The following article was posted on the Daily Beast website November 16, 2017:
CREDIT: JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERS
Former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak has said it would take him more than 20 minutes to list all the Trump officials he’s had contact with because the “list is so long.” In an interview aired on Russia’s state-run Channel One television station Thursday, Kislyak dismissed accusations of Russian election meddling as “nonsense” concocted by President Trump’s opponents but acknowledged that he’d had extensive contact with members of Trump’s administration. The list of contacts is “so long,” he said, “that I’m not going to be able to go through it in 20 minutes.” Kislyak, who has been a central figure in the U.S. investigation into the Kremlin’s alleged election interference, declined to give further details on what was discussed with Trump officials but said it was all part of normal diplomatic discourse. Kislyak was recalled as Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. in June. His comments came just a few days after Attorney General Jeff Sessions was grilled by the House Judiciary Committee on his interactions with the Russian ambassador.
The following article by John Cassidy was posted on the New Yorker website November 14, 2017:
The President’s eldest son, Donald Trump, Jr., is once again in the soup, following revelations that he corresponded with WikiLeaks during the 2016 Presidential election. Credit: Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty
With his Fifth Avenue-redneck persona and his affinity for the alt-right, Donald Trump, Jr., has sometimes been described as a chip off the old block. But his relationship with his father hasn’t always been a smooth one.
When Trump, Jr., was twelve, his father left his mother, Ivana, for a much younger woman, Marla Maples. It has been widely reported that Trump, Jr., stopped talking to his father for a time after that. They reportedly had some run-ins later on, too, when Trump, Jr., was enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. “Don Jr. opened the door, wearing a Yankee jersey,” Scott Melker, one of his former classmates, wrote on Facebook last year, describing what happened on one occasion when Trump came to take his son to a Yankees game. “Without saying a word, his father slapped him across the face, knocking him to the floor in front of all of his classmates. He simply said “put on a suit and meet me outside,’ and closed the door.” (The Trumps have denied this account.) Continue reading “Donald Trump’s Trump, Jr., Problem”
The following article by Aaron Blake was posted on the Washington Post website November 14, 2017:
President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. communicated with WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign. Here’s what the messages say. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
On Oct. 14, 2016, Mike Pence took to Fox News and flat-out denied that the Trump campaign was “in cahoots” with WikiLeaks. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” the Republican vice-presidential nominee said.
Adam Schiff isn’t going quiet any time soon — no matter what his Republican colleagues on the House Intelligence Committee might want.
The California Democrat has been a pervasive presence on cable news networks during the panel’s investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election. He has claimed “clear evidence” of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and last week issued a Twitter screed calling President Trump “the worst president in modern history.”
Schiff’s rising profile hasn’t escaped the notice of the president.“Sleazy Adam Schiff, the totally biased Congressman looking into ‘Russia,’ spends all of his time on television pushing the Dem loss excuse!” Trump tweeted over the summer. Continue reading “Dems find an unlikely attack dog on Russia”
The following article by Mark Hosenball and John Walcott was posted on the Reuters website November 10, 2017:
Credit: Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has questioned Sam Clovis, co-chairman of President Donald Trump’s election campaign, to determine if Trump or top aides knew of the extent of the campaign team’s contacts with Russia, two sources familiar with the investigation said on Friday.
The focus of the questions put to Clovis by Mueller’s team has not been previously reported.
“The ultimate question Mueller is after is whether candidate Trump and then President-elect Trump knew of the discussions going on with Russia, and who approved or even directed them,” said one source. “That is still just a question.”
Clovis testified in late October before the grand jury in Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He is also cooperating with the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating the same issues.
Contacted late on Friday, the White House declined to comment.
One of the sources described Clovis as “another domino” after former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI over his own contacts with Russians during the 2016 election campaign.
“The investigators now know what Papadopoulos was doing on the Russian front, which he initially tried to conceal, and who he told that to,” said the other source. “Now [they] want to know whether Clovis and others reported these activities and others related to Russia, and if so, to whom,” this source said.
Attorneys for Clovis did not respond to requests for comment. Lawyers for Papadopoulos had no immediate comment.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, declined to comment.
According to court documents related to Papadopoulos’ guilty plea, he reported to Clovis in an email on a March 24, 2016, meeting he had in London with a professor later identified as Joseph Mifsud.
Mifsud in turn introduced him to a Russian woman and the Russian ambassador in London, and they discussed setting up meetings to talk about U.S.-Russia ties in a Trump presidency.
The documents showed Clovis responded to the proposed meetings by saying he would “work it through the campaign.” While he told Papadopoulos not to make a commitment then to set up those meetings, he congratulated him for “great work.”
In August 2016, after Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, Clovis encouraged Papadopoulos to “make the trip” when Papadopoulos proposed going to an off-the-record meeting with unnamed Russian officials, the court documents show.
Victoria Toensing, one of Clovis’s lawyers, said last week her client “always vigorously opposed any Russian trip for Donald Trump and/or the campaign”.
After Papadopoulos’ guilty plea, the White House and former Trump campaign officials dismissed Papadopoulos and Clovis as minor figures in the campaign.
The campaign’s National Security Advisory Committee, which Clovis formed, has become a focus of the investigations by both Mueller and the Senate, sources said.
“Sam built the first group of eight,” J.D. Gordon, the director of the campaign foreign policy group, told Reuters, adding that he and then-Senator Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. Attorney General, had “nearly doubled” it in size.
However, two other sources familiar with the investigations said investigators have been told the committee Clovis formed did very little, and that other advisers appeared to carry more weight with Trump.
The following article by Eric Lutz was posted on the mic.com website November 11, 2017:
Stephen Miller — a top aide to President Donald Trump — was reportedly in regular contact with George Papadopoulos, contradicting the White House characterization of the former foreign policy adviser as having played an “extremely limited” role on the campaign.
The following article by Brett Samuels was posted on the Hill website November 9, 2017:
White House senior adviser Stephen Miller has been interviewed as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Russian influence over the 2016 election, CNN reported Thursday.
WASHINGTON — A congressional committee investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election released a transcript late Monday of a seven-hour interview lawmakers conducted last week behind closed doors with Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.
Some details from the interview were previously known, including the fact that Mr. Page traveled to Russia in summer 2016, when he was part of the campaign.
The House Intelligence Committee on Monday night released more than 200 pages of transcripts from its marathon interview of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, sprawling testimony that contained new details about the closely-scrutinized foreign policy aide’s relationship to Moscow.
The following article by Rosalind S. Helderman, Tom Hamburger and Carol D. Leonnig was posted on the Washington Post website November 5, 2017:
Contacts between Russians and members of Donald Trump’s team occurred multiple times during the 2016 campaign and presidential transition. (Alice Li, Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
After questions emerged about whether campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page had ties to Russia, President Trump called him a “very low-level member” of a committee and said that “I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to him.”
