Though Donald Trump is anxious to declare the investigation into collusion between his campaign and Russia old and over, the truth is that it’s just getting started. Both the Special Counsel and the Senate Intelligence Committee are staffing up, and the Counsel’s investigation is expanding to look at new areas.
Evidence of that expansion can be seen in orders that have gone out to members of Trump’s transition team.
Aides and volunteers on Donald Trump’s presidential transition were instructed Thursday to save any records related to “several pending investigations into potential attempts by Russia interests to influence the 2016 election,” according to a memo obtained by POLITICO.
The wording of that request might seem to leave a lot of room for Team Trump to decide “nope, this letter from Vlad isn’t related,” but the actual scope is quite broad.
In the memo from a transition lawyer, campaign officials were told to preserve all documents related to the Russian Federation, Ukraine and a number of campaign advisers and officials, including former campaign manager Paul Manafort, advisers Carter Page, Rick Gates and Roger Stone, and former national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn.
That should also catch the freshly en-lawyer-ed Michael Cohen and the peace plan he crafted for Ukraine along with Trump associate and mobster, Felix Sater, and Manafort-friendly Ukrainian politician, Andrii Artemenko. That mysterious document has been missing since it landed on Michael Flynn’s desk right before Flynn was fired.
Also covered in this period would be Kushner and Flynn’s attempt to set up a perfectly secure back channel that would consist of having Trump staffers walk into Russian embassies to talk to Moscow.
And there’s Kushner’s December meeting with a sanctioned Russian bank and with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.
It might also include documents concerning Manaforts’s ongoing contact with the Trump campaign and transition, contact that continued well after Manafort resigned his position as campaign chair.
With just over two months between the election and the inauguration, it might seem like this wouldn’t cover a lot of events, but the Trump team seems to have treated this period as a free-for-all in which they could negotiate deals, communicate without concern, and mix business and politics with disdain.
There should be plenty of documents to hold onto. And if not, I’m sure we can expect Trey Gowdy to launch an investigation into Donald Trump’s missing emails.