Fresh evidence Trump’s Russia headaches are not going away

The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch was posted on the Washington Post website March 24, 2017:

THE BIG IDEA: The drip, drip, drip of damaging Russia revelations continues, as White House efforts to change the narrative backfire.

— CNN reported late last night that the FBI has information that indicates associates of Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Clinton’s campaign: “This is partly what FBI Director James Comey was referring to when he made a bombshell announcement Monday before Congress that the FBI is investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. … The FBI is now reviewing that information, which includes human intelligence, travel, business and phone records and accounts of in-person meetings.” Three nuggets from the CNN report:

• “One law enforcement official said the information in hand suggests ‘people connected to the campaign were in contact and it appeared they were giving the thumbs up to release information when it was ready.’”
• The FBI cannot yet prove that collusion took place, but the information suggesting collusion is now a large focus of the investigation.
• The public attention has made it harder to prove: “One of the obstacles the sources say the FBI now faces in finding conclusive intelligence is that communications between Trump’s associates and Russians have ceased in recent months given the public focus on Russia’s alleged ties to the Trump campaign. Some Russian officials have also changed their methods of communications, making monitoring more difficult.”

Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign chairman, talks to reporters at the Republican National Convention in July. (AP/Matt Rourke)

— The White House continues trying to distance Trump from Paul Manafort, but his decades-long business associate, Rick Gates, remains entrenched at the highest rungs of the president’s political operation. Tom Hamburger reports: “Gates is one of four people leading a Trump-blessed group that defends the president’s agenda. As recently as last week, he was at the White House to meet with officials as part of that work. Through Manafort, Gates is tied to many of the same business titans from Ukraine and Russia, including Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with strong ties to [Vladimir Putin]. On Wednesday, the AP reported that Manafort had a multimillion-dollar contract with Deripaska between at least 2005 and 2009 that was aimed at helping the political interests of Putin. Gates also acknowledged a role in at least two recent, controversial deals involving separate Putin-connected oligarchs, including one other with Deripaska. Gates joined the firm in 2006. That year, the firm wooed Deripaska as a client, telling him that their goal was to set up a $200 million fund to make a series of private equity investments and acquisitions, primarily in Russia and Ukraine … Deripaska’s ties to Putin are so close that Russia’s foreign minister has asked U.S. secretary of states for more than a decade to help Deripaska secure a visa to enter the United States.” According to a 2007 report, Deripaska had been denied by the DOJ because of alleged ties to organized crime.

— The Associated Press reports this morning that Treasury Department officials have obtained information about offshore financial transactions involving Manafort as part of a federal anti-corruption investigation into his work in Eastern Europe: “Information about Manafort’s transactions was turned over earlier this year to U.S. agents … by investigators in Cyprus at the U.S. agency’s request …  It was not immediately clear what time period was covered under the government request for information about Manafort’s financial transactions in Cyprus. Manafort was known to route financial transactions through Cyprus … In one case, the AP found that a Manafort-linked company received a $1 million payment in October 2009 from a mysterious firm through the Bank of Cyprus. The $1 million payment left the account the same day — split in two, roughly $500,000 disbursements to accounts with no obvious owner. There is nothing inherently illicit about using multiple companies as Manafort was doing. But it was unclear why he would have been involved with companies in Cyprus, known for its history of money laundering.”

DAMAGE CONTROL BACKFIRES:

— House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R) accused U.S. spy agencies of “abusing” their surveillance powers by gathering and sharing information about Trump’s transition team – an unproven accusation that stunned observers and threatened to derail his committee’s probe of Russian interference in the presidential race. Greg Miller, Karoun Demirjian and Devlin Barrett report: Nunes, a close Trump ally and former member of his transition team, said in a press conference Wednesday that he was “alarmed” after seeing intelligence reports after the election that referenced U.S. citizens affiliated with Trump and possibly Trump himself. “What I’ve read seems to me to be some level of surveillance activity — perhaps legal, but I don’t know that it’s right,” Nunes told reporters outside the White House. “I don’t know that the American people would be comfortable with what I’ve read.”

“Nunes’s statements were remarkable on numerous levels,” our colleagues on the national security beat explain: “He publicly discussed FISA-approved surveillance, something that Comey had refused to do before Nunes’s committee days earlier. Nunes also attributed his information to an anonymous source, after he and other members of his party have bemoaned media reports relying on unnamed people. Perhaps most significantly, Nunes went to the White House to brief the president on the details of material potentially gathered as part of his panel’s investigation into associates of the president and Russia’s interference in the campaign.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain arrives for a Republican policy meeting at the Capitol. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

MACK THE KNIFE:

— Nunes’s refusal to disclose how he had obtained the documents and his unusual handling of the material — which he withheld from other committee members even while rushing to present it to the White House — were interpreted by many as a sign that his discovery was engineered to help the administration.

— The chairman’s decision to so explicitly come to Trump’s aid has undermined his credibility and raised new questions about the integrity of his investigation.

— Some prominent Republicans are starting to say publicly that only an independent investigation will remove “the big gray cloud” that now hangs over the White House, as Nunes himself put it on Monday. John McCain described Nunes’s actions as “bizarre” last night and said it is is turning what should be a serious probe into a “political sideshow.” The Arizona senator called for either a select committee or an independent commission to investigate the matter: “No longer does the Congress have credibility to handle this alone, and I don’t say that lightly,” McCain told Greta Van Susteren on MSNBC.

MORE BACKLASH:

— Top Democrats said Nunes breached a legal line by publicly discussing secret intelligence work:

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the congressman’s statements “appear to reveal classified information, which is a serious concern.” With regard to the substance of his claims, he added, “I have no idea what he is talking about.”

Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, accused Nunes of compromising their investigation, saying his remarks cast “quite a profound cloud over our ability to do the work.” “The chairman will need to decide whether he is the chairman of an independent investigation into conduct which includes allegations of potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians, or he is going to act as a surrogate for the White House, because he can’t do both,” the California congressman said. (In an MSNBC appearance later, he said there is “more than circumstantial evidence” that Trump officials colluded with Russia.)

— The leaders of the House Oversight Committee have asked the White House to turn over all information it has related to payments that ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn received from foreign governments. (Huffington Post)

— How does this all end? “The most likely scenario for collusion [between Trump officials and Russia] seems fuzzier and less transactional than many Democrats anticipate,” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes today. “A bit of conjecture: The Russians for years had influence over [Trump] because of their investments with him, and he was by nature inclined to admire [Putin] as a strongman ruler. Meanwhile, Trump had in his orbit a number of people with Moscow ties, including Manafort, who practically bleeds borscht. This is guesswork, but it might have seemed natural for Trump aides to try to milk Russian contacts for useful information about the Clinton campaign. Likewise, the Russians despised [Clinton] and would have been interested in milking American contacts … This kind of soft collusion, evolving over the course of the campaign without a clear quid pro quo, might also explain why there weren’t greater efforts to hide the Trump team’s ties to Russia, or to camouflage its softening of the Republican Party platform position toward Moscow. … The fundamental question now isn’t about Trump’s lies, or intelligence leaks, or inadvertent collection of Trump communications. Rather, the crucial question is as monumental as it is simple: Was there treason?”

Trump speaks yesterday during his meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus in the Cabinet Room. (Chip Somodevilla/EPA)

THE CREDIBILITY GAP:

— Trump insisted that the Nunes comments vindicated his wiretapping claims during an afternoon interview with Time Magazine: “When I said wiretapping, it was in quotes. Because ‘wiretapping’ is, you know, today it is different than wire tapping. It is just a good description. But ‘wiretapping’ was in quotes. What I’m talking about is surveillance. … Nunes just had a news conference. Now probably it got obliterated by what’s happened in London. But (he) just had a news conference, and (I hear) it is one of those things. … I think this is going to be very interesting. I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right. When everyone said I wasn’t going to win the election, I said well I think I would.” (Read the full transcript here.)

“Trump argued that his claims about scandalous wiretaps by Obama had to be viewed within the context of other assertions he had made in the past, which had later come true,” Michael Scherer writes in his cover story. “He had predicted, for instance, that the sexting of [Anthony Weiner] would become a problem for [Clinton’s] campaign, which it did … He had claimed that he would win the White House, when few believed him, which he did. He claimed that Britain would vote to exit the European Union—‘I took a lot of heat when I said Brexit was going to pass.’ He described Brussels as a ‘hellhole’ before a major terrorist attack there. ‘I happen to be a person that knows how life works,’ he said. Truth, in other words, takes time to ripen … [and] the more the conversation continued, the more the binary distinctions between truth and falsehood blurred, the telltale sign of a veteran and strategic misleader who knows enough to leave himself an escape route when he tosses a bomb.”

— Not helping their cause, Trump’s advisers are making clear that they see Nunes as a member of their team.

This is from an assistant to the president and the White House’s director of social media:

Aligned outside groups are also raising money off Nunes’s trip to the White House:

— Jeb Bush’s former communications director is one of many GOP operatives who think the Nunes gambit may backfire:

— “Morning Joe” suggested that the CNN story last night was an orchestrated response to Nunes holding his press conference:

View the post here.