Day 133: The Russia stories are now coming two at a time
On tap today: potential felonies covering up meetings, turning compounds in the U.S. back to Russian spies.
Somehow, inexplicably, the Trump-Russia stories are increasing in frequency, with two more emerging yesterday.
The first, potentially more innocuous — that is, if you consider felonies to potentially cover up collusion and other felonies innocuous — involved Attorney General Jeff Sessions being investigated by Congress for omitting yet another meeting with the Russian ambassador on his SF-86 disclosure form.
SF-86 is used for vetting purposes to get security clearance. He has already admitted failing to include at least two meetings with the ambassador after his confirmation hearings for attorney general.
If proven, he will have now committed perjury to get his job and to get security clearance.
Both types of omissions by the nation’s highest lawyer are felonies, subject to substantial prison time. Of course, Congress has mostly looked the other way on these issues so far, except for pressuring him to recuse himself from overseeing the Trump-Russia probe.
The second bit of news is that Trump wants to return to the Russians their property that was seized after their election meddling came to light.
The Russian embassy tweeted an unveiled threat less than two weeks ago.
The “great negotiator” folded like a cheap table.
What potentially makes this more scary than the Sessions news — and again, that could certainly be worse if the meetings were covered up to avoid evidence of collusion between Team Trump and Russia — is that there aren’t any obvious reasons for Trump to return the property to a country who used it to spy on the U.S.
Russia is openly admitting they hacked the election.
Barack Obama ousted the Russians in a move the intelligence community wanted for decades based on the belief that the sites were being used to spy on American interests by Russian intelligence.
Obama openly confirmed as much when he stated on December 29 that the compounds were being “used by Russian personnel for intelligence-related purposes”
Now, Trump is open to letting the Russians move back in? Why?
There are no obvious reasons — political, strategic or economic — for letting them return, other than the nefarious.
Russia spied. Russia hacked. Russia ousted. Makes sense.
Trump wins presidency. Russia says let us move back in. Russia gets to move back in. Makes no sense.
Trump folded for apparently no reason in a move that will allow Russian spies to continue to do what they do.
133 days in, 1329 to go
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