President Trump vs. Robert Mueller

Mr. Trump's son should be concerned.

The FBI has obtained wiretaps from Spanish authorities of conversations involving an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who met with President Donald Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., during the 2016 US presidential election, Yahoo News reported.

With Spies, or “Informants” as the Democrats like to call them because it sounds less sinister (but it’s not), all over my campaign, even from a very early date, why didn’t the crooked highest levels of the FBI or “Justice” contact me to tell me of the phony Russia problem?

Top FBI officials told Donald Trump that Russia and other global adversaries would likely try to spy on and even infiltrate his campaign, a new report said Monday.

The ominous warning — which was also given to Hillary Clinton — came about a week after Trump won the Republican nomination in July 2016, NBC News reported.

Both candidates were urged to tell the feds about any suspicious outreach to their campaigns, the officials said.

FBI warned Trump in 2016 Russians would try to infiltrate his campaign

Obama warned Trump against hiring Michael Flynn
Flynn was forced to resign as national security adviser over Russia contacts

Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador

“That Psychopath Is Going Down”: Inside Trumpworld, a Bizarre Counter-Narrative Takes Hold
Trump’s scorched-earth strategy has been in place since Rudy Giuliani replaced Trump’s long-suffering lawyers John Dowd and Ty Cobb. At first, it looked as if it were careening off course, as Giuliani gave off a series of erratic and combative interviews. Some speculated that Trump might be unhappy with his performance, but sources I spoke to say Trump is pleased. This is the plan.
“Rudy doesn’t do anything without Trump’s permission,” said one Republican close to the White House. The strategy grew out of conversations Trump has held in recent weeks with a group of outside advisers that include Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows, House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes, Sean Hannity, Dave Bossie and Corey Lewandowski, among others. “People think Trump is angry, but he likes the direction this is going,” an outside White House adviser said.

According to people familiar with Trump’s thinking, his team is attempting to build the case that anti-Trump forces in the F.B.I. entrapped his advisers using informants to plant evidence about Russian collusion. The theory goes that the F.B.I. later used these contacts with the Russians to delegitimize his presidency. Trump’s advisers say the intelligence community believed Hillary Clinton would win the presidency, but in case she didn’t, they concocted this elaborate plot to remove Trump from office. “Just when you think it can’t get stranger, it does,” a Trump adviser told me. Stone claims the anti-Trump conspiracy includes senior intelligence officials from the Barack Obama administration. “The guy who will end up burning in all this is [former C.I.A. director] John Brennan,” Stone told me. “If I were him I’d break the capsule and swallow it now. That psychopath is going down.”

As loopy as this theory can sound, the notion that there’s been a conspiracy among the Obama administration and the so-called Deep State to bring Trump down is more than a legal stalking horse—it’s now a dominant narrative in Trumpworld. The president himself is convinced that the secret F.B.I. informant who reportedly met with several Trump campaign advisers in 2016 was not merely an informant, but an Obama political operative. One administration official told me the theory has become so widely accepted that people in the West Wing are paranoid that the F.B.I. has multiple informants working to take down Trump. “There’s a paranoia about who else is one,” the official said.

Trump has told confidants in recent days that the revelation of an informant was potential evidence that the upper echelon of federal law enforcement has conspired against him, according to three people familiar with his recent conversations but not authorized to discuss them publicly. Trump told one ally this week that he wanted “to brand” the informant a “spy,” believing the more nefarious term would resonate more in the media and with the public.

WASHINGTON — At a White House meeting last winter, leaders of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department made an urgent appeal to John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, to side with them against Republicans in Congress who were pressing for information about the Russia investigation that would compromise confidential sources.

Mr. Kelly seemed to agree. But not long after Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, and Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, returned to their offices, Mr. Kelly called and reversed himself, according to a former law enforcement official. They would have to hand over the information after all.

What changed? Mr. Kelly’s answer: the president.

For more than a year, President Trump has been at war with law enforcement agencies that answer to him, interjecting himself into an investigation in which he himself is a subject. And he has escalated the conflict drastically in recent days by accusing the F.B.I. of placing a “spy” inside his 2016 campaign, pressuring the agencies to reveal secret information and demanding an investigation of his investigators.

The confrontation has no precedent in the modern era and holds great stakes not just for the president but for the relative autonomy for law enforcement investigations established after Watergate. Mr. Trump’s allies argue that he has every right to manage the executive branch and every reason to be outraged at possible misconduct aimed at his campaign. But many law enforcement veterans say he is wreaking untold damage on institutions that form the bulwark of a democratic society.

“To turn on the F.B.I. using this loaded language like ‘spy’ and ‘infiltrate,’ President Trump is trying to poison public opinion against the F.B.I. for his own reasons,” said Barbara McQuade, a career federal prosecutor who served as United States attorney in Michigan under President Barack Obama. “He may be successful, but I worry about the impact his kind of rhetoric has on the public when the F.B.I. is investigating a case of kidnapping or bank robbery and the president has told them they’re not trustworthy.”

Since even before taking office, Mr. Trump has disparaged intelligence agencies that concluded that Russia sought to influence the election on his behalf, at one point in effect comparing them to Nazis. He has publicly badgered law enforcement officials to shut down the Russia investigation and instead open inquiries into his political adversaries. But he went even further last week by effectively ordering an investigation into the actions taken regarding his campaign.

McConnell owes the country a fuller explanation on Russian meddling
President Donald Trump questioned on Monday why his predecessor did not do more to address Russian meddling in the 2016 election, even as his own administration has been quiet about its efforts to address such interference in the future.

So when Trump asks why President Barack Obama didn’t do more to stop the Russian meddling, a possible answer may be that Republicans chose to play politics. (Obama also did throw 35 Russians out of the country, which in our estimation was a slap on the wrist.) Had Republicans agreed to a true 9/11-type commission to investigate Russian meddling, we might have already gotten to the bottom of this. (Come to think of it, perhaps that is exactly why they wouldn’t agree to a commission.)

The GOP’s Dangerous Pattern of Putting Party Over Country
McConnell’s inaction while the Russians attacked the integrity of the presidential election is a feature of the modern Republican Party, not a bug.

Inside the State Where the GOP’s Authoritarian Streak Has Run Wild
North Carolina's power-grab politics have been replicated all over the country.

Trump Falsely Warns of Multistate Voter-Fraud Conspiracy

This simple chart debunks the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton sold uranium to Russia

The Nunes memo shows Republicans buy their own conspiracy theories

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Thursday after attending a classified briefing that he continues to support special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, including possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

McConnell told NPR that Mueller's investigation and a separate probe by the Justice Department's inspector general into the FBI's actions during the 2016 election will ultimately provide answers to a number of questions swirling around the presidential race.

"The two investigations going on that I think will give us the answers to the questions that you raise — the [inspector general] investigation in the Justice Department and the Mueller investigation," McConnell told NPR.

"I support both of them, and I don't really have anything to add to this subject based upon the Gang of Eight briefing that we had today, which was classified."

McConnell's vote of confidence in Mueller's investigation came after he attended a highly classified meeting with top law enforcement and intelligence officials on Thursday.

McConnell says he will not allow vote on bill protecting Mueller from firing