Like Mussolini before him, Trump is a master of manipulating the media. Though not exactly unconstitutional, Trump's propaganda and nonstop lying also threatens our democracy. (The New York Times keeps a running list of all the times Trump has demonstrably lied since he was sworn in.)

According to ThinkProgress, Trump's constant barrage of lies has a purpose: to spread so much disinformation that no one can agree on the facts. For instance: Trump "tells lies that are seemingly random, frequently inconsistent, and often plainly ridiculous.
"He says or tweets things on the record and then denies having ever said them. He contradicts documented fact and then disregards anyone who points out the inaccuracies. He even lies when he has no discernible reason to do so -- and then turns around and tells another lie that flies in the face of the previous one.
"Because of the constant media focus on his campaign, Trump was able to bombard the airwaves with an unending stream of surreal falsehoods.
"Many of the stories promulgated by Trump, [his then advisor Stephen] Bannon, and their allies -- such as Trump’s claim that Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the Kennedy assassination -- were obviously false and easily debunked. But the sheer volume of these stories had their intended effect. When fake news becomes omnipresent, all news becomes suspect. Everything starts to look like a lie.
"[Trump] is going to use the respect and deference typically accorded to the presidency as an instrument for spreading more lies. Reporters must refuse to treat him like a normal president and refuse to bestow any unearned legitimacy on his administration... The incoming president has made clear that he expects unquestioning obedience from the press, and will regard anyone who doesn’t give it to him as an enemy. That is the choice every news outlet faces for the next four years: Subservience and complicity, or open hostility. There is no middle ground."

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich points out that Trump's lies also serve as a diversion. When confronted with damaging news, Trump tweets even more outrageous lies. This swings attention away from the damaging news as reporters scramble to cover (or disprove) Trump's latest falsehoods.

When writing an Open Letter to the Members of the Electoral College, I researched the Republican electors -- the State assemblyman, the chairman of the GOP county organization, the retired mayor, and so on -- who met in December to formally elect the President. I was flabbergasted to see how many of their websites and Facebook pages linked to fake news articles and blogs claiming that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was planning to throw all our country's Christians into concentration camps. (Google those keywords to see what I mean.) As some Republican elected officials actually seem to believe this nonsense, it's no wonder that some ordinary voters thought Trump was the lesser evil.

The frightening thing is: According to Andrew Weisburd, Clint Watts and JM Berger, those fake news stories were planted by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in an attempt to discredit Clinton before the election. The fake stories claiming Clinton was in poor health and had ordered the murder of an aide were also examples of this. (Trump admires Putin, and Putin benefits greatly by having a sympathizer in the White House.)

Who is Vladimir Putin?

Then-President George W. Bush said of Putin: "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul."

A wiser assessment came from Senator John McCain. "I looked into Mr. Putin's eyes, and I saw three letters, a 'K,' a 'G,' and a 'B.' And their aggression in Georgia is not acceptable behavior." McCain referred to Russia's 2008 invasion of Sakartvelo, Russia's southern neighbor generally called "Georgia" in English.

A former KGB agent and former communist, the Russian dictator has ruled his country -- either as President or Prime Minister -- since 2000. According to The Atlantic, Putin spent that time gradually dismantling the republic built by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. According to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Putin banned freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of the press. He orders torture and persecutes religious minorities. His regime has been linked to the murder of journalists. According to Newsweek and the New York Times, analysts have called Putin's regime fascist.

The KGB was the Soviet Union's State Security Committee. Its function was to keep the communist dictatorship in power, and acted as a foreign and domestic intelligence service and as a secret police force. President Yeltsin abolished it in 1991 when the Soviet Union disbanded. According to The Telegraph, Putin revived the KGB in late 2016 -- now calling it the State Security Ministry (MGB).

Putin is ambitious and expansionist. He conquered territory from two of his neighbors -- Sakartvelo (Georgia) in 2008, and Ukraine in 2014. According to Politico, psychological and propaganda warfare were key to Putin's victory.

What does Putin want? The Atlantic reports that Putin wants to discredit Western nations and the concept of democracy to cement his control over his own country. If he can convince the Russian people that democracy doesn't work and Western people don't really have a voice in their governments, the Russian people will give up on seeking a voice in Russia's government.

According to Politico, Putin's "purpose... is not the physical destruction of the enemy, but the internal eroding of our readiness, will, and values."

According to Newsweek, the New York Intelligencer, and Politico, Trump has extensive financial ties to the Russian government. Trump didn't deny this until he entered politics, at which point he denied having anything to do with Russia whatsoever -- even though he was trying to build a Trump hotel in Moscow at the time. The Hill later reported that the Trump Organization planned to give Putin a penthouse in the hotel.

According to an investigation by the New Republic, Trump has extensive business ties to Russian criminals, some of whom are now in prison. "A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia," the magazine reported. "Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part...
"In 2015, the [Trump-owned] Taj Mahal was fined $10 million—the highest penalty ever levied by the feds against a casino—and admitted to having 'willfully violated' anti-money-laundering regulations for years."

Is Donald Trump a Russian agent? No. Did Russian hackers break into voting machines and change the totals? No. There's no evidence for that.

Did Russian propaganda and disinformation influence the election? Absolutely.

• According to NBC News, ABC News, and Mother Jones, Vladimir Putin personally supervised Russian efforts to manipulate the American election. According to The Atlantic, these hacks were typical of Putin's efforts to destabilize and disparage his enemies.
• According to The Guardian, Russian hackers operated directly out of the Kremlin. They began hacking Trump's opponents and publishing pro-Trump propaganda as early as March 2016.
• According to the New York Times, during the primary season, Putin launched disinformation campaigns against Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator Marco Rubio, and former Governor Jeb Bush when they were running against Trump. (Paradoxically, Graham later called for criminal charges against Christopher Steele, a British investigator who tried to stop this.)
• According to Mother Jones and Esquire, NSA Director Michael Rogers said that hackers working for the GRU - Russian military intelligence - broke into the email accounts of Clinton allies and published their private emails in a deliberate attempt to embarrass and discredit Clinton. According to USA Today, 16 other American intelligence agencies (and the FBI) confirmed this. The New York Times described how this was done -- and how Russia used similar cyber-attacks against their neighbors Ukraine, Estonia, and Sakartvelo (Georgia). Russia later used a similar attack against France. The Daily Mail reported that Russian propaganda attacks also influenced Brexit -- the United Kingdom's disastrous vote to leave the European Union economic alliance. (Twelve Russian intelligence officers were indicted for these crimes in July 2018.)
• Mother Jones reported that Putin also launched disinformation campaigns to manipulate elections in Sweden and Germany, with varying degrees of success. France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands then took steps to fight Putin's cyberattacks. Under Trump and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, the United States has done nothing to protect the United States.
• According to the Washington Post, the CIA discovered that GRU hackers had stolen emails from both the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee. However: the hackers only leaked the Democrats' emails to the public. The CIA -- backed by other intelligence agencies -- concluded that Russia was deliberately helping Trump.
• According to Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald, the official Russian news agency doctored some of those leaked documents to make them sound incriminating -- and Donald Trump trumpeted those falsified documents as the real thing.
  "This is not funny," Eichenwald wrote. "It is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the same manufactured story as truth.
  "Americans should be outraged. [Putin's] totalitarian regime, engaged in what are arguably war crimes in Syria to protect its government puppet, is working to upend a democracy to the benefit of an American candidate [Trump] who uttered positive comments just Sunday about the Kremlin's campaign on behalf of [Syrian dictator] Bashar al-Assad."
• According to the BBC, Russian hackers broke into State government computers and stole voter registration lists. They then used those lists to bombard registered voters on social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) with propaganda and disinformation. This "fake news" was meant to create sympathy for Trump by lying about his political rivals.
• Facebook later admitted they had unwittingly sold advertising space to a Putin-connected company - the so-called "Internet Research Agency," or IRA. The IRA used that space to push disinformation. The Guardian reports that "120 fake Russian-backed pages created 80,000 posts" of disinformation that "reached as many as 126 million Americans."
• The New York Times reported that Putin's operatives set up hundreds of fraudulent Twitter accounts pushing anti-Clinton propaganda. Google also admitted they sold advertising space to Putin-connected propagandists -- a different group of propagandists from the ones who targeted Facebook.
• According to the Daily Beast, one of those bogus Twitter accounts churned out fraudulent headlines for months while posing as the Tennessee State Republican Party. (For instance: "BREAKING: Obama’s CIA posed as RUSSIAN HACKERS to disguise their dirty work!") Those fake news stories were retweeted by members of the Trump campaign, including Donald Trump Jr., Michael Flynn, Kellyanne Conway, and Roger Stone.
• The Washington Post talked to Jonathan Albright, a social media analyst. Albright analyzed traffic from six fake Facebook accounts created by Russian propagandists.

  "For six of the sites that have been made public — Blacktivists, United Muslims of America, Being Patriotic, Heart of Texas, Secured Borders and LGBT United — Albright found that the content had been “shared” 340 million times. That’s from a tiny sliver of the 470 accounts that have been made public. Even if those sites were unusually effective compared to the 464 others, Albright’s findings still suggest a total reach well into the billions of “shares” on Facebook... more people had direct “interactions” with regular posts from just [these] six accounts than saw the ads from all 470 pages and accounts that Facebook has identified as controlled by the Russian troll farm in St. Petersburg, called the Internet Research Agency...
  "The other revelation in Albright’s download... is that most of them have nothing to do with the Nov. 8 election. Instead they are tailored to fit seamlessly into the ordinary online conversation of their particular audiences — politically activated African Americans, gay women, Muslims and people concerned about illegal immigration, Texan heritage or the treatment of veterans. There is talk of political issues, but relatively little about voting for Republican Donald Trump or against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
  "That suggests that the Facebook part of the Russian disinformation campaign consisted of at least two steps: The first was to identify voters and sort them into buckets based on the issues they responded to. This was done through the organic posts. The second step was to target voters in these buckets with Russian- bought political ads shaped to their interests, with the intention -- in at least some cases -- of affecting voting behavior. 'They were working to lead people along and develop a sense of trust,' Albright said.
  "The tone of the posts varies strikingly by the page. The one seemingly managed by a lesbian is intimate, confidential and chatty, with complaints about parents and teachers not understanding the challenges of being young and gay. The English is nearly flawless...
  "The United Muslim posts take pride in their religion, demand respect and seek to distance their faith from terrorism and ISIS [DAESH]. 'Share if you believe Muslims have nothing to do with 9/11. Let's see how many people know the truth!,' said one that reached 35,275 news feeds.
  "The Blacktivist posts are assertive and often angry, with many references to police violence against African Americans. Several urge the sharing of a video. One that reached 68,000 news feeds said, 'There is a war going against black kids.'
  "The other pages are conservative and anti-immigrant, with particular complaints about the treatment of U.S. veterans.
  "One on 'Being Patriotic,' said, 'At least 50,000 homeless veterans are starving dying in the streets, but liberals want to invite 620,000 refugees and settle them among us. We have to take care of our own citizens, and it must be the primary goal for our politicians!' That post reached the news feeds of 724,323 Facebook users.
  "The most explicitly political of the posts may be from Secured Borders, which routinely refers to Clinton as 'Killary' instead of Hillary. Many of the posts Abright collected went viral, reaching tens or hundreds of thousands of Facebook news feeds, often by posing a question or calling for a response — tools known to people savvy in the use of social media."

• Bloomberg News reported that Putin's hackers broke into the voting records of 39 States, and made attempts to remove voters from the rolls. Those efforts appeared unsuccessful -- this time. "One former senior U.S. official expressed concern that the Russians now have three years to build on their knowledge of U.S. voting systems before the next presidential election, and there is every reason to believe they will use what they have learned in future attacks."
• According to the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Huffington Post, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said his government had been in touch with Trump's campaign throughout the election season. According to Slate Magazine, an internet server registered to Trump's business was in constant communication with Russia.
• The New York Times reported that Trump's original campaign manager (Paul Manafort) and at least two others (Carter Page and Roger Stone) were in contact with Russian hackers throughout the election campaign. Manafort has close ties to Putin's regime and to former Ukrainian dictator Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally. Manafort has since been convicted of tax fraud and bank fraud, and Stone was convicted of witness tampering and lying to Congress. According to The Guardian, the Trump Administration later pressured the FBI and two members of Congress to deny the New York Times story. (Trump pardoned Manafort and Stone after losing the 2020 election.)
• According to the declassified intelligence report produced by the National Intelligence Director: the Russian propaganda machine was originally called Russia Today. In 2008, it changed its name to RT and set up a bogus nonprofit as its parent company in order to disguise the fact that it's controlled by the Russian government. In 2016:

  RT had a de facto alliance with WikiLeaks.

  RT produced propaganda videos falsely claiming Clinton was in poor health, had stolen all the money from her charity, and had financial ties to the Iraqi-Syrian terrorist group DAESH (the so-called "Islamic State.") RT posted these videos on the Internet to avoid the regulations that govern normal media.

  RT skillfully mixes truth with lies to attract, seduce, and radicalize viewers with legitimate desires for reform. For instance, reports on the (real) dangers of fracking are meant to create sympathy for Gazprom, the Russian government-controlled oil company.

  RT's leaders admit that part of their mission is to undermine Americans' confidence in the democratic process. (The fact that RT helped usher into power a candidate who lost the popular vote and is hostile to democracy is a considerable victory for them.)

  Putin and RT were planning a propaganda war against Clinton when it appeared she would win the election.

• The New Yorker reported that "Kremlin-backed operatives, hiding behind fake and stolen identities, posed as Americans on Facebook and Twitter, spreading lies and fanning ethnic and religious hatred with the aim of damaging Clinton and helping Trump. The Kremlin apparently spent about a million dollars a month to fund Internet trolls working round-the-clock shifts in a run-down office building in St. Petersburg."
• The Daily News Bin, The Daily Beast, and Mother Jones theorized that Russia has been blackmailing Trump and the Republican Party by threatening to release their private emails too.
• By August 2016, every American intelligence agency had concluded that Russian hackers had broken into American computers in an attempt to manipulate the election. In a Mother Jones article, journalist David Corn pointed out that even after Trump began receiving classified intelligence briefings, Trump spent the next six months denying that any cyber-attacks had taken place. At first he accused the Democratic National Committee of making the whole thing up. Trump eventually acknowledged that a cyber-attack had taken place, but blamed the Chinese government instead. Corn concludes: "Trump and his crew were active enablers of Putin’s operation to subvert an American election."
• According to NBC News, Putin launched a social media campaign in support of Green Party candidate Jill Stein hoping that Stein would draw votes away from Clinton. (Although the Green Party was founded to protect the environment, Stein is a pro-Putin nutcase.)
• Trump denies that Russian hacking had anything to do with his becoming President, and neither he nor Congress have done anything to secure our voting systems against similar attacks in the future. Instead, as Politico points out, "If the Trump campaign itself has openly discussed its use of data-backed information operations to conduct targeted voter-suppression campaigns... why would we believe the Russians wouldn’t be experimenting with the same tools and tactics?...
  "We just choose not to believe what Russia says, when they have repeatedly outlined what their strategic goals are and then moved to achieve them by force and guile."
• As Ambassador John Shattuck wrote in the Boston Globe: "The federal crime of treason is committed by a person 'owing allegiance to the United States who... adheres to their enemies, giving them aid or comfort.' ... By denigrating or seeking to prevent an investigation of the Russian cyberattack, Trump is giving aid or comfort to an enemy of the United States."

• "President Obama did not respond militarily to [Putin's 2014 invasion of Ukraine]. But he was not passive. Together with the European Union, the U.S. imposed several rounds of painful economic and financial sanctions on key Russian officials, banks, and businesses.
• "Putin has been desperate to get out from under these sanctions so that his regime can thrive domestically and internationally.
• Putin "seeks to restore some form of Russian empire —with at least informal dominion over all the territories of the former Soviet Union— while forcing the West to accept this new balance of power and treat Russia as a superpower once again.
• "Democracy is his enemy. [Putin] is smart enough to know that he cannot undermine it everywhere, but he will subvert, corrupt, and confuse it wherever he can."
• The Atlantic suggests that "The president-elect of the United States reportedly owes his office in considerable part to illegal clandestine activities in his favor conducted by a hostile, foreign spy service. It's hard to imagine a crisis of presidential legitimacy more extreme than that." Putin wants to weaken, divide, and destabilize the United States, and Trump is the perfect person to do it for him. Trump is deeply unpopular and regularly insults women, minorities, reporters, judges, members of his own party, members of the opposition party, intelligence professonals, allied countries, and anyone who did not vote for him. Republicans controlled both houses of Congress for the first two years of Trump's presidency and had no interest in holding him accountable -- essentially placing Trump above the law. The fact that Putin helped Trump attain the most powerful office in the country even though he was rejected by a majority of voters will set Americans against each other for years. This is exactly what Putin wants.

• "Trump's most shocking, pro-Kremlin proposal is to 'look into' recognition of Crimea [conquered from Ukraine in 2014] as a part of Russia. President Obama and nearly every member of Congress, Republican and Democrat, have rejected that idea vigorously.
• "Trump also has made clear his disdain for the United States’ alliances around the world. Demonstrating his misunderstanding of how NATO works, Trump has demanded that other NATO members essentially pay us for protection, making many of our allies, especially in the eastern part of Europe, nervous about his commitment to defend them." [Putin wants to expand Russian influence over American allies in eastern Europe, and American indifference is exactly what he wants.]
• "Trump has also disparaged our allies in Asia, creating new opportunities for Russian influence.
• "On trade, Trump's promises to disrupt our agreements also play right into Putin's agenda. From Putin's perspective, what could be [better] than a trade war between the United States and China or Mexico?
• "Trump's threats to stop paying our debts also would radically undermine our credibility as a lender, another desirable outcome for Putin.
• "Trump advocates isolationist policies and an abdication of U.S. leadership in the world. He cares little about promoting democracy and human rights. A U.S. retreat from global affairs fits precisely with Putin's international interests."

• According to the New York Post, Trump considered retired General Michael Flynn for the Vice Presidency in July 2016. Flynn is a Putin sympathizer. Though Trump eventually selected Mike Pence, Flynn joined the Trump campaign and gave a speech at the Republican National Convention. According to the Washington Post, Flynn (working for Trump) and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (working for Putin) were in contact throughout the 2016 election campaign. After Putin's efforts to manipulate the election became public knowledge, then-President Obama imposed further sanctions on December 28. The very next day, Flynn spoke to Kislyak, and apparently told him that Trump would lift those sanctions after he was sworn in. As Flynn held no government position at that time, he had no authority to negotiate with Russia, and thus violated the Logan Act. By providing "aid or comfort" to America's enemy, he may have committed treason as well. Trump later made Flynn his National Security Advisor. Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, who knows Flynn, wrote that Flynn would never have spoken for Trump without his friend knowing about it.
• The New York Times reported that acting Attorney General Sally Yates warned Trump that Flynn had lied to Mike Pence about his contacts with Kislyak. As Kislyak knew this, he could easily blackmail Flynn. Instead of firing Flynn, Trump fired Yates. Flynn did not resign until his lies to Pence became public knowledge -- almost three weeks later. The Atlantic details what Flynn lied about. CNN later reported that Russian officials had been planning to use Flynn to influence Trump for months. According to NBC News, outgoing President Obama personally warned Trump not to make Flynn his National Security Advisor, a warning Trump ignored. Flynn eventually pled guilty to lying to to the FBI about his conversations with Kislyak.
• Transcripts of Flynn's conversations with Kislyak were released in 2020. Flynn asked Kislyak to keep an "even-keeled" response to the sanctions the Obama Administration imposed in response to Putin's manipulation of the 2016 election. As Mother Jones points out, "At no point does Flynn castigate Kislyak for Russia's intervention in the 2016 election. He does not confront the Russian ambassador for Putin's covert operation to subvert American democracy. He does not tell Kislyak that Moscow will have to pay a price for hacking the Democrats and using the stolen information to influence the election for Trump's benefit. Flynn, a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, does not warn Kislyak against any further Russian information warfare targeting the United States. As the Obama administration was trying to impose a punishment on Putin for that attack, Flynn, on behalf of the Trump gang, was sending an utterly different message: We don't care about that... Flynn was signaling to Putin that once Trump took office, Trump wouldn't be pursuing the matter and, instead, would be reaching out to Russia as a partner. [Flynn] was dealing with the Russians as if there had been no attack. He was abandoning his obligation to defend the United States from foreign assault." In effect, Flynn betrayed the oath he swore as a member of the Armed Forces to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
• In a stunning act of cronyism, Trump's Attorney General - William Barr - dropped the case against Flynn in 2020, even though Flynn had pled guilty. As The Atlantic wrote: "Flynn will not be sentenced for lying to the FBI, a crime to which he pleaded guilty. He will now become a conservative celebrity, a Trump surrogate on television and the campaign trail. The way is open for him to enjoy fame and recover wealth... The way is now open for Russia and Putin to act again to help reelect Trump, as they acted to elect him in the first place. [But] Being released by Barr does not convert Flynn's lies into truth... Flynn's release by Barr only strengthens the suspicion that Flynn and Kislyak were furthering a corrupt arrangement between Trump and Putin. Flynn's release by Barr only strengthens the suspicion that the corrupt arrangement continues to this day." (Trump was voted out of office six months later, and pardoned Flynn as one of his last official acts.)
• Flynn wasn't the only Trump associate to meet with the Russian ambassador. According to the New York Times, then-Senator Jeff Sessions met with him during the campaign, and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner met him between the election and the inauguration. USA Today reported that Trump campaign official J.D. Gordon met the Russian ambassador in July. ABC News reported that Trump's son met with a pro-Putin group in Paris three weeks before the election. CBS News reported that Kushner also held several meetings with a Russian bank Putin's regime controls.

Putin and his regime made at least two documented attempts to share "dirt" stolen from Clinton aides with the Trump campaign.

• According to Mother Jones reporter David Corn, Special Counsel Robert Mueller learned that a Trump campaign advisor named George Papadopoulos acted as a go-between between the Trump campaign and Putin's regime between April and August 2016. "Mueller’s statement does indicate that the Trump campaign was attempting to create a secret connection with Putin’s office just as Russia was waging information warfare against the United States," Corn concludes. "Imagine how the Kremlin might have interpreted such warm and welcoming signals from the Trump campaign. This was not a knock-it-off message. It was a let’s-work-together message being sent to an adversary while it was assaulting US democracy." The Huffington Post added: "Papadopoulos found out [from Russian officials that] the hacked emails existed in April 2016. The leaked emails hacked from Democratic National Committee staffers’ accounts weren’t made public until July 2016. And the emails hacked from John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, weren’t released until October. That means a Trump campaign official knew something was coming from the Russian government that would damage the Clinton campaign, months before the public did." (Papadopoulos later pled guilty of lying to the FBI. After he served his sentence, Trump pardoned him.)

• According to the New York Times, on June 3, 2016, a Russian lawyer with connections to Putin's regime used intermediaries to contact Donald Trump, Jr. and offered to give him damaging information on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The intermediary wrote: "This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump."
  Trump Jr. wrote back: "If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer."
  Commentator Keith Olbermann pointed out that, later that day, Trump Sr. sent out his first tweet regarding Clinton's emails.
  On June 7, Trump announced that he would make a major speech revealing dirt on Clinton.
  On June 9, Trump Jr. met the lawyer in New York City's Trump Tower, along with his brother-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump Sr.'s aide Paul Manafort (who later became his campaign manager), and a few others.
  The Times found out about the meeting a year later, and asked Trump Jr. to comment. Trump Jr. initially told reporters he'd never been approached to meet with anyone from Russia. When confronted with the evidence, he admitted that he had, but the meeting didn't concern the election. He finally admitted to them that the lawyer had offered damaging information on Clinton, but said "it quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information."
  Journalist David Corn commented: "Given that the Trump camp initially lied about the nature of the meeting and its attendees, only a sucker would accept their account at face value. Whatever the outcome of the get-together, this is a solid instance of conspiring between Trump’s top lieutenants and prominent Russians."
  Attorney Jeffrey Jacobovitz told the Washington Post: "It's as close as you can get to a smoking gun... [Trump Jr.] may have crossed the line on conspiracy to commit election fraud or conspiracy to obtain information from a foreign adversary."

  David Corn related what happened next.

  "Five days [after Trump Jr.'s meeting], the news broke that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked. Cyber experts hired by the DNC produced a report pointing to Russian military intelligence (the GRU) as the culprit. How did the Trump campaign respond? The next day it released this statement: 'We believe it was the DNC that did the 'hacking' as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate and failed party leader.'
  "Ponder that spin. Trump’s campaign chief had learned days earlier that the Russians were targeting Clinton. Yet now the campaign was suggesting the Russian hack was a hoax cooked up by the victims.
  "Manafort went on ABC’s This Week on July 24 and was asked whether there were connections between the Trump campaign and the Putin regime. 'No, there are not, and, you know, there’s no basis to it,' said the man who the previous month had met with an emissary from [Putin] to receive anti-Clinton material from the Kremlin.
  "After the election, [Trump] would not accept the US intelligence community’s assessment that Russia had mounted this operation to help him win the White House. He routinely referred to the Trump-Russia scandal as a 'hoax' and 'fake news.'
  "The Trump Jr. emails demonstrate that through this entire affair, Trump’s top advisers possessed direct inside information indicating Putin’s crew was willing to act clandestinely to boost Trump’s chances... they were knowingly creating a smokescreen behind which the Putin operation could proceed.
  "...A person who helps a criminal conceal a crime, or who aids an escape or who even fails to report a crime, is known as an accessory after the fact. Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort helped keep Russia’s operation a secret."

  The Guardian reported that Trump Sr., Trump Jr., and their associates denied the meeting had taken place at least twenty times.
  Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort almost certainly committed a list of crimes by covering up the meeting. The Mother Jones list includes conspiracy, aiding and abetting computer fraud, and campaign finance violations. The New York Times list adds espionage.
  The Washington Post reported that, when Donald Trump, Sr. heard about the New York Times story, Trump Sr. "dictated a misleading statement about the nature of the fateful meeting... while other people involved were recommending some measure of transparency on the assumption that the truth would come out eventually, they were overruled by the president, who personally dictated the misleading statement."
  Mother Jones later reported that Trump Jr. may have committed a felony by lying to Congress about the meeting.
  A year after the New York Times broke the story, CNN reported a claim by Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen. Cohen claimed (without providing evidence) that Trump knew all about the 2016 meeting beforehand and approved of it.

• According to Business Insider, during the Presidential campaign, anti-Trump Republicans hired research company Fusion GPS to look into Trump's ties to Putin. As part of their investiation, FGPS brought in a Russia expert, retired British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Steele's Russian sources provided him with a wealth of information. American intelligence later reviewed the raw data (later called the "Steele Dossier") and discovered that, though some parts of it were false, other parts fit facts they already knew.
  Of the allegations that appeared to be true, the most frightening is this one. The Republican party platform originally strongly condemned Putin's 2014 invasion of neighboring Ukraine and conquest of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula. According to Steele's sources, Putin's regime agreed to release damaging information about Clinton if the Trump campaign dropped the platform's strong language.
  Changing the platform on Ukraine was the Trump campaign's only major contribution to the Republican party platform. The WikiLeaks website began publishing emails stolen from Clinton allies a few days after the Republican party made the change. WikiLeaks got those stolen emails from Russian hackers working for Putin. If these allegations are correct, and Trump knew about it, he is almost certainly guilty of treason.
  When the Republican Party nominated Trump, the Democrats retained FGPS to continue the work. FGPS was co-founded by Glenn Simpson, who hired Steele as a subcontractor. Simpson later told Congress that Steele is a boy scout with a sterling reputation.
  In the course of his investigation, Steele saw signs of Russian efforts to blackmail or compromise Trump. Since that would constitute a crime in progress, he told Simpson that they had to take the information to the FBI. Steele did so in July 2016, and the FBI met with him in September. The FBI told Steele that they already knew some of this from a source inside the Trump campaign.
  In October, the New York Times reported that the FBI had investigated Trump and found no connection to Russia. Steele then gave up on trying to convince the FBI to take action. The Comey Letter emerged two weeks later, and Simpson told Congress in 2018 that Comey may not have known about the Russian efforts to compromise Trump that Steele had uncovered. Comey's memoir appears to confirm this.
  According to the New Yorker, Buzzfeed published the Steele Dossier in January 2017. The Dossier indicated a significant threat to American national security: an enemy dictator potentially had the power to blackmail the President of the United States. Instead of investigating this, Congressman Devin Nunes, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Senator Charles Grassley -- aided by commentators on Fox News -- decided to shoot the messenger.
  Note that the Steele Dossier is a list of allegations. Steele is a researcher -- not a journalist or a prosecutor. He never intended his findings to be made public, and he was not able to independently verify that every piece of information his sources gave him was true. As journalist David Corn later reported, "The Russians indeed were working to assist Trump. The Trump campaign had tried to obtain Clinton dirt from the Kremlin. There had been a flow of information from Manafort to Putin-friendly oligarchs... and, according to the Treasury Department, to the Russian intelligence service. Trump had been pursuing a development project in Moscow, as part of a years-long effort to score a lucrative deal there." In other words, the Steele Dossier got the small details wrong, but it was correct about the big picture.

  Business Insider later reported that the agent in charge of counter-intelligence at the FBI's New York office in 2016 was named Charles McGonigal. McGonigal appears to have been a Trump supporter. It was apparently McGonigal's office that told the New York Times in 2016 that the FBI had cleared Trump of any ties to Putin.
  After leaving the FBI two years later, McGonigal apparently did work for Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and friend of Putin's who has been sanctioned by the Treasury Department. Deripaska was one of the people McGonigal would have investigated when he was an FBI agent. In 2023, McGonigal pleaded guilty to money laundering and accepting payoffs from Deripaska. McGonigal has also been charged with lying to the FBI.

  
  
• According to the Center for American Progress, officials from the Trump campaign -- including Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Jeff Sessions, Michael Cohen, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, Carter Page, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn -- held 28 meetings with Russian operatives. All-in-all, Trump's team contacted Russian officials -- or were contacted by Russian agents -- 101 times. As David Corn points out, these contacts continued even after Trump and his staff knew that Putin's hackers were committing crimes in order to help them.
• The House and Senate are supposedly investigating ties between Trump and Putin. However...
  In March 2017, FBI Director James Comey told Congress that his agency was investigating possible collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russian hackers. A day later, Congressman Devin Nunes, chairman of the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee, told journalist David Corn that he'd never heard of some of the key players. Corn related: "Nunes told me he didn't know who they were. Huh? Page and Stone— - key players in the Trump-Russia scandal who appeared in many media accounts— - you don't know who they are? No, he said. Other reporters shook their heads in disbelief. Nunes was either lying or displaying reckless ignorance. This is the guy in charge of one of the two congressional investigations probing the Trump-Russia scandal."
  Mother Jones and New York Magazine soon reported that Nunes, who also worked for the Trump campaign, bent over backwards to protect Trump from the investigation. The New Yorker later reported that Nunes killed the House investigation entirely. (Mother Jones adds that Nunes refused to call witnesses, subpoena documents, or investigate Trump's business ties to Russia.) Politicus USA wrote that then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan tried to cover up Nunes' efforts to protect Trump.
• Almost a year after telling David Corn that he'd never heard of Carter Page, Nunes released a misleading memo meant to protect Trump by discrediting the FBI investigation. The memo was so full of factual errors that no one took it seriously. Among other things, Nunes' memo falsely claimed that the FBI was out of bounds investigating Page despite Page's many ties to Putin's spies. Nunes also said on-camera that Trump had never met George Papadopoulos, despite a photograph showing them together. Furthermore, the censored version of the Mueller Report found that "Trump publicly named him [Papadopoulos] as a member of the foreign policy and national security advisory team chaired by Senator Jeff Sessions, describing Papadopoulos as 'an oil and energy consultant' and an 'excellent guy." (Vol. 1, p. 84)
• A year later, Nunes -- in a Congressional hearing -- parroted Putin's clumsy propaganda by claiming that it was Ukraine, not Putin, who attacked the 2016 election.
  Trump's personal attorney is Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani's associate, Lev Parnas, later said that Nunes was in on Trump's plan to extort the President of Ukraine into announcing a bogus investigation into presidential candidate Joe Biden, thus smearing Biden enough for Trump to defeat him in 2020. (Trump repeatedly claimed he doesn't know Parnas, despite photographs, audio recordings, and videos showing them conversing.) The Sacramento Bee pointed out:

  "Text messages released by the House Intelligence Committee last week reveal that a top Nunes aide named Derek Harvey –- who served on Trump's National Security Council before he joined Nunes' staff -– sought direct contact with Ukrainian officials in an effort to smear former Vice President Joe Biden....
  "An aide to Rep. Devin Nunes exchanged dozens of text messages with indicted Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas about a search for information on former Vice President Joe Biden from Ukrainian prosecutors,” wrote Sophia Bollag of The Sacramento Bee. “The exchanges include repeated references by Nunes aide Derek Harvey and Parnas to Biden. Parnas allegedly helped carry out President Donald Trump's campaign to pressure the Ukrainian government for investigations that would benefit Trump’s re-election.”
  "Harvey still works for Nunes.
  "For months, Nunes has acted as Trump’s attack dog, defending the president from accusations that he pressured Ukraine to investigate Biden. Nunes sat in House Intelligence Committee meetings and derided the impeachment proceedings against Trump as a “hoax.” Yet... The newly-released texts prove that Nunes’ staff also engaged in secret efforts to damage Biden.
  "Nunes knew the Ukraine allegations were true because his office was involved in the same plot. But he used his position in Congress as a platform to spread lies and mislead the public...
  "Nunes lied. He lied to the American people and to his own constituents about the Ukraine allegations, dismissing them although he knew they were true. He deliberately misled the American people by attempting to undermine impeachment hearings that examined an anti-Biden effort in which his own office had direct involvement... Devin Nunes has betrayed the truth, betrayed the trust of voters and, quite possibly, betrayed our country."

  Trump later awarded his clueless sycophant the Medal of Freedom.

  Law Professor Richard Painter -- who worked in the Bush Adminstration -- points out that "The first and strongest clue that the Republican members of Congress are behaving irrationally and counter to their conservative values relates to the GOP leaders' refusal to impeach the president, even though Vice President Pence would be Trump's inevitable successor. On the surface, ushering in a President Pence would appear to be both a brilliant and logical move for the Republicans. If Pence were president, Congressional Republicans, many of whom strongly opposed Trump in the GOP primaries, could accomplish just as much of their policy agenda, if not more, with a lot less collateral damage."

  So why don't they? As noted above, Senator Lindsay Graham was the target of a Russian disinformation campaign when he was running against Trump, and American intelligence later concluded that Russian intelligence had hacked the Republican Party's emails. Painter points out that Graham was one of Trump's most frequent and forceful critics until he abruptly reversed himself in October 2017, at which time Graham became one of Trump's most vehement defenders. For instance, in November 2017, Graham condemned the press for "endless attempt[s] to label [Trump] as some kind of kook, not fit to be President." A year earlier, Graham himself said "I think [Trump]'s a kook. I think he's crazy. I think he's unfit for office."

  "We know that Senator Graham's emails were stolen by the Russians," Painter writes, "based upon his own admission in a December of 2016 interview. No public display of Graham's emails exists, so it is reasonable to consider the possibility that his emails are still in play..." In other words, Trump -- or Putin -- is blackmailing Graham by threatening to release the emails the Russian hackers stole. Though there is no direct evidence for this, Painter concludes that the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming.

  Regarding Congressman Nunes, "There is no logical reason for Nunes to go so far in trying to obstruct the Russian investigation unless he has something personal at stake."

  Painter continues: Mitch McConnell "blocked President Obama from announcing that Russia was meddling in the election, refusing to sign a bipartisan statement that would condemn Russia's interference. McConnell also refused to pass a law protecting Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's election meddling, which raises another red flag." Also, McConnell "received a total of $3.5 million dollars [in campaign contributions] from Len Blavatnik, a Russian-American oligarch with close ties to Putin and the Kremlin." (Mother Jones reports that McConnell is using his position as Senate Republican Leader to block the Senate -- and therefore the entire Federal Government -- from taking any steps to protect future elections from Russian hackers.)

  "If the Russians discovered any hidden scandals within the Republican hacked emails," Painter writes, Putin would not hesitate to use those as leverage. "It is well-known within the intelligence community that Russian intelligence officers are highly skilled at exploiting people's weaknesses with the goal of securing their cooperation. Putin [is] especially adept at identifying vulnerabilities in targets, skillfully manipulating and cultivating cooperation from his victims."

  Painter concludes: If "Republican leaders in Congress... wanted to simply lower taxes for the rich, block immigration and overturn Roe v. Wade, without compromising their reputations and electability in the future, then [they would impeach Trump and replace him with Mike Pence.] Although financial ties to the Kremlin appear to be a strong incentive, the [Republicans'] conduct appears to be motivated by more than just money. Clearly, these powerful GOP leaders do not want to know about Russia’s interference in 2016, and they do not appear to care if Russia meddles in future elections... If certain Republican Congress members are hiding their Kremlin-linked finances or are being threatened in some way, making it difficult for them to fulfill their Constitutional duty to provide oversight of the executive branch, then Putin has made a mockery of our democratic system."
  

  Painter's blackmail theory fits the facts, but Matthew Yglasias points out in Vox that Graham had other reasons for becoming Trump's supporter. "...All incumbent Republicans are aware that crossing Trump could cost them politically... Graham badly needs Trump to support him to ensure he doesn't face a primary challenge. That would be pretty easy for a normal Republican incumbent, but precisely because Graham was so critical of Trump in the past, he needs to go above and beyond to demonstrate his current loyalty to the president who — whatever his problems nationally — remains very popular in South Carolina."

  
  
• Yahoo News reported that the Republican-controlled Senate investigation stalled, with the Republicans refusing to gather evidence or pursue leads. Mother Jones explained why: the investigation's chairman, Senator Richard Burr, also worked for the Trump campaign.
  After nearly four years, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee finally released their report. According to the Christian Science Monitor, Slate, and Mother Jones, the Senate concluded that:

  • Trump's first campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was "a grave counterintelligence threat." Manafort spoke almost daily with a known Russian spy and shared internal polling data with him. The spy may have been personally involved in the Russian cyberattack, and even if he wasn't, his colleagues were. The Senate found a "direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services." The spy "likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence." Mother Jones reports: "Trump and his campaign aided and abetted Moscow's assault on American democracy and sought to exploit it." Trump and Barr are lying when they say it's a hoax.
  • The Senate found "two pieces of information" that "raise the possibility" that Manafort himself was connected "to the hack-and-leak operations."
  • The Senate concluded that "Manafort could benefit financially" by using his access to Trump to advance Russia's agenda.
  • Manafort -- and the Trump campaign as a whole -- helped cover up the fact that Putin was behind Wikileaks and the cyberattack.
  • Trump committed perjury when he told Special Counsel Robert Mueller that he didn't recall talking with Roger Stone about Wikileaks. The Senate concluded they had spoken about it "on multiple occasions."
  • Trump believes the bonkers "conspiracy theory" that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the 2016 cyberattack, and went so far as to ask Ukraine President Zelensky to investigate it. The "conspiracy theory" was disinformation and originated from a Russian spy.
  • On the day a recording of Trump bragging about harassing women hit the media, Roger Stone called an intermediate and told him they needed Wikileaks to release emails stolen from the Clinton campaign as quickly as possible to divert attention from the scandal.
  • Mother Jones concludes: "Russia is currently intervening in the 2020 election to help Trump." However, the details about ongoing Russian manipulation have been redacted and are not available to the public.
  • The New York Times observed: "The simplicity of the scheme has always been staring us in the face: Donald Trump's 2016 campaign sought and maintained close contacts with Russian government officials who were helping him get elected. The Trump campaign accepted their offers of help. The campaign secretly provided Russian officials with key polling data. The campaign coordinated the timing of the release of stolen information to hurt Hillary Clinton's campaign... The Intelligence Committee report shows clear coordination between Russians and the Trump campaign, though there is no evidence of an explicit agreement. The evidence... suggests Mr. Trump knew this at the time."
  
  
• The New York Times reported that the day after Michael Flynn resigned as National Security Advisor, Trump met with FBI Director James Comey, a fellow Republican, and asked him to end the FBI's investigation of Flynn's ties to Russia. This was obstruction of justice -- an offense for which Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were both impeached. As New York Magazine put it:
  "...There is not yet any clear proof that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia’s electronic break-in to Democratic electronic records during the 2016 election. The attempted manipulation of justice is... the more serious crime.
  "...The crime detailed in the reported Comey memo... is of the utmost seriousness. It is evidence of the president attempting to turn the FBI into an organ of personal control. In addition to the request to lay off Flynn, Trump reportedly asked Comey to direct his resources to the prosecution of leakers within the administration and journalists who report on the leaks.
  "Much of the surrounding public evidence — Trump reportedly asked for Comey’s pledge of loyalty, proceeded to fire Comey, and then told NBC’s Lester Holt that the Russia investigation played a role in the firing — confirms the most dire conclusions. Trump has abused his power and perverted the functioning of the government in a way utterly inconsistent with democratic government as Americans understand it. If the FBI can be unleashed on the president’s enemies, and restrained from prosecuting his allies, then the presidency would become an instrument of authoritarian control.
  "Unless Comey has somehow, unimaginably, lied about the content of his memos, Trump must be impeached."
• According to the Washington Post, Trump asked his Director of National Intelligence, Daniel Coats, and his Director of Central Intelligence, Mike Pompeo, to pressure Comey on his behalf. This didn't work either, and as noted above, Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017.
• Former NSA analyst John R. Schneider wrote that allied governments -- and American's own intelligence agencies -- have started withholding classified information from the White House due to their fears that someone will tell Putin the identity of their confidential sources.
• According to the Washington Post, they had good reason to be afraid. In a meeting with Russian Ambassador Kislyak and his colleagues in May, 2017, Trump shared highly classified intelligence information with them -- apparently without thinking it through. The intelligence came from an ally (believed to be Israel), and Trump endangered the life of the ally's classified source. (Russia now knows the location of a source inside DAESH that revealed the terrorist organization's inside information.) "Officials said the capability could be useful for other purposes," the Post reported, "possibly providing intelligence on Russia’s presence in Syria. Moscow would be keenly interested in identifying that source and perhaps disrupting it.
  "Russia and the United States... have competing agendas in Syria, where Moscow has deployed military assets and personnel to support [Syrian dictator] Bashar al-Assad." It may be in Putin's interest to compromise the source to protect Assad. If that happens, the source will not be able to warn us of future DAESH terrorist attacks.
  Trump called then-Secretary Hillary Clinton unfit to be President as she had been reckless with classified information, leaving it on a computer server from which unauthorized parties (including Russia) might have been able to steal it. Trump also called for former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to be executed for sharing classified information. Though it's not illegal for the President of the United States to share classified intelligence with a hostile foreign power, had President Obama done it, he would have been impeached immediately.
• According to the Daily Beast, Congress passed a law imposing new sanctions on Russia in July 2017. Trump criticized the bill but signed it anyway, as Congress had more than enough votes to override a veto. The deadline for implementation was January 1, 2018, but Trump waited until March 15 to implement them -- even though the Constitution requires the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

• "On October 7, 2016, the media released video of candidate Trump speaking in graphic terms about women years earlier, which was considered damaging to his candidacy." (This was the audio clip of Trump bragging about using his wealth and celebrity to get away with kissing and groping women without their consent, including married women. It was recorded less than a year after he married his current wife.) "Less than an hour later, WikiLeaks [released] thousands of John Podesta's emails that had been stolen by the GRU in late March 2016." (Vol. 1, p. 7)
• As noted above, Putin's so-called "Internet Research Agency" troll farm meant to sow chaos by posing as American citizens and posting incendary content. "The IRA's social media accounts attracted hundreds of thousands of followers. For example, at the time they were deactivated by Facebook in mid-2017, the IRA's 'United Muslims of America' Facebook group had over 300,000 followers... the 'Being Patriotic' Facebook group had over 200,000 followers, and the 'Secured Borders' Facebook group had over 130,000 followers... these posts reached at least 29 million U.S. persons and may have reached an estimated 126 million people." (Vol. 1, p. 26)
• "The IRA operated individualized Twitter accounts similar to the operation of its Facebook accounts, by continuously posting original content to the accounts by also communicating with U.S. Twitter users directly (through public tweeting or Twitter's private messaging.) The IRA used many of these accounts to attempt to influence U.S. audiences on the election. Individualized accounts used to influence the U.S. presidential election included @TEN_GOP [in which Putin's trolls pretended to be the Tennessee Republican Party]; @jenn_abrams (claiming to be a Virginian Trump supporter...); @Pamela_Moore13 (claiming to be a Texan Trump supporter...); and @America_1st_ (an anti-immigration persona...)" (Vol. 1, p. 27)
• The IRA used its online presence to organize pro-Trump rallies by pretending to be American Trump supporters. (Vol. 1, p. 31)
• "On multiple occasions, members and surrogates of the Trump Campaign promoted - typically by linking, retweeting, or similar methods of reposting - pro-Trump or anti-Clinton content published by the IRA through IRA controlled social media accounts... in total, Trump Campaign affiliates promoted dozens of tweets, posts, and other political content created by the IRA." (Vol. 1, p. 33) Putin's IRA used senior members of the Trump campaign as "useful idiots."
• "Starting in June 2016, the IRA contacted different U.S. persons affiliated with the Trump Campaign in an effort to coordinate pro-Trump IRA-organized rallies inside the United States. In all cases, the IRA contacted the Campaign while claiming to be U.S. political activists working on behalf of a conservative grassroots organization... While certain campaign volunteers agreed to provide the requested support (for example, agreeing to set aside a number of signs), the [Mueller] investigation has not identified evidence that any Trump Campaign official understood the requests were coming from [Russian] nationals... IRA employees violated U.S. law through these operations, principally by undermining through deceptive acts the work of federal agencies charged with regulating foreign influence in U.S. elections." (Vol. 1, p. 35) Putin's agents committed crimes in the United States, and the Trump campaign benefited from those crimes.
• "Although members of the IRA had contact with individuals affiliated with the Trump Campaign, the indictment does not charge any Trump Campaign official or any other U.S. person with participating in the conspiracy. That is because the investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. person who coordinated or communicated with the IRA knew that he or she was speaking with Russian nationals engaged in the criminal conspiracy." (Vol. 1, p. 175) Putin successfully played Trump campaign officials for fools.
• As Vox points out, "'collusion' has no legal definition and is not a federal crime. So while the report did not establish conspiracy or coordination, it does not make a determination on 'collusion' — and in fact, it strongly suggests that there was at least an attempt to collude by Trump’s campaign and agents of the Russian government. The fact that it did not rise to the level of criminal activity does not mean it was not a serious breach of trust and a damning indictment of [Trump's lack of] commitment to the health of the American legal and political system...
  "There is insufficient evidence to prove that the Trump administration was directly involved in Russian crimes like stealing Clinton’s emails. But did the Trump campaign actively work with the Russian government to improve its electoral chances? ...the report provides plenty of evidence to suggest the answer is yes...
  "The report is littered with evidence Trump and his staff were open to Russian interference in the election. Mueller explicitly concludes that 'the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian effort.'
  "...The Trump team and Russia worked to reach out to each other (and vice versa) without ever developing a formal arrangement to coordinate."
• Retired CIA officer John Sipher points out that neither the National Intelligence Director's report nor the Mueller Report mention what the SVR -- Russia's most professional and competent espionage service -- was doing during the GRU's cyberattacks and the IRA's propaganda war. "Is it possible that the Russian espionage service played no role in Russia's operation, and had no spies helping support what the Mueller report characterized as a 'sweeping and systematic' attack of American institutions?" Sipher asks. "Cyberhacks, troll farms, and the use of WikiLeaks are hardly cutting-edge espionage tradecraft. The Russian efforts that have been revealed to date were poorly hidden and displayed little professional elegance." In other words, Putin's attack on the United States would not have stopped with fake news and the leaking of stolen and doctored emails.

So... Russia circulated fake news stories, leaked stolen documents, and forged emails to help Trump defeat Clinton. What difference does that make if the voting machines weren't hacked?

A great deal. Putin wants to weaken and destabilize the United States. Trump's policies would do just that. Among other things, Trump promised to execute innocent people who are unlucky enough to be related to a terrorist. He wants to deport eleven million immigrants and their children, even if those children are American citizens. He wants to discriminate against Mexican-Americans, Muslim Americans, and African-Americans. He is a serial sexual batterer and adulterer. He insults immigrants, veterans, judges, women, Jewish people, reporters, the disabled, gay people, and the majority of Americans who did not vote for him. Since Trump is profiting from his international business and acting as President at the same time, he violated the Constitution's emoluments clause from his first day in office and may well violate the STOCK Act. (He even produced his television show as President.) Public outrage has begun to demand Trump's impeachment, but the Republican-controlled Senate won't do it. This will destroy public confidence in our government - exactly what Putin wants.

According to the Daily Mail, Calexit is a fringe group who thinks California should leave the United States to become its own country. For most of their existence, these people were (rightly) ignored by the general public. However: when Trump won an apparent Electoral College victory, some voters in California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and Hawaii -- horrified by the idea of a Trump presidency -- started wondering if the five west coast States should form their own nation or join Canada.

Who's funding Calexit? According to Bloomberg, it's Vladimir Putin.

By helping both Trump and people who want to escape Trump, Putin -- like the Star Wars movies' Emperor Palpatine -- hopes to destabilize, discredit, and ultimately destroy America. (Politico suggests that, during the Obama era, Putin supported a Texas independence movement.)

According to ProPublica, Putin is still trying to divide and destabilize America today. "The same social media networks that spread Russian propaganda during the 2016 election have been busily amplifying right-wing extremism surrounding the recent violence in Charlottesville, according to researchers who monitor the activity."

After the election, Trump himself appropriated the term "fake news." The term properly refers to the propaganda Putin planted on social media, i.e. bogus articles that masquerade as legitimate news stories. Trump -- a master at playing the media -- now uses the term to describe any news unflattering to him. Trump now claims any news stories that portray him negatively -- such as recordings of him disparaging women -- were made up by television stations and newspapers. "You know why I do it?" Trump told reporter Lesley Stahl. "I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you."

By conflating real news about his misogyny and unpopularity with Putin's disinformation, Trump has two purposes: first, to con everyone into thinking he's a benevolent genius, and second, to prevent anyone from taking the threat of Putin's cyberattacks seriously.

As retired CIA officer John Sipher wrote:

"Just as Putin has unleashed his intelligence and security services, Trump has kneecapped and undermined his own. Trump launched his presidency with an attack on the CIA, accusing CIA officers of leaking and behaving like Nazis. He ridiculed the unanimous conclusions of intelligence community related to Russian attacks on the 2016 election and began a long-running verbal assault on the FBI...
"It’s almost too easy for Putin. It does not take a trained intelligence officer to exploit Trump’s ego and ignorance. Trump’s vulnerabilities are on frequent public display. He is quick to anger, unable to control his impulses, loyal to no one, easy to flatter, easily influenced but loath to accept advice, a serial bluffer, and fully transparent about his vanity and congenital need for approbation.
"This is not a meeting of equals but a summit between a con-man and a man who is easily conned."

As noted above, the majority of Putin's disinformation tries to dupe conservatives into believing that liberals are anti-American and that bogus liberal conspiracies threaten their lives and families. There are also cases of the opposite, with propaganda targeted at liberals vilifying conservatives as a threat to minorities and freedom. Putin's purpose is to create conflict in America. His goal is to convince Americans that people who disagree with them are the enemy, and to turn us against each other.

Trump is helping Putin achieve this goal. In February 2018, his deputy press secretary, Hogan Gidley, said "There are two groups that have created chaos more than the Russians, and that’s the Democrats and the mainstream media." The absurdity of this is that there are more Democrats (49% of Americans) than Republicans (40% of Americans). Instead of condemning the Russian dictator, Gidley denounced ordinary Americans.

As the Washington Post points out, Putin's hackers are still attacking the United States today. Putin's cyberattack "was hard enough to resist when the executive branch wanted to resist it; who knows how hard it will become as President Trump feels... politically threatened by upcoming elections..." Trump, McConnell, and their enablers in the Republican-controlled Senate refuse to do anything to stop Putin from hacking future elections.

Columnist Dana Milbank points out that McConnell is so focused on blocking election security that he might as well be working for Putin.

"Russia attacked our country in 2016. It is attacking us today. Its attacks will intensify in 2020. Yet each time we try to raise our defenses to repel the attack, McConnell, the Senate [Republican] leader, blocks us from defending ourselves.
"Let’s call this what it is: unpatriotic. The Kentucky Republican is, arguably more than any other American, doing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding...
"McConnell... is aiding and abetting Putin's dismantling of Americans’ self-governance."

(Read Milbank's column for specific examples, which are too numerous to list here. Six months later, The Hill reported that McConnell has blocked the Senate from voting on ten bills meant to stop hostile nations from manipulating our elections.) As "Moscow Mitch" McConnell refuses to protect future elections from cyberattacks, Senate Republicans must remove him from his position of leadership in favor of someone who will. If they do not, McConnell must be expelled from the Senate.

According to The Daily Beast and Vox, Putin's hackers attacked the 2018 election too. That July, then-Senator Claire McCaskill reported a hacking attempt by Russian military intelligence (the GRU). McCaskill was voted out of office that November.

Trump is not a Russian agent, but he's bending over backwards to make himself look like one. Trump claims that "Nobody has been tougher on Russia than I have," but his entire foreign policy -- insomuch as he has one -- is centered around weakening America and helping Putin.

• According to Mother Jones, Trump's admiration for Putin goes back a decade. According to Politico, Trump also admires Syrian dictator (and Putin ally) Bashar al-Assad.
• According to MSNBC and Politifact, Trump has the most pro-Russian foreign policy in history. He regularly praises Putin and takes extremely pro-Putin positions harmful to the United States.
• One of Putin's strategic goals is to break up America's alliances with other democracies. Since taking office, Trump repeatedly disparaged the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the longstanding mutual defense alliance between North American and European democracies. Trump insulted long-standing American allies Australia, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, France, Qatar, Denmark, and the entire European Union. (Mexico has since scaled back its trade with the United States and entered a new trading partnership with Argentina.) Trump also insulted one of our newest allies, Montenegro.
• Trump also insulted South Korea. The United States and South Korea have been allies for seventy years, and our alliance places a military, economic, and political check on Russia, China, and North Korea. According to Bob Woodward's book Fear: Trump in the White House, Trump honestly doesn't care about this and actively hates South Korea. Even though then-Secretary of Defense Mattis and others explained to Trump that ending the alliance would weaken both countries, Trump has repeatedly tried to withdraw the American soldiers stationed there and end our trade agreements. At one point, Trump's chief economic advisor hid a draft executive order that would have done this. Trump forgot to sign it as it wasn't on his desk.
• Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement also hurt America abroad and isolated us from our allies -- exactly what Putin wants.
• Trump dragged his feet for months implementing sanctions against Russia.
• According to the New York Times, in February 2017 Putin deployed nuclear missiles that violate the INF arms control treaty signed by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Trump did nothing for two years. When Trump finally took action, he neither imposed sanctions nor took Russia to the United Nations or the World Court -- he announced that America would also cancel the INF treaty and start an arms race.
• Later that year, Trump met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. At the meeting, he told them that he didn't care about Putin's 2016 cyberattacks. A year later, Putin openly admitted he is planning more cyberattacks in 2020. As noted above, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has successfully blocked all attempts to protect our elections from Putin's manipulation.
• In May 2018, Trump announced that the United States will no longer abide by the deal his predecessor made with Iran, under which Iran gave up its nuclear weapons program. According to the Huffington Post, Trump did this even though Iran kept their part of the bargain.
  Who benefits from this? Putin. America's key allies -- France, Germany, and the United Kingdom -- support the deal, and Putin wants to break up America's alliances while extending his own influence over the Middle East.
  It isn't in America's interests to back out of an agreement that benefits both sides. Why did Trump do it? According to CNN, one of his motives is "his ravenous desire to eradicate President Barack Obama from the history books. ...If Obama was for it he is against it. Foreign diplomats said privately that one reason Trump hates the Iran deal was that it was the proudest foreign policy achievement of the Democratic president." The President of the United States should conduct foreign policy based on keeping America safe, not based on the desire to make his predecessor look bad.

• At the Helsinki Summit, Putin told Trump that he was not behind his 2016 cyberattack, and Trump said he believed him -- publicly rejecting the conclusions of Congressional investigators, the FBI, the Justice Department, and all sixteen American intelligence agencies. Trump openly provided our country's enemies with aid and comfort. "President Putin... just said it’s not Russia," Trump said. "I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today."
  Former CIA director John Brennan wrote: "Donald Trump's press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of 'high crimes & misdemeanors.' It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump's comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin."
  Michael Gerson -- a conservative columnist who was a speechwriter for George W. Bush -- was even harsher. "Trump actively advanced many important national objectives — of Russia. He claimed Crimea to be Russian, credited Putin’s denials of cyberaggression, attacked NATO, called the European Union a 'foe,' openly supported Brexit, disparaged the leadership of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, pushed for a trade war with Europe and blamed tension in the U.S.-Russia relationship on the United States. At Helsinki, having imitated Neville Chamberlain in every detail but the umbrella, he declared a famous victory. And so our president, who shows how tough he is by abusing migrant children, was a cringing coward before a dictator. [Trump] remains in total denial about Russian intentions and actions."
  
• In 2019, Trump defended Russia's 1979 attempt to conquer Afghanistan.
• Later that year, Trump demanded that Russia be reinstated into the Group of Seven industrialized nations. (Russia was expelled when Putin conquered Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in 2014.)
• The Kurds are the world's largest ethnic group without their own country. The region they inhabit is divided between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. The Kurds were long-time allies of the United States, siding with America during the Gulf War and the Iraq War, and fighting alongside Americans to defeat DAESH.
  The United States is also allied with Turkey, a country facing the same problems we're having -- namely, an authoritarian demagogue (R.T. Erdogan) becoming leader of a democratic country. The Turkish government is afraid that Turkish Kurds will try to break off from Turkey and form their own country, and has long opposed self-determination for Kurds in Iraq and Syria. For their part, Iraqi and Syrian Kurds formed militias to protect themselves from dictators like Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad. Turkey, fearing armed Kurdish groups in their own country, considers these militias terrorists.
  After playing a pivotal role in helping America defeat DAESH, the United States pledged that we would protect the Kurds if they dismantled fortifications they had built to protect themselves against a hostile Turkey. The Kurds did so -- and then President Erdogan talked Trump into withdrawing American support for the Kurds so he could invade northern Syria. The Kurds found out Trump had betrayed them when Trump announced it on Twitter.
  Trump gave in to Erdogan without consulting anyone in the State Department or the Defense Department who could warn him that betraying our Kurdish allies also betrayed America's national security. Why did Trump do this? He makes millions from a massive Trump hotel in Turkey's largest city.
  Turkey then invaded Syria, forcing the Kurds to turn to Russia for help. In the confusion, over eight hundred DAESH fighters escaped.
  Newsweek points out that Trump handed a victory to Putin and Assad and received nothing in return. According to anti-terrorism expert Michael S. Smith, Putin has two long-term goals. First, Putin wishes to expand his influence in the Middle East. Second, Putin wishes to break up NATO.

  Smith said that Putin emboldened Erdogan's international ambitions in order to increase the tensions within NATO—by putting him at odds with the organization and its stated goals—only then to "pull the rug" from under Erdogan's feet.
  "Putin created a situation where he led Erdogan to believe that he would tolerate Erdogan making this move against the Kurds and what Erdogan didn't seem to anticipate is that this enabling of sorts would lead to increased tensions with governments in NATO member states. This factors squarely into Putin's agenda.
  "Putin has now made a statement that indicates—on its face at least—that he is opposed to Turkey occupying these territories in Syria. He's put Erdogan in this corner and the question is, who is going to back Erdogan up at this point?
  "Erdogan did not see this on the cards. He also did not see that he was creating a situation where Putin could step in and seem like the responsible actor on the playing field by basically asserting himself in such a way that looks like he has concerns for human rights.
  "In terms of grand strategy, this is what Putin is doing by protecting the Kurds—who were among the United States' most dedicated and competent local allies in the fight against Islamic State.
  "Putin... made Erdogan and Trump look like clowns."
  

• Putin conquered Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in 2014, and wishes to conquer more of Ukraine. In order to do this, Putin must drive the United States and Ukraine apart. Putin's solution was to push the false narrative that Ukraine -- not Russia -- was behind his 2016 cyberattack. Trump actually appears to believe this nonsense himself, and is making foreign policy decisions based on Putin's propaganda. (The Washington Post reported that Putin may have personally convinced Trump of this at a summit in July 2017. "One former senior White House official said Trump even stated so explicitly at one point, saying he knew Ukraine was the real culprit because 'Putin told me.'")
  Moreover, Congressman Devin Nunes openly parroted Putin's propaganda during a Congressional hearing. ("President Trump had good reason to be wary of Ukrainian election meddling against his campaign and of widespread corruption in that country. ... So you obviously know that the President had concerns... about 2016 election meddling by the Ukrainians.") Nunes was rebuked by a witness, former National Security Council officer Fiona Hill.

  "Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security service did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that, perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves... The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016.
  "I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternative narrative that the Ukrainian government is a US adversary, and that Ukraine—not Russia—attacked us in 2016. These fictions are harmful even if they are deployed for purely domestic political purposes.
  "Right now, Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them. In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests."

  This did not prevent Republican Senators John Kennedy and Ted Cruz from parroting Putin's propaganda in interviews later that week.

• According to the Washington Post, Trump's attempt to bully President Zelensky of Ukraine into helping him with his re-election campaign played into Putin's hands. Zelensky, desperate for military aid against Putin, kissed up to Trump and make himself look foolish.
• In February 2020, the New York Times reported that then-National Intelligence Director Joseph Maguire's aide Shelby Pierson briefed Congress about Putin's ongoing attempts to manupulate the 2020 election. Trump was so incensed that Pierson had briefed Democrats as well as Republicans that he fired Maguire. Trump replaced Maguire with Richard Grenell, a vocal Trump supporter who knows nothing about intelligence. In other words, in the middle of an enemy cyberattack, Trump fired the expert and replaced him with someone who doesn't know how to defend our country.
  The Times reported that Russian Intelligence has "made more creative use of Facebook and other social media. Rather than impersonating Americans as they did in 2016, Russian operatives are working to get Americans to repeat disinformation... That strategy gets around social media companies’ rules that prohibit “inauthentic speech.”
  "...The Russians are working from servers in the United States, rather than abroad, knowing that American intelligence agencies are prohibited from operating inside the country. (The F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security are allowed to do so with aid from the intelligence agencies.)
  "...Much of the Russian aim is similar to its 2016 interference, officials said: search for issues that stir controversy in the United States and use various methods to stoke division."
• In May 2020, Trump announced that the United States would no longer honor the Open Skies Treaty with Russia, a key component of arms control. Starting a new arms race during a time of record deficits has no benefit to America and is a colossal waste of money.
• In June 2020, Trump's former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, published a tell-all book about his time in Trump's White House. Bolton, a neoconservative, believes in unlimited Presidential power and was one of the architects of George W. Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq.
  Even though Bolton was appalled by Trump's behavior, he refused to testify before the House impeachment inquiry -- presumably because he was working on his book at the time and wanted to make sure it had enough new material that people would buy it. According to Mother Jones' summary of Bolton's book, "Trump [illegally] beseeched [Chinese President] Xi to help him win reelection in 2020. [Trump] didn't know the United Kingdom is a nuclear power or that Finland is not part of Russia. And [Trump] did indeed withhold military aid to pressure the Ukrainian president - for which he was impeached - to launch investigations to tar Joe Biden and promote a nutty conspiracy theory that holds that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the 2016 presidential election." Bolton also wrote that Trump "willfully ignored or denied that Russia was meddling globally in US and many other elections... Trump believed that acknowledging Russia's meddling in US politics, or in that of many other countries in Europe and elsewhere, would implicitly acknowledge that he had colluded with Russia in his 2016 campaign." Bolton also confirmed that Trump himself believes the Russian dictator's laughable claims of innocence. "Trump was buying the idea," Bolton wrote, "that the Ukraine was actually responsible for carrying out Moscow's efforts to hack US elections." Trump also urged Bolton not to criticize Russia in public.
• In July 2020, the New York Times reported that Russian Military Intelligence has been offering bounties to Taliban militants to kill American soldiers serving in Afghanistan. Trump was briefed on this five months earlier. Instead of taking action to protect American soldiers, Trump pushed for Russia to be re-admitted to the Group of Seven Industrialized Nations. Trump wanted closer ties with Russia when they were paying the Taliban to kill Americans.
  Two Administration officials told the Washington Post that Trump has no intention of doing anything about the Russian bounties. The Post points out that Trump cares more about impressing Putin than he does about the lives of American soldiers.
• In September 2020, the head of the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis filed a whistleblower complaint that Trump -- along with Acting Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf -- are covering up Putin's ongoing attempts to manipulate the 2020 election. (Wolf is still serving in the Trump Administration even though his term as Acting Director has expired.) The complaint also indicated that the Trump Administration has exaggerated the threat posed by left-wing extremists while ignoring the much greater threat posed by white supremacists.

Trump claims he wants "America First," but his actions show he really wants "Putin First." Putin is the sworn enemy of democracy, and the Russian dictator continues to reap enormous rewards from his 2016 cyberattack against the United States. Trump is obsessively loyal to Putin, and has received nothing in return for that loyalty.

Trump was aware of Putin's efforts to spread disinformation and refused to inform the public. Mother Jones concludes: "Trump, Giuliani, and the rest of the gang were... enabling and aiding yet another Russian attack on a US election - just as they did in 2016."

Slate Magazine's analysis adds that Putin falsified audio recordings of Biden to make him sound corrupt. Donald Trump, Jr. promoted these fakes. Also, "In a December 2019 conversation, then-national security adviser Robert O'Brien told Trump that Giuliani had been 'worked by Russian assets in Ukraine.' Trump shrugged and went on promoting the [fake] allegations Giuliani was feeding him."

According to Wikipedia, Russian soldiers attacked civilian targets (including churches, schools, and hospitals) and have tortured and murdered women and children. At this writing, Russia has been accused of murdering at least 1200 civilians and committing 14,000 war crimes.

Legacy Links: [But Today, I Confess: Political Satire in Verse] | [Obamawatch] | [The Legacy of George W. Bush]