Allegations that the Russian government has a file of items they can use to manipulate Donald Trump were met this morning with a shower of Tweets from the president elect. Tweets that prove Trump remains the most unintentionally ironic human being on any continent.
Not only did Trump go straight to Putin for his get out of news cycle free excuse, he misquoted the Kremlin. The statement from the Kremlin spokesperson includes this extremely believable statement.
The Kremlin does not engage in gathering compromising materials.
Of course not. Russia doesn’t even have a word for something like that.
Trump’s Twitter rant spilled over from last night into the morning, with his claims getting bigger as he rolls on.
Which seems to be something that should be shared with Donald Trump Jr.
Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.
And they might also want to remind the Russian ambassador.
Russia said it was in contact with President-elect Donald Trump’s team during the U.S. election campaign, despite repeated denials by the Republican candidate’s advisers that any links existed.
Donald Trumps’s Russia connections are numerous. Members of his team with a direct connection to the Kremlin include Paul Manafort, Rex Tillerson, Carter Page, and Michael Flynn. Accussations that Trump’s team were in contact with Russia throughout the campaign are not part of the unsubstantiated portfolio of charges from a former British agent. They’re just … real, and possibly still under FBI investigation.
The explosive documents that leaked overnight have less confirmation.
The report’s credibility is difficult to evaluate. The identity of the author is unknown, but is said to be a former agent of Britain’s external intelligence service, MI6, who was stationed in Moscow in the 1990s. It is a single source. Many media outlets have sought in vain to independently corroborate the allegations. It has misspellings and mistaken references. Most importantly, it appears to have begun as political opposition research.
That doesn’t make any of the other connections any less certain. And it doesn’t affect information from Financial Times showing how Trump was bailed out of bankruptcy by money laundering sums for oligarchs in Russia and former Soviet states.
The one portion of the “single source report” that lends credibility to the rest is that the report identifies Russia’s demands on Trump.
They wanted Trump to weaken the US position on the Ukraine, and that’s exactly the single issue on which Trump intervened to change the Republican platform.
Of course, Donald Trump could clear a lot of this up if he followed through on just one promise and released his tax returns.