trump’s public show of support in Russia’s dealing with foreign policy also deepened suspicion. Further, the leaking of Hillary’s emails in a manner that seemed to hurt and disable her presidential bid pointed to Russia.
Private security firms and researchers have also found that some of the code used in Hillary’s email hack is linked to Russia’s operations. There is consensus within the U.S. intelligence community that Russia hacked Hillary’s emails partly to help Trump’s Presidential bid against Hillary.
There has been uncertainty about Trump’s campaign team’s awareness of Russia’s interference. However, it is possible that they knew and that Trump’s team built their bid around Hillary’s emails, with Trump constantly calling her “Crooked Hillary” on the campaign trail. Circumstantial evidence has shown that Roger Stone, a close ally to Trump could have known about the leak of Hillary’s emails beforehand. He had previously claimed to be had been in touch with WikiLeaks, the platform that released Hillary’s emails. A tweet from October 2nd insinuates he could have had an idea of what was to happen five days later when WikiLeaks released the first batch of emails from John Podesta, Hillary’s top aide.
Trump’s campaign leader at the time, Paul Manafort, had ties to Russia. He resigned, however, following the discovery of a secret ledger that had his name in it. The ledger claimed he had received $12.7 million over a period of 2007-2012. The money was from former Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych who was in support of Russia’s policies and government. Although he denied the allegations, Manafort was the only official mentioned by name by the report.
The involvement of the Russians during the election period was welcomed by President Trump. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” Trump stated at a July 2016 press conference. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov also recently confirmed that some of Trump’s associates were still in contact with Russia.
After putting all this information together, we realize that a certain number of unknown officials within Trump’s political camp were in contact with Russia before and after the election. We also find that Trump’s campaign group had no problem with Russia’s interference with the U.S. election and at times welcomed the thought. What is lacking, thus far, is a connection between these two as well as a confirmation that the Russians did have a hand on the outcome of this Democratic process.
- Did Trump Lie about Mark Flynn’s call to the public?
Michael Flynn was selected by President Trump to serve as National Security Adviser following his election as 45th President of the United States. Soon after Christmas, Flynn made a series of phone calls to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. His failure to elaborately disclose the contents of those phone calls have cost him his job. However, the focus now is who else had the knowledge of the calls and when they knew it.
December 29th marked the beginning of new sanctions to Russia from the United States. These were announced by President Obama with the reason for them being Russia’s interference in the U.S. election process. The same day, Flynn made many calls to Kislyak. This is not surprising, however, given Flynn’s close ties with Russia as well as his expression of interest in working together with Putin in the past so as to fight terrorism.
The timing of the communication was the main issue. Had Flynn been calling Kislyak to talk about the overturning of the sanctions? That would mean undermining the Obama administration. Further, it would have been illegal under the Logan Act which prohibits people that are outside the executive arm of the United States government from making foreign policy on the country’s behalf.
News of the calls went public on January 12th, with both Sean Spicer – President Trump’s press secretary and Vice President Mike Pierce telling reporters that the calls were as a result of Christmas greetings that had gone too far, growing into friendly exchanges between both parties. This seemed highly suspicious since Russia’s Orthodox Christmas was celebrated on January 9th this year.
This information was quickly discredited following a report published by the Washington Post which confirmed that the two parties had been talking about sanctions. Two sources on the report further claimed that the Trump administration would take care of the sanctions.
According to the report, Flynn also lied to Mike Pence personally. This led to him giving a false statement to the media by claiming he had not discussed anything about sanctions with Kislyak.
Possibilities in this story would include that Flynn acted of his accord and called Kislyak without the knowledge of President Trump and his administration. It could also be that Flynn acted on instructions that were known by Trump’s administration the entire time then went forward to hide the truth from the American people. Alternately, it could also be possible that Trump’s administration found out about the contents of the calls earlier on before the calls’ occurrences were made public, but tried to cover it up afterward.
Trump’s reluctance to have Flynn leave office while previously describing him as a “wonderful man” has supported the two last possibilities. Additionally, his claims that the media treated Flynn “very very unfairly” would allude to the fact that he was in support of Flynn’s actions. Ongoing investigations by FBI’S counterintelligence will soon shed new light onto the nature and content of these calls, giving us new information on this fiasco.
- Could Russia Blackmail Trump?
President Trump’s push to build his business empire in Russia have been somewhat successful. It has included efforts to build a Trump Hotel in Moscow. Trump’s business dealings in Russia go back years and years. Due to this, he has frequently traveled to Russia.
The Steele Dossier uses this fact to build its case. According to the Dossier, Trump practiced a number of inappropriate acts while in Russia. One of these is the hiring of prostitutes to urinate on a bed that President Obama once slept in.
According to the Dossier’s sources, Russian intelligence filmed these acts. Russia has thus been using them as leverage to get Trump’s support in their policies. However, the Dossier has largely gone unpublicized. This is because most of the sources are unidentified, so there is no way to confirm whether the information is true or not.
So far, only some parts of the Steele Dossier have been confirmed to be accurate. As such, mainstream media has refrained from reporting most of its contents. Allegations made within the Dossier are currently undergoing deep investigation.
It is clear that most of this is as a result of Trump’s doing. By avoiding snide remarks calling on Russia to hack Hillary’s emails, failing to consistently praise President Putin in public, and employing officials with no personal history with Russia, these scandals could have easily been avoided.
This is going to be detrimental for President Trump’s agenda. He needs many active members of his administration to help in pushing bills through Congress, helping him draft policies as well as crafting executive orders that can stand the legitimacy test in a court of law. With most of his officials occupied in putting out such political fires and dealing with frequent press leaks, he can only do so much.
