Tag: Trump 2016 campaign

Yates spars with GOP at testy hearing

The Hill logoRepublican senators sparred on Wednesday with former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates over investigations into former Trump aides that were related to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. 

Yates testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of Chairman Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) probe into the origins of the FBI’s Russia investigation and former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Graham is one of two Senate Republicans running probes into the Obama administration’s investigations of Russia. 

The hearing, however, also had overtones of the 2020 election. Graham is a key Senate ally of President Trump, and the investigations are ramping up with less than 100 days to go before the 2020 election. Trump is badly trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in national and key swing-state polls. Continue reading.

This paragraph from before Trump’s election now looks ominously prescient about his ability to inspire violence

AlterNet logoWith just days left before the 2016 election and with Donald Trump projected to have a 33 percent chance of winning the presidency, Lawfare writers Quinta Jurecic and Ben Wittes published a paragraph that now looks disturbingly prescient about the movement of Trumpism:

Jurecic shared the paragraph over the weekend after the recent mass shootings, writing: “[Wittes] and I wrote this four days before the 2016 election. I’ve never really stopped thinking about it.”

The piece itself analogized the movement behind Trump to the Muslim Brotherhood. Its point wasn’t to say that the movements were equivalent, but that they had similar functions as political ideologies and potential drivers of extremist violence.

View the complete August 6 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

Here are five irrefutable facts about Trump’s connection to Russia

AlterNet logoIn July 2016, Donald Trump — then still the Republican Party’s presidential candidate — openly encouraged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic Party’s nominee for the White House.

“I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” Trump told a group of reporters assembled reporters at a news conference.

As former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report made clear, this was not the beginning of Trump’s association with Russia — but it was certainly a flashpoint.

View the complete August 4 article by Matthew Rozsa from Salon on the AlterNet logo here.